Readers of Palestinian poetry in translation are likely to have encountered some of Huda Fakhreddine’s exquisite work online this year. She has translated some of the most urgent and resonant poems written in Arabic during the genocide, including poems by the late Hiba Abu Nada, a Palestinian poet who was killed by Israeli bombardment in Gaza in October 2023, and a quartet of poems by the great living Palestinian poet Ibrahim Nasrallah, which will be published this month in a chapbook entitled Palestinian by World Poetry Books. Fakhreddine is a preeminent scholar of Arabic literature in the US, with expertise in modernist Arabic poetry and its relationship to its ancestral tradition. Her wealth of expertise and historical understanding are immediately evident in her translations of Arabic poems, but there’s more that draws me to her work. Fakhreddine is a scholar of time, noting with precision and insight the shifts that Arab poets make in response to the upheavals in their communities and homelands, and the ensuing conversation with (and against) power and status quo in which the great poets are often engaged. On the occasion of the launch of her latest translation, Salim Barakat’s The Universe All At Once, Selected Poems (Seagull Books), I’m thrilled to bring WWB readers this conversation with her about her craft.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha (LKT): During the past nine months, you have translated some incredibly powerful poems by living Palestinian poets, including Ibrahim Nasrallah and Samer Abu Hawash, and by poet Hiba Abu Nada, who was killed by Israel’s bombardment in her home in Khan Yunis, Gaza, on October 20, 2023. Why has it been important to you to make the work of Palestinian poets available to English-language readers during the unfolding genocide in Palestine? You’ve said before: “I need these poems, they don’t need me.” Can you reflect on what the emotional or even spiritual impact of such a deep engagement with these texts has been like for you in this time of genocide?

Huda Fakhreddine (HF): Palestine, its history, and its cultural production are an integral part of any responsible reading of Arabic literature in the last one hundred years and more. Centering Palestine and Palestinian literature has always been important in my writing and teaching. It is a clear way of signaling to students and colleagues in the field of Arabic studies, the area of Middle Eastern studies, and the larger humanities my commitment to studying Arabic literature with integrity and not in response to outside, imposed imperatives. Palestine is at the core of my intellectual and academic concerns as a scholar of the Arabic literary tradition. I’m convinced that literature is a continuum, and one cannot truly read a poem written today without knowledge of the tradition it belongs to; similarly, one cannot truly engage with a poem written a thousand years ago—as poem and not an artifact—without a connection to its legacy and its consequences in its language, and to that language’s creative consciousness in this present moment. 

Translating the works of Palestinian poets while a genocide unfolds in Gaza has been a lifeline for me. Gaza has been speaking for decades, and we must listen and learn. At this counterpoint in history, we look to Gaza and its artists and writers for a language, for ways of existing and resisting, and for an alternate history to counter the one written by the oppressor.

How can we claim to be true humanists unless we enter the apprenticeship of the language and literary tradition we study as a way of seeing, as a method of thought, a manner of existing and navigating the world? And here in the US, there can be no directions in the field of Arabic literary studies except resistance and recognition of this field’s exploitative nature, and its complicity in the violence we are now witnessing against Palestine and the Arabic tradition to which it belongs. Reading and translating Palestinian poetry is one way through which recognition and resistance can happen. Claiming to study a culture without respecting and advocating its just human cause is a kind of hypocrisy we see often in the Western academic and cultural sphere that keeps us on its margins, tokenized and in the service of some fascination or fetishization. I am reminded here of a question Gabriel Garcia Márquez posed in his Nobel acceptance speech, and I’m struck by how aptly it fits the case of Palestinian and Arabic literature in general: “Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change?” He goes on to wonder why “the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries” is denied other peoples, and why their attempts at achieving it are always demonized and crushed at all costs. We are witnessing this unfold in real time in Gaza. Enough already! When you don’t have the basic human decency to protest a genocide against the Palestinian people, your “reading and appreciating” of their literature is violence and aggression.

LKT: You’ve translated numerous Arabic poetry collections including Lighthouse That Denied Me and The Sky That Denied Me, by your father, Lebanese poet Jawdat Fakhreddine, and Come, Take a Gentle Stab and The Universe All At Once, by Salim Barakat. And you’ve recently translated a new collection of poems, Border Wisdom, by your partner, Palestinian poet Ahmad Almallah, into Arabic. You seem to favor close collaborations—can​ you reflect on your role both as translator and collaborator on the new text? How has the conversation between you and the authors of the original texts shaped your process as translator?

HF: Translation is the most creative and intimate reading of a text, and it is necessarily collaborative. I think of translation as a conversation with the text, its author, or cotranslators when they are involved. It’s a conversation that unpacks the original texts through agreement, conflict, misunderstanding, tension, and discovery. That’s how I imagine my relationship with the poets I translate, even the Abbasids and pre-Islamic poets. Of course, when the conversation is actually possible on the phone or in person, things change, not necessarily for the better, but a different dynamic takes place.

Conversations with authors of original texts take different forms. In translating the work of my father, Jawdat Fakhreddine, the conversation has been ongoing all my life. I have a sense of authorship/ownership of his poems that comes from my having literally lived with some of them echoing in my head for years. However, the translation is a conversation with the poems, not the poet—and my relationship with the poems is part of what I hope my translation conveys as well. I’ve translated two volumes of his work in collaboration with other translators, and in these experiences, I think the conversation with a third person helped balance the reading and forced me to create necessary creative and critical distance from poems to which I sometimes felt too closely attached.

Working with Salim Barakat is different. He remained outside the translation process altogether when we were working on the first volume [of his work]. This new volume is more of a collaboration with him because he participated in the selection of poems and excerpts, and, of course, we had several long conversations on the phone and in writing while conducting the interview. Still, he prefers not to discuss his work and I prefer not to involve him in my reading of his work. He set the challenge in his text, and I accepted it, as a reader and a translator.

My most sustained and involved collaboration is with Ahmad Almallah, my partner. Our relationship began and continues to be centered on our shared interest in and love for poetry. We have been partners in poetry for over two decades now. And while translation is always also an act of creative writing, my translation of Ahmad into Arabic is almost entirely that. My engagement with his poetry satisfies my aspirations as a reader, a writer, and a translator in Arabic and in English, and at the intersection or gap between them. The Arabic underpinnings of Ahmad’s poems, their anchoring in Arabic poetry, is a level of reading that informs my translations of his poems, their return to Arabic as I take it upon myself to remake them. I find the conversation with Ahmad before, during, and after the poem invigorating. It requires me as a translator to expect more of my translated text, and it also has an impact on my own writing in Arabic. Our recent coauthored poem is the beginning of a new project we hope to work on together: a series of responses to poems that have had an impact on us and that move us to respond or object or engage, the way Eliot’s The Waste Land does. Some of the poems we are in conversation with are in Arabic. Writing for Ahmad is always also reading, translating, and mistranslating. It is an engagement with language at the nexus of loss/silence and discovery/creation. This is very appealing for me as a reader and a translator.

LKT: What first drew you to Salim Barakat’s work? How would you describe his contribution to modern Arabic poetry?

HF: What first drew me to Salim Barakat’s work is the tempting challenge. Barakat’s poetry is a confrontation between “language” and “meaning.” Meaning is resolution; it is an organizing of language into a coherent finality, and language in Barakat’s poetry is a resistance against precisely that finality. It keeps the reader frustrated, working actively in search of an elusive meaning, and ultimately, maybe, forced to settle for an illusion of meaning, an imagined resolution. This motivates me very much, as a reader and a translator. The idea of difficult poetry (which I reject or push against) and the idea of the untranslatable, which I find necessary to reconcile with before embarking on any translation, especially of poetry, are what drew me to Barakat’s work.

Barakat’s proclaimed mission is to unsettle the Arabic language, to defamiliarize it and reinstill it with a rawness and a wildness from which, he claims, it has been purged. And he does that by mining the creative potentials of grammar. Most striking about Barakat’s writing is his insistent probing of the simple phrase, the seemingly mundane unit of syntax, to create a fascinating and unexpected effect. His work demands an intimate knowledge of the Arabic poetic and prose tradition. It deliberately transgresses genre divisions and self-proclaimed schools and projects, and continuously deconstructs the artificial divide between form and meaning.  His work demands a brave, reckless reader, willing to be led astray and ready to enjoy the labyrinths or minefields that are Barakat’s texts.

LKT: As a translator and a scholar of Arabic literature, how would you describe the contribution of Palestinian poets and writers to (global) literature in the last hundred years, beyond the regional context? What themes have they introduced or developed? Which movements are they most notably in conversation with?

HF: Palestine, as a motif, metaphor, experience, and cause, has prominently featured in modern Arabic literature. The Nakba of 1948, and the endless states of exile and refugeedom into which it cast the Palestinian people across the Arab world and beyond, sparked many new trends and movements in modern Arabic literature and art during the second half of the twentieth century.

The Nakba and the Palestinian experience in its aftermath have had lasting and far-reaching consequences in Arabic cultural production. For example, we cannot study the rise of the modernist movement without the contributions of Palestine and Palestinian writers and thinkers. The same applies to conversations about existentialism and the question of commitment; the dialectical relationship between history and art; the ideas of pan-Arab Nationalism, Syrian Nationalism, and the projects of political and cultural rebirth; the brief duration of Arab symbolism, surrealism, and absurdism. Palestinian writers and artists have been at the frontiers of innovation and experimentalism in Arabic literature, and have played crucial roles in theorizing the future of Arabic literature in its different genres and forms.

Palestinian writers and theorists invited us to reconsider our understanding of commitment in literature. Taking a cue from Kanafani and his powerful statement—“I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite”—Palestinian literature impresses upon us the fact that artistic commitment cannot be divorced from political commitment. He believed that all art, and especially literature, should aim to transform the world, otherwise it is nothing but a tool for preserving the world as it is and recycling its existing injustices. To be a writer and a poet is to necessarily be compelled to imagine the world differently.

LKT: If you were to offer an introductory course on modern Palestinian literature for readers who are newly interested, what are the literary texts you would include? What are the critical essays or texts that you would recommend as companions to these works?

HF: Palestinian literature is not literature for times of crisis, and its study is not an afterthought or a “safe” way to show solidarity. Just as I insist that a study of modern Arabic literature is incomplete without Palestinian literature, I insist on studying Palestinian literature in the larger context of the tradition it belongs to. Last spring, I taught a course entitled “Resistance Literature from Pre-Islamic Arabia to Palestine,” in which we read selections from Arabic poetry and prose exploring the themes of resistance, community and individual agency, and revolution in its various forms (social, political, and literary). Next fall, I am teaching a class entitled “Palestine in Modern Arabic Poetry,” which examines the rise of the modernist movement in Arabic poetry through the lens of Palestine.

In addition to the well-known names who are relatively more available in translation, such as Samih al-Qasim, Mahmoud Darwish, Emil Habibi, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Ghassan Kanafani, and Ibrahaim Nasrallah, I am committed to highlighting writers and poets who are understudied, such as Tawfiq al-Sayegh, Ibrahim Tuqan, Fadwa Tuqan, Salma Khadra al-Jayyusi, Mueen Bssieso, Hussein al-Barghouti, Zakaria Mohammad, and others. Of course, I think a class on modern Arabic literature is incomplete without a look at exophonic works that engage with the Arabic language or channel it somehow, and in this case works that address or speak to and of Palestine in the languages of the diaspora.

LKT:  I’d love to close with two questions you posed to Salim in an interview, with a minor amendment. First: Is there a text you dream of translating?

HF: Al-Shanfarah’s Lamiyyah is a poem that has accompanied me throughout my life. I’ve memorized parts of it since I was a child. It often rings in my head, especially in these past nine months. It is a poem that saves, consoles, enrages, soothes, and satisfies. I relish my dream of translating it and protect that dream by deferring the translation, postponing it. In the meantime, I keep looking for opportunities to channel the poem’s energy, its music, its attitude, and the way, like every great poem, it gathers the world and rearranges it in its landscape of sounds and images.

LKT: And second, is there something you are still waiting for?

HF: At this moment, I only wait for the end of the massacre, the end of this genocide. The genocide in Gaza is a counterpoint in history, the end of the world as we know it—nothing should be the same after this. Time stands still; there will be no dreams, no future, no plans until the massacres end and time regains some sanity, completing its march toward a free Palestine.

Huda Fakhreddine is associate professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a writer, a translator, and the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh UP, 2021).