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.”
“…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.”
The towering, generation-defining Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) was born on this day in al-Birwa.
“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.”
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
“No one says to the olive tree: How beautiful you are!”
Today on Jadaliyya, Sinan Antoon published translations of two Rashid Hussein poems to mark Youm al-Ard, or Palestinian Land Day.
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?)
Yesterday, the great Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish would have been seventy years old.
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.