*These ruins are familial,this wreck familialthis bleeding and these massacres familial,the slaughterhouses familial,and these poems, they are familial too,and their meanings rancid.We ascend to a sky collapsing on top of another sky,and this, our pagan digging in search of a god in the mines of thunder.I will end the ancestors. I will rid myself of the ancestors, tattered andfrayedlike bits of cloth, not even history can sew together, despite its needlesof anthems and songs.I will rid myself of the ancestors, sliced like pieces of bread on whichhistory hasn’t managed to spread its butter at breakfast.*Here are the heirs of the bull heartsand the tyrants who are kind to gardens.The gardeners guide the bees to the pollen in the gods’ blossoms.Sweat dripson the foreheadof the yearsand the years’ hands tremble.I will end what happened to the horseand what happened to the earth stretching beneath the horse’s hooves.I will end all that robs me of my feeling as a stranger.A stranger I will remain,and strangers are contentwith the magic of their sorrow.
Selections from A Spiritual Admonition (excerpt)
Feature Date
- March 7, 2025
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- Translation
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“Selections from A Spiritual Admonition (excerpt)” from The Universe, All at Once: Selected Poems: by Salim Barakat.
Published by Seagull Books in August 2024.
English Copyright © 2024 by Huda J. Fakhreddine.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Salim Barakat is a Kurdish-Syrian writer, considered to be one of the most innovative poets and novelists writing in the Arabic language. He was brought up in Qamishli in northern Syria and spent most of his youth there. After living in Beirut and Cyprus, he moved to Sweden in 1999, where he now resides. A prolific writer, Barakat has published dozens of novels and collections of poetry. He is distinguished from his contemporaries for the innovative use of style and theme within his writing.
Huda J. Fakhreddine is a writer, translator, and 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). She is co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures and an editor of the Library of Arabic Literature.
Salim Barakat, the captivating Kurdish-Syrian poet and novelist known for his mastery of Arabic style, is hailed as an enigmatic and intricate figure in contemporary Arabic literature. In The Universe, All at Once, he curates, in collaboration with translator Huda J. Fakhreddine, a selection from his later works, considering them the pinnacle of his poetic career. Drawn from pieces composed between 2021 and 2023, the poems in this collection vary from excerpts of an expansive book-length poem to concise, intense fragments. Fakhreddine expertly renders his writing in English, a courageous and praiseworthy attempt to challenge the barriers of the untranslatable.
This volume not only showcases the prolific author’s poetic evolution but also features a comprehensive interview with Barakat. Conducted by Fakhreddine, the interview delves into Barakat’s early influences, hobbies, talents, reader expectations, and reflections on displacement, childhood, and interpersonal connections. Together, The Universe, All at Once presents the best of Barakat’s latest poetry to his readers and allows invaluable insight into the writing processes and motivations of a visionary modern poet.
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