Dictionary of Midnight by Abdulla Pashew and translated by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse, William T. Vollmann

This is poetry from Iraq.

Dictionary of Midnight by Abdulla Pashew translated by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse, William T. Vollmann is published by HewesHeiser. This is a Book originally written in Kurdish. This was published in 2018.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781944700805E12.

Dictionary of Midnight, by Abdulla Pashew and translated by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse, William T. Vollmann from Kurdish, brings Kurdish-language poetry from Iraq into English through Kurdish midnight, lexical darkness, and Abdulla Pashew’s sense of language as a place where a people keep surviving. 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 midnight, dictionary, exile, and the words one needs when daylight has failed, not as a fixed lesson about Iraq. 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. Dictionary of Midnight belongs in the translated poetry library because it brings Kurdish poetry into the library as political memory, lyric endurance, and linguistic shelter.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.