Book record
Come, Take a Gentle Stab
Salim Barakat
Translated from Arabic by Huda J. Fakhreddine
Come, Take a Gentle Stab, by Salim Barakat and translated by Huda J. Fakhreddine, Jayson Iwen from Arabic, brings Arabic-language poetry from Syria into English through Salim Barakat's Syrian-Kurdish verbal abundance, risk, and a title that makes gentleness and violence touch. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is what happens once the poem starts making its own weather. I would read it for stab, tenderness, body, and the baroque energy of language refusing polite containment, not as a fixed lesson about Syria. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. Come, Take a Gentle Stab belongs in the translated poetry library because it adds a Syrian Arabic voice of excess, danger, and linguistic charge.
- Published
- 2021
- Publisher
- Seagull Books
- Language
- Arabic
- Country
- Syria
- ISBN
- 9780857428882