Summer Reads: ‘And We Still Have the Sea’
“yes, the sea changes colors / drinking the yellow of my doubt and distrust / turning as blue as my melody / my songs and ships set sail on its scattered waves”
Poetry
Summer Reads: ‘The Crime of Translation’
“But in a broader sense, crime as transgression takes in a spate of ideas, images, and conceits from Arabic literature.”
Read the Re-Issue of Sargon Boulus’s 1971 Literary Anthology, ‘Tigris’
In 1971, the great, maverick Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus published a single issue of an English-language literary anthology that he called Tigris.
Summer Reads: Rym Jalil’s ‘My Mother’s Kitchen’
“Every day I lie and say / I know this place. / My mother’s kitchen / brims with afflictions / I must pretend to befriend it / we all know it can have only one master / from its beginning to its end”
Summer Reads: ‘The Song of the Banu Sasan’
This summer, we will run select pieces from summer issues of ArabLit Quarterly. This excerpt from a tenth-century poem by Abu Dulaf, translated by Brad Fox, ran in the summer 2020 CRIME issue of the magazine.
From Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi’s ‘A Friend’s Kitchen’
Next month, Poetry Translation Centre is releasing a collection of poetry by Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi, A Friend’s Kitchen, translated by Bryar Bajalan and Shook. To mark the occasion, they have shared an excerpt from the introduction and two poems from the collection.
Lit & Found: On Humor in Poetry and Translation
“If you are trying to avoid reproducing violence or trauma as it is, if you are trying to distill something in it that evokes something that makes it relatable, or accessible to a stranger—to make it vulnerable—humor plays a beautiful role there.”
Muhammad al-Maghut’s ‘Bleak Ink Sky’
“I am done / Smoke rises from my heart.”
‘Ode to a Burning Homeland’: Two Poems for Sudan
Our beloved homeland is burning!