Lighthouse for the Drowning

Jawdat Fakhreddine was born in 1953 in a small village in southern Lebanon. A professor of Arabic literature at the Lebanese University in Beirut, he is one of the major Lebanese names in Modern Arabic Poetry, and is considered one of the second generation poets of the modernist movement in the Arab world. He earned an MA in Physics and taught at the high school level for more than 10 years. During this time he published a number of poetry collections and was encouraged by Adonis to work on a PhD in Arabic literature. Fakhreddine intermittently publishes articles and new poems in al-Hayat newspaper, which is an Arab newspaper published in London and distributed worldwide, and in as-Safir, one of the two major Lebanese Newspapers. He writes a weekly article in al-Khaleej newspaper, a widely distributed gulf daily newspaper. He currently lives in Beirut, Lebanon.Huda Fakhreddine is Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work focuses on modernist movements and trends in Arabic poetry and their relationship to the Arabic literary tradition. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015), a study of the modernist poetry of the twentieth century Free Verse movement and the Abbasid muh?dath movement, as periods of literary crisis and metapoetic reflection. She holds an MA in English Literature from the American University of Beirut and a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Indiana University, Bloomington.Jayson Iwen is a poet and cross-genre writer, the author of Six Trips in Two Directions (2006), which won the Emergency Press International Book Award; A Momentary Jokebook (2008), which won the Cleveland State University Ruthanne Wiley Memorial Novella Award; and the anti-novel Gnarly Wounds (2013). Recently published poems of his can be found in The &Now Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Eureka Literary Magazine. He currently lives in Duluth, Minnesota, and is Associate Professor of Writing at The University of Wisconsin–Superior. He met both Huda and Jawdat Fakhreddine when he lived in Lebanon, where, amongst other things, he was Assistant Professor of English Literature at The American University of Beirut and organizer of the first post-war, open mic reading series in Lebanon.

ON TRACK FOUR JOURNAL'S LIST OF 'TEN OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED POETRY COLLECTIONS BY PEOPLE OF COLOR IN 2017'"'Words . . . are the lost homeland,' Jawdat Fakhreddine claims in his ruthlessly self-scrutinizing Lighthouse for the Drowning. Like Paul Celan and Taduesz Rozewicz, words are not the way back to what’s been lost, but rather they comprise the very 'rubble and remains' of their losses. They carry as well the echoes of the 'guiding voices' that 'have died.' Fakhreddine's dilemma, like Celan's and Rozewicz's, is to know what feelings and perceptions to trust. As a result, out of his lost Lebanon, out of his disillusionment in politics, he finds a spirit in poetry 'that flows from deep and rises effortlessly / to flicker like the passing sky.' If this sounds evanescent, it's not because the constant pressure of his lost homeland and of words seek to countermand any hope of finding a way out of history's dark and confusing labyrinth. Written twenty years ago, Lighthouse for the Drowning is a clear and concise description of the present."—Michael Collier"Lighthouse for the Drowning brings to the attention of an Anglophone readership a complete poetry collection (published for the first time in Arabic in 1996) by the prominent Lebanese poet and critic, Jawdat Fakhreddine. In the detailed Introduction to the translated collection (the first translator being the poet's own daughter), the collection is deftly situated within a context that lies between the tradition of pre-modern Arabic poetry and the quest for modernity, the combination of these two sources of inspiration being a pertinent aspect of the poet’s own muse. The language and sound of the original verse is described as being 'simple and intimate,' but a reading of the collection, whether in its original Arabic or in this accomplished translation, makes it abundantly clear that those qualities are an intrinsic part of the poet's aspiration to forge his own path within the variegated contexts of modern Arabic poetic creativity. The challenges inherent in the process of translation, translating poetry in general and this particular collection in particular, are also discussed—the preparation of an original 'literal' version by the native-speaker of Arabic, the process of 'carrying across' the ideas and images of that version into another cultural context, and the difficult task of reconciling the two. The resulting English version of the collection is a clear token of such a successful collaborative process."—Roger Allen

• ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction Three Profiles of DeathGlowSeptemberPreparationFoxes Seas Do I Take Refuge in Myself For YemenAn Evening in Old Sanaa Elevation How Long This Day of Mine There in the Winter A Lighthouse for the Drowning Forty Grass Distraction Heavy Essence Day Night Light Pulse Land StarsBird My Evening ThereThe Slanted BalconyThe Sky That Denied Me Winter’s Words Birds of Regret Smoke Dying Directions