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.
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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