Shereen Malherbe

Issue 3 of The Bennington Review has a poem by Ghassan Zaqtan, “Damascus 1986,” translated from Arabic by Fady Joudah:

Zaqtan, of course, is a multi-award-winning Palestinian writer living in Ramallah, the author of ten collections of poetry and two novellas, winner of the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize (for Like a Straw Bird it Follows Me, tr. Joudah)and twice nominated for the Neustadt Prize. The Silence That Remains (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), also translated by Joudah, is his most recent poetry collection to appear in English.

His novella, Describing the Past, translated by Samuel Wilder (2016), is a must-read; his Where the Bird Disappeared (2018) builds on that book.

This poem, “Damascus 1986,” is full of hard sounds, scarcely tethered images, and missed opportunities. It opens:

DAMASCUS 1986

The key’s clang
the sun I called from the windowsill
the brief time of fondness
none of it were mine

Read the…

Ahmed Shafie (http://shaaaf.blogspot.com) is an Egyptian poet, novelist, and translator who oddly does not have a collection in English translation, although his work has been translated by Robin Moger and, here, by Humphrey Davies:

Shafie was a 2014 resident at the University of Iowa’s prestigious International Writing Program, and he’s the author of the acclaimed collection 77 (2017), which made several “best of 2017” lists. Before that, he published Other Poems (2009), and A Side Street Ending in a Fountain (2000), and he’s also published two novels: The Creator (2013) and Sousou’s Journey  (2003).

He’s also an award-winning translator; his translation of Russell Edson’s Collected Prose Poems was one of Muhammad Abdelnaby’s “favorite reads” of 2015.

This latest translation, by multi-award-winning translator and scholar Humphrey Davies, appears in Rusted Radishes. It is taken from his collection 77, where it was untitled.

It opens:

BIRDS

have no hands.