Seeds in Flight

Notes

Like most poems we've translated from Arabic, this was fiendishly difficult to unpick. Translating Arabic poetry is virtually impossible for someone unless they're a native speaker who is steeped in contemporary Arabic poetry, so we were very lucky that Worod Musawi was there to help us.

If you look at the original Arabic version, you'll see that the poem is centred with line breaks that seem to be based on shape more than meaning. The most radical departure we made from Khaled's original poem was to alter the line breaks and put the poem into couplets. This slows the poem down, allowing the images room to breathe.