Recognized for his memoir This Boy’s Life, Tobias Wolff has written one novella, The Barracks Thief, which won the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1985. A Vietnam story set entirely in the United States, The Barracks Thief is a… Read More ›
War Ballad (alternatively titled Ballad of 1941) was first published in Andrey Voznesensky’s debut collection, Mozaika (Mozaics) (Vladimir 1960), along with I Am Goya. In that book the poem was “dedicated to the partisans of Kerch, a peninsula in the… Read More ›
Fadwa Tuqan wrote Song of Becoming in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War that resulted in the defeat of the tripartite Arab coalition (Egypt, Syria, and Jordan) by Israel. The defeat also meant that the Palestinian struggle against dispossession,… Read More ›
This popular poem by Mahmud Darwish has had more than one translation in English. It is a striking poem and rare in its subject matter. It humanizes the enemy and, more specifically, the soldier enemy who invades one’s country. In… Read More ›
Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Shout No More Stop killing the dead, don’t shout anymore, don’t shout if you still want to hear them, if you hope not to pass on. They have the imperceivable murmur, they make no more noise than the… Read More ›
Dis Nigeria Sef is the longest poem in Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Songs in a Time of War. This poem does not belong among the war poems; the writer acknowledges in one of his memoirs that it was written in 1977, long… Read More ›
In the original Arabic of this poem by Mahmoud Darwish, there are 24 numbered stanzas representing the journal of a “wound,” specifically Palestinian. It is the diary of the violated and wounded, of the dispossessed and occupied. “Wound” here is… Read More ›
The Desert includes selections from the poetic diary of Adonis during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 and the siege of Beirut. The poem is dated “June 4, 1982–Jan. 1, 1983.” It is made up of 35 numbered… Read More ›
There is little question that Death Fugue (Todesfuge) is Paul Celan’s most celebrated and anthologized poem, a work that, as Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi avers, has become “as much an icon of the Holocaust as the photograph of the little boy… Read More ›
Mahmoud Darwish was born in Palestine when it was a British mandate. At the age of six, he experienced the dispersal of his people upon the birth of the state of Israel (1948). The Palestinians had to flee or accept… Read More ›
The Buckow Elegies are 22 poems that Bertolt Brecht wrote during the summer of 1953, when he was staying at a country house that he had bought early the previous year. The poems were published gradually over the next two… Read More ›
Written shortly after Mayakovsky’s first meeting with Lily Brik in 1915, this poem takes its tone from Catullus’s “I love, and I hate” and its mood from the gothic tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, to whom the poem alludes… Read More ›
This poem begins with the observation that no marker preserves the memory of the Jews and others whom the Germans killed at Babi Yar, a ravine outside the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, on September 29, 1941. Yevtushenko’s words (and the… Read More ›
I’m not saying that was yesterday. With worthless Summer money in our pockets we are again on the chaff of scorn, in the autumn maneuvers of time. And the escape route to the south does not come to us, like… Read More ›
The story of a disillusionment with respect to a misunderstood marriage, this novel of psychological realism is cast in the form of the recollections—with the full force of hindsight—of John Dowell, a wealthy American who has lost his wife, Florence,… Read More ›
Based on Ballard’s childhood experiences in a Japanese concentration camp outside Shanghai, this autobiographical novel became a successful film adaptation for director Steven Spielberg in 1985. The story unfolds in three parts, opening in Shanghai on the eve of the… Read More ›
Sir Walter Scott’s most popular novel, Ivanhoe, takes place during the 12th-century reign of Richard I. While historians took him to task for incorrectly extending the Saxon-Norman conflict into that century, the public enthusiastically received his tale of knights, displaced… Read More ›
Anna Marie Porter’s novel of the French Revolutionary War, The Hungarian Brothers, proved her most popular romance. It either delighted or repulsed readers in later centuries, depending on their fondness for the genre. One contemporary review of the novel read,… Read More ›
The word chivalry derives from the French term cheval, or horse, and those practicing chivalry in medieval times possessed highly developed horseback-riding skills. Dressed in armor during times of battle and known as knights, from a term that originally meant… Read More ›
The Great Depression had a profound psychological effect on many Americans, shaking their faith in capitalist ideology. The notions that opportunity was equal and unlimited and that success was assured for energetic, hardworking, talented individuals no longer seemed valid. In… Read More ›
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