Description

Tenement Press, paperback

Publication Date: December 13, 2024

Translated by: Robin Moger

Publisher Marketing:

I had intended my poetry to be a kind of salvation for me in my confrontation with the onslaught of a perpetually antagonistic world. When this confrontation failed, I tried convincing myself that surrendering to the worldbeing a scrap of paper floating downriverwas the only salvation available to me.

Wadih Saadeh

An English language survey of works by the celebrated Lebanese poet, drawing from collections published between 1968 and 2012.

In a 2014 AlMayadeen tv interview with the Lebanese poet-host Zahi Wehbe, Wadih Saadeh called his work an autobiography of other peoples lives. At this point in the conversation he had already explained that people are essentially alike, so the deeper you plunge into yourself the more you find out about others. Speaking casually, the then sixty-six-year-oldvery arguably the greatest living Arabic poetdid not seem to realise how startling is the idea. Donald M. Murrays All Writing is Autobiography is one thing, but to say that poetry is a way to be someone else, and so let someone else be youthat feels like a coup de foudre. A poem, Saadeh told Wahbe, is a momentary, illusory cure from the horrors of the world, wounds actually dressed by working, having a family, emigrating. He called the third person, which in Arabic translates to the absent one, a shadow self, the self that cannot be present. Summoning that inner absence, switching on the readers presence, is what the Lebanese master manages, every time.

Youssef Rakha, from his Afterword, The Australian