could never use the expression “at wit’s end” again
in other places at the farthest reaches of indifference
& silence
terminal
tragic
Gaza Ghetto
for nearly twice 365 days progresses live on all screens
the hallucinated project of a new Hiroshima
head-chopping robots ventriloquist-robots imitating
in the dead of night the tears of little ones
robots shouting orders “get out human animals”
behind every 250/500/900kg bomb
every missile every bullet fired into knee neck
testicles heart
every explosion greeted with cries of joy
supreme Command Destroy Raze Eradicate Kill
Kill every last member of the A-MAL-EK tribe
***
devastation & slaughter claimed justified in the name
of their ancestors’ suffering
on Western Lands & of the Almighty who loves above
all some of his children
to whom he issues “good blood” certificates worth title
deeds & absolute right of Conquest
***
Gaza Ghetto
2 million children men & women displaced
a thousand times
waiting at any instant in a territory from
beyond the grave Death
walking skeletons tortured with ultimate
weapon
Hunger
the kind that feeds on organs devours
muscles blurs speech dissolves thoughts
putting some together as difficult as
lifting heavy stones self-awareness itself
on the street a man suddenly collapses
a woman leaning against a wall slowly falls
children bellies swollen licking flour traces
on truck floors
scratching sand in search of lentils
land drenched in their blood the sap of Palestine
***
terrified words wander through the maze of hell
no longer knowing
how to express this ignominy the collapse of
Humanity
a loud cry bursts out of throats
Barbarity
“at wit’s end”
at the very end of the end at the very end of hunger
forever
a before
&
an after
forever
GAZA GAZA
at wit’s end, forever
Olivia Elias
translated from the French by Jérémy Victor Robert
Olivia Elias’s writing acts like a seismograph. Attentive to false pretenses, the poet uncovers the horror hidden behind everyday expressions, such as “at wit’s end”. Here is what she says about the origin of the poem:
“One morning when I woke up, as my mind was wandering, the expression ‘at wit’s end’ [à bout] came to me. It dawned on me at once that I could never use it innocently again. We never imagined we would be witnessing a genocide. Of course, there have been others since 1945. But this one—announced very officially, claimed, and methodically pursued with military, financial, and diplomatic assistance from the US Empire and Germany, as well as, to varying degrees, from the vast majority of Western powers and the mainstream media—is unfolding on all screens. A genocide being filmed and televised. Day after day, we see unbearable images of killing, destruction, and starvation. A ‘war’ that looks like a ‘hunt with hounds’ where the objective is to exhaust the ‘human game’ and force them to surrender. This poem came to me as a cry of indignation, but I also wanted to include elements showing the horror of what is happening.”
The main challenge in translating this striking poem lies in its concise style, which can be rendered into English thanks to a more fluid use of articles, easier construction of neologisms, and the ability to create compact verses. More than a documentary poem, “at wit’s end, forever” resembles a painting by Bosch or one of the circles of Dante’s Inferno. The enumeration of the atrocities committed confronts the powerful’s deliberately ignorant discourse on history and law. And the reader’s eye follows the thread of the poem through a maze that seems to have no way out. It is perhaps this conundrum that gives Elias’s words such power: how can one still write poetry at the very end of the end?
“One morning when I woke up, as my mind was wandering, the expression ‘at wit’s end’ [à bout] came to me. It dawned on me at once that I could never use it innocently again. We never imagined we would be witnessing a genocide. Of course, there have been others since 1945. But this one—announced very officially, claimed, and methodically pursued with military, financial, and diplomatic assistance from the US Empire and Germany, as well as, to varying degrees, from the vast majority of Western powers and the mainstream media—is unfolding on all screens. A genocide being filmed and televised. Day after day, we see unbearable images of killing, destruction, and starvation. A ‘war’ that looks like a ‘hunt with hounds’ where the objective is to exhaust the ‘human game’ and force them to surrender. This poem came to me as a cry of indignation, but I also wanted to include elements showing the horror of what is happening.”
The main challenge in translating this striking poem lies in its concise style, which can be rendered into English thanks to a more fluid use of articles, easier construction of neologisms, and the ability to create compact verses. More than a documentary poem, “at wit’s end, forever” resembles a painting by Bosch or one of the circles of Dante’s Inferno. The enumeration of the atrocities committed confronts the powerful’s deliberately ignorant discourse on history and law. And the reader’s eye follows the thread of the poem through a maze that seems to have no way out. It is perhaps this conundrum that gives Elias’s words such power: how can one still write poetry at the very end of the end?
Olivia Elias is a French-language, Palestinian-diaspora poet born in Haifa in 1944. She lived in Lebanon—where her family had taken refuge in 1948— until she was 16, then later in Montreal and Paris. Elias only began publishing in February 2015. Since then, she has published Ton nom de Palestine (Al Manar, 2017; repub. by La feuille de thé, 2025), Chaos, Traversée (La feuille de thé, 2019) and Ce Mont qui regarde la mer (Cambourakis, 2025). In 2022, she made her English-language debut with Chaos, Crossing (World Poetry), a bilingual and expanded version of Chaos, Traversée, followed in 2023 by Your Name, Palestine (World Poetry). Translated into several languages, her poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies in France and abroad. Chaos, Crossing was a finalist for the 2024 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation.
Jérémy Victor Robert is a translator between English and French. He has published French translations of Etel Adnan’s Sea & Fog (Mer et Brouillard; L’Attente, 2015), Donna Stonecipher’s Model City (Cité modèle; joca seria, 2020), and Sarah Riggs’s Murmurations (APIC, 2021, with Marie Borel). Together with Sarah Riggs, he translated Olivia Elias’s Ton nom de Palestine. He recently finished the translation into English of her third book, This Mount Overlooking the Sea (Ce Mont qui regarde la mer; Cambourakis, 2025).
