OLIVIA ELIAS - YOUR NAME, PALESTINE
Olivia Elias
Your Name, Palestine
Translated from French by
SARAH RIGGS and JÉRÉMY VICTOR ROBERT
Drawings by
BASIL KING
$25.00
Limited Edition Chapbook
40 pages
October 1, 2023
BIOS
A poet of the Palestinian diaspora, OLIVIA ELIAS writes in French. Born in Haifa in 1944, she lived until the age of sixteen in Lebanon, where her family took refuge in 1948, then in Montreal, before moving to France. Her work, translated into English, Arabic, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese, has appeared in anthologies and numerous journals. In 2022, she published her first book in English translation, Chaos, Crossing (World Poetry), translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid.
SARAH RIGGS is a poet, artivist, and co-founder of Tamaas. She is the translator, from French, with the help of Alisha Mascarenhas, Jérémy Robert, and Cole Swensen, of Etel Adnan’s TIME (Nightboat, 2019), which won the Griffin International Poetry Prize and Best Translated Book Award and was nominated for Lambda and PEN.
JÉRÉMY VICTOR ROBERT is a translator between English and French who works and lives in his native Réunion Island.
BASIL KING is a painter and writer associated with Black Mountain College and the author of several poetry collections.
Olivia Elias
Your Name, Palestine
Translated from French by
SARAH RIGGS and JÉRÉMY VICTOR ROBERT
Drawings by
BASIL KING
In Your Name, Palestine, French-Palestinian poet Olivia Elias, who took refuge in Lebanon in 1948 before moving to France and Canada, remembers the country she had to leave.
Elias’s second collection in English—translated by Jérémy Robert and Sarah Riggs—is an ode to the blazing beauty of Palestine in which the poet draws from the “heart and the wind playing between high hills and deserts” the strength to question the doom that came to her hometown. Taking inspiration from Aimé Césaire and other writers, and with the help of musicians, Elias redefines the notion of nation, and the sense of belonging, be it to a country or a memory. “Your Name, Palestine,” the choral poem at the center of this book, commends a “people that knocks / relentlessly on the doors of the future / a country pushed into the margins of history.
Printed in a limited edition of 300 copies, this hand-bound chapbook with letterpress covers features a series of drawings made in response to Elias’s poems by Basil King, a New-York-based artist and writer associated with Black Mountain College.
Twenty-five copies are numbered and signed by the author, translators, and artist.
“Intended for voices set to instruments… [this] work speaks of the intifada singers, the debke performances that conceptualize art from the violences of occupation, and the traditional melodies evoking the dignity of liberation… Palestine, untorn, in concert, singing.” —Xiao Yue Shan, Asymptote
“For Elias ... it is at the deepest roots of the time of darkness and heavy threats in which we live that poetry draws its necessity.” —Antoine Boulad, Recours au poème
BIOS
A poet of the Palestinian diaspora, OLIVIA ELIAS writes in French. Born in Haifa in 1944, she lived until the age of sixteen in Lebanon, where her family took refuge in 1948, then in Montreal, before moving to France. Her work, translated into English, Arabic, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese, has appeared in anthologies and numerous journals. In 2022, she published her first book in English translation, Chaos, Crossing (World Poetry), translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid.
SARAH RIGGS is a poet, artivist, and co-founder of Tamaas. She is the translator, from French, with the help of Alisha Mascarenhas, Jérémy Robert, and Cole Swensen, of Etel Adnan’s TIME (Nightboat, 2019), which won the Griffin International Poetry Prize and Best Translated Book Award and was nominated for Lambda and PEN.
JÉRÉMY VICTOR ROBERT is a translator between English and French who works and lives in his native Réunion Island.
PRESS
Reviewed by Mirene Arsanios in the Poetry Project Newsletter
Limited Edition
40 pages
October 1, 2023
