Kareem James Abu-Zeid is an award-winning translator of authors from across the Arab world. His most recent translation is Najwan Darwish’s Exhausted on the Cross, the subject of the featured review in the Spring 2021 issue of WLT.
Asma Ghanem / Courtesy of the artist
Hunger strike, fortieth day*
Your bodies flutter on the ceiling
of the room I can see your slow gestures
the small bones in the joints
of your...
Mohamed Masri / Courtesy of the artist
I Write the Land
I want to write the land,
I want the words
to be the land itself.
But I’m just a statue the Romans carved
and the Arabs forgot.
Col...
New York. NYRB. 2021. 144 pages.
IN NAJWAN DARWISH‘S unflinching new collection of poems, Exhausted on the Cross, we witness a poet in conflict with his calling, conversing w...
New York. New Directions. 2016. 120 pages.
Several artists stand out among the many voices that a new wave of translation has made available to anglophone readers; one of these is the Lebanese writer...
Kareem James Abu-Zeid, tr. New York. New York Review Books. 2014. ISBN 9781590177303
Najwan Darwish is a young Palestinian poet, born in Jerusalem in 1978. He is no relation to the great Palestinian p...