#The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology

[majestativa]

She contains you like eternity.

— May Sayegh, The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, transl by Lena Jayyusi & Naomi Shihab Nye, (2001)

[feral-ballad]

Deema K. Shehabi, ed. by Nathalie Handal, from The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology; “Breath”

[Text ID: "and I see you breathe red poppies over the hills in Palestine / and I see girls with orchards of almond trees in their eyes / and I can't tell my love how to leave our land without weeping / and I can't always love this land."]

[fujiblackthorne]

from The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology; “Somnambulist” 🥀🕊️

[revoltingcocks]

A Moment of Mourning by Palestinian Poet Donia El-Amal Ismail, translated by Atef Abu-Seif and Nathalie Handal

from The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology edited by Nathalie Handal (Interlink Books, Northampton, MA, 2001)

[yaya-tchoum]

Isolated in the moon's eternity

~•Nada El-Hage•~

# Nada El-Hage tr. by Nathalie el-Hani, from The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology; #“The journey of the shadow”

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Artwork: Georg Pezolt - Salzburg von einer Loggia

* * * *

And we return to the parched blossom of time, wrinkled with longing.

— Deema K. Shehabi, The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, (2001)

[belles-lettres]

[la-semillera]

Are you counting the years of my absence, remembering

a first encounter, a place, an hour?

[...] You're sitting on

your house's stone floor watching the season's flow.

- Etel Adnan, from "There," The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, edited by Nathalie Handal (Interlink Books, 2015)

- Etel Adnan, Untitled, c.1980. Oil on canvas,

[kiki-de-la-petite-flaque]

And we return

to the parched blossom of time,

wrinkled with longing.

— Deema K. Shehabi, The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, 2001.

[antigonick]

hello! hope the new year is treating you well (so far!) i decided i wanted to read more in translation this year, especially poetry, and i was wondering if u had recommendations for works translated into english (or french) from living or 20th century poets. it’s not a strict preference i just really want to expand my horizons ! anyways i love your blog it’s a much appreciated resource ❤️

Hi! Aw, that’s such a lovely idea. Honestly I mostly read English-writing authors (you must have noticed...) but I do have a few things to recommend.

• Rainer Maria Rilke’s works, most notably Sonnets to Orpheus and Duino Elegies trans. by Martyn Crucefix, but also The Book of Hours trans. by Babette Deutsch.

• Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova, trans. by Jane Kenyon, though I also like Stanley Kunitz’s take, and Marina Tsvetaeva’s Selected Poems, trans. by Elaine Feinstein.

• Odysseus Elytis’ What I Love, trans. by Olga Broumas, and my favourite The Sovereign Sun, trans. by Kimon Friar, who also translated Sodom and Gomorrah by Nikos Kazantzakis. Also, C. P. Cavafy’s The Complete Poems, trans. by David Mendelsohn or Poèmes, trans. by Marguerite Yourcenar (what??) and Constantin Dimaras.

• Federica Garcia Lorca’s A Season in Granada, trans. by Christophe Maurer, and Octavio Paz’s Collected Poems, trans. by Eliot Weinberger, others (including Denise Levertov and Elizabeth Bishop) and Octavio Paz himself. Also, Kelly Martínez-Grandal’s Zugunruhe, trans. by Margaret Randall, and of course Jorge Luis Borges’ Selected Poems, trans. by several translators (among others, W. S. Merwin and John Updike.)

• Speaking of W. S. Merwin, he translated a lot of poems, spanning centuries and languages, and he’s a beautiful translator; I’d recommend his Selected Translations. 

• Edith Södergran’s We Women, trans. by Samuel Charters, and Matilda Olkinaitė’s Matilda, trans. by Laima Vince. 

• Adonis’ Selected Poems (trans. by Khaled Mattawa) and Saadi Youssef’s Without An Alphabet, Without a Face (by Khaled Mattawa too). 

• I’m also thinking of Women of the Fertile Crescent: An anthology of Modern Poetry by Arab Women. You can find a lot of beautiful excerpts on @soracities blog.

• I know it’s not 20th century, but I have a soft spot for modern translations (some more interventionist than others) of classic poetry. My very favourites include Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter (obviously), Mary Barnard’s Fragments of Sappho, Renée Vivien’s Sapho, Marguerite Yourcenar’s La Couronne et La Lyre, Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey, Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, Kenneth Rexroth’s 100 Poems from the Japanese (some of them you can find in this one—though be careful! Sometimes Rexroth claims he’s translating for shits and giggles when he’s really the writer, like in The Love Poems of Marichiko), A. K. Ramanujan’s The Interior Landscape: Classic Tamil Love Poems and the gorgeous Andal’s Autobiography of A Goddess, trans. by Priya Sarrukai Chabria and Ravi Shankar. 

• In the same vein, though they’re plays rather than poems, I’d recommend Oliver Py’s very cheeky take on Shakespeare’s Roméo et Juliette, and Anne Carson’s Bakkhai (Euripides) and An Oresteia (Aiskhylos, Sophokles, Euripides). 

Aaaaand... that’s that! Sorry, this is severely lacking in contemporary poetry, but I hope this helps—oh and happy new year to you too ♡

[jayvespertine]

— Nada El-Hage, tr. by Nathalie el-Hani, Edited by Nathalie Handal, from The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology; “The journey of the shadow”

[majestativa]

My biography: alienation to the bone.

— Fawziyya al-Sindi, The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, transl by Joseph T. Zeidan, (2001)

[feral-ballad]

Deema K. Shehabi, ed. by Nathalie Handal, from The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology; “The Glistening”

[Text ID: "creating the deep gnawing of love, / a love which makes you want to leave your skin behind."]

[runn0ft]

MEET CUTE

1. Arnie Bernstein, Swastika Nation: Fritz Kuhn and the Rise and Fall of the German-American Bund || 2. Boardwalk Empire “All In” 4x4 || 3. “Are You Flirting or Staring a Fight”, source unknown || 4. Boardwalk Empire “All In” 4x4 || 5. Mona Fayad, from The Poetry of Arab Women- A Contemporary Anthology; “Love Poems” || 6. Boardwalk Empire “All In” 4x4 || 7. HaRav Yochanan Zweig || 8. Boardwalk Empire “All In” 4x4 || 9. Richard Siken, Crush || 10. Boardwalk Empire “All In” 4x4

all gifs by @fancykraken​

[revoltingcocks]

Door of the Cities by Palestinian poet Munia Samara, translated by Amal Amireh

from The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology edited by Nathalie Handal (Interlink Books, Northampton, MA, 2001)

[soracities]

Any Asian, Middle Easter, or Spanish authors/poets you could possibly recommend? I would love to start reading outside of my comfort zone this year.

I don’t know if you had any specific country or culture in mind so I’m just going to include all of my favourites across the whole, plus what’s been recommended to me (I’ve included some diasporic authors and a few anthologies too)

Asian (East, South-East and South):

Arundhati Roy

Andal 

Rabindranath Tagore

Kiran Desai

Agha Shahid Ali

Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Han Kang

Banana Yoshimoto

Haiku by Basho, Buson and Issa

Kenji Miyazawa

Takuboku Ishikawa

Li Po

Yu Xuanji

Can Xue

Eileen Chang

Xiaolu Guo

Viet Thanh Nguyen

EDIT: More South Asian writers, courtesy of anon:

Mirza Ghalib

Nazir Akbarabadi

Hasan Manto

Premchand

Adi Shankara

Chanakya

Kalidasa

Middle Eastern (and some North African):

Rumi

Mahmoud Darwish

Saadi Youssef

Maram al-Masri

Hafez

Forough Farrokhazad

Sinan Antoon

Nathalie Handal

Etel Adnan

Nawal El Sadawi

Marjane Satrapi

Ahdaf Soueif

Dunya Mikhail

Khaled Hosseini

Amal el-Mohtar

Adonis (would start with Songs of Mihyar the Damascene, or The Pages of Day and Night)

Nizar Qabbani

Khaled Mattawa (not just for his poems, but his tireless translations which honestly, are a gift beyond measure)

Spanish / Spanish-language

Homero Aridjis

Octavio Paz

Alejandra Pizarnik

Julio Cortázar

Eduardo Galeano

Andres Neuman

Enrique Vila-Matas

Silvina Ocampo

Norah Lange

Dulce Maria Loynaz

Gabriela Mistral 

Valeria Luiselli 

Isabel Allende 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

Rosario Castellanos

Josefina Vicens 

Alejandro Zambra 

Lorca

Julia de Burgos

Additional Anthologies:

The Colombian Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry

The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono No Komachi and Izumi Shikibu / Women Poets of Japan: An Anthology

Frontier Taiwan: An Anthology

We Sinful Women: Contemporary Urdu Poetry

Breaking The Silences: an Anthology of 20th-century Poetry by Cuban Women.

ÜL: Four Mapuche Poets / Poetry of the Earth: Trilingual Mapuche Anthology

Victims of a Map: A Bilingual Anthology of Arabic Poetry

Inside / Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora

[xamueluz]

and i can

only hope

you had a special song a

poem memorized a secret

that made you smile

Suheir Hammad, Edited by Nathalie Handal, from The

Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology;

"Of woman torn"