Hello, everyone.
Welcome.
Thanks for patience.
We're glad you're all here.
Thanks for choosing the Poetry Center tonight
amongst all other options that were available to you.
It's a beautiful evening in Tucson
and I'm glad to see all of you.
I am going to just quickly introduce Fady, and then
have him get to it.
And he read last night in Phoenix.
It was a wonderful reading.
We had a tremendous night, and I'm
excited to have him here as well.
This reading in particular, we celebrate
because it has a special name, and it's a name,
it's a featured reading within our series.
This is the second annual Hannelore Quander-Rattee
Reading for Works-in-Translation.
And this is for writers who are working both on their own work
as well as translators.
It's named in memory of Hannelore Quander-Rattee, who
was a translator and a poet who was here in Tucson.
We're excited to celebrate and remember her in this way.
We're especially excited to have Fady here tonight
to help us celebrate her memory and the written word.
So thank you to Hannelore, thank you to Fady,
and thank you to all for being here.
And introducing Fady, I want to say this.
In a credo that he published with the Kenyon Review that
can be read as a statement on poetics,
Fady writes in this piece that he
titles "In the Name of the Letter, the Spirit,
and the Double Helix" these lines, these first lines.
"In the beginning there was translation."
You can start to orient towards Fady's interests as a poet
and as a citizen of the world by the title that precedes this.
His interest in naming beyond these simple classifications,
i.e.
what does it really mean to name something in letters
and what they make possible when they are strung together.
In the spirit and in the double helix,
which can be both the great organizing principle i.e.
the double helix as the pleasure and domination of form.
That thing that we both use and are periodically
used by, but also identity as in DNA,
the who-ness of who we are, and all that
makes us similar and different.
If in the beginning there was translation,
that's because we begin in relationship.
It's not the single helix, it's the double one.
Relationship to the world to identity
to the abstract and concrete and indeed
to form these are all pleasures that I take from Fady's work.
They give one a sense of how to be,
and they do something that the best poems do.
They give us a sense of something beyond ourselves,
something other.
They give us an ability to momentarily see
beyond the confines of our egos and our individual particular
bodies.
His poems work the shifts between the universal
and the personal, between memory and forgetfulness.
They are portraits in a way of the relationship of art
to empire and to suffering, but they are also
testaments to what can be beautiful in the world.
Of course, Fady also translates, and I find his translations
from the Arabic thrilling.
I first came to know this work through his translations
of Mahmoud Darwish, as well as his work with Ghassan
Zaqtan and Amjad Nasser.
There's a new collection of older Zaqtan poems
that I predict will find a home very soon,
so anticipate that book to come out.
As well as a collection of Nasser's work
that Fady is working on right now
with the poet and translator Khaled Mattawa.
Fady's the author of "The Earth and the Attic,"
a book that was included in the Yale Series of Younger Poets,
as well as the collections "Alight," and, most recently,
the book length and book sequence,
"Textu," which proposes a new meter and form for poetry.
Each of the poems is composed by character count and 160
characters, the length of a text message.
He has translated two collections
of Mahmoud Darwish and the collection
"If I Were Another" won a PEN Literary Translation
Award in 2010.
His translation of Ghassan Zaqtan's "Like a Straw Bird
It Follows Me" won the prestigious Griffin
International Poetry Prize.
Most recently he's published a translation
of Amjad Nasser's "Petra."
His day job toggles between fatherhood and the hospital.
He's a physician of Internal Medicine in Houston, Texas.
He's finishing, he's in the lap round of a Guggenheim year,
so we're lucky to catch him while we can.
We're glad that he's here.
Please help me welcome Fady Joudah.
[CLAPPING]