I Tried to Translate the War for You

May God curse physics

Why do the migrants drown and float on the water after they have breathed

Their last?

Why not the reverse?

Why doesn’t a person float when they are alive and drown when they are dead?

This anthology of poems is by the Palestinian-Syrian poet Ghayath Almadhoun, born in 1979. The anthology has been termed a poetic manifesto on refugeeism that ranges from questions of homeland, the situation in Syria, to the Arab diaspora in Europe. This volume includes a selection of his poems translated for the first time into Hebrew.

Translation editor: Fardus Habib Allah

Literary editor: Shoham Smith

Copy editor: Amira Binyamini-Nevo

Cover: Faten Jarrous Giryes