Jazra Khaleed - The Light That Burns Us
Jazra Khaleed
The Light That Burns Us
Translated from Greek by
PETER CONSTANTINE, SARAH MCCANN, MAX RITVO, ANGELOS SAKKIS, JOSEPHINE SIMPLE, BRIAN SNEEDEN, and KAREN VAN DYCK
$16.00
148 pages
October 29, 2021
ISBN 9781954218017
Distributed by Asterism (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
BIOS
JAZRA KHALEED (born in Chechnya, 1979) is a poet, translator, and filmmaker. He is a Greek citizen and lives in Athens; he writes exclusively in Greek. His works are an indictment of fascism, social injustice, police brutality, and racism in contemporary Greece. His debut collection, Grozny, was published in 2016, and his recent collection, but is this poetry?, was published in 2020. His poems have been widely translated for publications in Europe, the US, Australia, and Asia, and have appeared in The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, World Literature Today, and other publications. As a founding editor of the Athenian poetry magazine Teflon, and through his own translations, he has introduced to a Greek readership the works of Amiri Baraka, Keston Sutherland, Etel Adnan, among many other American, British, Australian, Arab and German-language political and experimental poets. His short films have been screened at festivals such as the Ann Arbor Film Festival (USA), Experiments in Cinema (USA), Kasseler Dokfest (Germany), and L’Alternativa (Spain), among others. The film rendition of his poem about the immigrant situation, “The Aegean or the Anus of Death,” won prizes at the Paris Festival for Different and Experimental Cinema, the Zebra Poetry Film Festival, and the Balkans Beyond Borders Short Film Festival.
KAREN VAN DYCK is the editor of Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry (Penguin, 2016), which introduced Jazra Khaleed to a wider readership. She has written about the anthology and Khaleed’s poetry in The Guardian and PN Review. Her translations include The Rehearsal of Misunderstanding: Three Collections of Poetry by Contemporary Greek Women Poets (Wesleyan UP, 1998), The Scattered Papers of Penelope: New and Selected Poems by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (Graywolf, 2008), and Three Summers (NYRB, 2019), a novel by Margarita Liberaki. She co-edited The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (Norton, 2010) with Peter Constantine, Rachel Hadas, and Edmund Keeley. She is the Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Modern Greek Language and Literature in the Classics Department at Columbia University where she founded the Program in Hellenic Studies and teaches courses on gender, diaspora, and translation.
Jazra Khaleed
The Light That Burns Us
Edited by KAREN VAN DYCK
Translated from Greek by
PETER CONSTANTINE, SARAH MCCANN, MAX RITVO, ANGELOS SAKKIS, JOSEPHINE SIMPLE, BRIAN SNEEDEN, and KAREN VAN DYCK
The English-language debut of one of Greece's most radical and original poetic voices.
“An explosive cadence… Khaleed’s sentiment toward the would-be aesthetes seems clear: ‘Fuck off, flower poets.’” —David Wallace, The New Yorker
“[Jazra Khaleed] stands up to fascism by writing and performing Greek-language poetry that is unmatched in technical bravura, emotional depth, and political urgency. He performs his poetry at a lightning clip—so fast the Nazis can barely keep up, let alone talk back—a hip-hop emcee in a fever.” —Max Ritvo, LA Review of Books
“Agitated and delirious and necessary.” —Lotte L.S, Mute
“As a whole, these translations point to the collective love that gave them shape—a love for Khaleed’s own Greek and for the Greek language more broadly… Thoughtful and linguistically careful, Khaleed’s English debut plants the right beat in our chests.” —Panagiota Stoltidou, Hopscotch
“These poems deserve their place in Poetry and American Poetry Review and in the curriculum of graduate schools, yet the project here aims beyond literary acceptance or enhanced status in the academy toward the gritty, unresolvable truth of the refugee experience. The voice here longs for all that the displaced long for—food, home, dignity, hope, justice.” —John Whalen, Colorado Review
BIOS
JAZRA KHALEED (born in Chechnya, 1979) is a poet, translator, and filmmaker. He is a Greek citizen and lives in Athens; he writes exclusively in Greek. His works are an indictment of fascism, social injustice, police brutality, and racism in contemporary Greece. His debut collection, Grozny, was published in 2016, and his recent collection, but is this poetry?, was published in 2020. His poems have been widely translated for publications in Europe, the US, Australia, and Asia, and have appeared in The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, World Literature Today, and other publications. As a founding editor of the Athenian poetry magazine Teflon, and through his own translations, he has introduced to a Greek readership the works of Amiri Baraka, Keston Sutherland, Etel Adnan, among many other American, British, Australian, Arab and German-language political and experimental poets. His short films have been screened at festivals such as the Ann Arbor Film Festival (USA), Experiments in Cinema (USA), Kasseler Dokfest (Germany), and L’Alternativa (Spain), among others. The film rendition of his poem about the immigrant situation, “The Aegean or the Anus of Death,” won prizes at the Paris Festival for Different and Experimental Cinema, the Zebra Poetry Film Festival, and the Balkans Beyond Borders Short Film Festival.
KAREN VAN DYCK is the editor of Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry (Penguin, 2016), which introduced Jazra Khaleed to a wider readership. She has written about the anthology and Khaleed’s poetry in The Guardian and PN Review. Her translations include The Rehearsal of Misunderstanding: Three Collections of Poetry by Contemporary Greek Women Poets (Wesleyan UP, 1998), The Scattered Papers of Penelope: New and Selected Poems by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (Graywolf, 2008), and Three Summers (NYRB, 2019), a novel by Margarita Liberaki. She co-edited The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (Norton, 2010) with Peter Constantine, Rachel Hadas, and Edmund Keeley. She is the Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Modern Greek Language and Literature in the Classics Department at Columbia University where she founded the Program in Hellenic Studies and teaches courses on gender, diaspora, and translation.
PRESS
Reviewed by Panagiota Stoltidou for Hopscotch Translation
148 pages
October 29, 2021
ISBN 9781954218017
Distributed by Small Press Distribution (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
