Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature.

• Author: Boullata, Issa J.

Yet another translation prepared under the auspices of PROTA (Project of Translation from Arabic), this anthology is unique in many ways. It is not only a testament to the indefatigable efforts and resourcefulness of PROTA's founder and director, Dr. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, but also to the Palestinian people she belongs to and the culture that sustains their identity. With the translation and editorial work supported and subsidized by Palestinian businessmen, professionals, and intellectuals dispersed in various parts of the world, this anthology represents the resilient will to live and the firm commitment to collective self-preservation and continuity of a people whose very existence is threatened. This fact alone, of course, does not make a good anthology. In the final analysis, it is the poets, fiction writers, and other authors from Palestine represented in this volume as well as the editor and the translators that are responsible for the quality of this anthology.

Apart from earlier English anthologies of general Arabic literary writings that included sections on Palestinian literature, there have been English anthologies of specifically Palestinian writings before the one under review, such as Sulafa Hijjawi's Poetry of Resistance in Occupied Palestine (Baghdad, 1968), Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb's Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance (Washington, D.C. 1970), Abdul Wahab Al-Messiri's A Lover from Palestine and Other Poems: An Anthology of Palestinian Poetry (Washington, D.C. 1970), and A. M. Elmessiri's The Palestinian Wedding: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Poetry (Washington, D.C. 1982). But all these good works are limited to poetry and their coverage thereof is narrow in scope and historical perspective. By contrast, the present anthology contains poems, short stories, selections from novels, and extracts from personal accounts, chosen from the works of some one hundred Palestinian authors; and its coverage includes writings culled from the period before the catastrophic Palestinian diaspora of 1948 (particularly poetry) as well as from the period after it. Furthermore, it has a section on Palestinian poetry originally written in English. It is therefore a more comprehensive compilation and much broader in scope and larger in size than any earlier English anthology of Palestinian literature. In this capacity, it rightfully fills a gap in the literary field and its publication comes opportunely...