While better known for her correspondences with Khalil Gibran, the Lebanese-Palestinian writer May Ziadeh was a leading figure in the early-twentieth-century Arab literary world and feminist movement in her own right, whose work inspired generations of writers including the Egyptian writer and activist Nawal El Saadawi. Despite her lasting influence, no full-length work of Ziadeh’s—neither her French nor her Arabic writing—is available in English translation and she remains relatively unread in the Anglophone world. This week, we are pleased to feature one of Ziadeh’s earliest French poems, “Goodbye, Lebanon”—with its elegiac adieus for her landscape-lover homeland as she looks back from her new home in Cairo—rendered in Rose DeMaris’ creative translation that revives Ziadeh’s Romantic sensibility and revisits that exilic feeling which knows that, in separation, “grief goes on”; a poem which will resonate across time with the contemporary moment.
Goodbye, Lebanon
Goodbye, Lebanese mountains.
I’m going far
from your pink rose garlands,
your bright red satin strawberries.
Egypt called in a serious voice,
and already my boat’s rocking
bears new fruit—