Publishers' Weekly Starred Review for New Darwish

If I Were Another Mahmoud Darwish, trans. from the Arabic by Fady Joudah. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26 (240p) ISBN 978-0-374-17429-3

This second volume by the late, great Palestinian poet Darwish (1941–2008) to be translated by Palestinian-American doctor/poet Joudah comprises four nonconsecutive books of longer poems spanning 1990 to 2005. These works follow Darwish's poetic development from a historically focused middle period to the devastatingly personal lyric-epic of his late style. Formally varied—Rubaiyats alternate with sprawling free-form poems, in which prose paragraphs meet both long and short verse lines—Darwish's Sufi-inspired poetry probes, admires, describes, longs for and questions. His subjects are often broad: the inheritance and disinheritance of lands, languages and histories. Sometimes, though, he turns to concrete need, confessing, for example, in “Mural,” his book-length poem about a brush with death: “I want to walk to the bathroom/ on my own.” But Darwish's poems are at their most singular and powerful when he collapses the boundaries between great and small concerns, as when he articulates, “Wars teach us to love detail: the shape of our door keys,/ how to comb our wheat with eyelashes and walk lightly on our land.” The stakes of this work—for Darwish and for his readers—are clear: “O my language,/ help me to adapt and embrace the universe.” (Nov.)

PW Reviews 17 Aug 2009

Amjad Nasser: Now Available in English

Susannah Tarbush reviews Jordanian poet Amjad Nasser's Shepherd of Solitude, the first collection of his work to appear in English. It's translated by poet Khaled Mattawa and published by Banipal Books. Tarbush argues that the volume gives English readers an insight into a major Arabic poet, his poetry marked by a fierce wit and equally fierce elegiac manner, a poet of many flavours gathered by a sharp intelligence.

Khaled Mattawa sums this sense up beautifully in his introduction, pointing out that Nasser uses the word and image of the shepherd frequently, positioning himself, as poet,

like a shepherd watching over a flock of wayward, reckless versions of himself. He gives these selves free rein to act out their crises and victories, and they in turn reveal to him various shades of the glory and folly of human nature. Their flaws recounted and noted, he shepherds them home at the end of the day and closes the stable door behind him.

I Saw Ramallah reviewed in Daily Star

A feisty and focused review by Shahzad Khan in The Daily Star, Bangladesh's only online newspaper (strapline: "Committed to the People's Right to Know"). Khan concludes her review, which is followed by a long excerpt, with the observation that it is through Mourid Barghouti's

rich mix of concrete detail and metaphorical flight that the book achieves its undoubtedly haunting effect. The tale is told with remarkable simplicity and in a tone that can be universally understood, yet its texture and details, in some case quite unfathomably, remains Arabic, and rooted specifically in the Palestinian earth. One doubts whether anything similar exists in the dishearteningly burgeoning literature of political exile, asylum, and flight.

Barghouti fans can follow news of his publications and events by friending him on Facebook.

Towering Babels? Arabic and/as Other Languages

Two interesting posts about language(s) today, first from blogger Lameen Souag, who is studying translation at SOAS, and keeps the blog Jabal al-Lughat blog, where a fascinating discussion is flowing about "French among Algeria's elite" and the place of Arabic and Berber in Algerian culture, politics and literature. It's an informed debate around a complex issue, showing how language is tied up with all sorts of identities: national, ethnic, classed, generational, and political.

The Washington Times, on the other hand, boobs in its review of Rafik Schami's The Dark Side of Love, claiming that Anthea Bell translated the book "from the Syrian." The Literary Review and Three Percent are all over this mistaken claim, with Chad Post pointing out that - among other things - Bell is probably one of the best-known translators from German: the language in which the book was first published in 2004. Schami's novel does cover an epic sweep of Syrian history, but he moved to Germany in 1971.