On Translating Dalia Taha
Taha asks us to attend to what language itself crumbles before.
The four poems published in Poetry come from Dalia Taha’s Enter World, first published in Arabic by Almutawassit in 2025, and forthcoming from Graywolf in my English translation in 2026. Organized as a series of summons, each poem in the book begins with the word “Enter,” inviting silence, grass, books, demolished homes, hills, and other natural, unnatural, and emotional landscapes to inhabit the world the book creates. In every poem making up this collection, Taha challenges us to reimagine, reinstate, or rethink our relationships to history, to compromised states of being and embodied experiences, to the places and natural forms that surround us, and to language itself.
“I wrote this collection partly so I would not go mad, and partly so one can hold onto whatever has not been contaminated completely by this war,” she said in one of our earliest conversations. Taha lives and writes in the occupied West Bank, in Ramallah—where a two-year genocide unfolded approximately fifty miles away in Gaza, just beyond reach. Writing, for Taha, becomes a way of preserving sanity—a refusal of the idea that war is an inescapable contaminant of the marrow and matter of life.
“We all know what happens in war,” Dalia writes in the prose poem Enter Tears. “It strips a people of everything: their language, their homes, their songs, their trees—it even yanks the tears right out of their ducts.” Enraged by the excision, from the accounts of atrocities and war crimes, of the salty fluid sorrow calls home, the speaker proceeds to argue for an impossible archive: she wants a book fair populated only by anthologies of tears.
In the same vein, the poems that make up Enter World work by summoning what might have been erased, alongside what remains—fragile, maybe, but not obliterated—into the space of the poem: a book resting on a nightstand, a cypress tree’s shadow splitting a street in half, ancestral knowledge carried in the body, tears excised from history. As she surrounds herself, and us, with the beauty and cruelty of life, Taha asks us to attend to what language itself crumbles before.
Sara Elkamel (she/her) is a poet and journalist living between her hometown, Cairo, Egypt, and New York City. She earned an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. Elkamel's poems have appeared in Poetry magazine, The Common, Michigan Quarterly Review, the Yale Review, the Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry London, Poet Lore, Best New Poets ...