Category: Palestinians
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The lines quoted above come from a book-length poem by Cahit Koytak, a distinguished Turkish poet. In Turkish, the poem is called ‘Gazze Risalesi’ and addresses two Josephs in turn, one a Palestinian boy exposed to the bombing of Gaza, and the other an Israeli young man, a bomber pilot. Cahit Koytak talks to them…
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The Caged Parrot Watches the Demons Dance
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This piece returns to a preoccupation of my own, concerning language. What is the point of writing, the point of taking a position and then articulating it ? And of course that leads to the question, why keep writing these stanzas, these mere words amid all the bizarre and frantic and disastrous political action going…
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Despatches to my Gazan Son
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Justin C McIntosh has given his permission for his photograph above to be used for the cover of a long Turkish poem by Cahit Koytak, now published as a book with an English translation alongside. I am proud to have been one of the translators. The original Turkish poem is called Gazze Risalesi. In English…
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The Inn this Advent
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Photograph by Robert Atanasoski/AFP/Getty Images. Expulsion I heard this song tonight from the desert the shelters below ground there and the wrecked homes and I heard it from the grey waters just south of Europe, with winter coming on and the boat leaking and from the guard posts and barbed frontiers that now cover a…
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Despatches to my Gazan Son
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At the end of last year I translated into English a long poem by the distinguished Turkish poet Cahit Koytak. In Turkish, the poem is called “Gazze Risalesi.” It was written in 2008, but could just as easily have been composed last Summer, during the Israeli bombings which took place then, too. It seems that…