Olivia Elias - Chaos, Crossing
Olivia Elias
Chaos, Crossing
Translated from French by
KAREEM JAMES ABU-ZEID
Foreword by
NAJWAN DARWISH
$20.00
Bilingual Edition
192 pages
November 15, 2022
ISBN 978-1-954218-07-9
Distributed by Asterism (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
BIOS
Poet of the Palestinian diaspora, born in Haifa in 1944, OLIVIA ELIAS writes in French. She lived until she was 16 years old in Lebanon where her family took refuge in 1948, then in Montréal-Canada, before moving to France. Her third and most recent collection, Chaos, Traversée, appeared in 2019. Characterized by terse, laconic language and strong rhythms, her poetry shows a deep sensitivity to the Palestinian cause, the plight of refugees and human suffering in general. Her work, translated into English, Arabic, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, has been published in numerous journals and in anthologies.
KAREEM JAMES ABU-ZEID is a translator of writers from across the Arab world, including Najwan Darwish (Palestine), Adonis (Syria), Rabee Jaber (Lebanon), and Dunya Mikhail (Iraq). He has received an NEA translation grant, PEN Center USA's Translation Award, a Fulbright Fellowship (Germany), and a CASA Fellowship (Egypt), among other honors. He is also the author of The Poetics of Adonis and Yves Bonnefoy: Poetry as Spiritual Practice.
Olivia Elias
Chaos, Crossing
Translated from French by
KAREEM JAMES ABU-ZEID
Foreword by
NAJWAN DARWISH
In her English-language debut, acclaimed French-language poet of the Palestinian diaspora Olivia Elias probes deeply into the upheavals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Chaos, Crossing—translated by award-winning translator Kareem James Abu-Zeid—is a powerful chronicle of uprootedness, of times marked by inequality, injustice, and disconnection. These poems seek the calm at the center of the storm, the still point amidst the chaos.
“Each of Olivia Elias’s powerful poems sparkles with the unexpected: exile puts down roots in time, healing is a Ferris wheel, and loss a slough that leads to language. Kareem James Abu-Zeid’s translations are delicate and wonderful. This book is a joy to read.” —Jennifer Croft
“Olivia Elias, child of the Nakba, is a world citizen, resident at one time or another of Lebanon, Canada, France. But as a poet, she remains a Palestinian, inhabited by the landscape, the language, creating lyrics that speak the sorrow of displacement, and a memory vaster and deeper than any one woman’s, with a restraint that dignifies both grief and rage.” —Marilyn Hacker
“One has first to lose faith in words, these poems suggest, then grapple with each word, each line break, their placement on the page, in order to regroup them. Kareem James Abu-Zeid’s translation conveys Elias's tension and urgency, asking us to stop at each word and to approach one of her central questions: is it possible that too much rage kills rage?” —Ahmad Almallah
“Elias, a Palestinian exile, creates beauty from damage, playing with the tension between chaos and innocence. This book is a fierce and tender odyssey around the world and deep inside the human psyche.” —Sylvie Baumgartel
“The times and places in Chaos, Crossing have searching questions for those who stop there, and bones to pick from snapping jaws, everywhere state terror goes unveneered and war is occupation, in island camps and shipping lanes of forcible displacement, a ripple of cosmic fury in every poem-enactments of refusal by a ‘citizen-scribe of occupied Palestine and the world’ that are poems to reread and inhabit, belonging everywhere and now entering English-language poetry, which will be much affected through the capable edition and translation of Kareem James Abu-Zeid.” —David Larsen
“Elias’s language moves between the desire for naming and the unbearable blur that precedes it, both asserting and interrogating acts of inscriptions.” —Mirene Arsanios, The Poetry Project Newsletter
“Where names cannot be relied upon, Elias attends to the noises produced by settler-colonialism: ‘the sound of an olive tree being uprooted’ and ‘the prisons blooming / in the desert / the barbed wire scraping / your shores.” —Cindy Juyoung Ok, Harriet Books
BIOS
Poet of the Palestinian diaspora, born in Haifa in 1944, OLIVIA ELIAS writes in French. She lived until she was 16 years old in Lebanon where her family took refuge in 1948, then in Montréal-Canada, before moving to France. Her third and most recent collection, Chaos, Traversée, appeared in 2019. Characterized by terse, laconic language and strong rhythms, her poetry shows a deep sensitivity to the Palestinian cause, the plight of refugees and human suffering in general. Her work, translated into English, Arabic, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, has been published in numerous journals and in anthologies.
KAREEM JAMES ABU-ZEID is a translator of writers from across the Arab world, including Najwan Darwish (Palestine), Adonis (Syria), Rabee Jaber (Lebanon), and Dunya Mikhail (Iraq). He has received an NEA translation grant, PEN Center USA's Translation Award, a Fulbright Fellowship (Germany), and a CASA Fellowship (Egypt), among other honors. He is also the author of The Poetics of Adonis and Yves Bonnefoy: Poetry as Spiritual Practice.
PRESS
Reviewed by Mirene Arsanios for The Poetry Project Newsletter
Reviewed by Cindy Juyoung Ok for Harriet Books
Reviewed by Christopher Titmuss for The Buddha Wallah
Bilingual Edition
192 pages
November 15, 2022
ISBN 978-1-954218-07-9
Distributed by Small Press Distribution (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
