The Town I Never Told You About

“Astonishingly powerful… Zaqtan conjures shifting degrees of historical depth, like a ruined house where some corridors go and go and go while others suddenly shut, the family portrait rendered mute, or even falling apart in one’s hands; continuity is never a certain thing, here, and the effort of remembering seems vast. Yet remembering must be done.”

“Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan’s latest collection… gathers poems written between 2022 and 2024 and translated from Arabic by Robin Moger. Villages and hillscapes emerge through memory, with individual recollections opening on to a longer history of displacement. Some poems unfold over several pages, while others are built around a brief incident. Their length changes, but each returns to the hold a place retains after it has been left.”

Ghassan Zaqtan is a Palestinian poet, novelist, and editor. Born in Bethlehem, he has lived in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Tunisia.

Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic to English based in Barcelona. He has translated several novels and prose works into English, including Haytham El Wardany’s The Book of Sleep, Mohamed Kheir’s Slipping, Iman Mersal’s Traces of Enayat, and Ghassan Zaqtan’s Strangers in Light Coats.

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