For this week’s showcase, we are thrilled to present two surreal, staccato zen koans by contemporary Palestinian poet Samer Abu Hawwash in Huda Fakhreddine’s concise translation. If you admire these spare lines that probe the relationship between appearance and reality, check out a recent profile of the author by translator Fakhreddine in the online portal Jacket2.
Kafka on the Beach
I hear the trees passing behind the window.
One of them, maybe a palm tree, opens the curtain, stares me down, and moves on.
At the corner, there’s a cat yawning, saying to the old man: “So . . . you can speak?!
The old man responds: “But I am not very bright.”
I think I am looking into a mirror.
At the Mall
You ride the escalator
like a suitcase walking with the sprint of the animal
it was made from.
But still;
what illusion always makes you
wait for something
at the top of the escalator?!
Translated from the Arabic by Huda Fakhreddine
Samer Abu Hawwash is Palestinian and was born in Lebanon in 1972. He graduated from the Lebanese University with a degree in journalism in 1996 and has worked for a number of cultural newspapers and platforms in Lebanon and the Arab region. He currently resides in the United Arab Emirates where he is editor in chief of Website 24, an online news outlet. He is a prolific writer, poet, and translator with two novels and nine poetry collections of his own so far. In 2008, he published a fifteen-volume series of translated American poetry published by Kalīma, a translation initiative funded by the Abu Dhabi Authority of Cultural and Heritage and Dar al-Jamal, a publishing house based in Beirut and Berlin. The series includes the works of writers such as William Faulkner, Sylvia Plath, Billy Collins, Charles Simic, Jack Kerouac, Ted Kooser, Charles Bukowski, Ann Sexton, and others.
Huda J. Fakhreddine is Assistant Professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and the co-translator with Jayson Iwen of Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA editions, 2017) and with Roger Allen of The Sky That Denied Me (University of Texas Press, 2020). Her translations of modern Arabic poems have appeared in Banipal, World Literature Today, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly, and Middle Eastern Literatures. Her book of creative non-fiction titled Zaman Saghir taht shams thaniya (A Small Time under a Different Sun) was published by Dar al-Nahda, Beirut in 2019. Her book The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press in 2020.
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