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. As a child she lived in Lebanon where her family had taken refuge in 1948. At the age of sixteen, she moved to Montréal, Canada, and later settled in France. Her third poetry 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. Chaos, Crossing—an extended version of the French book translated by Kareem James Abu Zeid—marks her debut in English translation. Published by World Poetry in 2022, it was shortlisted for the Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation. Your Name, Palestine, a long poem translated into English by Sarah Riggs and Jérémy Robert, was published in a special-edition chapbook by World Poetry in 2023. Her work has also been translated into Arabic, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Japanese, and has appeared in numerous journals and 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 is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship for translation, PEN Center USA’s Translation Award, a Fulbright Fellowship (Germany), the Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation, a CASA Fellowship (Egypt), and has been a finalist for PEN America's Translation Prize, once in poetry and once in prose. He is also the author of The Poetics of Adonis and Yves Bonnefoy: Poetry as Spiritual Practice (Lockwood Press).
Born in 1978, Najwan Darwish is one of the foremost contemporary Arab poets. Since the publication of his first collection in 2000, his poetry has been hailed across the Arab world and beyond as a singular expression of the Palestinian struggle. He has published eight books in Arabic, and his work has been translated into more than twenty languages. NYRB Poets published Darwish’s Nothing More to Lose in 2014, and Exhausted on the Cross in 2021. His most recent book in English translation is No One Will Know You Tomorrow: Selected Poems 2014–2024 (Yale Margellos). Darwish lives between Haifa and his birthplace, Jerusalem.
PRESS
Chaos, Crossing shortlisted for the Sarah Maguire Prize
Reviewed by Khalid Lyamlahy for World Literature Today
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
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 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.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE SARAH MAGUIRE PRIZE FOR POETRY IN TRANSLATION
“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
“[H]ow long must those in Gaza wait for the Devastation to be named?” asks Olivia Elias in her English-language debut. … 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
“Chaos, Crossing enters the category of poems of Palestinian resistance with the poet’s willingness to employ cut-to-the bone language to convey truths of six million Palestinians denied political, social-economic liberation by its neighbours.” —Christopher Titmuss, The Buddha Wallah
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
Chaos, Crossing shortlisted for the Sarah Maguire Prize
Reviewed by Khalid Lyamlahy for World Literature Today
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)
