Ghayath al-Madhoun in Hebrew Translation Today
By Daniel Behar. In Arabic literary circles the rumor circulates that Ghayath 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. 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.
