Chechnya-born Greek poet Jazra Khaleed’s sobering poem laments the death and chaos of the Syrian war, documenting his experience in the country where there is ‘one grave for every thousand corpses, one shadow for every thousand survivors’
By Jazra Khaleed and Karen Van Dyck for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network
In this sobering poem, poet Jazra Khaleed vividly depicts a war “so trite and pedestrian, filled with similes and ornate adjectives, its history is written in the font Comic Sans.” For most of us in the settled world unable to imagine what it is that Syrian refugees go through, these words encompass a different but now less unknowable spectrum of the human experience.
—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief, Asymptote
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