The Silence That Remains: Selected Poems

Ghassan Zaqtan, Fady Joudah, trans.

Palestinian poet, novelist, and journalist Ghassan Zaqtan is one of the most consequential writers of our time. His unadorned, cleanly delivered narratives of war and witness are animated by a joyful sensuality—how better to express loss than to illuminate living the dailiness of resistance? Zaqtan’s poems are elegantly translated and introduced by Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American poet whose insight into Zaqtan’s work is at once intimate and historical. The books from which these poems were drawn are themselves survivors of disposession, occupation, and exile—in some cases only a few copies remain of the original Arabic editions.
 
When interviewed by PBS for their special on Palestinian poets, Zaqtan said, “I am not the kind of person who will walk in front of the demonstration… I walk behind the demonstration in order to collect the small things that may fall, whether it’s the handkerchief or a child’s backpack or a purse.” This generous volume represents two decades of incandescent creativity.

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ISBN: 9781556595141

Format: Paperback

Damascus 1986

The key’s clang
the sun I called from the windowsill
the brief time of fondness
none of it was mine

This cramped morning
sprinkled over the neighbor’s garden
from the edge of the pillow
isn’t mine

It wasn’t mine
that laugh of the girl who gleamed behind the vase
in air

There had to be a hand picking jasmine nearby

If only our neighbor would turn off the radio
I could hear
how water breaks over her hands as she washes . . .

I would have opened the window
I would have turned off the lights

About the Author

Ghassan Zaqtan is a Palestinian poet and novelist. He was born in Beit Jala, near Bethlehem, and has lived in Jordan, Beirut, Damascus, and Tunis. His book Like a Straw Bird it Follows Me, translated by Fady Joudah, received the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2013. He is the winner, alongside Elias Khoury and Alice Walker, of the Mahmoud Darwish Excellence Award. In 2014 and 2016, he was shortlisted for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature from the University of …

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About the Translator

Fady Joudah has published four collections of poems, The Earth in the Attic, Alight, Textu—a book-long sequence of short poems whose form is based on text message character count—and, most recently, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance. He has translated several collections of poetry from Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received a PEN award, a Banipal/Times …

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Reviews

“What does poetry do? Nothing and everything, like air, water, soil, like birds, fish, trees, like love, spirit, our daily words… It lives with us, in and outside us, everywhere, all the time, and yet, we are too often oblivious of this gift. It’s a poet’s job to bring this gift out and back, this gift that makes us human again. And Mr. Zaqtan has done it. His poetry awakens the spirits buried deep in the garden, in our hearts, in the past, present and future.” —Judges’ citation, Griffin Poetry Prize

“Zaqtan is not only the most important Palestinian poet alive, but one of the most important poets of our time, embodying in various sophisticated and cosmopolitan forms of expression depths of feeling, complexity, compassion, and witness beyond compare.” —Lawrence Joseph

“[Zaqtan] examines states of being in quotidian life with the patience and care of a jeweler.” —Arts Fuse

“The poet’s trade is exile, and a Palestinian poet’s trade thus a double exile: Ghassan Zaqtan’s work is exemplary in that its lyrical intensity simultaneously hides and foregrounds.” —Nomadic Poetics