A Horse at the Door

Wadih Saadeh

A chronology of poems selected & translated by Robin Moger

'Memories? Dreams? Thought experiments? A doubt hovers over what we are reading. That was in the distant past, that never was. Wadih Saadeh’s poems are haunted by absence and yet they brim with life, alert as they are to the most elusive disturbances of air. There was no division between us and the earth. Here a chair, a tree, a bird, a ghost has as much subjectivity as any living human. They have desires. They are the poet’s interlocutors. Their existential discussions with him are rehearsals for a world in which the wind may perchance return the leaf to the tree. The poet is not naïve. He knows the impossibility of wholeness, the irreversibility of exile’s traumas. Yet his voice remains playful. It has the supreme authority of tenderness. It embodies an ethics of the passers-by, who crush no one and are crushed by no one. Robin Moger’s supple translation deftly navigates the text’s associative meanderings. Breathless, the reader stands amazed.' – Omar Berrada