Ghayath al-Madhoun in Hebrew Translation Today

By Daniel Behar

In the early 2010s, translations of Ghayath al-Madhoun’s poetry into Swedish and Dutch quietly did what we now call going viral: they circulated through European literary networks with a velocity and reach that no Arabic-language edition could have achieved on its own, and they laid the foundations of the professional image that sustains him today. In Arabic literary circles the rumor circulates that al-Madhoun is the only living Arab poet in 2026 who can live off his poetry. As his Hebrew translator, I can attest that the rumor is plausible, even if matters might be more complex than the formula suggests.

No poet in our media-saturated world can live off book sales and royalties alone. What al-Madhoun traffics in ‒ with remarkable proficiency ‒ is his image: a carefully curated performative personality that crosses fluidly between media, genres, and institutional contexts, and that makes him an attractive figure for the European cultural infrastructure willing to underwrite ambitious creative projects. The Klas de Vylders stipendiefond for immigrant writers in Sweden, the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin residency scholarship, appearance fees at poetry festivals across the continent, film commissions, book commissions, anthology curation ‒ these are real revenue streams. This is not a criticism. It is a description of what a successful 21st-century poet actually looks like: less a solitary figure bent over a manuscript than something closer to what we might call, without condescension, an influencer, a digital creator whose medium happens to be verse, and whose platform was built not by follower counts but by the slower, more durable machinery of literary translation. And underneath all of it ‒ the image, the institutions, the viral spread ‒ lies what made it possible: a poetic voice so kinetically charged that it survives translation into thirty languages and arrives in each one still crackling:

صَدِّقُوني / تستطيعون إِدراكَ حُزْني بلا مترجم / فهو حزن كرنفالي (“ستوكهولم”، لا أستطيع الحضور 2014)

Believe me / you can grasp my melancholy without a translator / for it is a carnivalesque kind of melancholy. (trans. Daniel Behar)

As his Hebrew translator I also can attest that al-Madhoun’s carnivalesque melancholy – served in the warm personable address of a trusted ṣadīq, a good friend – is indeed uncontainable. The poems are sensuously embodied in the Arabic language, they are native to it, captivatingly so, but they do not originate in Arabic so much as pass through it. I have by now received countless responses from readers who felt awakened, rattled, recharged by the Hebrew versions. My standard, slightly evasive, reply has been that I deserve no special credit: that I functioned as a medium rather than an author, and that what makes al-Madhoun’s poetry translatable ‒ almost recklessly translatable ‒ is precisely its excess, the sheer surplus that overwhelms any single language and spills irrepressibly into the next.

In a binational reading group where we read the poems in Hebrew and Arabic side by side, emotions ran high, but the debates were never strictly political, because in al-Madhoun’s work the politics cannot be separated from the personality. That inseparability is precisely what the poems aim for. One Israeli participant told me he found al-Madhoun simultaneously infuriating and irresistible, and that for days after our meeting he could not stop thinking about him, turning the poet over in his mind, unable to resolve the contradictions and untie the knots. In al-Madhoun’s poems, the more the speaker addresses his presumably European beloved about Damascus, the more the city refuses to stay still. It swells and contracts, shifting in distance and bodily proportion, becoming something between memory and hallucination. It was precisely this shapeshifting quality ‒ the city as a physically unstable, living presence ‒ that entrapped this particular reader, and reflected back on him as if seen in a mirror. These were the lines that we dwelled on in the Hebrew translation:

وكانت دمشق تبدو أقرب كلمّا حدثتكِ عنها / والأجسام التي نراها في المرآة تبدو أقرب ممّا هي عليه في الواقع / وتلك التي تحمل أرواحنا ابتعدت كثيرا (“يمكن للشاعر أن يتحول إلى ذئب” ، أدرينالين 2018)

And Damascus seemed closer the more I spoke to you about it / while the bodies we see in the mirror appear closer than they actually are / and those that carry our souls have receded far away. (trans. Daniel Behar)

In another session, two gracious Palestinian women ‒ one a schoolteacher, the other a nutritionist ‒ participated in the discussion with great vivacity, but were less perturbed by the intertwining of the Nakba and the Shoah than by al-Madhoun’s nomadic bachelorhood, the stubborn refusal to settle down, the wild sexual role-playing with his (presumably Swedish) girlfriend:

أتسلَّلُ بجانبكِ فتتظاهرين بالنومِ، لكنَّني أشمُ رائحةَ الجنسِ بانتصابةِ حلمتيكِ  فأعرفُ أنَّكِ كاذبةٌ […] ولكنَّني بكلِّ ما أملكُ من خبثِ البدويِّ الذي يسكنني، أخيِّبُ آمالكِ، وأُطلِقُ خرافي المسكينةَ لترعى أمامَ ذئبكِ الجائع، وأنتظرُ، وأنتظرُ، وأنتظر… لا يخيِّبُ ذئبُ شهوتِكِ توقعاتي، ممزقاً لحمَ خرافي فوقَ فراشِكِ الأبيضَ الذي يُشبهُ صحراءَ سويديةً من الثلجِ. (“شيزوفرينا” ، أدرينالين 2018)

I slip in beside you and you pretend to sleep, but I smell sex in your nipples’ pertness and know that you’re a liar.  […] But with all the rank cunning of the Bedouin that dwells inside me, I dash your hopes. I loose my poor lambs to graze before your famished wolf, and I wait and I wait and I wait… The wolf of your desire doesn’t let me down, ripping apart my lambs’ flesh on your white bed that resembles a Swedish desert, of snow. (trans. Catherine Cobham)[1]

These two women lost sleep over al-Madhoun’s deviousness and deviations. What this man needed, they agreed, was a good match ‒ an intelligent, warm Palestinian woman who would finally make a joint home with him. Every time the poems were read out loud before discussion began, al-Madhoun became a presence in the room. He has found his moment here. Of all times, in the midst of a boundless campaign of obliteration, and of all languages, in the language of the occupation. The room was not the same after he arrived.

But a question lingers in the room along with his presence. Why Hebrew? Why bring al-Madhoun into the language in which orders of annihilation and mass destruction were issued ‒ the language, precisely, of those his poems indict? Why this language, when he already circulates in 30 others, many of them spoken by vastly larger audiences? What does Hebrew give him ‒ or give us ‒ that Swedish, German, English, and French cannot?

One possible answer is that while al-Madhoun’s poems often puncture formalities of poetic etiquette in Arabic (the explicit eroticism, the poetic footnotes), in Hebrew they truly ought to get under the reader’s skin, serve as irritant, contaminate a discourse sunk in denialism, bypass defense mechanisms and reach the soft spot of moral uproar. The eruptive energy of moral perturbation, which I have watched readers redirect onto the poet himself ‒ onto his provocations, his contradictions, his restive persona ‒ could, with the right conditions, be turned inward instead, into the far more uncomfortable work of self-examination. A poetically attuned reviewer of the collection in Hebrew writes: “To read this book in Hebrew, with Israeli eyes, means being to some degree an unintended reader, actively performing it along an unpaved path. This is a position that invites creative thinking, criticism, even self-flagellation, pain and of course comparison.”[2]

In a media landscape saturated with indigestibly violent imagery, half-truths, and ideologically predigested news, the elementary shock of raw embodied language becomes not a luxury but a necessity. Poems like al-Madhoun’s restore that shock, and with it the capacity to feel what the numbing noise has taught us to suppress. Translating al-Madhoun into Hebrew was, therefore, never simply a literary exercise. It was an intervention. His voice ‒ intimate, digressive, saturated with literary allusions that range from pre-Islamic Arabic poetry to the Quran to European modernism ‒ poses a direct challenge to the dominant Israeli discourse that reduces Palestinian experience to nothing but a security threat. His poems speak from within the Palestinian body: the body of the massacre survivor, the escapee, the lover in exile who carries his wound like a second skin. To bring that voice into Hebrew is to insist that this body exists, that it suffers, that it demands to be heard in the language of its occupier.

This requires a leap of faith on the part of the resistant Hebrew reader who has spent three years isolated in an aggressively defensive bubble of his own making, reinforced by the nearly total media silence on what is actually happening in Gaza. It also demands renewed trust in the Hebrew language and its capacity to feel, express, and carry that energy across. The leap is smaller than it looks. Opening a book of poems by a Palestinian poet does not ask for political conversion, it asks for a momentary lowering of the guard, a willingness to be taken in. Al-Madhoun’s dizzying charisma, what Stefan Weidner calls a schwindelerregend, vertigo-inducing quality, makes him an ambassador of pain with gleaming material ready-made for multimedia translation.[3] His poems have their ways of “slipping in”.

But how does the poet come to entrust his Arabic lyric to the language of military edicts and racist dehumanization? The story of the translation began before October 7, 2023. I received the commission from the Maktoob project of binational literary translation in the summer of 2022, and was paired with the poet, writer, and podcast hostess Firdaws Habiballah as my Palestinian co-translator. It proved a felicitous match: she had hosted al-Madhoun on her show, knew him personally, and brought to the work an intimacy with his voice and a personal accountability that ensured the political ferocity, the cultural nuance, and the deliberate provocations of the texts would not be ironed out.

Maktoob is a collective project which grew with time into a small binational community through the animating spirit of the Iraqi-Jewish sociologist Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani. Over nine years, it has produced 40 titles of Arabic literature in Hebrew translation. Its founding premise is that the standard Israeli model of Arabic-to-Hebrew translation was ethically and aesthetically compromised. Produced largely by translators trained through the military and security apparatus, it treated Arabic as a language of surveillance rather than literary culture, and routinely domesticated, distorted, or politically neutered the texts it carried across.[4]

Maktoob’s corrective is structural: every translation is produced through a binational dialogue between a Hebrew translator and a Palestinian editor and co-translator (or vice versa), who serves as the author’s representative within the process, guaranteeing that the text’s cultural and political specificity ‒ its “Palestinianness,” its “Arabness” ‒ survives the crossing intact. No translation goes to press without the explicit written consent of the author. The project does not receive Zionist institutional funding. Its legitimacy in the Arab world was powerfully endorsed by the late Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury whose trilogy Children of the Ghetto Shenhav translated into Hebrew within the confines of Maktoob, becoming the first language in the world to complete its three-volume translation before Khoury’s death in 2024. Khoury championed the project publicly on major Arabic-language media platforms, arguing that Maktoob honored the Palestinian narrative without erasure, included indigenous speakers in the translation process, and recognized that Hebrew was not exclusively the language of Jews but also the daily language of Palestinian citizens of Israel.[5]

Al-Madhoun and Shenhav had met by chance somewhere in Europe in 2021 and enthusiastically conspired to bring the former’s work into Hebrew. This conspiracy was facilitated in no small part by Shenhav’s own persona: in Arab literary circles he is received less as an Israeli figure than as an Iraqi one, a Baghdadi Jew whose relationship to Arabic language and culture is one of embedded inheritance. But after Shenhav, who has trained himself in the art of translating Arabic prose, attempted one text from Adrenalin (2018), he recognized that poetry translation was a different discipline, and withdrew in favor of a more suitable hand.

Shenhav’s honesty tells us that the poems are not political testimony dressed up in poetic costume. They are technically unforgiving poems in the full sense of the word: organisms whose meaning is inseparable from their rhythm, their tonal shifts, their ironic layering, their movement between registers of Arabic. When Shenhav withdrew and my name meant nothing to al-Madhoun, it was Habiballah’s presence overseeing the project that reassured him. When we renewed contact in 2024 before publication, al-Madhoun still stood behind it to our delighted astonishment. One of the mottoes in his most recent Arabic collection, I Have Brought You a Severed Hand (2024), reads: “the metaphors in this poem are adapted from real events that have never happened before.” As Alex Tan observes, the collection already foresaw something of the ruin to come. Written before October 7, it was addressing the aftermath of catastrophe.[6] The same, in a different sense, is true of the translation: begun in the summer of 2022, completed before the world changed, it arrived in 2025 as a Hebrew book that had prophesied its own timeliness. Hence, we chose as our title the line “I Tried to Translate the War for You,” drawn from I Have Brought You a Severed Hand:

حاولتُ أنْ أترجم لك الحرب، من لغةٍ ساميَّةٍ إلى لغةٍ هندو أوروبية، فأصابتكِ الشظايا، حاولت أن أسعفكِ، فحاصرتنا نشرة الأخبار، حاول مجلس الأمن أن يرسل لنا أسلحة ذكية، فصادرها رجال أمن متوسطو الذكاء، شتمنا الصليب الأحمر فاعترض الڤاتيكان، أكلنا لحم كلابٍ منزليةٍ قُتلَ أصحابها، فاعترض أنصار البيئة، نجونا من الغرق فاعترض اليمين الأوروبي. كيف يمكن أن أصف لكِ كم يشبه هذا العالم ضربات الأيدي الهزيلة على الجدران السميكة لغرف الغاز في معسكرات الاعتقال، دون أن تُصابي بـ اضطرابات ما بعد الصدمة؟ (“لو كنا في عالم افتراضي” ، لقد أحضرت لك يدا مقطوعة 2024)

I tried to translate the war from a Semitic language to an Indo-European language for you, and you were hit by shrapnel. I tried to come to your aid and we were besieged by news bulletins. The Security Council tried to send us smart weapons, and security men of average intelligence confiscated them, we insulted the Red Cross and the Vatican objected, we ate the flesh of dogs whose owners had been killed and the environmentalists objected, we were saved from drowning and the European Right objected.
How can I describe to you how much this world resembles the beating of skinny hands on the thick walls of gas chambers in detention camps, without giving you PTSD? (trans. Catherine Cobham)

Interestingly, the speaker had not considered translation between Semitic languages, and has thus made us Hebrew readers either interlopers or mute co-creators within his textual world: neither the European beloved who must have the war explained to her, nor the Arabic reader for whom no explanation is necessary. We arrive uninvited. According to Maktoob’s marketing analysis, the title genuinely enhanced sales and made the book a relative success. We also strategically decided to give the book a strong finish, ending it with the poem “We”, an unsparing poetic response to the first campaign in a long line of recurring Israeli military onslaughts on Gaza. Al-Madhoun wrote this poem in the wake of Operation Cast Lead, the assault on Gaza in the winter of 2008‒9, during which he lost contact with his grandmother in the bombarded city:

نحن المتناثرون شظايا، الممطرون لحماً، نتقدم بالاعتذار الشديد من هذا العالم المتحضر فرداً فرداً، رجالاً ونساءً وأطفالاً، لأننا وبدون قصد منا ظهرنا في منازلهم الآمنة بلا استئذان، نعتذر لانطباع أشلائنا في ذاكرتهم البيضاء كالثلج، ولأننا خدشنا صورة الإنسان الطبيعي الكامل في أعينهم، […] ونعتذر أيضاً من الجنود الإسرائيليين الذين تكلفوا عناء الضغط على الأزرار في طائراتهم ودباباتهم لتحويلنا إلى قطع، نعتذر منهم على الصور البشعة التي تحولنا إليها بعد أن صوبوا قنابلهم مباشرةً إلى رؤوسنا الطرية، وعلى الساعات التي سيقضونها الآن في عيادات الأطباء النفسيين ليعودوا بشراً كما كانوا قبل تحويلنا إلى أشلاء مقززة تلاحقهم كلما حاولوا النوم، نحن الأشياء التي رأيتموها على الشاشات والصحف، والتي إن اجتهدتم في جمع بقاياها كلعبة البزِّل، فإنكم ستفوزون بصورة واضحة لنا، واضحة لدرجة أنكم لن تستطيعوا أن تفعلوا شيئاً (“نحن” ، لا أستطيع الحضور 2014)

We, who are strewn about in fragments, whose flesh flies through the air like raindrops, offer our profound apologies to everyone in this civilised world, men, women and children, because we have unintentionally appeared in their peaceful homes without asking permission. We apologise for stamping our severed body parts into their snow-white memory, because we have violated the image of the normal, whole human being in their eyes […] We also apologise to the Israeli soldiers who took the trouble to press the buttons in their aircraft and tanks to blow us to pieces, and we are sorry for how hideous we looked after they aimed their shells and bombs straight at our soft heads, and for the hours they are now going to spend in psychiatrists’ clinics, trying to become human again, like they were before our transformation into repulsive body parts that pursue them whenever they try to sleep.
We are the things you have seen on your screens and in the press, and if you made an effort to fit the pieces together, like a jigsaw, you would get a clear picture of us, so clear that you would be unable to do a thing. (trans. Catherine Cobham)

When I read this poem aloud in Hebrew at book launch events, I can almost hear the aggregative غصّة, the lump in the throat, swallowed hard and in silence. Some in the audience had once been those soldiers, or were at that moment waiting for their sons, nephews, and grandchildren to come home from military duty. Once I read it before a group of Hebrew-speaking Palestinians who protested that it had no business existing in Hebrew. To me, that protest was the most convincing proof that it should, that the translation was doing exactly what it was meant to do: rattling something that had grown into unspoken dark mass, above all the book’s vertiginous crossovers between the gas chambers and the dismemberment of Gaza, drawn in the language of those who administer both the memory of the one and the reality of the other.

Al-Madhoun ultimately got underneath my skin as well ‒ at times as a shot of adrenaline, at times as a slow-burning irritant. A notable formal innovation he introduces into Arabic poetry is the creative use of marginalia as part of the poem. This practice is often celebrated by critics ‒ Alex Tan most poignantly ‒ as a perennial de-centering of discourse, a “crowding in from the margins” which enacts politically what the poems argue rhetorically. Al-Madhoun himself has stated that he is constitutionally allergic to the notion of a stable center. With candor reserved for the familiarity of a translator, I can confess that I initially found some of the footnotes annoying and off-putting. The best of the footnotes detonate; the weakest merely annotate and explicate. Pseudo-learned annotation like this one is a case in point:

هامش كوميدي: تكمن عبقرية دانتي في الليمبو، تأملها قليلاً، وستدرك فورًا أننا نعيش في أولى طبقات الجحيم. (“لو كنا في عالم افتراضي” ، لقد أحضرت لك يدا مقطوعة 2024)

Comedy footnote:
The genius of Dante lies in his description of Limbo, think about it a little, you’ll realise immediately that we’re living in the first circle of hell. (trans. Catherine Cobham)

There is more than a hint of pedagogical condescension in explaining Dante’s genius to us. It is a hermeneutically bossy gloss rather than a decentering gesture. I could not omit it, but felt compelled to understand it not as a lapse but as a register in the vocal texture of al-Madhoun’s speaker, who is, among other things, a Syrian-Palestinian intellectual performing his erudition before a European audience. The farcical take on erudition here is part of a performative counter-philology. He reappropriates the canon with deliberately excessive affect, as if the very act of citation were a form of trespass, haunted by the seething wound of one who was never meant to belong to the tradition he boasts of knowing. Elias Khoury’s Palestinian narrators perform similar intertextual maneuvers vis-à-vis Hebrew literature and the Western canon. Explained thus to myself, I could reproduce the footnote with full creative backing.

This logic of trespass opened for me a reciprocal freedom. If al-Madhoun could cite Dante and Paul Celan, performing a counter-philological raid on the Western tradition, then the Hebrew translation was entitled to perform its own raids for aesthetic and affective purposes. The most consequential decision I made was to insert, in a passage dense with Quranic and classical allusions, a line from the biblical Book of Ruth:

قلبي الذي تعرفينه جيدًا، كنتُ أُطعمُهُ بحّةَ صوتكِ، كي يستكينَ، وأنفثُ فيه غيمةً من حشيشة الكيف، ليهدأ، وكان البدويّ الذي يلبسُ جلدي شاردًا مع عرب الشمال، كيف لي أن أستقرّ وأسكنَ في بيتك، والله أكّدَ أنّي في كلّ وادٍ أهيم؟ كيف لي والمواويلُ تسرقني من حضن أمّي، ويأسرني خصرك الواضحُ كالموت من بين أصدقائي، فأتبعك كما يتبعُ صاحبُ امرئ القيس صاحبَه / البلادُ البلادُ العبادُ العباد / ؟ وأفرُّ منكِ كما يَفِرُّ المَرْءُ مِن أَخيه، وأُمِّه وَأَبيه، وَصَاحِبَتِه وَبَنيه. (“وكانت دمشق تبتعد”، أدرينالين 2018)

My heart, which you know well, I used to feed it the hoarseness of your voice, to calm it, and blow into it a cloud of hashish, to soothe it. And the Bedouin who wears my skin was roaming with the Arabs of the north. How can I settle and dwell in your house, when God has confirmed that “I wander in every valley”? How can I settle when the mawwal songs steal me from my mother’s embrace, and your waist, as plain as death, captures me from among my friends, so I follow you as Imru al-Qays’s companion followed him since “all lands are God’s land, and everywhere are His people”? And I flee from you as “a man flees from his brother, his mother and his father, his wife and his children”.

These four breathless lines include no less than five references to Quran, ḥadīth, and classical pre-Islamic poetry. To this flurry of iqtibāsāt (quotations) I added my own in translation:

[S]o I follow you as Imru al-Qays’s companion followed him since “all lands are God’s land, and everywhere is His people”? “whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge.” And I flee from you as “a man flees from his brother, his mother and his father, his wife and his children”.

Ruth the Moabite is the archetypal Jewish figure of the migrant. She is the foreigner who, through loyalty and love, is absorbed into the receiving culture, from whose lineage the Davidic dynasty will eventually come. The Palestinian refugee-poet pursuing his Swedish beloved in exile, invoking Islamic scripture to signal his cultural difference from Judeo-Christian Europe, speaks in uncanny negative parallel to Ruth. For a Hebrew reader, the insertion builds an emotional bridge to the Palestinian’s exposure and vulnerability that no footnote could construct. It indicts Judeo-Christian Europe for failing to honor its own scriptural precedents for welcoming the stranger and it does so in the stranger’s own language. The biblical verse activates the deep cultural memory of the Jewish self: the nomadic stateless self that knows what it means to be a stranger in a strange land. It confronts it with what that self has sanctioned in the age of recurrent destruction wrought in its name to supposedly safeguard Israeli sovereignty.

Modern Hebrew grew in the shadow of mass death. The Holocaust reshaped Hebrew literary language in terms of metaphors, silences, relationship to testimony and to the limits of representation. From Avot Yeshurun to Dan Pagis and Yehuda Amichai, Hebrew developed a poetic idiom forced to confront unanswerable questions: how does a language go on speaking after the systematic annihilation of those who were religiously attached to it? What does elegy sound like when the scale of loss exceeds any individual act of mourning? These questions left formal traces. Hebrew carries, in its very tissue, a vocabulary for catastrophe, for displacement, for the ghost-life of the expelled and exterminated.[7]

This is precisely the vocabulary al-Madhoun’s poetry requires. His poems about the ongoing Nakba and the Syrian war, about Syrian and Palestinian statelessness in Europe, about the uncountable dead of Gaza, Damascus, Bint Jbeil, and various sorts of complacence and complicity enabling these deaths, operate within the formal and emotional registers that Hebrew literature has been cultivating. Translating his work into Hebrew is therefore not a translation across an abyss of incomprehension. It is a translation between two languages that have, through different histories of catastrophe, developed vast resources for saying the unsayable. No other target language offers this resonance.

This cuts both ways. The very fact that Hebrew has processed Jewish catastrophe so intensively may generate a defensive resistance to encountering Palestinian catastrophe in the same register, a resistance rooted not in ignorance but in a refusal of the implied equivalence. But that refusal is itself the argument for translation. A provocation in a language already charged with catastrophe is precisely the kind of confrontation that literature is equipped to stage.

---

Notes

[1] Bilingual Arabic-English versions, including Cobham’s translations, are to be found online on the website LyrikLine: Ein Projekt des Haus für Poesie. Many of the versions appear on Al-Madhoun’s personal website Poetring the World. For book versions in English see Ghayath al-Madhoun, Adrenalin (Notre Dame, Indiana: Action Books, 2017), trans. Catherine Cobham. Ghayath al-Madhoun, I Have Brought You a Severed Hand (Notre Dame, Indiana: Action Books, 2025), trans. Catherine Cobham.

[2] Carmit Rosen, “Time Becomes a Typewriter, and the Dead Become Poems,” Panas Literary Review, 23 May 2025. [In Hebrew]

[3] Stefan Weidner, “Gaza ohne Gaza: Palästinensische Lyrik,” Frankfurter Allgemeine, 30 July 2025. [In German]

[4] Hana Morgenstern, “What is Anti-Colonial Translation? The Form and Content of Binational Resistance in Maktoob,” Journal of Levantine Studies, vol. 9, no. 2 (Winter 2019), pp. 37‒60.

[5] Iliyās Khūrī, “Fī hādhihi al-tarjama fiʿl muqāwama”. [In Arabic]

[6] Alex Tan, “Out on a Limb: On Ghayath Almadhoun’s ‘I Have Brought You a Severed Hand’,” Cleveland Review of Books, 19 February 2026.

[7] Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi has argued that Hebrew literary imagination has been structured around what she calls a ‘poetics of exile and return’ informed by a sense of bygone and impending catastrophe. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2000).

---

About the Author

Daniel Behar is Associate Professor of Modern Arabic Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published on a wide range of comparative topics related to Arabic poetic modernism and literary modernity in venues including Journal of Arabic Literature, Middle Eastern Literatures, Journal of World Literature and Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam. His monograph Syrian Poets and Vernacular Modernity (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) examines the poetic scene in Syria in the 1970s and uncovers connections between original Arabic poems and poetry translations from countries of the Eastern Bloc.

---

Citation: Daniel Behar, Ghayath al-Madhoun in Hebrew Translation Today, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 18.06.2026, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/66091

---

The text only may be used under licence Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

---

---