#WiTMonth Cover Reveal: Iman Mersal’s ‘The Threshold’
The collection is coming mid-October and can be pre-ordered on the MacMillan website.
Poetry
Translating Al-Khansa: ‘Between the Scylla of Shrillness and Melodrama, and the Charybdis of Monotony and Cliché’
” It’s certainly my experience that the deeper one goes into the surface of a text, the stranger it becomes, and the more likely one is to find something fresh in translation.”
‘A Poem from the World of Cats’ by Muthaffar al-Nawab
“A dark wind bellowed out destruction / as a sweet street kitty awaited nightfall”
Remembering Muthaffar Al-Nawab: Poet, Nomad, and Warrior for Justice Who Fought from the Trenches of Poetry
“. But this fervor, depth, and audacity also made exile the only possibility for such a voice, as he became a particularly odd type of globetrotter, one who remained for half a century merely one step ahead of his pursuers. “
Remembering Salah Ahmed Ibrahim, an Avant Garde Pioneer of Sudanese Poetry
“Were they a bundle of arugula,
displayed for sale to the westerners in the big city,
they’d have been spared the scorching heat.
Instead, they’d have been carefully placed on a wet matt in the shade,
their lips kept wet with sprinkled water
their cheeks sparkling with freshness and moisture.”
New Poetry from Sudan: Mughira Harbya’s ‘Three Songs for the Ghajar’
“Only a ghajari knows the meaning of love.”
From the ‘Mirrors’ Issue: Hilal Badr’s ‘Ash-sha’b Yurid Isqat an-Nizam’
A shout awakens me; someone is yelling, “Ash-sha’b yurid isqat an-nizam [The People want to bring down the regime].” Does anyone believe this? I don’t.
A Poem for Land Day: Mahmoud Darwish’s ‘The Second Olive Tree’
“The olive tree does not weep and does not laugh.”
On March 13, Poems for and after Mahmoud Darwish
“Perhaps you’re there now / You watch what’s happening from afar, / and with the silence of a god, / decide to do nothing.”