Author Description

Product Description Bennani's translations of Arabic poetry are like arrows aimed at objects. They go swiftly and directly to the mark. They sing with direct energy... a delight to read; it is enlivening to know. Darweesh is called "Poet of the Palestinian Resistance," but these fast-moving poems are not political poems. They are about love, pain, death central beliefs and feelings of the poet concerned not so much with the quotidian as with the permanent truths felt through immediate experience. Bennani skillfully communicates Darweesh's ideas in these able translations. Review These last closing lines from the transcendent poem "The Prison Cell," by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Ben Bennani, encapsulate the power of the poems selected and translated by Bennani in Roses and Dictionaries: Modern Arab Poets (Cyberwit.Net, 2019). The sad interplay of beauty, war, despair, do not surrender to that abyss, but rather rise toward a common plane that suggests connection in the darkest and most unlikely situations. The elegance of the rendering and weaving of natural images against blood, drudgery, and loss will truly make us sad, but through their illumination and art, these poets and their translator render us expanded and newly free. --C.A. Warner, American Poet Mahmud Darwish, in "On Poetry," considers a perennial problem: if poetry could cease to be communication mainly with fellow-poets and become "a chisel / In the hand of a laborer! / Or a plough / In the grip of a peasant!" it would then become better poetry. "The Prison Cell" is an engaging dialogue between the prisoner and the guard. It ends in a paradox. This is a valuable book for Western readers. The Arab poets presented here deal in their separate ways with many of the same problems confronting Western poets, indeed encountered by poets everywhere in the world: the difference between reality and imagination, present reality and artistic significance, the p