Describing the Past
GHASSAN ZAQTAN, TRANSLATED BY SAMUEL WILDER
When he was seven years old, Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan moved with his family to a Karameh refugee camp east of the River Jordan. That camp—a center of Palestinian resistance following the Six-Day War and the site of major devastation when Israel razed the camp following the Battle of Karameh in 1968—is the setting for Zaqtan’s first prose work to appear in English, Describing the Past.
This novella is a coming-of-age story, a tale of youth set amid the death and chaos of war and violence. It is an elegy for the loss of a childhood friend, and for childhood itself, brought back to life here as if dreams and memories have merged into a new state of being, an altered consciousness and way of being in and remembering the world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born near Bethlehem, Palestinian poet, novelist and editor GHASSAN ZAQTAN has lived in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Tunisia. His verse collection Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, translated by Fady Joudah, was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize for 2013, and he was nominated for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in both 2014 and 2016. His name appeared for the first time in 2013 among the favourites to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
SAMUEL WILDER is a translator of Arabic literature, a writer, and a student of comparative poetics. Since 2006, he has lived and worked as a literary translator in Cairo and Beirut, and pursued academic work in London and Cambridge.
PRAISE
“To call the novella haunting would be insufficient. The prose has a rare, fugitive quality: a narration that seems to envy the air, envy the breath of the other, and which knows in contrast its own confinement [...] This novella should be commended both for its role in the translation of Zaqtan’s oeuvre into English and as the first title in a new series for Arabic literature at Seagull Books, edited by the scholar and translator Hosam Aboul-Ela [...] In Wilder’s English, Zaqtan’s images are vital and distinctively restless; the prose has a bold simplicity that never settles into familiarity.”
— Full Stop
“A taut, perfect object, beautifully crafted (and translated by Wilder). Little is clear and there are few answers, but the ultimate impression is one of controlled gorgeousness [...] Seeing Zaqtan’s novella emerging from this vibrant publishing house, and in such distinctive and elegant form, is an optimistic act of decolonization from a book trade centered on the UK and US. If Seagull’s vigorous list of Arab authors is indicative, there should be plenty more to come.”
— Electronic Intifada
“While history serves as a backdrop to this dream narrative, Describing the Past is primarily “the story of a childhood whose domain is between the living and the dead, a coming of age story that ends as soon as it begins in desire”. Samuel Wilder, winner of Lucius Lyon Prize for poetry translation and a doctoral candidate in Arabic studies at Cambridge University, has captured the lyricism in Zaqtan’s writing with finesse.”
— Arab Weekly
INFORMATION
Published by Seagull Books, 2016
ISBN 9780857423498
80 pages, hardback