New Poetry in Translation: ‘Obituaries’

This poem, by award-winning author Rasha Omran, appears in our latest issue, SYRIA: Fall of Eternity, ed. Ghada Alatrash and Fadi Azzam. If you’re in Berlin, join us for a launch event on May 3, 2026.

Obituaries

By Osama Esber

Translated by Jonas Elbousty

March 2015

 

1

The city wakes up in obituaries.

Every dawn we hear or read news

of its death in a disappearing face.

The city wakes up within its walls

and remains alive in its death

with no children or relatives to mourn.

 

2

The city is buried with every deceased

then returns from the grave only

to prepare its walls

for more obituaries.

Time has a printing press

that prints only the names of the dead.

There are no lights

for our feet to see the way

And day did not come,

there was only night,

and in this night, a single chair

sitting atop the city’s summit.

 

3

The city where we are born but do not live,

the city that only shares news

of our deaths.

We will continue to ask it about another life,

we will keep searching it like madmen for light

at the end of the tunnel.

Osama Esber is a poet, short-story writer, publisher, and translator. He is a member of the editorial board of Fiker and director of the publishing house Bidayat. Currently, he is the editor of the Arabic section of Tadween Publishing. His poetry collections include Screens of History (1994); The Accord of Waves (1995); Repeated Sunrise in Exile (2004); and Where He Doesn’t Live (2006). His short- story collections are entitled The Autobiography of Diamonds (1996); A Café for Committing Suicide (2000); and Rhythms of a Different Time (in progress). He has translated works by Richard Ford, Michael Ondaatje, Bertrand Russell, Tony Morrison, Nadine Gordimer, Noam Chomsky, Terry Eagleton, Alan Lightman, Gerda Lerner, and Raymond Carver, among others. Esber currently lives in Chicago.

Jonas Elbousty is an academic, writer, literary critic, and translator. He holds an MPhil and a PhD from Columbia University and teaches in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. He has authored or co-authored eight books, including Reading Mohamed Choukri’s Narratives (2024), Aswat Mu’asira: Short Stories (2023), Media Arabic (2021), Arabic Literary Reader (2014), and Vitality and Dynamism: Interstitial Dialogues of Language, Politics, and Religion in Morocco’s Literary Tradition (2014). He has also translated several of Mohamed Choukri’s works, including his complete short stories, Tales of Tangier (2023) and Faces (2024), as well as Akram Alkatreb’s poetry collection The Screams of War (2024). His work has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, ArabLit Quarterly, Asheville Poetry Review, Banipal, Prospectus, Sekka, Journal of North African Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Literature, Journal of New Jersey Poets, World Literature Today, among other publications.