A Tree Whose Name I Don’t Know by Golan Haji

“In Golan Haji’s poems and prose-poems, fable and myth are incised into history and contemporanaeity, al-Ma’arri’s verses are re-inscribed upon the Odyssey, made to reflect on the ongoing tragedy of the Kurdish people, and of each individual exile. A young Syrian poet now living in France, Haji, polyglot and humanist, is a luminous arrival for world poetry. Is there a word for “saudade” in Arabic? His poems, in Stephen Watts’ fine-honed translations, are imbued with it.”—Marilyn Hacker “I met Golan Haji at the Al-Sendian (Al-Mallajeh) Festival in Syria in 2010, a beautiful gathering of poets, artists, photographers, children, and villagers, and the last of its kind before the appalling years of rupture exploded in 2011. We’ve translated these poems across the intervening years whenever there was an opportunity to snatch time to sit, or walk, together—this shared space being vital because it gives the scope to directly test and coax the fluency, physicality, verve and edge of the poetr