Describing the Past

Ghassan Zaqtan is a Palestinian poet, novelist, and editor born near Bethlehem. He has lived in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Tunisia, and writes primarily in Arabic. Across poetry and fiction, his work attends to landscape, displacement, memory, and Palestinian experience. Samuel Wilder is a writer and translator of Arabic literature whose work is shaped by comparative poetics and close attention to modern Arabic prose. He has lived and worked in Cairo and Beirut and has pursued academic work in London and Cambridge.

• ForewordFady JoudahDescribing the Past

“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.”