Sadder than Water: New & Selected Poems

New and selected poems by one of the foremost Palestinian poets and a major figure in the Arab world.

One of the foremost Palestinian poets and a major figure in the Arab world, Samih al-Qasim was born in 1939, in Zarqa, Jordan to a Palestinian Druze family from the Galilee. He grew up in the village of Rama and experienced the Palestinian tragedy of 1948 first hand, achieving fame as one of the celebrated "resistance poets" during the 1950s. His first book was published when he was just eighteen, and over the decades he has produced a body of work that is as varied and innovative as it is large. A resident of Rama until his death in 2014, Samih al-Qasim remained to the end an outspoken opponent of racism and oppression on all sides of the Middle East conflict. Given the richness of al-Qasim's work, and its centrality to Arabic literature at large, it is surprising that his poetry remains almost unknown in English to non-specialists, since one cannot really claim to understand modern Palestinian letters without reading Samih al-Qasim. Sadder Than Water collects poems (with en face Arabic) from his various periods and modes and makes available to English readers the full range of al-Qasim's oeuvre, which is characterized by its ironic approach to painfully charged political situations, its melancholy music, and its lyrical evocation of Palestinian heritage.

SAMIH AL-QASIM (1939–2014) was the author of over thirty books of poetry, several novels, collections of plays, essays, and criticism. He appeared regularly at literary festivals throughout the Arab world and in Europe, his work has been translated into many languages, and editions of his collected poems have been published in Beirut and in Cairo. NAZIH KASSIS is a lexicographer and translator of contemporary Arabic prose and poetry. He received his doctorate in linguistics from the University of Exeter and has compiled, edited, and translated several dictionaries. He has taught English and Arabic at the University of Haifa, the Academic Arab College for Education, and Portland State University. He writes poetry in the local dialect. Born in the Palestinian village of Iqrit in 1944, he has lived in Rama since 1948. ADINA HOFFMAN's books include My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century (Yale University Press) and Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City (FSG). She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and was one of the inaugural winners of the Windham Campbell prize. ROBYNCRESWELL is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. He is the translator of TheThreshold (Farrar,Straus &Giroux, 2022) and author of City of Beginnings:PoeticModernism in Beirut (2019). His work has earned the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize and the 2023 National Translation Award in Poetry.