Program Description
Event Details
Kareem James Abu-Zeid, PhD in Conversation with Arthur Sze
No One Will Know You Tomorrow: Selected Poems, 2014-2024
by Najwan Darwish (Author), Kareem James Abu-Zeid (Translator)
A selection of the exquisite, passionate verse of the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish, superbly translated into English
“A lush bouquet of essential poems from one of our species’ most urgent living poets. These are poems of testimony, of presence and the persistence of joy.”—Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
Born in Jerusalem in 1978, Najwan Darwish is one of the most important poets of the Arabic-speaking world. This definitive collection, which draws from five volumes published in Arabic as well as new unpublished work, brings to English-language readers a sweeping trove of Darwish’s most powerful and urgent poetry of the last decade.
In spare lyric verse, Darwish testifies to the brutal and intimate traumas of war, the anguished fatigue of waking up each morning in an occupied land, and the immeasurable toll of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While anchored in the geography of Palestine, his poetry also explores the rich artistic inheritance of the Arabic-speaking world, moving between regions, landscapes, and eras, from the glories of medieval Granada to the rippling shores of contemporary Haifa. In dialogue with poets, philosophers, and seekers from many different traditions, Darwish’s verse pulses with spiritual longing and a sense of battered, disoriented wonder—a witness to both the atrocities we visit upon one another and the miracle that we are here at all.
No One Will Know You Tomorrow is a tribute to the indomitability of the human spirit: its sensitive attunement to beauty and its endurance in the face of unspeakable tragedy.
Najwan Darwish is arguably the best-known and most acclaimed poet from Palestine and Kareem James Abu-Zeid has been translating Darwish's work for the past 12 years. In addition to the forthcoming book, Kareem James Abu-Zeid has published two books with NYRB Poets: Nothing More to Lose (2014), and Exhausted on the Cross (2021). The latter was the winner of the Sarah Maguire Prize, and was a finalist for The Pen America Award for Poetry in Translation, the National Translation Award, and the Derek Walcott Prize.
Kareem James Abu-Zeid is a translator, editor, writer, teacher, and scholar who works across multiple languages. As an acclaimed translator of Arabic literature, he works with prominent English-language publishing houses to introduce the writings of Arab poets and novelists to a broad audience, seeking to promote Arabic literature in the US and around the world. While he enjoys translating all kinds of texts, he is particularly fond of Arabic poetry.
Kareem has received numerous awards, fellowships, honors, and residencies for his work as a translator and a scholar, including PEN Center USA's 2017 Translation Prize, the 2022 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation, a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts translation grant, the 2015 Northern California Book Award for Best Translated Poetry, Poetry Magazine's 2014 translation prize, a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Germany, a CASA Fellowship in Cairo, and residencies from the Lannan Foundation and the Banff Centre for the Arts. A full list of his awards is available here.
As a freelance professional translator from Arabic, French, and German into English, he has produced hundreds of texts since 2003: books, essays, movie subtitles, plays, poems, speeches, and more, covering such wide-ranging topics as art history, Islam, Buddhism, genetics, politics, and particle physics.
As a professional editor of American and British English, he has worked on an equally broad array of topics and genres for institutions and individual clients around the globe. He has edited hundreds of texts since 2004, and many full-length books. Most recently (from 2015 to 2017), he worked as a freelance Senior Translating Editor for a book project with MoMA.
Kareem is also the author of the book The Poetics of Adonis and Yves Bonnefoy: Poetry as Spiritual Practice (Resources in Arabic and Islamic Studies, Lockwood Press, 2021).
Learn More about Translator, Writer, and Editor Kareem James Abu-Zeid, PhD at www.kareemjamesabuzeid.com
Arthur Sze is an American poet, translator, and professor. Since 1972, he has published ten collections of poetry. Sze's ninth collection Compass Rose (2014) was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Sze's tenth collection Sight Lines (2019) won the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry.
Sze was the first Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he resides and is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts. poets.org/poet/arthur-sze