A Wave in the Sea: Najwan Darwish on “Exhausted on the Cross”
Kareem James Abu-Zeid, left, and Najwan Darwish (photo credit: Veronique Vercheval)
Born in Jerusalem, Najwan Darwish published his first poetry collection in 2000. He has since become one of the foremost contemporary Arab poets, and one of the most powerful poetic voices to emerge from Palestine in the modern era. His first book to appear in English was
Nothing More to Lose (NYRB Poets, 2014), which was listed by NPR as one of the best books of the year. Now, with the publication of his second major collection in English,
Translating Multilingual Wordplay in Danyil Zadorozhnyi’s “Letter to Ukraine”
, via Wikimedia Commons
Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler and Reilly Costigan-Humes s translation of Danyil Zadorozhnyi s Letter to Ukraine appears in the February 2021 issue of Words Without Borders
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How do you translate a poem into a single language when it is interested in the liminal space between two languages? That was the first question my cotranslator Reilly Costigan-Humes and I asked ourselves when we read Danyil Zadorozhnyi’s “Letter to Ukraine,” a poem that explores questions of national and cultural identity from the perspective of a Ukrainian poet writing in Russian. In this post, I will do my best to reenact the creative process of answering it.
Three Poems by Salgado Maranhão
Islander
the word that is a stone in flight.
I listen to the sea singing your Azores,
an ax splitting open silence.
I, too, am that stone that sings:
a bird stitched to the Atlantic.
Oh Islander of Lusitanian seas,
that gave me a tongue with the salt
of their words; between the howling of the sea and the unfathomable wind:
the poet is always an island of stars!
who pray to the stomach
without metaphysics. Of those who
drown their sufferings
I am a creature of speech
bearing bones
from behind the shadows,