A fifth season to leave: translations from the collection by Mohamad Nassereddine

These poems, translated from Arabic into English, are selected from the Lebanese poet Mohamad Nassereddine’s fifth collection, A Fifth Season to Leave, which approaches death from every angle with an eerie familiarity and acceptance. The poems employ death as a site where the unknown can be explored, but they also invoke death to imagine alternatives to what is known, or written in history – Wadi Haddad is resurrected to complete his mission in “Poem Out of Place and Time”, and Nassereddine’s friend answers questions from beyond the grave in “An Exchange”.

Although the poems take up the subject of death, their project is one of imagination and wonder. In a review of A Fifth Season to Leave, Abbas Beydoun described Nassereddine as “… unlike any other Arab free-verse poet who precedes him”. In another review, Dr. Ahmad Nazzal writes: “the poet highlights the genius of childhood”, playing with language and inviting imagination. In an online exchange regarding the poem “Two Songs for the Crucified”, Nassereddine told me, “the message of the poem is that we need a miracle of childhood and happiness instead of theology”. This message resounds throughout this collection which coaxes us away from ologies and toward the imaginative, unknown, and otherworldly.