The twentieth poem in our Palestine Advent series is From the River to the Sea, by Samer Abu Hawwash, translated by Huda Fakhreddine.
From the River to the Sea, by Samer Abu Hawwash.
Samer Abu Hawwash is is a Palestinian writer and translator. He was born in Lebanon to a Palestinian refugee family. He has published ten volumes of poetry, starting with his debut collection Life is Printed in New York (1997). He is also a prolific translator of English-language fiction and non-fiction.
Huda Fakhreddine is Associate Professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge, 2023). Her book of creative nonfiction titled Zaman saghir taht shams thaniya (A Small Time Under a Different Sun) was published by Dar al-Nahda, Beirut in 2019. She is the co-translator of Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA editions, 2017), The Sky That Denied Me (University of Texas Press, 2020), Come Take a Gentle Stab (Seagull Books, 2021), and the translator of The Universe, All at Once (Seagull Books, 2024).
With thanks to Natalie Jabbar and Chris Rose for inspiring this idea.
Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash
Lifesaving Poems 