Victims of a Map: A Bilingual Anthology of Arabic Poetry

Mahmud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim and Adonis are amongst the leading poets in the Arab world today. Victims of a Map presents some of their finest work in translation, alongside the original Arabic, including thirteen poems by Darwish never before published – in English or Arabic – and a long work by Adonis written during the 1982 siege of Beirut, also published here for the first time. Adonis (the pen-name of Ali Ahmad Said) was born in Syria in 1930. He was exiled to Beirut in 1956 and later became a Lebanese citizen. The founder of the influential journal Mawaqif, a critic as well as a poet, he has exercised enormous influence on Arabic literature. He is the author of Sufism and Surrealism, also published by Saqi. Mahmoud Darwish was born in 1942 in the village of al-Birweh in Galilee, Palestine. His family fled to Lebanon in 1948 when the Israeli Army destroyed their village. He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom, the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from France and the Prince Claus Award from the Netherlands. He died in August 2008. Samih al-Qasim is a Palestinian born to a Druze family of Galilee in 1939. He grew up in Nazareth and has long been politically active in Israel, suffering imprisonment many times. A prolific writer, he had published six collections of poetry by the time he was thirty.