The Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts

Special Guest Judge, Diana Arterian:

“The Grammar of Survival” follows a woman during a relatively simple errand: “to kiss a
wounded boy”—her nephew. During her journey, we take in the striking terrain, its gorgeous textures and sounds. It is during this trek to and from her brief stop at her nephew’s bedside that the context of this woman’s life reveals itself. What had seemed dignified in its description is quickly revealed as forlorn. Her landscape is empty of neighbors, but with “fresh tire tracks.” “For years the threat of expulsion had circled her family like a patient hawk,” Nabhan Khraishi writes, “never leaving the sky above them.” The boy had been shot through the leg by soldiers. The remnants of settler cruelties on locals are visible, but their agents unseen. So Khraishi allows passive voice to reign—shacks crushed, water tanks opened, flour bags torn to let loose its precious contents. “Sheep were found dead, their bodies stiff with poison.” This majestic countryside has also borne the relentless violences exacted on its Palestinian residents. “[I]n this landscape distance was never measured simply in kilometers,” Khraishi writes. “It was measured in watchtowers. In rumors that traveled faster than wind. In the remembered echo of gunfire rolling across stone.” This land: the pulsing heart of a brutal, unbalanced struggle. Khraishi has accomplished an incredible feat of overlaying a Modernist structure—a single day in a life to reveal its many truths—upon the devastating realities of decades-long atrocities endured by Palestinians in an apartheid state. None of this would be legible or as powerful without Khraishi’s remarkable work defined by his original text. This translation sustains a stately yet concentrated intensity, honoring the original’s intentions. The tone never waivers, instead guiding Khraishi’s descriptions and rhetorical gestures into English with unfaltering care.

Diana Arterian is the editor and co-translator of Smoke Drifts (World Poetry Books), the selected works of the late contemporary Afghan poet Nadia Anjuman. These co-translations, done with Marina Omar, have previously appeared in venues such as Asymptote, Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, Exchanges, Gulf Coast, North American Poetry Review, and was anthologized in Hair on Fire: Afghan Women Poets (Two Lines Press Calico Series). Arterian is also the author of the poetry collections Agrippina the Younger (Northwestern University Press) and Playing Monster :: Seiche, which received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was a Poetry Foundation Staff Pick. Her work has been recognized with fellowships from the Banff Centre, Millay Arts, Yaddo, and others. A Poetry Editor at Noemi Press, Arterian writes “The Annotated Nightstand” column at LitHub and lives in Los Angeles.