Taha Muhammad Ali

Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931 in Saffuriyya, a village in the Galilee north of Nazareth. His formal schooling ended after the fourth grade. He was seventeen in 1948 when the village’s people fled to Lebanon; Saffuriyya was destroyed, and he was never able to return to it. He came back across the border and settled in Nazareth, where he lived for the rest of his life, a few miles from a village he could not enter.

He kept a small souvenir shop near the Church of the Annunciation, selling to Christian pilgrims by day and reading poetry at night. He was, in the most literal sense, self-taught — he worked through classical Arabic literature and modern poetry on his own — and the voice that came out of it was unlike the rhetorical, declamatory register that dominated Palestinian poetry in his lifetime: short lines, uneven beats, imagery from village life, and a dry comic intelligence that arrives at grief sideways.

His major English collection, So What: New & Selected Poems, 1971–2005, was translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin and published by Copper Canyon Press in 2006, and made him internationally known in his seventies. Adina Hoffman’s My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century tells his life alongside the century’s. He died in Nazareth on 2 October 2011.

Selected works

• So What: New & Selected Poems, 1971–2005 (trans. Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, Gabriel Levin; Copper Canyon Press, 2006)

Sources

• So What: New & Selected Poems — Copper Canyon Press
• Taha Muhammad Ali — Wikipedia