Live Encounters Arab Poetry & Writing July 2026
Nano, poems by Asaad Al-Jabbouri.
Translated from Arabic by Dr. Salwa Gouda.
Nano
Writing with the alternative energy of the mother tongue
in the last threads of night…/
he saw the glasses bent as if in a deep
trance.
While the stag spread through her embrace,
interpretations crept into the language of the body.
And say: no faith endures.
If God is sectarian.
His love is gathered by straw remnants
and she thinks long and hard about a matchstick.
2
A night that sleeps naked in the body’s vaults.
And a sleeper who cannot interpret dreams upon waking.
3
Both are lost
sleep broken under the bed,
dreams bare.
4
She did not walk in the slain one’s funeral,
she detonated language,
and busied herself bandaging the poem’s head.
5
A setback in the nest.
They remembered the raven of the fifth of June.
6
Reading is an oven
the reader may burn the text or be burned by it.
7
The woman on the ropes, split in two…/
words are clothes that get dirty.
And the washing machine broke down from the density of chatter.
8
On the crumbling walls of the face
spare parts of gloom
and firefighters busy themselves with treating the fires.
9
They are not envelopes for sleep
nor seats for glances to sit upon.
Eyes are taverns, the wider they open, the more they drift in daze.
10
He cut it and threw it at the reader
the umbilical cord of the snake-poem.
11
Hope is a fruit of tender years.
And no tree with a doctorate certificate.
12
She got drunk on her own elixir, crying out:
Cognac—and what I love most in you is foxes, my darling.
13
Anxiety is a protein in the tissues of writing
he said this, depressed, as he accompanied the language of mammals.
14
She borrows abandonment from his love without recording it,
while she sees him rambling incoherently in negative sentences.
15
Never for the sleep of lovers.
This is the bed of the dramaturgist, inflamed with the egg-white of fire.
16
An inflamed eye overflowing with bitter tears
that is the sun of memories.
17
The sun is still in nightclothes,
the rooster is still wrestling.
18
The heart is a hot-air balloon dreaming of ashes,
and the road to love’s capital hits the wall.
19
The eagle above the olive trees,
filming the march of the red ants.
20
He goes out for a walk without guard
the brain that threw its owner’s head into the ditch.
© Asaad Al-Jabbouri
Dr Salwa Gouda is an accomplished Egyptian literary translator, critic, and academic affiliated with the English Language and Literature Department at Ain Shams University. Holding a PhD in English literature and criticism, Dr. Gouda pursued her education at both Ain Shams University and California State University, San Bernardino. She has authored several academic works, including Lectures in English Poetry and Introduction to Modern Literary Criticism, among others. Dr. Gouda also played a significant role in translating The Arab Encyclopedia for Pioneers, a comprehensive project featuring poets, philosophers, historians, and literary figures, conducted under the auspices of UNESCO. Recently, her poetry translations have been featured in a poetry anthology published by Alien Buddha Press in Arizona, USA. Her work has also appeared in numerous international literary magazines, further solidifying her contributions to the field of literary translation and criticism.
Asaad Al-Jabbouri is an Iraqi-born poet, novelist, and researcher (b. 1951 in Dhi Qar) who has lived in Denmark since 1989; a member of the Arab and Danish Writers’ Unions and the Cambridge International Encyclopedia of Poetry, he has worked as a journalist and runs the website Al-Imbaratur, with an extensive bibliography that includes over a dozen poetry collections (from I Slaughtered the Rose in 1977 to Texts from the Cold Sanatoriums in 2025), several novels (such as The Armed Fever and The Assassination of Nobel, the latter also published in English), and major encyclopedic works like the 23-volume Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry and the ongoing 10-volume Anthology of the Arabic Novel, alongside critical studies on modern poets published across Syria, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, and Jordan.