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Tenement Press is an occasional publisher of esoteric,
accidental, angular, & interdisciplinary literatures.
My head is my only house unless it rains
Don Glen Vliet
See here for Rehearsal, an ongoing
& growing collation of original (& borrowed)
digital ephemera.
Tenement Press is an occasional publisher of esoteric,
accidental, angular, & interdisciplinary literatures.
My head is my only house unless it rains
Don Glen Vliet
Were a wind to arise
I could put up a sail
Were there no sail
![]()
I’d make one of canvas and sticks
Bertolt Brecht, ‘Motto’
(Buckow Elegies)
I could put up a sail
Were there no sail
Bertolt Brecht, ‘Motto’
(Buckow Elegies)
See here for Rehearsal, an ongoing
& growing collation of original (& borrowed)
digital ephemera.
Rehearsal / 27. Wadih Saadeh / Three poems.
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Saadeh selling his poems on Hamra Street, Beirut,
Haidar Abbas Abadi, © 1968.
Saadeh selling his poems on Hamra Street, Beirut,
Haidar Abbas Abadi, © 1968.
Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger
Just room enough
Air from his lungs,
water from his eyes,
what does he need with the outside?
From his breath the breeze,
from his tears the water,
should he need food
the garden of his mind
holds fruits.
He locked the door
and sat;
he turned his face
away from the shapes of people passing,
away from the shapes of the birds
at the window tapping.
What would he feed the birds?
How could he invite the people in?
If a bird wanted grain, where would he get it?
If people came in, where would they sit?
A locked room, small,
just room enough
for someone’s eye,
for their breath.
![]()
He said that one
was like the other:
the basil in the corner
and his mother.
That people could not tell them apart.
That they would say ‘Good morning’ to his mother
and the basil would answer;
that they’d address the basil
and the mother would reply.
He said: Her hands weren’t filled just with veins,
there were roots there,
and her palms were leaves,
her eyes two flowers;
when she moved through the streets
fields’ scents floated from her clothes.
He said that they were twins,
his father and the tree.
That he would lean his arm on it
and it would lay its bough on him.
That it would green to see him,
yellow when he took ill.
That when the wind shook it
he would shiver.
He said this and he walked towards the door.
He rolled a cigarette and left.
Who drowned became a cloud
then fell in drops;
the swimmers in the sea,
they swim in him.
![]()
ORDER WADIH SAADEH’S A HORSE AT THE DOOR DIRECT FROM TENEMENT
Wadih Saadeh was born Wadih Amine Stephan in 1948 in the village of Chabtine in northern Lebanon. As a young man he moved to Beirut where he first began to write poetry and where, in 1973, he would distribute handwritten copies of his first collection, The evening has no siblings. He lived and travelled between Beirut and Europe—Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Greece and Cyprus—until in 1988 he finally emigrated with his family to Australia, where he lives now: ‘a village farmer, resident in Sydney.’ A figure of central importance in the development of the Arabic prose poem, his published collections are as follows ...
(1981) The evening has no siblings
In two parts—the first written between 1968 and 1973,
the second between 1973 and 1980—that were published together
in a single volume in 1981.
(1983) The water, the water
(1985) A man in second-hand air sits and thinks of animals
(1987) Seat of passenger who left the bus
(1992) Because of a cloud most probably
(1997) An attempt to join two banks with a voice
(1999) The text of absence
(2001) Dust
(2006) Darning the air
(2006) Another configuration of the life of Wadih Saadeh
(2011) Who took the glance I left before the door
(2012) Tell the passer-by to return, he left his shadow
Translations of individual poems and collections have been published in a number of European languages, most frequently his Lebanese civil-war collection Because of a cloud most probably. In English, many translations of his poems can be found online, and in anthologies such as Crack in the wall: New Arab Poetry (Saqi Books, 2001) and Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (Norton, 2008). The only published English-language volume dedicated to his work is Anne Fairburn’s A secret sky (Ginninderra Press, 1997), which contains poems from Saadeh 1992 collection. Moger’s selected translations of Saadeh, A Horse at the Door, is forthcoming in Tenement’s “Yellowjacket” series, December 2024.
Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic to English who lives in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat. His translations of prose and poetry have appeared widely. Moger’s most recent publications include Strangers in Light Coats (Seagull Press, 2023)—a collection of the poems of Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan—and Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal (And Other Stories Press, 2023), which was a joint winner of the 2024 James Tait Black Prize for Biography.
Just room enough
Air from his lungs,
water from his eyes,
what does he need with the outside?
From his breath the breeze,
from his tears the water,
should he need food
the garden of his mind
holds fruits.
He locked the door
and sat;
he turned his face
away from the shapes of people passing,
away from the shapes of the birds
at the window tapping.
What would he feed the birds?
How could he invite the people in?
If a bird wanted grain, where would he get it?
If people came in, where would they sit?
A locked room, small,
just room enough
for someone’s eye,
for their breath.
He said
He said that one
was like the other:
the basil in the corner
and his mother.
That people could not tell them apart.
That they would say ‘Good morning’ to his mother
and the basil would answer;
that they’d address the basil
and the mother would reply.
He said: Her hands weren’t filled just with veins,
there were roots there,
and her palms were leaves,
her eyes two flowers;
when she moved through the streets
fields’ scents floated from her clothes.
He said that they were twins,
his father and the tree.
That he would lean his arm on it
and it would lay its bough on him.
That it would green to see him,
yellow when he took ill.
That when the wind shook it
he would shiver.
He said this and he walked towards the door.
He rolled a cigarette and left.
Who drowned
Who drowned became a cloud
then fell in drops;
the swimmers in the sea,
they swim in him.
ORDER WADIH SAADEH’S A HORSE AT THE DOOR DIRECT FROM TENEMENT
Wadih Saadeh was born Wadih Amine Stephan in 1948 in the village of Chabtine in northern Lebanon. As a young man he moved to Beirut where he first began to write poetry and where, in 1973, he would distribute handwritten copies of his first collection, The evening has no siblings. He lived and travelled between Beirut and Europe—Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Greece and Cyprus—until in 1988 he finally emigrated with his family to Australia, where he lives now: ‘a village farmer, resident in Sydney.’ A figure of central importance in the development of the Arabic prose poem, his published collections are as follows ...
(1981) The evening has no siblings
In two parts—the first written between 1968 and 1973,
the second between 1973 and 1980—that were published together
in a single volume in 1981.
(1983) The water, the water
(1985) A man in second-hand air sits and thinks of animals
(1987) Seat of passenger who left the bus
(1992) Because of a cloud most probably
(1997) An attempt to join two banks with a voice
(1999) The text of absence
(2001) Dust
(2006) Darning the air
(2006) Another configuration of the life of Wadih Saadeh
(2011) Who took the glance I left before the door
(2012) Tell the passer-by to return, he left his shadow
Translations of individual poems and collections have been published in a number of European languages, most frequently his Lebanese civil-war collection Because of a cloud most probably. In English, many translations of his poems can be found online, and in anthologies such as Crack in the wall: New Arab Poetry (Saqi Books, 2001) and Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (Norton, 2008). The only published English-language volume dedicated to his work is Anne Fairburn’s A secret sky (Ginninderra Press, 1997), which contains poems from Saadeh 1992 collection. Moger’s selected translations of Saadeh, A Horse at the Door, is forthcoming in Tenement’s “Yellowjacket” series, December 2024.
Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic to English who lives in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat. His translations of prose and poetry have appeared widely. Moger’s most recent publications include Strangers in Light Coats (Seagull Press, 2023)—a collection of the poems of Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan—and Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal (And Other Stories Press, 2023), which was a joint winner of the 2024 James Tait Black Prize for Biography.
