Kareem James Abu-Zeid
Kareem James Abu-Zeid, PhD, is an award-winning translator of poets and novelists from across the Arab world and beyond, and has translated over a dozen full-length books from three different languages. His most recent translation is Najwan Darwish’s Exhausted on the Cross (NYRB Poets, 2021). He is also the author of the book The Poetics of Adonis and Yves Bonnefoy: Poetry as Spiritual Practice (Lockwood Press, 2021).
Reading List
Contemporary Arabic Poetry in Contemporary Translation
Prior to 2001, Arabic literature—despite its vast history and broad geographies—would have counted as a fairly “minor” literature in terms of its English-language translations. But after the attacks of September 11, the Arab world was suddenly of acute interest to the United States and the rest of the English-speaking world. Enrollment in Arabic language courses […]
Translations
A Dinner Invitation
Translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid I told myself: If you want to see her now, look where the sky meets the mountain as it descends to the sea. Her invitation’s eternal now, and her home is time. So let others sing their lamentations, let them surrender to separation. I’ll […]
Home
Translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid Nothing but the nightmare bus passes by our home, nothing but the whistle of a single train sounds in our memory— sometimes it takes our children, sometimes it brings us colonizers. Its whistle is the silence of victims, its smoke is their history. And in our […]
[The horizon came, carrying in its hands]
Translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid The horizon came, carrying in its hands a famished gull. The shores shear off their waves while migration’s air collects its leaves and heads back home. Life is metaphor, and morning, like evening, has steam rising from it. The path my footsteps took […]