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Contributor

Faraj Bayraqdar

Contributor

Faraj Bayraqdar

Faraj Bayraqdar was born in 1951 in Tir, a village near Homs in central Syria. He began publishing poetry while still in high school. At the University of Damascus, he and a group of friends started a literary journal, but certain texts published in it led to his arrest and imprisonment for three months. His first collection, You Are Not Alone, came out in 1979 and was quickly followed by two more. He stopped writing in the early 1980s due to commitments in the Syrian Communist Labor Party; his wife, also a party member, was arrested and spent four years in prison. In 1987, Bayraqdar was arrested again and remained in prison without trial until 1993, when he was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor for belonging to an unauthorized political association. His imprisonment lasted more than thirteen years, in three different prisons (the Palestine Division, Tadmor, and Saydnaya). Without his knowledge, a group of friends in Beirut published Dove in Free Flight, a collection of his poems that was used, Elias Khoury writes, as "one of the instruments of pressure on the Syrian authorities to mobilize international, intellectual opinion, particularly in France, in order to set the poet free." After an international campaign was mounted on his behalf, Bayraqdar was released from prison during the brief political respite known as "Damascus Spring" in 2000.

Articles by Faraj Bayraqdar

Najati Tayyara, Still Imprisoned
By Faraj Bayraqdar
On May 11, 2011, Al Jazeera conducted a phone interview with my friend the writer and Syrian rights activist Najati Tayyara.  In that interview, my friend spoke with complete candor about the brutal,…
Neighing
By Faraj Bayraqdar
Stop, and weep  Not sadness over the corpse ofthe remnants of a cursed godand so not a sadnessover a bird burdened with open spaceDon’t take me-Don’t leave me-maybe, my two friends,…
Translated from Arabic by The New York Translation Collective
Ode of Sorrow
By Faraj Bayraqdar
 The blue of depth is sadnessand the depth of blue-sadnessand a star quivering tears in this space-Language at the peak of clarityunfurls the night . . .Indeed, the moment is wounded by a dreamto…
Translated from Arabic by The New York Translation Collective
Cooing
By Faraj Bayraqdar
Your cooing wears me out at night—                    so wear me out.Like wine in the odes, you go on cooingand leave me what moves horses   …
Translated from Arabic by The New York Translation Collective
Groans
By Faraj Bayraqdar
1Here I am you aloneIn this mad, gapingHellHere I am you alone and death altogetherWith its predators and its seers and the informersPerhaps I am arriving atThe limit of my possibilitiesFor you to arrive…
Translated from Arabic by Shareah Taleghani
An Alphabetical Formation
By Faraj Bayraqdar
Alif You’re not beginning . . .It’s an eternity, you know . . .I mean, the ever-after, you knowNo matter, then.Raise your cavalryBut don’t set out for the horizon,Or the sea . .…
Translated from Arabic by Shareah Taleghani