A Tree Whose Name I Don't Know

by Golan Haji, Stephen Watts (Translator)

Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies. Translated by Stephen Watts and Golan Haji.
"In Golan Haji's poems and prose-poems, fable and myth are incised into history and contemporanaeity, al-Ma'arri's verses are re-inscribed upon the Odyssey, made to reflect on the ongoing tragedy of the Kurdish people, and of each individual exile. A young Syrian poet now living in France, Haji, polyglot and humanist, is a luminous arrival for world poetry. Is there a word for 'saudade' in Arabic? His poems, in Stephen Watts' fine-honed translations, are imbued with it."—Marilyn Hacker

Genres: Poetry

62 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2017

About the author

Golan Haji is a Syrian poet and translator with a postgraduate degree in pathology. He was born in Amouda, a Kurdish town in the north of Syria. He has worked as a translator from English and American literature, and has translated Robert Louis Stevenson’s Scottish classic Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde into Arabic (2008), in addition to Dark Harbor , selected poems of Mark Strand (2002), Rear Window, scenario of Alfred Hitchcock‘s movie (2005), Elephant by Dan Wylie (2010), Notebooks of Anton Chekhov (2011).

His first collection of poetry in Arabic, Called in Darkness (2004), won the Al-Maghut prize in poetry. His second book of poetry, Someone Sees You as a Monster (2008), was published during the event celebrating Damascus as the Capital of culture in 2008. His next collection Autumn Here is Magical and Vast, in both Arabic and Italian,was published in Rome 2013. He lived in Damascus until he had to flee his country and has now settled in France.

Reviews

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this and promptly forgot it on the publisher's table at AWP, and was very glad it found its way back to me. These are poems written by Golan Haji, translated by Stephen Watts and the poet. Amazingly, I read another poetry collection this year that had some poems written in collaboration with Golan Haji - Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance: Poems.

These are poems of leaving, of loss, of exile, of memory. Some are long prose poems while others are shorter. "Box of Pain" and "Autumn Here is Magical and Vast" feel like the most representative of the emotions of the entire collection.

[Bogi Takács]

Golan Haji, the author is a Kurdish Syrian poet who writes in Arabic, and who has left his country of origin in 2011 (he currently lives in France). This is his first English-language collection, but previously he has been published in Italian, and he has had an amount of shorter poems appear in English translation – as far as I can tell, these have been mostly included in this book.

Please see my full-length review on Bogi Reads the World:
http://www.bogireadstheworld.com/poet...

Source of the book: Print ARC from the publisher

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Purchased as a part of my AWP buying spree, and picked up for April in Arabia and Read the World 21 challenges, I had no context or familiarity with the author going into this. As a result I did feel a bit like I was floundering a good part of the time. Despite or because of this, my favorite poems from this collection tended to be those that evoked a dream-like quality, like "A Light in the Water"

The dreamers are sleepers fully dressed under the water. Bubbles are a sign of life, as of the body's decay. We can't be sure which. They sleep on the stage and their hands don't move, and the waves delude you into thinking their fingers stir in weak and final motions.

The author is a Kurdish Syrian poet currently living in France, and these poems are built on the bones of loss and war and emigration and mourning.