Nizar Qabbani’s 1967 Letter To Gamal Abdel Nasser
“Whoever loves his country, Mr. President, purifies its wounds with alcohol, and with fire cauterizes—if need be—the areas that are wounded.”
Poetry
Friday Finds: Ines Abassi’s ‘The Key’
“The last key I carried /dangles alone on the key rack / like a corpse at the gallows”
Monday Poem: ‘Even Those Who — Temporarily — Survived’
“and they wished away the rest of her generation, tomorrow / and, after tomorrow, all those who thought / —just thought— / of praying for her”
Islam Nawwar’s ‘Don’t Say that My Son Is Walking in Heaven’
“And I’m still surprised by the highly specific classification of my identity / On my ID card, where they wrote: / Male, Muslim, single.”
New in Translation: ‘Song of Myself’ by Ghareeb Iskander
“There are silent voices inside me. / I will free them now / I will free also / The letters of love words / Suffocated in my mouth.”
Mehmet Hakki Suçin on Translating Mahmoud Darwish into Turkish
“For instance, the Palestinian society is more familiar with references to Christianity than the Turkish society. … So while translating Darwish’s works, I brought the references to verses from the Bible or the Torah to the attention of Turkish readers.”
Summer of Lock-in Lit: Poems from ‘Sparrows Are Not a Breed of Wind’
“Winter yields a Spring / Spring’s dreams are ruined by / Summer. / Summer, without farewell / cedes authority / to Autumn”
Lock-in Summer of Lit: Ghareeb Iskander’s ‘A Letter to Adil’
“What can I do?/ Except stay deadly silent/ In this desert/ which dwells in a dark room.”
Lock-in Literature: 4 Poems by Jan Dost
“I am the star up there that lurks shy and restless in the sky,/ silently chewing on his pale light.”