"I don't like to resemble these taxi drivers to whom passing journalists glean their quick impressions about the country they are visiting."
Friday Finds: Darwish’s ‘Red Indian’ Poem Across Eight Languages
"…K k’aaba’ob, che’ob beeta’an yéetel kili’ich t’aan, juntúul ch’íich’ ka’anal u xik’nal máanal u ka’analil ti’ jump’éel ts’oon."
On Mahmoud Darwish Day, 13 Poems
The towering, generation-defining Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) was born on this day in al-Birwa.
Sahar Abdallah: On Illustrating Darwish’s ‘Think of Others’ for Kids
"We are still working on the third poem by Darwish, and I’m eager that Tanmia should continue on this path of introducing poetry to children and young adults."
For National Poetry Day: 10 from New or Forthcoming Collections
Each time I begin to write about love the other woman reaches out and pushes my fingers from the keyboard the lonely woman who lost everything the wild woman who looks like me
Palestinian Poetry for Youm al-Ard, Day of the Land
Today on Jadaliyya, Sinan Antoon published translations of two Rashid Hussein poems to mark Youm al-Ard, or Palestinian Land Day.
5 Must-read Memoirs (and Not-quite-memoirs)
Assembly Journal, for their "five books" series, asked me to come up with a list of five Arabic books. The field was too dizzyingly wide. Even when I narrowed my topic to "memoirs and not-quite-memoirs," it was a difficult winnowing process: What about Galal Amin's Nectar of the Years? Well, it hasn't been translated into English, so that's that, I suppose. Sayyid Qutb or Huda Shaarawi's memoirs, for their historical and political importance? Taha Hussein's classic The Days? (But hasn't everyone already read The Days?)
On Darwish’s Birthday, Goytisolo Wins Award in Poet’s Name
Yesterday, the great Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish would have been seventy years old.
Mahmoud Darwish in English: A Conversation with Translator Ziad Suidan
Ziad Suidan, PhD Candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is translating eighteen poems by Mahmoud Darwish as part of his dissertation. Sofia Samatar, a doctoral student in UW’s Department of African Languages and Literature, talked to him about the project.
A Palestinian-American Poet’s Virtual Book Tour and More Poems for Gaza
Yesterday on The Huffington Post, Anis Shivani introduced three emerging poets who have books scheduled for release in early 2011. One of them was the Palestinian-American poet Deema Shehabi, whose debut collection, Thirteen Departures from the Moon, is set to come out from Press 53 in March.
Must-have Arabic Poetry Collections of 2010 (in English)
Over at Ron Slate's website, On the Seawall, he asked nineteen poets to recommend new and recent titles for holiday gift-giving purposes. While I certainly respect the sentiment, readers over at ArabLit are free to buy the below-listed books for themselves.
One-minute Review: Mahmoud Darwish’s /Journal of an Ordinary Grief/
In Mahmoud Darwish’s Journal of an Ordinary Grief--published in 1973 as Yawmiyyat al-Huzn al-'Adi and now available in English translation--the narrator shapes his personal, Palestinian memories against the insistent push of Israeli and Western-dominated history. The book thus presents itself not as an official record, but as a collection of individual wounds.
