A Building

Ibrahim Nasrallah Translated from the Arabic by Huda J. Fakhreddine
October 18, 2024

Buildings destroyed by Israeli bombardment in Bureij camp, in the central Gaza Strip, June 24th, 2024.

Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Some of my earliest memories are of being counted: my kindergarten teacher shepherding our rambunctious class across the busy street, a watchful aunt trying to wrangle a gaggle of cousins into the car, a soccer coach checking us off as we boarded the bus en route to a game. If anyone was missing, everything stopped; only when the errant child was found could the group proceed. When I encountered the opening lines of Ibrahim Nasrallah’s poem “A Building,” translated by Huda J. Fakhreddine—“Seventy-six are in the room. / In the hallway, / in the bathroom, / in the kitchen, / seventy-six.”—the figure’s insistent reiteration immediately evoked in me this kind of loving total. From one vantage point, to enumerate a life can shroud it in a kind of cold facticity; but where the imperial tally reduces a life to a statistic, in the poem’s loving account, the number recurs like a heartbeat. There are seventy-six lives in this building, in this poem, not only according to a survey of the architecture’s physical space—“in the bathroom, in the kitchen”—but, seventy-six, too, “in the scarce air, / in the girl’s tears.” Here, the total is not a map of discrete parts; rather, each moment of each life offers a glimpse of the whole. We are here, Nasrallah’s poem asserts. A world in each of us. Should we lose any, we are less an entire world.

– Claire Schwartz

Listen to Ibrahim Nasrallah read "A Building" in the original Arabic.

Listen to Huda J. Fakhreddine read "A Building" in her translation.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ بناية

في الغرفة ستةٌ وسبعون
في الممرِّ ستةٌ وسبعون
في الحمّام والمطبخ ستةٌ وسبعو
في الجوع والمرض ستةٌ وسبعون
في رغيفِ الخبز الوحيدِ الذي تتأمّله 152 عينًا،
ستةٌ وسبعون
في جرعة الماءِ الأخيرةِ
في غيمةِ الغبارِ التي عبَرتِ النافذةَ
وفي صوتِ القذيفةِ التي دمَّرتِ البيتَ المجاورَ
وفي صوتِ سيّارةِ الإسعافِ التي
لم تستطع الوصولَ إلى أيّ جرح..
ستةٌ وسبعون
في الهواءِ القليلِ.. وفي بكاءِ طفلةٍ لا تُدركُ ما يدورُ
وطفلٍ لم يفهم الحربَ إلّا بعدَ أن تقطّعتْ يداه..
ستةٌ وسبعون
في الليلةِ التاليةِ لليلةِ المئةِ للقصفِ..
ستةٌ وسبعون
وفي السِّجل المدنيّ.. في شهاداتِ الميلادِ..
ستةٌ وسبعون
في الظلالِ هنا..
ستةٌ وسبعون
وعلى الدَّرج يتراكضون حينما أغارتْ الطائراتُ..
ستةٌ وسبعون.

لحظةُ صمتٍ تبتلعُ الكونَ
ولا شيء يبقى غيرُ قبر بحجم العالم.

A Building

Seventy-six are in the room. In the hallway, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, seventy-six. In hunger and illness, seventy-six. In the only loaf of bread on which a hundred and fifty-two eyes are fixed, seventy-six. In the last sip of water, in the cloud of dust that crossed the window, in the echoes of the bomb that leveled the house next door, in the sirens of the ambulance that couldn’t reach the wound...seventy-six. In the scarce air, in the girl’s tears, she, who doesn’t know what’s going on, and the boy’s cry, he, who only understood war after his hands were cut off, ...seventy-six. In the night after the hundredth of this bombing...seventy-six. In the civil record, in the birth certificates...seventy-six. Seventy-six are in these shadows, and in the stairwell where they all crowd when the raids begin. A moment of silence swallows the universe. Nothing remains except a grave as wide as this world.

Ibrahim Nasrallah is a Palestinian poet, novelist, painter, and photographer. He was born in Amman, Jordan, in 1954 to parents uprooted from their home in Palestine in 1948. Nasrallah has published 14 poetry collections, two books of film criticism, and 24 novels, 14 of which make up his epic Palestinian Tragicomedy series covering 250 years of modern Palestinian history. His many awards and honors include the 2018 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (The Arabic Booker), the 2022 Palestine Prize, and the 2023 Grand Prize for the Novel from the Turkish Authors’ Association. Nasrallah is the only two-time winner of the Katara Prize for Arabic Novels: in 2016 for his novel The Spirits of Kilimanjaro and in 2020 for his novel A Tank Under the Christmas Tree. His new chapbook, Palestinian, translated by Huda Fakhreddine, collects four poems written during the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Huda J. Fakhreddine is a writer, translator, and associate professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015), The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and a book of creative non-fiction, Zaman s̩aghīr taḥt shams thāniya (A Brief Time Under a Different Sun) (Dar al-Nahda, 2019). She is the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge, 2023). Her translations of Arabic poems have appeared in Banipal, World Literature Today, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly, Asymptote, and Middle Eastern Literatures, among many others. She is co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures and an editor of the Library of Arabic Literature.