Ashraf Aboul-Yazid A STREET IN CAIRO

Full of dried trees and people, Filled with a mixture of mud and bones, But it always looks like a river, As life looks like death!

The man who returned home, In his short break, Is just a street in Cairo, With balconies of despair, With lost wars dancing inside him, With feet sinking in blood and dead bodies, Those killed ones that sleep in his heart After finishing their roles in the news.

The man who returned home, In his short break, Is seeking a vision

In the hand spread between two cities, With lines sketched by years, Made of sands and winds.

The man who returned home, In his short break, is asking: “How many last wars will be enough?”

The 1001 Lamps of Jack Hirschman

On the streets of San Francisco

With his palm tree body Jack was carrying his poetic ladder. He used to support it on the pillars of light and ascend Holding a secret lamp box to light up a thousand and one day: He lit a lamp for freedom, A glowing lamp that would illuminate the darkness for guerrillas in the heart of their caves. A lightning lamp for the caring mothers; of land, language, and people, A lamp for the survivors of forced migrations, And another lamp for the islands exiled from the sea of love. He carried the last lamp To roam the world’s roads; From Haiti to Vietnam, And from Colombia to Palestine. Jack! I could see you; With the legendary genie’s lamp .

You rubbed it and mumbled lamenting Dylan Thomas, To raise music from his eternal note. You danced with Allen Ginsburg Like two sunflowers in Van Gogh’s fields Before you ran by Picasso and Renoir To put the seed of your last lamp in the field of revolution. There, the poets of the world will plow their forgotten land, To grow the trees of light, Where all of them carry their flaming lamps, Holding their poetic ladders, Supporting them where the poles rise in the roads across the world, To light the eternal lamp signed by Jack Hirschman.

Ashraf Aboul-Yazid, writer, translator and journalist from Egypt. Author of more than 35 books of poetry, novels, biographies, criticism, children’s literature and translations. As a journalist, he worked in Egypt, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Korea. He works as the editor-in-chief of the Silk Road Literature Series in Egypt and as the editor-in-chief of the Korean Arabic-language portal the AsiaN.

The poetic experience of the poet Ashraf Aboul-Yazid

The poetic experience of the poet Ashraf Aboul-Yazid appears in his elaborate reading of his poetic self-awareness, and in projecting his own experience of travel and alienation as a non-textual written record, but rather as a semantic ground that flickers in the backgrounds of texts.

To form a kind of textual substrate that is interpreted or received in advance, so that it works in the memory of texts, and in the methods of its investigations of the world.

In light of this awareness, the poet performs a charming textual game represented in his constant and active poetic talk about memory. The memory here is not necessarily the poetic memory whose interpretation may be withdrawn or his integrated anti-war, hence this research seeks to dive into the poetic potentials presented by Ashraf Aboul-Yazid: the poet, the emigrant, the eternal traveler, the expatriate, the plastic artist, the photographer, and the journalist who lived through various journeys, and practiced multiple travels, as if he were a contemporary Sinbad seeking to reveal before to pick him up adventurous, and seeks to contemplate and question before certainty takes him away.

The poetic experience of Ashraf Aboul-Yazid is an experience that deserves contemplation, because it is an experience emerging from a poet who practiced its positions, not imagining them, who lived in exile, endured travel, and suffered its pains and wounds in a continuous nostalgic horizon. It is an experience that gives us how to alienate the Egyptian poet, how he stares at the streets and contemplates them as if he is staring at the streets of his own memory, his own childhood, how he reformulates his imagination while he misses the details of the sensory place to take refuge in the spiritual place that he carries on his back in all his travels.

It is the nature of the Egyptian traveler everywhere he goes. remains attached in its original position. In the faces of the lanes, villages, and cities that he experienced and grew up in, and from here the memory continues to work, and the poet continues to imagine in search of the absolute imagination himself.

Abdullah Al Samati

CIP - Каталогизација у публикацији Народна библиотека Србије, Београд

821.411.21(620)-1(0.034.2)

АБУЛ-Јазид, Ашраф, 1963Улица у Каиру и друге песме [Електронски извор] / Ашраф Абул-Јазид ; превод са енглеског Ана Стјеља = А street in Cairo and other poems / Ashraf Aboul-Yazid

; translated from English by Ana Stjelja. - Београд = Belgrade : Удружење за промоцију културне разноликости „Alia

Mundi”, 2023 (Београд : Удружење за промоцију културне разноликости „Alia Mundi”). - 1 електронски оптички диск

(CD-ROM) : текст ; 12 cm. - (Едиција Porta Mundi)

Системски захтеви: Нису наведени. - Насл. са насловне стране документа. - На насл. стр. и упор. ств. насл. на арап. писму. - Упоредо срп. и енгл. текст и арап. изворник.

- Ауторова слика. - Тираж 100. - О аутору. - Поетско искуство Ашрафа Абул-Јазида / Абдулах Ал-Самати.

ISBN 978-86-81396-20-9

COBISS.SR-ID 115099401