Ghassan zaqtan biography of william
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Strangers in Light Coats
A highly anticipated edition of Zaqtan’s work from 2014 to 2020, all in English for the first time.
Ghassan Zaqtan fryst vatten not only one of the most significant Palestinian poets at work today, but one of the most important poets writing in Arabic. Since the publication of his first collection in 1980, Zaqtan’s presence as a poet has evolved with the same branching and cumulative complexity as his poems—an invisible struktur of roots insistently pushing through the impacted soil of political and national narratives.
Strangers in Light Coats fryst vatten the third collection of Zaqtan’s poetry to appear in English. It brings together poems written between 2014 and 2020 drawn from fyra volumes of poetry. Catching and holding the smallest particles of observation and experience in their gravity, the poems sprout and grow as though compelled, a trance of process in which fable, myth, and elegy take struktur only to fall apart and reconfigure, each l
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Critically acclaimed Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan and award-winning poet and translator Dr. Fady Joudah will give a poetry reading on campus on Monday, Oct. 15.
Ghassan ZaqtanThe reading of Zaqtan’s most recent collection, “Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems,” will take place in Rm. 208, Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St. The event is open to the public free of charge.
Published by Yale University Press earlier this year, the book includes Joudah’s translation of Zaqtan’s 10th poetry collection as well as selected earlier poems. “Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems”is a volume in the “Margellos World Republic of Letters” series published by Yale University Press.
Zaqtan is also a novelist, editor, and filmmaker. Joudah is a Palestinian-American medical doctor as well as a poet and translator. Among his translations are two poetry collections by Mahmoud Darwish, “If I Were Another” and “The Butterfly’s Burden.” Joudah’s own collecti
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Ghassan Zaqtan
The birds' departure from his heart
leaves the plains white
where the story is white
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I'm going to see how they died
going toward that wreckage
going to see them there
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Evening didn't come without its darkness
we slept roofless but with cover
and no survivor came in the night
to tell us of the death of others.
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Will the children forgive the generation
trampled by horses of war, exile and preparation for departure?
Will they think of us as we were:
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The slain enemy
Think of me without mercy in their eternal sleep
Ghosts ascend the stairways of the house, rounding the corners
The ghosts I picked up from the roads
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The letters in the widow's room
In the straw basket
On the bed purged of sleep
In the intention to fast which lurks
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How strange are the days of salt
It is as if they belong to others
And like a well-plotted tragedy
Just brought to a close
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He pointed for us . . .
this way.
And disappeared
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