Simple Balance (A Revelation, 40 Poems, and a Solitude)

As a naive ancestor of mine said: Life is too miserable to not enjoy its failures and dull dawns. I’m not a creature who writes all the time, nor publishes often, but yes am one who reads and contemplates the world and its imaginary beings. Reading and writing bewitches me, and I do it by the dim, blurry light of bars and ephemeral rooms the home is an ideal place. My texts are the contents of a saddlebag hung on the empty stage of a nameless tobacconist, and I’d like to think that some day it will fill with actors and outlaws and perhaps one of these will lean forward to learn the meaning of that verse I left abandoned there without erasing.

ABDUL HADI SADOUN
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Abdul Hadi Sadoun (Baghdad, 1968) is an Iraqi author, translator, and Hispanist, living in Madrid, Spain, where he writes in both Arabic and Spanish, and translates in both directions. He is the author of numerous books of both prose and poetry, including the novel Memoiras de un perro iraqui (2016) and Todos escriben sobre el amor menos tú (2018). He has translated into Arabic authors such as Cervantes, Machado, Lorca, Borges, Alberti, Bécquer, and Javier Marías.

Lawrence Schimel (New York, 1971) is a bilingual (Spanish/English) writer, who has published over 130 books, as well as a prolific literary translator, who has published over 180 books. He has translated into Spanish authors such as Maggie Nelson, Danez Smith, Christopher Soto, and Koleka Putuma, and into English: Carmen Boullosa, Juan Villoro, Elsa Cross, Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, Gabriela Cantú Westendarp, Jeannette
L. Clariond, and many others.

Posted: November 3, 2024 at 4:20 pm