Forty-nine poems selected from four books by the Syrian poet Riad Saleh Hussein, translated from the Arabic by Mehmet Hakkı Suçin, have been published by Ayrıntı Yayınları.
Some poets’ voices reach far beyond their short lives. Riad Saleh Hussein lived only twenty-eight years, yet decades after his death his lines echoed again in the streets, on the walls and in the squares of Syria. Su Gibi Sade Kurşun Gibi Kesin (Simple as Water, Clear as a Gunshot) now brings this voice to Turkish readers.
In Hussein’s poems, love, loneliness, poverty, freedom and death speak from within everyday life. A plain sentence suddenly opens onto an unexpected image; within a few lines a familiar scene becomes the door to another world. Beside sorrow there is humour, beside fragility there is protest. In these poems, which convey the weight of life, the will to live also keeps finding its way.
Having lost his hearing at the age of thirteen and largely self-taught, Hussein built a voice of his own in contemporary Arabic poetry. The power of his poems lies not only in the pain of what he lived through but in his turning that pain into a language in which everyone can find something of themselves.
Compiled from the poet’s four books, this selection brings his poetic world together in a single volume in Turkish for the first time. Opening with an introduction by Mehmet Hakkı Suçin, the book draws the reader closer both to Hussein’s life and to his plain, sharp and surprising way of speaking.
An invitation to read for those curious about contemporary Arabic poetry, for those who wish to meet a new poet, and for those who know how a few lines can go on living inside a person all day long: Su Gibi Sade Kurşun Gibi Kesin.
Translated from the Turkish for this site.