Ten titles, ten countries! This month, we’re presenting reviews of a wide-ranging text of image philosophy in the age of virtual reality; a Russian master’s memoirs of his infamous literary friends; poetry anthologies featuring testimonies from the genocide in Gaza and the bold voices of Afghan women; a delicate and revelatory Serbian novel parsing lineage and dementia; and so much more. . .
From Language to Language: The Hospitality of Translation** by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, translated from the French by Dylan Temel,Other Press, 2025**
Review by Xiao Yue Shan
Power is domination—at least, that’s how it’s been…
Ten titles, ten countries! This month, we’re presenting reviews of a wide-ranging text of image philosophy in the age of virtual reality; a Russian master’s memoirs of his infamous literary friends; poetry anthologies featuring testimonies from the genocide in Gaza and the bold voices of Afghan women; a delicate and revelatory Serbian novel parsing lineage and dementia; and so much more. . .
From Language to Language: The Hospitality of Translation** by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, translated from the French by Dylan Temel,Other Press, 2025**
Review by Xiao Yue Shan
Power is domination—at least, that’s how it’s been overarchingly conceived. Though the concept abstracts out to a vast array of actualities, from the centralized to the diffused, the individual to the plural, the Foucauldian and the Weberian, the most immediate and base display of human power is that of one subject being undermined by another. Translation, then, as an intersectional arena between two bodies that are as similar as they are different, is an optimal stage by which to study the varying dynamics of power; but especially within the postcolonial context, it has commonly begun with the premise that translation is a dominating act, with one more powerful language exercising its patterns, definitions, and cultural values over another. In From Language to Language, the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne wants to build his theories on a different foundation.
It may seem that the closer one looks at translation, the less feasible an equilibrium seems—at least, from the outside. For bilingual or multilingual persons, however, the idea of equal values for different languages is simply fact; the hosts of multiple languages are likely to regard them as equally essential components, regardless of any diglossic differences in fluency, utility, or geographical relevance. As a speaker of Wolof, French, and English, Diagne is in this camp, and opens this English edition of From Language to Languagewith a personal anecdote on his family’s migration, which ends with the determination that his children should “live out their different identities and the languages that expressed them with self-assurance as pride.” His own multilingualism therefore places him at a position more primed to think of translation less as a sequence of conquests, and more as a rendezvous of common goals, whether that be the making of a fully-fledged individual, or of a more varied and generous world. There is, he says, a “gratitude and equality within a shared humanity, which is at the very heart of translation.”
By bringing the notion of hospitality into the translational exchange, Diagne coopts the innate generosity and charity of the act, but evades the pitfalls of gift-related debt by noting that both languages gain equally from the exchange, as “to translate is to create human community with the speaker of the language that one is translating.” Even when the resulting text is reductive, appropriative, or produced for colonial purposes, Diagne suggest that the undertaking of the translation—what takes the mediating individual from being a “vehicle” to being a translator—is a sense of hospitality, of taking in two languages into the mind and moving, shifting them against one another in the pursuit of knowledge and elucidation. It is not necessarily the human being—with all of our various motives, prejudices, and desires—who can accomplish what Derrida had called a pure gift, but the languages themselvesare open to each other, that cultivates within the translator a “cross-pollination.” They lead us to curiosity, wonder, and finally the recognition of a common humanity as we realize what all language is meant to do: to make us real to one another.
Where Diagne does face the real failures of cross-cultural exchange, such as the regard of ‘primitive’ African art that gained so much traction in the Western world, he distinguishes these instances as projection, not translation. The simplification and repurposing of foreign expressions can only be categorized as an intellectual and imaginative failure, one that completely neglects the necessary reciprocity of translation. In this, From Language to Language is less a guide to the ethics of postcolonial interaction, and more an ode and an appraisement of translation’s generosity, compassion, and grace—which in fact forces us to first acknowledge, then see beyond our limits. When we dehumanize ourselves by devaluing or reducing one another, it is our most human invention—language—that urges us back towards coexistence, that opens the door of our little rooms and ushers us back into our common world.
Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreevby Maxim Gorky, translated from the Russian by Bryan Karetnyk,Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025
Review by Mandy-Suzanne Wong
The earliest complete edition of Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreevfirst appeared in English in 1934; now, in Bryan Karetnyk’s sensitive new translation, Gorky’s sketches of his tumultuous friendships with these three titans of Russian literature have once again come alive with a scintillating play of memory and imagination, tenderness and criticism.
In these anecdotal portraits, born of meticulous observation and sympathetic reflection, Gorky defies the self-enclosed perspective that Leo Tolstoy saw in him, having groused: “This is why [your stories] have no characters.” On the contrary, these novelistic descriptions fortify real-life specifics into the aura of fictional characters, and Karetnyk’s translation renders Gorky’s keen attunement with graceful clarity; in Anton Chekhov’s “sad and gentle smile,” for instance, “. . . you could feel the subtle scepticism of a man who knew the value of words, the value of dreams.” Among their wide-ranging meanderings, the writers’ musings on aspects of the literary life—story ideas, interactions with fans, stylistic choices, words like “wishy-washy”—are particularly fascinating.
Not only do the three men themselves get under the skin of Gorky’s writing, so also does their work, causing shifts in perspective that inspire stylistic transpositions and modulations on all levels of his prose. In a montage of carefully numbered notes, he recalls Tolstoy as godlike and diminutive, lofty and earthy—as if the great author had personified one of his own larger-than-life, paradoxically intimate novels. Chekhov, in contrast, Gorky remembers with affectionate vignettes which, complete with rural schoolteachers and other Chekhovian characters, protest the “banal,” ubiquitous, socially accepted forms of violence that Chekhov lamented throughout his life. Turning to the morbidly flamboyant Leonid Andreev, Gorky’s concise formulations suddenly give way to a prolix digression on lying down between train tracks, reminiscent of Andreev’s gruesome sensationalism.
In this edition, J.M. Coetzee provides a valuable introduction to Gorky’s life and work, describing how, as a student of Tolstoy, admirer of Chekhov, and mentor to Andreev, Gorky rocketed to worldwide fame with his novel Mother. He was imprisoned for anti-monarchist activity but, horrified by the violence of the October 1917 Revolution, was eventually sidelined by Lenin. So deep was Gorky’s faith in communist ideals, however, that he allowed himself to be taken in by Stalin’s flattery, ascending to the greatest heights of the Soviet nomenklatura and publicly endorsing the gulags to preserve his lucrative reputation. Yet, throughout his life, he used his considerable influence and resources to support writers who faced persecution and starvation under the repressive regime. Reminiscences reasserts the value of what Gorky is best known for today: his remarkable ability to relate to someone with generosity, vivacity, and precision.
Orlanda** by Jacqueline Harpman, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz,Seven Stories Press, 2025**
Review by Regan Mies
“Do you remember the sound of my voice inside my head?” Aline asks the part of herself sitting across the table. “What does I mean when you say it?”
In Jacqueline Harpman’s Orlanda, the 35-year-old university lecturer has long been uninspired, worn down, forlorn for what seems like forever—or at least since she was twelve, when her mother began demanding the modesty and restraint of young womanhood. Then one day, everything changes in an instant: Aline is reading Woolf’s Orlando when she spots a young man at a train station café. Inexplicably, a part of herself, of her soul, zeroes in on him, departs from her body, and occupies his. As she invades, Aline senses only a tremor, a strange sorrow that matches her melancholy stasis, the “perpetual feeling of emptiness” she’s never been able to shake. The body-hopping part of her, which our narrator christens Orlanda, revels in her—his—new form. The consciousness of twenty-year-old music journalist Lucien Lèfrene has put up no resistance whatsoever.
What follow, in Ros Schwartz’s lively translation, are Orlanda’s ecstatic exploits with men; his gradual unearthing and worming out of the responsibilities of Lucien’s former life; and eventually, his trickster’s impulse to confront the repressed Aline and shock her with his intimate knowledge of her life and desires. He is, somehow, that buoyant, unrestrained, twelve-year-old part of her, become flesh.
Having first published Orlanda in 1996, Harpman is best known for the enormously successful I Who Have Never Known Men, a dystopic story of thirty-nine women and one girl who find themselves trapped in a bunker without explanation. Its main character is a singular girl in this makeshift society of women, facing a coming-of-age within the rigid confines of their prison, and through her, the author poses the question: What could it mean to transform from girl into woman in a world without freedom or possibility? In Orlanda, too, Harpman lingers in the territory of puberty and adolescence through Aline, who feels trapped by her mother’s expectation of charm and femininity and stifled by her mother’s insistence that energy, anger, and vigor has no place in a woman’s life. But where I Who Have Never Known Men never strays from its weighty solemnity, Orlanda shows Harpman at her wittiest and most delightful. The narrator—presumably a fourth wall-breaking stand-in for the author—frequently exclaims in surprise when her characters act unexpectedly, and on every page, the sheer pleasure Harpman seems to derive from exploration and imagination is clear, though the gravity of her characters’ very real dilemmas never seems to fall far out of reach.
After Aline and Orlanda first meet, a cosmic magnetism pulls them back to one another time and time again. Together, they’re relaxed and confident; they give each other strength. Orlanda brings out in Aline abilities she no longer realized she possessed, whether an unabashed attraction to her longtime partner or the ability to confront an obnoxious dinner party host. How would your ego and id interact were they distinct entities? Who might have the upper hand? Aline and Orlanda’s clashes and codependences help pave Harpman’s way toward an answer: What could we learn from ourselves, about ourselves, when confronted head-on byourselves?
At the Threshold of the Image: From Narcissus to Virtual Realityby Andrea Pinotti, translated from the Italian by John Eaglesham,Zone Books, 2025
Review by Xiao Yue Shan
“Imagination has turned into hallucination,” the Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser once warned, in response to our collective hypnosis after the advent of the image: “They are supposed to be maps but they turn into screens. Instead of representing the world, they obscure it. . .” It’s a familiar line of thought within the study of image consciousness, for as long as there has been representation, there has been the struggle to track the real and the facsimile—where they separate, where they congregate, and to what extent they denigrate and draw from one another. Now that technological innovation is coming in a deluge to redefine magic, to create surfaces anew, to induce vision and sensation, and to readdress our bodies’ sensual functions, the same question of demarcations is growing alongside the innovations. It is into this dialogue that Andrea Pinotti arrives with his fascinating and rangy At the Threshold of the Image, which advocates for neither admission nor insulation against the invasion of image, but simply—as the title states—addresses our enduring romance with the boundary, and how it underscores our resistance to physical limits.
Narcissus falls in love with his reflection, Alice plunges into Wonderland, Galatea’s marble body begins to move, a viewer attempts to swat away a fly painted onto a canvas, the near-opaque figure of Tupac Shakur sways in front of an audience of thousands, Brecht knocks down the fourth wall, Wan Hu-Chen writes himself into a book in order to be with its protagonist, David Cronenberg’s Videodromeconstructs the television screen as a passage. . . These are but a few of the samples, references, artworks, productions, and narratives that Pinotti draws on throughout his treatment of the threshold between representation and reality, forming the conceptualization of this in-between space as an “in/out dialectic” that incites both our desire to become a part of the image, and to have the image come to life. As he illustrates with encyclopaedic knowledge, images represent doorways of imaginary proportions, and we’ve never been able to resist tapping on a door.
Still, now that this door is no longer an unopenable photograph, cinema, text, painting, or dream, and has morphed with digital largesse into something that can truly be considered “an osmotic membrane,” Pinotti is attempting to diffuse this semi-traumatic evolutionary jump by mapping out the aesthetic and phenomenological lineage of humans skipping back and forth across the threshold. It is a yearning that stems from the very first mirror-reflection, he surmises—from the very first acknowledgement that what one sees looking back is not only an image, but an extension of the self. As such, this is not a text that presumes any judgment or prescription for the increasingly morally complex presence of growingly convincing un-realities, but one that positions this pursuit of immersion within the history of human consciousness.
Because the instinct and fantasy of entering the image is a possessive one—and possession is so human. We are creatures covetous of experience, and the more we are aware of our own experiential limits, the more we seek to surpass them. It is our appetite for feeling, for navigating, for discovery, and for conquest that leads us not only to create works of unreality—which expand and multiply our reality—but also to long for the real potentials of those unrealities. History evinces that standing at a threshold never means turning back, it means forging on. Even if, as Pinotti so artfully and expertly illustrates, we have to invent somewhere to go.
Castigationby Sultan Raev, translated from the Kyrgyz by Shelley Fairweather-Vega,Syracuse University Press, 2025
Review by Mandy-Suzanne Wong
In Shelley Fairweather-Vega’s virtuosic translation, Sultan Raev’s novel Castigation displays an astounding variety of tones and forms. The translator’s note advises readers to “give up all attempts to fit this tale into any frame,” and indeed, within the text you’ll find poems, lists, digressive footnotes, vengeful snakes, Soviet punitive psychiatry, extensive quotations from Shakespeare and Şayloobek Düyşeev, and references to several of the world’s religions. Rich with polyphony and plethoric subtexts, Castigation rewards careful reading—and rereading.
From the beginning, Raev employs doppelgängers and recurring images to agitate the vortex of uncertainty in which his characters—seven psychiatric patients trudging through a desert to the Holy Land—find themselves. Is the desert a post-apocalyptic world? Or is it “The Seven” who are lost between death and reincarnation? Does the Holy Land even exist? The disorientation becomes thoroughly terrifying as the characters’ historical namesakes, including Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great, invade their dreams and undermine their sense of self, and their relationships are complicated by mistaken identities and past traumas.
Denominated “a new Kyrgyz epic” on its cover, Raev’s novel has earned a place among the monumental thousand-year-old songs that inaugurated Kyrgyzstan’s indigenous literary traditions. Balladic rhythms and refrains suffuse the prose along with soothsayers and gods of epic poetry, but Raev’s story overturns the tradition of celebrating bloody military exploits; instead, he amplifies the voices of victims—women, the mentally ill, exploited animals, children . . .
The bitterness of the vulnerable betrayed by the powerful pervades the novel’s sense of history and The Seven’s coerced expulsion from their world. Kyrgyzstan was formed when the Soviet government took it upon itself to decide what being Kyrgyz meant and where to put people who seemed to fit the official description. In return for being basically exiled to a reservation, the indigenous nomads were promised advantages which Stalin later retracted, allowing poverty to overrun the Kyrgyz peoples.
Raev critically juxtaposes such imperialist violence with domestic abuse, political repression, and ecological destruction. The desert is partly a figure for an exhausted Earth suffering from deforestation and post-extractivist climate change, and in chastising humanity’s exceptionalist illusions, the curses that rain down upon Castigation’s conquerors are reminiscent of *Kojojash,*a traditional Kyrgyz epic in which a hunter is cursed by a mountain goat after driving her kin almost to extinction. “You’re not the pillar of the World!” an elderly woman screams at Alexander the Great. “All the living beings on Earth were not born to feed your belly!”
House of Day, House of Nightby Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones,Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025
Review by Christopher Alexander
For readers already familiar with Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s rich literary imagination, her patchwork novel House of Day, House of Night will seem like a homecoming of sorts. Set in the author’s adopted home of Krajanów, the stories return to her familiar themes: feminism, spirituality, astrology, the more-than-human world, and a mysticism rooted in the rich humus of the everyday.
Krajanów is part of the region of Silesia, annexed by the Prussians in the eighteenth century and slowly Germanized until it was returned to the Poles after the Second World War in a land swap. Tokarczuk addresses this porousness of borders and the trauma of relocation in House of Day, House ofNight, which could not be more rooted in place and its shifting nature. In a scene loaded with tragic irony and sly humor, a relocated German returns to his village with his wife to see the town he grew up in, only to die on a hill, unwrapping a chocolate bar he would never eat, as his wife waits in the car below. What follows is an administrative tug of war as Czech and Polish guards discover the body and shove it repeatedly across the border to avoid claiming responsibility. The foxes, for their part, crisscross the frontier with impunity.
The cast of characters are the town’s residents—the intrigue of their foibles and follies, the adventures of their lives. The narrator is a writer who has recently moved in, and one of her closest friends is an older woman and wigmaker, Marta, who is both the guardian of the town’s memory and a reminder of human time’s fleeting nature. As they listen to Anna Karenina together on the radio, the narrator muses about her friend: “I sometimes wonder if she can understand these stories made up of dialogue read out by a single voice, and I think maybe she’s only listening to individual words, to the melody of the language.” In the next sentence, she hints that Marta may be becoming senile. The human tendency towards meaning becomes lost in music, and memory, and—like life—fades out and on.
But for those of us still able to distinguish words and make meaning out of sentences, House of Day, House of Nightis a joyous read for the deep empathy and consideration Tokarczuk has for her characters. In this reissue of Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s luminous 2003 translation—which brought Tokarczuk’s work into English for the first time—readers will find deep insights into the origins of Tokarczuk’s fiction, which lie in the genius loci of Krajanów.
The Endless Week** by Laura Vazquez, translated from the French by Alex Niemi,Dorothy Project, 2025**
Review by Christopher Alexander
Laura Vazquez’s The Endless Week begins with a promise of sorts—a biblical epigraph hinting that the following pages contain knowledge of the face of God: “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; / then we shall see face to face. / Now I know in part; / then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” But as much as the novel is a meditation on both the divine and the human, it is also a reflection on the omnipresence of images on social networks and the way they mirror and refract our reality.
Salim, the young hero of the The Endless Week, is a poet who posts his work online and lives at a remove from the world. He has stopped attending school after a classmate had his eye gouged out, disturbed by the collective non-response of the administration; instead, he learns about life outside his doors through the internet, speaking to his followers and messaging his friend Jonathan, whom he eventually meets in “real life.” Sharing this isolated existence is his sister Sarah, their father, and their dying grandmother. Vazquez threads all these various elements to form a plot that involves Salim and Sarah’s search for their lost mother, who is a potential blood donor for their grandmother. This leads to a departure from their insulated life to confront the flesh-and-blood incarnations of existence, which show up in a motley cohort of the homeless, drunk, and disenfranchised. Yet, despite The Endless Week’s novelistic appearances, it is at its core an exceptional work of poetry.
Vazquez aligns herself with a mystic tradition that observes the world with a detached, almost clinical view of events as they occur. Operating on the level of koan, a concise paradoxical wisdom similar to that of verse, Vazquez extends both aesthetics to deploy them in prose. The result is a mediatization of images that reflect and refract on the fragile, slippery nature of existence and its essential nature. In one scene, Salim he becomes conscious that he is a collection of images (thoughts) while engrossed in his phone:
He wondered how many images were engraved in his mind like that, how many ads, how many words, shapes, songs, smells, scenes, faces, how many thousands of clips lived like that in his mind, and how many more would get in without him realizing. He wondered if the scenes in his mind belonged to his mind or if they belonged to the world. Was he made of this combination of images and memories, some abstract, some clearer, in his mind? Did his memories make him, or did he make his memories? He locked his phone, he shuddered once.
For Vazquez, the world itself begins in words that come from a distant voice, whispering us into being. In a world of deepfakes, The Endless Week reminds us that reality is pure fiction and that we co-author our existence with a cohort of other agencies, suggesting that each one of these others is a face and facet of God.
The Investigator** by Dragan Velikić, translated fromtheSerbian byChristina Pribichevich-Zorić,Istros Books,**** 2025**
Review by Mandy-Suzanne Wong
How does the past manifest in us to shape our sense of possible futures? Celebrated Serbian writer Dragan Velikić confronts this question with quiet torment in *The Investigator,*his second novel to be translated into English.
Dragan Velikić, a fictional narrator who shares his author’s name, suffers a paralytic tremor of the soul when his mother dies in Belgrade, upon which his recollections of her become entangled in his terror of losing his memory to Alzheimer’s. He recalls her domineering passion for order and detail; over and over she had poured over old photographs, “obsessed with wanting to have the full wealth of her experience at her disposal at every moment. That was why she had to keep remembering the life she had lived and vigilantly reign over its vast territory.” Here is a suggestion that time can be ruled—and that the ruler may select their life experiences from the offerings available within the territory’s borders. “The world was like a catalogue,” says Velikić of his strictly organized childhood. In his mother’s eyes, anything in the catalogue, any past or present detail, could be read as a “warning sign” for the future. This is the logic of genetics as well as superstition: using past circumstances to explain the present and anticipate the future. But even as he notices his mother’s inclinations surfacing in himself, Velikić finds them stifling.
Is it madness to seek order in a life consisting of unfinished stories—especially considering how easily events may be forgotten, families lost, borders redrawn? Velikić’s grappling with bereavements, memory lapses, and aborted projects is part of his struggle to exist in a place that should be home but offers none of home’s comforts or stability; in violent ethnic conflicts, his native Pula becomes Italy one minute, Yugoslavia the next, and ultimately Croatia. When Yugoslavia’s disintegration renders Pula unsafe for Serbs, dispossession and relocation to Belgrade catalyze the fatal decline of Velikić’s parents.
Christina Pribichevich-Zorić’s beautiful translation of Velikić’s muted conflicts insists on a slow read; his ruminative plot appears to leave no loose ends while in fact creating sheaves of them. As the novel progresses, it becomes difficult to distinguish actual events from what the narrator merely imagines, and the reader may find herself unable to trust her memory of what she has read—or sometimes not wanting to trust it, when Velikić re-envisions a previously remembered episode in a richer imaginary. With uncertainty pathing the text, The Investigator’s greatest revelation may indeed be the creative promise latent in the truth’s vulnerability.
Hair on Fire: Afghan Women Poets**, translated from the Persian-Dari,Two Lines Press, 2025**
Review by Liliana Torpey
Ideally, anthologies would act contrary to our expectations, shining brightest when they complicate what might be simplified, and introducing plurality over a flattening unity. This is certainly the case in Hair on Fire: Afghan Women Poets, the broad parameters of which shelter other, more specific descriptors: clandestine, diasporic, exilic, activist, academic, feminist, feminine. In her introduction, Aria Aber states that Afghan poetry is one “of fragmentation, multiethnic positionalities and languages, and geographic variation.” The five poets featured here, writing in Persian and brought into English by eight translators, deliver a variation in poetics that will surely offer any reader of poetry a place to land.
I was particularly taken by Maral Taheri’s poems, which writhe and dance like a ball of worms (figures that feature prominently in her verses). “I need to spit to one side / and send kisses to the other / then come back and fill out my crosswords / I would never admit that the world has no meaning,” writes Taheri in Hajar Hussaini’s muscular translation. Here, love and irreverence wrestle and embrace amidst existentialist chaos and material violence.
Mahbouba Ibrahimi’s poems, on the other hand, elicit feelings of longing, a troubled introspection: “Mournful, enraged, / these days / poetry / can’t work its poetry.” Meanwhile, Mariam Meetra’s work throws a gut punch of tenderness and despair: “and plant a tree in the middle of the room / so the explosions can’t shake it / the blood stench can’t smother it.”
Some poems are unyielding in their act of witnessing war, terror, and stolen childhoods, as in Karima Shabrang’s lines: “Of all things silent I am afraid, / of a silent God / who dwells where the hands of orphans can’t reach.” Others grasp with determination toward freedom: “If you have no legs, leap into the dark . . . By any path that can lead away from this prison / you have to escape,” writes Nadia Anjuman.
In focusing only on five poets, Hair on Fire brings their stature into focus, recognizing these writers’ place in a global, feminist canon. You could never make me believe that poetry has no meaningful effect—not when collections like this exist.
You Must Live, New Poetry From Palestine**, edited and translated from the Arabic by Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor,Copper Canyon Press, 2025**
Review by Christopher Alexander**
You Must Live, New Poetry From Palestine is both a prayer and an order: that the rich polyphony of voices continue to live in face of ongoing genocide. Bringing together works from contemporary poets currently living in Palestine (with the exception of Yahya Ashour, who was stranded in Michigan when the war began), the poems in this collection vibrate with present urgency, acting as a testimony not only to the brutality of the Israeli invasion, but the vibrancy of the fractured literary community in Gaza. In one of the early poems of the collection, Waleed al-Aqqad addresses this mutilated body politic and the collective mourning of its citizens in “I have never seen a corpse intact”:
I have never seen a corpse intact but I recognize each of them every one of them, each victim. Even those fingers, I know whose they are.
For the most part, the collected works are written in an experimental vein of modernist Arabic poetry inaugurated by Mahmoud Darwish, which—while resolutely contemporary—is rooted in classical traditions. In their introduction, editors and translators Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Boor address some of the difficulties of bringing this form of verse into contemporary English, particularly given the prevalence of poetic devices in everyday speech and the common motif of personification that speaks to a pre-Islamic, animist view of the universe.
One example of this intersection between past and present aesthetics can be found in the queer politics of Nema’a Hassan’s “How to build a pub in a country prohibited from love.” Arabic verse has a long tradition of odes to young boys and a running theme of liberation through excess and drinking, both of which existed alongside strict conservative mores. In referencing not only the repressive force of the Israeli army but also the theocratic rule of Hamas, Hassan demonstrates the possible subversions:
To my neighbor whose window I peep through each night, urged by the tight dress I love to wear, I smile and feed naughty children syruped pies.
For the poets included in this volume, simply submitting their work was an act of courage, as each message sent to the outside world initiated them as potential targets—and still does. The process of translation and editing also put them at risk, shining a beacon each time they connected to a cell tower or satellite; to hone their language, they put their lives on the line. Still, as the authors of this volume remind us again and again, simply living in Palestine is deadly, and the depths of the tragedy must be heard and understood for it to stop. To imagine such a future, certain poems in this volume also conjure up an end to the war, such as in Khaled Juma’s “When the Soldiers Leave this Place”:
When the soldiers leave this place, I’m going out to buy a few millimeters of air and try, if I can, to sing you to sleep.
. . .
When the soldiers leave this place don’t mess with what remains of the story. They know—they only know what is only known to them.
The story is not over, and this collection grants its readers access to the knowledge and experiences of those living on the ground: the bonds of family and kinship, the intimate awareness of death, the devastating impacts of genocide, and the will to go on living.
Christopher Alexanderis a poet, performer and multidisciplinary artist. S he is currently engaged in a long-term investigation on interspecies communication and the performance of nature in the Mediterranean. Together with the visual artist and researcherAlexia Antuoferomo, they co-founded the collective of artists and researchers,Tramages. Heir texts and translations have been published inAsymptote, Belleville Park Pages, Pamenar Press Online Magazine, parentheses, Point de chute, FORTH Magazine, Fragile Revue de Créations, remue.net, andTransat’, among other publications. Heir work has been exhibited at 59 Rivoli, La Générale Nord-Est, Mémoire de l’avenir, and the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Heir first poetry collection,play-boy, explores the seepage of toxic masculinity into contemporary gender norms and is forthcoming in a bilingual edition with Le Nouvel Attila in 2026.
Regan Mies* is a writer and translator in New York. Her work has appeared in theLA Review of Books,Cleveland Review of Books,Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere.*
***Xiao Yue Shan*is a poet, writer, editor, and translator.
Mandy-Suzanne Wong* writes experimental fiction, essays, and poetry. Her books includeThe Box andDaughter of Mother-of-Pearl, both published by Graywolf Press.*
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