Wolves, Also — Web Exclusive
By Ghassan Zaqtan
Translated by Fady Joudah
When it was close and had found its way . . .
the sound of its breathing
and the scent by the door told of it.
Someone's footsteps walked by
before it lunged.
. . . and everything here has disappeared
you and the others,
the distant clothes and those who were sitting
the few flowers in the pot
the color of wine
the poem:
the enemy comes to drink our tea at night
and leans his Tommy submachine on the wall . . .
The poem
was it Darwish's
did he say: submachine or rifle?
The enemy's daughter was in the shadows
she had thick eyebrows . . . she had the taste of a slow river,
a voice sprinting out of sleep and a scent of leaving.
The visitors disappeared,
their notebooks under them disappeared in dense fog,
the actor in the death scene
before the end
and the Jazz song
in a club whose name is no longer clear
on a Saturday night in Memphis . . .
the way coats looked while hanging behind the side door . . .
and the wolves kept howling at me
Ghassan Zaqtan was born in 1954 near Bethlehem. He obtained a teachers' training degree from Jordan and worked as a physical education teacher. Zaqtan worked with the Palestinian resistance movement and was editor of Bayader literary magazine of the PLO. He is the editor of the literary page of Al-Ayyam, a daily newspaper in Ramallah, and the editor of the new poetry quarterly Al-Shou’ara. He has published a number of poetry collections, with his first novel appearing in 1995. His poetry abounds with luminous imagery, ranging in topics from life and death to the particular themes running through contemporary life. He has participated in countless international poetry festivals, and his works have also been translated into French.
Fady Joudah was born in Austin, TX, in 1971, the second of five children. His father, originally from Palestine, accepted teaching positions first in Libya, then in Saudi Arabia, where Joudah attended junior high and high school. His father introduced him early to classic Arabic poetry—reciting lines, talking about technique, linking those beloved poems with his own life as a boy. Joudah returned to the United States for college, attending the University of Georgia and joined the Veterans Affairs hospital in 2000 as a doctor of internal medicine. He is also a field member of Doctors Without Borders since 2001. The translator of many of Mahmoud Darwish’s collections of poetry, including The Butterfly’s Burden, his poetry has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Bellingham Review, and Crab Orchard, among many. Joudah is the first physician and the first Arab-American to receive the Yale Series of Younger Poets award.