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Taha
Muhammad Ali is one of the leading poets on the contemporary Palestinian
literary scene. Born in 1931 in the Galilee village of Saffuriya, he
fled to Lebanon, together with most of the inhabitants of his village,
during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. A year later after slipping across
the border with his family, he found the village destroyed, and he settled
in Nazareth, where he has lived ever since.
The
Saffuriya of his childhood has served as the nexus of his poetry and
fiction, which are grounded in everyday experience and driven by a
storyteller's vivid imagination. Taha Muhammad Ali writes in a forceful
and direct style, with disarming humor and unflinching, at times painful,
honesty — the poetry's apparent simplicity and homespun truths
concealing the subtle grafting of classical Arabic and colloquial
forms of expression. Audiences worldwide have been powerfully moved
by Taha Muhammad Ali's poems of political complexity and humanity.
Never Mind is the poet's first collection to appear in English.
"In Muhammad
Ali’s world, what appears to be placid can suddenly become disconcerting….
He is a beguiling story-teller who maintains a tone of credibility
and lucidity without diluting the mysterious or distressing aspects
of his tale…. By avoiding commonplace response to everyday experience
[Muhammad Ali] has written poems that are fragile and graceful and
fresh."
 John
Palattella, The Nation
"A deeply
humane collection ... I have been living with this resonant little
book for the past few weeks ... and am grateful for its large embrace.
Muhammad Ali speaks with an emotional forthrightness and unflinching
honesty that at times reminds me of the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet,
at times of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. He writes in a literary
Arabic grounded in the vernacular and rooted in local custom. ...
He has developed a style that seems both ancient and new, deceptively
simple and movingly direct ... [The poem] "Abd El-Hadi Fights a
Superpower" should be required reading in Washington."
Edward
Hirsch
The
Washington Post
"Muhammad
Ali exemplifies the marriage of folk-cultural rootedness and cosmopolitanism
also found in the American poet Wendell Berry and Orkney's George
Mackay Brown. His free-verse poems … subtly disclose the implications
of personal stories and situations…. Contains a splendid introduction
to Ali the man and storyteller, and a sensuous prose story of childhood
disappointment."
Booklist
“His
patient, insistent and often beautiful iterations of who is who and
what is what are as compelling and evocative as the faces and places
that any reader has himself or herself loved ...
It is immediately evident that the poet's vision of experience is equally
applicable to Arabs and Jews, kings and paupers, the quarter of the
world's population that is Chinese, and the other three-quarters as
well. The more explicitly 'political' poems ... may also be read as
parables of the love and hate that bind all of us to home.... Never
Mind is a must.”
Ha’aretz
(Israel)
ABD
EL-HADI FIGHTS A SUPERPOWER
In
his life
he neither wrote nor read.
In his life he
didn't cut down a single tree,
didn't slit the throat
of a single calf.
In his life he did not speak
of the New York Times
behind its back,
didn't raise
his voice to a soul
except in his saying:
"Come in, please,
by God, you can't refuse."
*
Nevertheless--
his case is hopeless,
his situation
desperate.
His god-given rights are a grain of salt
tossed into the sea.
Ladies
and gentlemen of the jury:
about his enemies
my client knows not a thing.
And I can assure you,
were he to encounter
the entire crew
of the aircraft carrier Enterprise,
he'd serve them eggs
sunny side up,
and labneh
fresh from the bag.
1973
TAHA
MUHAMMAD ALI is the author of four collections of poetry in Arabic and
a collection of short stories.
PETER
COLE’s most recent book of poems is What Is Doubled: Poems 1981–1998.
A new volume, Things on Which I’ve Stumbled, is forthcoming
from New Directions. Cole’s many volumes of translations from Hebrew
and Arabic include The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim
and Christian Spain, 950–1492 (Princeton). He is a 2007 MacArthur
Foundation Fellow.
YAHYA
HIJAZI was raised in Jerusalem's Old City. He holds an M.A. from the
Hebrew University and currently works at the Palestinian Counseling
Center and David Yellin College.
GABRIEL
LEVIN's translations include On the Sea, by Yehuda Halevi,
and The Little Bookseller Oustaz Ali, by Ahmed Rassim. Anvil
Press published his second collection of poems, Ostraca, in
1999.
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