‘The Experience’: New Poetry in Translation by Hoda Omran
“My city is full of barking / as if it were our shared memory / howling out there, in the cold.”
“My city is full of barking / as if it were our shared memory / howling out there, in the cold.”
“After the genocide, / the genocide.”
Three months ago, ArabLit contributor Asmaa Dwaima lost her sister, who was martyred along with her little son. This poem is for her sister, Rewaa.
Nineteen-year-old poet Marah Muhammad Al-Khatib is a student in data science in Gaza who is one of the laureates of ArabLit’s Summer 2025 Gaza Literary Translation Series; her work has appeared in Spanish with Elvantodelsuimangr and Gaza Tarevista.
This poem was commissioned for the Voiced festival, highlighting global and local endangered languages through creativity; author Hanan Issa also talks here about her relationship with the poetry of Nazik al Malaika.
These two poems are by Samar Al-Ghussein, a young Palestinian writer from Gaza who is at work on her first collection.
On Friday morning, the 23rd of May 2025, while Ala’ Al-Najjar, a Palestinian pediatrician at Al-Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis in the Southern Gaza Strip, was treating the wounds of the injured children of the genocidal Israeli war, she received the news of martyrdom of her nine children: Yahia, Rakan, Raslan, Jubran, Eve, Revan, Sadeen, Luqman, and Sidra. Her eldest child was twelve years old, whereas her youngest was only a six-months old baby. Nine days later, her husband, Dr. Hamdi Al-Najjar, joined his children due to his serious wounds. Ala’ has only one child left alive. This poem is written for her.
“Press your body to the sea— / it comes out cool, unharmed— / and let tears move across your hidden grief.”
French publisher Fidel Anthelme X is planning to bring out a bilingual Arabic-French collection by Palestinian poet Dana Flaifl, Tout ce que j’ai c’est l’écriture, avec elle je résiste, translated […]