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Portrait of Rashid Hussein
HaOlam HaZeh photographer, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons · Source file on Wikimedia Commons for “Portrait of Rashid Hussein”

Rashid Hussein

راشد حسين

1936–1977

Musmus, Galilee

Poet, journalist, and translator between Arabic and Hebrew, who wrote of a country turned into prisons and died alone in a New York apartment at forty.

GalileetranslationexilePalestinians in IsraelPLO

Rashid Hussein Mahmoud was born on 28 December 1936 in the village of Musmus in the Galilee, and came of age among the Palestinians who remained inside Israel after 1948, under military government. He published his first collection in 1957, at twenty-one, and was one of the poets who made that community’s literature — alongside Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim, both younger than him and both, at first, in his shadow.

He edited Al Mirsad, the Arabic weekly of the left-Zionist party Mapam, and was a member of the party until it expelled him in 1962 over his public support for Gamal Abdel Nasser; his application to return to teaching was then rejected. From around 1964 he translated the Hebrew poetry of Hayim Nahman Bialik into Arabic — an act of literary attention that satisfied nobody, and that says a good deal about the position he occupied. He eventually left the country, joined the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and worked as a Hebrew-Arabic translator in its New York office and then as its correspondent at the United Nations.

He died on 2 February 1977, at forty, in a fire at his New York apartment. Mahmoud Darwish elegised him in a 1986 poem, “On Fifth Avenue he greeted me.” His body was returned for burial in Musmus, where the grave became a Palestinian nationalist site. Several collections of his poetry were published after his death.

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  1. Without a PassportPoem
  2. Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud1913–1948
  3. Dareen Tatour1982–

Connected in the archive

10 connected records

10 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.

written by them — 1 record

  • Without a PassportPoems

    Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: poetSlug: "rashid-hussein" → Rashid Hussein

named in this record — 2 records

One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.

  • Mahmoud Darwishمحمود درويشPoets1941–2008

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: He published his first collection in 1957, at twenty-one, and was one of the poets who made that community's literature — alongside Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim, both younger than him and both, at first, in his shadow.

  • Samih al-Qasimسميح القاسمPoets1939–2014

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: He published his first collection in 1957, at twenty-one, and was one of the poets who made that community's literature — alongside Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim, both younger than him and both, at first, in his shadow.

on a related subject — 7 records

Filed near each other — the same Mandate district, or the same uncommon subject tags.

Cite this page

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Chicago
“Rashid Hussein.” Poetry, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/poetry/rashid-hussein.
MLA
“Rashid Hussein.” Poetry, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/poetry/rashid-hussein. Accessed 22 August 2026.
BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-rashid-hussein, title = {Rashid Hussein}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/poetry/rashid-hussein}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }