Batool Abu Akleen — Tenement Press

_{Gaza, the Old Town (circa 1862),

Albumen Print, ℅ the Library of Congress.}

_{٤٨ كغم /
48kg.

Batool Abu Akleen

Translated from the Arabic by the poet,

with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami,

Cristina Viti & Yasmin Zaher

Tenement Press #19
978-1-917304-03-0
135pp [Approx.]

(eds.) Dominic J. Jaeckle

& Cristina Viti

£18.50

PREORDER DIRECT FROM TENEMENT HERE

Publishing 16th May 2025

A debut collection from the Palestinian poet—Modern

Poetry in Translation’s ‘Poet in Residence,’ 2024—a

bilingual assembly of forty-eight poems in which each

work accounts for a single kilogram; a body’s mass; a

testament to a sieged city; a vivid
and visceral

voicing of the personal and the public in the

midsts of unspeakable violence.

هكذا أطهو حزني / This is how I cook my grief}

_{أقطف من الشارع قلوباً طازجةً

أختار أكثرها خيبةً

بيدٍ خفيفةٍ أسرق الدموع

.أعبئ رائحة الحزن في علب السردين الصدئة

نظرات الأمهات تلتصق بأعينهن بشدة

.فأخطفها برشاقةٍ لأني أشبه أطفالهن

في قدرٍ نحاسيٍ

أغلي كل مسروقاتي

أضيف لها دماً لم تشربه الأرض بعد

.ونشارةَ تابوتٍ كان باباً لبيته الجديد

أسكبُ الخليطَ في قلبي

فيصبح أسوداً

هكذا أطهو حزني}

_{I pick fresh hearts from the street

the most defeated ones

with nimble fingers I steal the tears

I fill rusted sardine tins with the smell of sorrow.

Mothers’ glances cling tight to their eyes

but I snatch them easily, because I resemble their children.

In a copper pot

I boil what I’ve stolen,

add the blood that hadn't been absorbed

& sawdust from a coffin meant as the door to a new home.

I pour the mixture into my heart

until it blackens.

This is how I cook my grief.}

Editor’s Note

_{I was introduced to the poetry of Batool Abu Akleen thanks to an Italian translation written by Aldo Nicosia for an anthology of women’s poetry and art dedicated to the memory of Etel Adnan. *

I was impressed with this young poet’s ability for close observation and empathy and by the immediacy and vividness of her language. In one instance, in a poem she wrote at the age of fifteen in 2020, she takes on the voice of a mother to describe daily life in a Palestinian refugee camp and the physical and psychic impact of the violence of borders on adults and children alike. Publication of the anthology, for which I wrote an English version of that poem, led to a series of events and exhibitions in which some of Batool’s paintings were also shown, and to the beginning of our correspondence and friendship. Thanks to her good command of English and to her perseverance and courage against the ongoing massacre of her people, we were able to co-translate a number of other poems.

Over the past few months, while going through a number of evacuations, continuing her studies via distance learning following the razing of her faculty in Gaza City, holding English classes for some of the children residing in the camp where she lives and honouring her commitments as translator in residence for Modern Poetry in Translation, Batool has worked to assemble her first collection and make English versions of her poems—most of them self-translated, except for a few made in collaboration with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Yasmin Zaher or myself.

On receiving her first draft, I was once again struck, not only by her determination in speaking with unflinching precision the horror that would leave us speechless, but by her ability to stay with the internal logic and structure of her collection as she navigates grey no man’s lands of exhaustion, shock and survivor’s guilt. Her spare & lucid language wakes us from the glare of generic livestreamed indignation as she watches bomber planes named for First Nation people murdered in an earlier genocide buzzing overhead, the rude health of soldiers’ bodies and its lethal potential for seductiveness fed by institutionalised robbery, murder and rhetoric, children turning their own fathers’ age in a few seconds.

Observing the daily endurance and human failings of those around her, imagining liberation by utopian transformation or divine intervention (I’m reminded here of Elia Suleiman’s 2002 film of that title), openly voicing her anger and loss, not asking why (‘hier ist kein warum,’ as Primo Levi recalled) but fighting absurdity by its own weapons (‘I was wandering the streets in search of a second-hand ceasefire’), Akleen reaches out for a space of shared humanity where life and poetry are welcomed and nurtured. I can only praise her for creating such a space within herself against forbidding conditions and salute her as she takes her place with the fellow poets she honours by her work.

Viti, MMXXIV

_{* See Costanza Ferrini (ed.), Di acqua e di tempo /

Of Water and Time (San Marino: AIEP, 2022).}

_{SEE HERE FOR AN INTERVIEW WITH AKLEEN ℅ ARAB LIT

INTRODUCING AKLEEN, mpT’s ‘POET IN RESIDENCE, MMXXIV’}

_{TWO POEMS, TRANSLATED BY YASMIN ZAHER, ℅ TRIANGLE HOUSE}

^{Image(s)

Middle—Gaza, seen from the west.
(Corona, New York: Stereo-Travel Co., circa 1908),

℅ the Library of Congress.}

^{Bottom—Samson's gate, Gaza (circa 1862),}
^{Albumen Print, ℅ the Library of Congress.}}

^{Batool Abu Akleen is a poet and translator from Gaza, Palestine. She started writing at the age of ten, and at the age of fifteen, she won the Barjeel Poetry Prize for her poem ‘It Wasn’t Me Who Stole the Cloud,’ which was published in the Beirut-based magazine Rusted Radishes and later included in the Italian anthology Of Water and Time. Akleen’s poetry has been translated into several languages, including English and Italian, and featured in numerous international publications. Her work was recently included in the July 2024 issue of mpT: Modern Poetry in Translation, ‘Salem to Gaza,’ and she was the magazine’s 2024 ‘Poet / Translation in Residence.’

Graham Liddell is a writer, translator, and scholar of modern migration literature. His translations from Arabic have appeared in Banipal, ArabLit Quarterly, and The Stinging Fly. In 2022, he edited and contributed to a book-length issue of the literary translation journal Absinthe, entitled Orphaned of Light: Translating Arab & Arabophone Migration. A recent recipient of a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, Liddell wrote a dissertation on the ways that contemporary Arab and Afghan migration experiences are narrated in both published literature and the asylum process. His current position is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Hope College.

Wiam El-Tamami is an Egyptian writer, translator and editor. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in publications such as Granta, The Paris Review, Freeman’s, Ploughshares, AGNI, Literary Hub, CRAFT, The Massachusetts Review, and ArabLit, among others. She won the 2011 Harvill Secker Prize, was shortlisted for the 2023 Disquiet International Prize, and received a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2024. She is currently based in Berlin.

Cristina Viti is a translator and poet working with Italian, English and French. Her most recent publication includes Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger (Tenement Press, 2022), a co-translation of poems by Anna Gréki, The Streets of Algiers and Other Poems (Smokestack Books, 2020), and her translation of Elsa Morante’s The World Saved by Kids and Other Epics (Seagull Books, 2016), which was shortlisted for the John Florio Prize. Viti held collaborative translation workshops within the Radical Translations project run by the French and Comparative Literature departments of King’s College; Tenement’s imprint No University Press published an anthology of texts resulting of these workshops in 2024, An Anarchist Playbook.

Yasmin Zaher is a Palestinian journalist and writer. Her journalism has appeared in Al-Monitor, Haaretz, and Times of Israel. Her debut novel, The Coin (Catapult)—a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice—was published in 2024.}

_{As Modern Poetry in Translation’s 2024 ‘Poet in Residence,’ a thread of translations of Akleen’s poems was published in the Autumn issue of the magazine, ‘Salam to Gaza: Focus on Dissent and Resistance.’}

_{Recently, standing in front of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ‘Landscape with the Flight into Egypt,’ at the Courtauld gallery, my friend and I were discussing Raymond Geuss’s argument about the moral choice of locating oneself in a painting as opposed to being a viewer.

The question is: should we see ourselves as the characters in the painting, take a side, or maybe even implicate ourselves? I wondered if the predicament applies to poetry. We’re all sophisticated enough to know that the “you” isn’t you, and the “I” isn’t I, but could we, as readers, locate ourselves in a poem? This is to go further than merely identifying with an emotion or a sensibility. Choosing a position in the poem would be akin to choosing a position in the world: viewer or participant?

From Janani Ambikapathy’s

editorial introduction to the issue.}