Ik hier jij daar

Adrenalin is Syrian-born, Stockholm-based Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun’s first collection to be published in English. This sinuous translation by Catherine Cobham comprises poems that span years and continents, that circulate between cities, ideas, lovers, places of refuge, war zones, time zones, histories. Here is a vital, relentless, intertextual voice that refuses arrest by sentimentality, that pursues the poetry coursing underneath the poetry.

Fluid and unselfconscious, Ghayath Almadhoun writes love poems in the shape of nightmares: I have brought you a severed hand is a surreal mix of absurd humour, heteroerotic lust and dead seriousness. Caught between two exiles, the one inherited from his Palestinian father and the one he chose and lives, Almadhoun attempts to explain water and tame hope.

This book never misses the defiant beat of an exile’s haunted footing across wars, seas and memory. Almadhoun turns the genocidal logic of colonialism upside down, emptying out the crumbs of humanity and civilisation. —Don Mee Choi

Almadhoun uses every possible means of silence to make the total devastation palpable. —Alfred Schaffer

Many poets attempt to traverse the gulf between the experience of tragedy and the ability to relay its magnitude to anyone else. But few living have done it with such flourish, such sustained passion and formal precision as Ghayath Almadhoun. —Kaveh Akbar

Ghayath Almadhoun (born 1979, Damascus) is a Syrian-Palestinian poet who moved to Sweden in 2008. He has published five collections of poetry in Arabic, the latest being Adrenalin (Almutawassit, 2017) and I have brought you a severed hand (Almutawassit, 2024). In 2017, Adrenalin was translated into English by Catherine Cobham and published by Action Books. In 2023, Almadhoun curated, edited and translated the poetry anthology Kontinentaldrift: Das Arabische Europa (Verlag Das Wunderhorn and Haus für Poesie), which includes thirty-one Arabic poets living in Europe. The English translation of I have brought you a severed hand is published simultaneously by Divided in the UK and Europe and by Action Books in the USA. Almadhoun currently lives between Berlin and Stockholm. His work has been translated into nearly thirty languages.

Catherine Cobham taught Arabic language and literature at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, for many years and was head of the department of Arabic and Persian from 2011 until 2021. She has translated the work of a number of Arab writers, including poetry by Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Ghayath Almadhoun, Tammam Hunaidy and Nouri al-Jarrah, and novels and short stories by Yusuf Idris, Naguib Mahfouz, Hanan al-Shaykh, Fuad al-Takarli and Jamal Saeed. She has written articles in academic journals and co-written with Fabio Caiani The Iraqi Novel: Key Writers, Key Texts (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

Published on the centenary year of Pasolini’s birth, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Writing on Burning Paper is a dual edition that stages a dialogue between cinema today and Pasolini’s timeless films and words.

The two complementary volumes slide into one another, forming a unique set that evokes and celebrates Pasolini’s enduring influence. The smaller book features his epic autobiographical poem ‘Poet of the Ashes’, in a revised translation by esteemed poet Stephen Sartarelli; the larger book comprises original tributes by vital filmmakers from across the contemporary cinema landscape.

Twenty filmmakers shared personal reflections in the form of essays, poems, photographs, drawings and more: Catherine Breillat, Luise Donschen & Helena Wittmann, Jia Zhangke, Radu Jude, Payal Kapadia, Alexandre Koberidze, Dane Komljen, Mike Leigh, Mariano Llinás, Roberto Minervini, Valérie Massadian, Luc Moullet, Ben Rivers, Angela Schanelec, Ulrich Seidl, Basma al-Sharif, Deborah Stratman, Anocha Suwichakornpong and Gustavo Vinagre.

Nasleep neemt de protesten rondom het Gezi Park in 2013 als vertrekpunt en verkent gaandeweg wat er is overgebleven van dit historische moment waarin een andere wereld voor het grijpen leek. Het zijn gedichten die laveren tussen ritmische, conceptuele en kritische noise enerzijds en postrevolutionaire affecten anderzijds, tussen politise­ring enerzijds en onmacht en radeloosheid anderzijds.

Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-Translations, & Originals

Ten poems by Sagawa Chika are conveyed into English and other languages through a variety of translation techniques and procedures, some of them producing multilingual poems. Languages used include English, Japanese, French, Spanish, Chinese.

"Mouth: Eats Color is a brilliant infra-textual work, brainchild of the bi-cultural poet/translator Sawako Nakayasu. The collection provokes, expands, and disavows the parameters of language and person and tradition, to forge a beautiful weave of performance and interrogation. This is a project of multilingual wit and passion, echo upon echo upon echo." — Anne Waldman

Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation – separately and in various combinations. She has lived mostly in the US and Japan, briefly in France and China, and translates from Japanese. Her books include Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (Wave Books), Pink Waves (forthcoming, Omnidawn), The Ants (Les Figues Press), Texture Notes (Letter Machine Editions), and the translation of The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Penguin Random House), as well as Mouth: Eats Color – Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals (Rogue Factorial), a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry. She is co-editor, with Eric Selland, of an anthology of 20th Century Japanese Poetry (forthcoming, New Directions). She teaches at Brown University in the Department of Literary Arts.