Last night, the Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah presented at the Jerusalem Fund. He was a guest of the Fund's Cultural Gallery. Joudah shared his own poetry, as well as some of his award-winning translations of the late Mahmoud Darwish's work. He performed two of Darwish's pieces in Arabic, as well.The Jerusalem Fund's cultural coordinator Robyn Davis interviewed Joudah and posted it on Youtube. Also, the Fund published video and audio files from the event below.
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Download the audio (mp3) or listen on the player below:
Joudah was the 2007 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for The Earth in the Attic. In his poems Joudah explores big themes—identity, war, religion, what we hold in common—while never losing sight of the quotidian, the specific. Contest judge Louise Glück described the poet in her Foreword as "that strange animal, the lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas." She finds in his poetry "an incantatory quality and concludes, These are small poems, many of them, but the grandeur of conception is inescapable. The Earth in the Attic is varied, coherent, fierce, tender; impossible to put down, impossible to forget."Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American doctor and has been a member of Doctors Without Borders since 2001. His translation of Mahmoud Darwishs recent poetry, The Butterfly's Burden, received the 2008 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.
