Wadih Saadeh, A Horse at the Door / A Chronological Selection of Poems

Tenement #16 / ISBN: 978-1-917304-02-3
210pp [Approx.] / 140 x 216mm
Translated & selected from the Arabic by Robin Moger
Edited by Dominic Jaeckle
Designed and typeset by Traven T. Croves

13.12.24

With an Afterword by Youssef Rakha.

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An English language survey of works by
the celebrated poet, drawing from collections
published between 1968 and 2012.

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I had intended my poetry to be a kind of salvation for me in my confrontation with the onslaught of a perpetually antagonistic world. When this confrontation failed, I tried convincing myself that surrendering to the world—being a scrap of paper floating downriver—was the only salvation available to me. But this proved impossible, too.

Wadih Saadeh

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Reading Wadih Saadeh, in this inspiring translation by Robin Moger, one finds oneself entering the aftershocks of an imagination devastated by war and the deep internal and external exiles that follow such destruction. His poetry, loose and open—attentive and philosophical—lives in the remnants of what is left, of what survives to tell its tales, in both short-form, slightly surreal parables, and longer autobiographic tracings. It speaks of dust, of being dust, of stones talking to stones, of separated limbs and shadows walking their own way, clinging to shapes, of being water, of being rubble, new languages learnt, friendships, and tobacco at the source of a breath. Of travelling without arrival. Of moving without settling. As though one is forever seeking to settle but one doesn’t know how, or into what form. In the end, the poet settles on passing, and finds aliveness in its slightest movements. Like passing one’s hand through one’s hair, as he does it in the closing sequence of his ground-breaking poem from the Lebanese civil war. An extraordinary and painfully timely collection.

Caroline Bergvall

Wadih Saadeh was fated to wander. He moved between exiles, from Beirut to Europe, until the earth entire became an exile. And his poem migrated with him, roaming through the city streets where the finest and cruelest scenes life has to offer may be seen, then into and through his own body, from where he contemplates himself in order to contemplate the world: two illusions, in opposition and insoluble. Poetry may be this perpetual voyage through senses and memories, but it is like the travelling of dreamers, it has no road. And like most wandering poets whose childhood waits for them in their future, Wadih Saadeh constructed a house out of his: a home for his soul with his mind stood on the threshold, on guard like a figure in a fairy tale. His poem is an open house, to which he hosts he invites the animals of Mount Lebanon, its flowers and insects, the mad and homeless and gypsies, departed relatives and fellow poets, both dead and alive, the whole world. The poet set up home in this house until he disappeared into it, and here, from his concealment, he brings language back to the simplicity of the first questions… only that his gaze is that of someone who knows that nothing he sees will he ever see again. Return is another illusion. Everything that is written is a beautiful gift, offered to the absence of those he loved. He is recovering, in that vast invisibility, some part of what once was then disappeared. The moment of its loss is complex, an entanglement of weightlessness, joy, and grief: grief, because the end is forever at the point of arrival and the process of departure is never-ending; joy, that the end has come at last to relieve him of the burdens of his past, his fears and fury and pleasures; and weightlessness, because the poet owns nothing, not even the word they write. His word belongs first and foremost to the dead, his father among them:

"During the war, my father went searching the wilderness for a bone, that he might crush it with a stone and sate his hunger. From the lineage of that crushed bone came children, of which I was one. I was the son of a crushed bone."

Golan Haji

Memories? Dreams? Thought experiments? A doubt hovers over what we are reading. "That was in the distant past, that never was." Wadih Saadeh’s poems are haunted by absence and yet they brim with life, alert as they are to the most elusive disturbances of air. "There was no division between us and the earth." Here a chair, a tree, a bird, a ghost have as much subjectivity as any living human. They have desires. They are the poet’s interlocutors. Their existential discussions with him are rehearsals for a world in which the wind may perchance "return the leaf to the tree." The poet is not naïve. He knows the impossibility of wholeness, the irreversibility of exile’s traumas. Yet his voice remains playful. It has the supreme authority of tenderness. It embodies an ethics of the passers-by, who "crush no one and are crushed by no one." Robin Moger’s supple translation deftly navigates the text’s associative meanderings. Breathless, the reader stands amazed.

Omar Berrada

In a 2014 AlMayadeen TV interview with the Lebanese poet-host Zahi Wehbe, Wadih Saadeh called his work ‘an autobiography of other people’s lives.’ At this point in the conversation he had already explained that people are essentially alike, so the deeper you plunge into yourself the more you find out about others. Speaking casually, the then sixty-six year old—very arguably the greatest living Arabic poet—did not seem to realise how startling is the idea. Donald M. Murray’s All Writing Is Autobiography is one thing, but to say that poetry is a way to be someone else, and so let someone else be you—that feels like a coup de foudre. A poem, Saadeh told Wahbe, is ‘a momentary, illusory cure’ from the horrors of the world, wounds actually dressed by working, having a family, emigrating. He called the third person, which in Arabic translates to ‘the absent one,’ ‘a shadow self, the self that cannot be present.’ Summoning that inner absence, switching on the reader’s presence, is what the Lebanese master manages, every time.

[...]        

(Youssef Rakha, from his Afterword, ‘The Australian’)

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See here for a further word on this title.

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See here for Moger’s translation of Saadeh’s ‘Dead Moments,’ ℅ the Cordite Poetry Review.

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Stickered editions will carry a cover adornment; a reproduction of a portrait of the poet and his mother, author’s own, date unknown).

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Wadih Saadeh was born Wadih Amin Estefan in 1948 in the village of Chabtine in northern Lebanon. As a young man he moved to Beirut where he first began to write poetry and where, in 1973, he would distribute handwritten copies of his first collection, The evening has no siblings. He lived and travelled between Beirut and Europe—Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Greece and Cyprus—until in 1988 he finally emigrated with his family to Australia, where he lives now: ‘a village farmer, resident in Sydney.’ A figure of central importance in the development of the Arabic prose poem, his published collections are as follows ...

The evening has no siblings (1981) /
يس للمساء إخوة

(In two parts—the first written between 1968 and 1973, the second between 1973 and 1980—that were published together in a single volume in 1981.)

The water, the water (1983) /
المياه المياه

A man in second-hand air sits and thinks of animals (1985) /
رجل في هواء مستعمل يقعد ويفكر في الحيوانات

Seat of passenger who left the bus (1987) /
مقعد راكب غادر الباص

Because of a cloud most probably (1992) /
بسبب غيمة على الأرجح

An attempt to join two banks with a voice (1997)
محاولة وصل ضفتين بصوت

The text of absence (1999)
نص الغياب

Dust (2001)
غبار

Darning the air (2006)
رتق الهواء

Another configuration of the life of Wadih Saadeh (2006)
تركيب آخر لحياة وديع سعادة

Who took the glance I left before the door (2011)
من أخذ النظرة التي تركتها أمام الباب؟

Tell the passer-by to return, he left his shadow (2012)
قل للعابر أن يعود, نسي هنا ظله

Translations of individual poems and collections have been published in a number of European languages, most frequently his Lebanese civil-war collection Because of a cloud most probably. In English, many translations of his poems can be found online, and in anthologies such as Crack in the wall: New Arab Poetry (Saqi Books, 2001) and Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (Norton, 2008). The only published English-language volume dedicated to his work is Anne Fairburn’s A secret sky (Ginninderra Press, 1997), which contains poems from his 1992 collection.

Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic to English who lives in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat. His translations of prose and poetry have appeared widely. His most recent publications include Strangers in Light Coats (Seagull Press, 2023)—a collection of the poems of Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan—and Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal (And Other Stories Press, 2023), which was a joint winner of the 2024 James Tait Black Prize for Biography.  

Youssef Rakha is an Egyptian writer of fiction and non-fiction working in Arabic and English. He is the author of the novels The Book of the Sultan’s Seal (Interlink, 2014) and The Crocodiles (Seven Stories Press, 2015), which are available in English, and Paolo, which was on the long list of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2017 and won the 2017 Sawiris Award. The Dissenters (Graywolf, 2025) is his first novel to be written in English.