Where Not to Be Born

Author: Safaa Fathy

Publisher: Litmus Press (2024)

Where Not to Be Born encompasses a selection of works representing Safaa Fathy’s wide-ranging, richly allusive, and cinematically-inflected poetic practice. Bringing together  poems from four Arabic-language books that were published between 1989 and 2010, Rawad Wehbe’s luminous translation invites English-language readers into Fathy’s densely populated image-scape that is both an affectionate paean and pronounced divergence vis-à-vis traditional Arabic literary forms. As Wehbe writes in his introduction, “liberated from the discourse of the qasida’s hegemony, and defending the vanguard of the Arabic prose poem, Fathy strikes and claws at the heart of language.” This volume is presented in English and the original Arabic and includes a postface by Jean-Luc Nancy.