Poetry anthology with Sophus Helle (eds.), Born in Babylon: Middle Eastern Poetry on Diaspora and Antiquity. Wesleyan University Press, forthcoming.
Born in Babylon is a multilingual poetry anthology that gathers personal and political reflections on exile, migration, loss, and transformation by ancient and modern poets from the Middle East. The poems in the volume set up a dialogue between the deep past and the troubled present, criss-crossing the rich archive of exilic stories from the ancient Near East with the voices of modern poets from the region, all of whom grapple with the same forms of upheaval, grief, culture shock, and nostalgia. The volume consists of English translations of original poems in Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, Turkish, and Kurdish, as well as translations from ancient Sumerian, Akkadian, Demotic Greek, and Biblical Hebrew. By staging such an unlikely and experimental dialogue across millennia, Born in Babylon pushes against purist notions of “roots” or “origins,” highlighting instead how movement, translation, and cultural hybridity are the oldest forms of human identity, belonging, and connection.
The anthology consciously brings together migrant experiences and languages that are often separated by colonial legacies, national borders, sectarian divides, and, to put it simply, thousands of years. We hope such an ambitious text can offer a new vision for the rich, multi-ethnic, postcolonial, and polyphonic future(s) of the West and East alike.
Aside from serving as co-editor of the volume, I wrote the Introductory essay and produced the Arabic translations for the poems of Amal al-Jubouri, Fadhil al-Azzawi, Liwaa Yazji, Ghareeb Iskander, and Widad Nabi. I also assisted in the Hebrew and Kurdish translations of works by Abdulkadir Musa and Mati Shemoelof.