WEBVTT

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Hello, everyone.

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Welcome.

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Thanks for patience.

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We're glad you're all here.

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Thanks for choosing the
Poetry Center tonight

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amongst all other options
that were available to you.

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It's a beautiful
evening in Tucson

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and I'm glad to see all of you.

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I am going to just quickly
introduce Fady, and then

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have him get to it.

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And he read last
night in Phoenix.

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It was a wonderful reading.

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We had a tremendous
night, and I'm

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excited to have
him here as well.

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This reading in
particular, we celebrate

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because it has a special
name, and it's a name,

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it's a featured reading
within our series.

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This is the second annual
Hannelore Quander-Rattee

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Reading for
Works-in-Translation.

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And this is for writers who are
working both on their own work

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as well as translators.

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It's named in memory of
Hannelore Quander-Rattee, who

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was a translator and a poet
who was here in Tucson.

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We're excited to celebrate
and remember her in this way.

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We're especially excited
to have Fady here tonight

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to help us celebrate her
memory and the written word.

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So thank you to Hannelore,
thank you to Fady,

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and thank you to
all for being here.

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And introducing Fady,
I want to say this.

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In a credo that he published
with the Kenyon Review that

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can be read as a
statement on poetics,

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Fady writes in
this piece that he

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titles "In the Name of
the Letter, the Spirit,

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and the Double Helix" these
lines, these first lines.

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"In the beginning
there was translation."

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You can start to orient towards
Fady's interests as a poet

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and as a citizen of the world
by the title that precedes this.

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His interest in naming beyond
these simple classifications,

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i.e.

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what does it really mean to
name something in letters

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and what they make possible
when they are strung together.

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In the spirit and
in the double helix,

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which can be both the great
organizing principle i.e.

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the double helix as the
pleasure and domination of form.

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That thing that we both
use and are periodically

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used by, but also
identity as in DNA,

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the who-ness of who
we are, and all that

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makes us similar and different.

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If in the beginning
there was translation,

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that's because we
begin in relationship.

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It's not the single helix,
it's the double one.

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Relationship to the
world to identity

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to the abstract and
concrete and indeed

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to form these are all pleasures
that I take from Fady's work.

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They give one a
sense of how to be,

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and they do something
that the best poems do.

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They give us a sense of
something beyond ourselves,

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something other.

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They give us an ability
to momentarily see

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beyond the confines of our egos
and our individual particular

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bodies.

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His poems work the shifts
between the universal

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and the personal, between
memory and forgetfulness.

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They are portraits in a way
of the relationship of art

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to empire and to suffering,
but they are also

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testaments to what can be
beautiful in the world.

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Of course, Fady also translates,
and I find his translations

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from the Arabic thrilling.

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I first came to know this
work through his translations

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of Mahmoud Darwish, as well
as his work with Ghassan

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Zaqtan and Amjad Nasser.

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There's a new collection
of older Zaqtan poems

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that I predict will
find a home very soon,

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so anticipate that
book to come out.

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As well as a collection
of Nasser's work

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that Fady is
working on right now

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with the poet and
translator Khaled Mattawa.

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Fady's the author of "The
Earth and the Attic,"

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a book that was included in the
Yale Series of Younger Poets,

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as well as the collections
"Alight," and, most recently,

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the book length
and book sequence,

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"Textu," which proposes a new
meter and form for poetry.

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Each of the poems is composed
by character count and 160

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characters, the length
of a text message.

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He has translated
two collections

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of Mahmoud Darwish
and the collection

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"If I Were Another" won a
PEN Literary Translation

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Award in 2010.

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His translation of Ghassan
Zaqtan's "Like a Straw Bird

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It Follows Me" won the
prestigious Griffin

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International Poetry Prize.

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Most recently he's
published a translation

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of Amjad Nasser's "Petra."

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His day job toggles between
fatherhood and the hospital.

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He's a physician of Internal
Medicine in Houston, Texas.

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He's finishing, he's in the
lap round of a Guggenheim year,

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so we're lucky to
catch him while we can.

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We're glad that he's here.

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Please help me
welcome Fady Joudah.

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[CLAPPING]

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