“Salim Barakat’s poetry infused a fresh fervour in both forms and themes of contemporary Arab poetry, while his prose revived stunning narratives where the fantastic becomes a powerful fabric to recreate reality. Huda J. Fakhreddine’s The Universe, All at Once is not only a very welcome breakthrough in introducing more of Barakat’s poetry in English; but is also a brave and highly commended endeavour in defying the untranslatable.”—Subhi Hadidi, Syrian literary critic, editorialist, and translator
“Salim Barakat, the dazzlingly enchanting Kurdish-Syrian poet and novelist, and a master of Arabic style, is rumoured to be one of the most enigmatic, riddle-ridden, vorticular writers in modern Arabic literature. Following the tradition of ‘minor literature’, i.e. writers who choose not to write in their mother tongue but to explore the uncharted terrains of the language of the self-proclaimed majority, Barakat’s grand, incomparable Arabic style is simply untranslatable. Or so we thought. And here comes Huda Fakhreddine and performs—for the second time—the impossible ‘task’: she doesn’t only give these auto-selections from Barakat’s poetry a graceful, exquisite English ‘afterlife’, in the Benjaminian sense, but gives us new keys to his old secrets, opens up new doors into his seemingly sealed world, and entices the magician himself to talk about his craft, about ‘the making of Salim Barakat’, from his early childhood in northern Kurdish Syria, to his current, secret garden of refuge in Sweden. This translation, to paraphrase Chopin, is proof that after Barakat ‘has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art’. After all, nothing is more difficult than simplicity.”—antón shammás
‘What is there to say about these poems that largely escape sense and make so much happen? They take refuge in a long history of song (“that delicate line, running from the origin of comedy to your moan”) and summon us to join them. This translation is most alluring where it gives form to Barakat’s philosophy, a poetics of damage that is always available to the consolations of sonic relief. Try rolling these lines around your mouth—“let it be slow, your enchantment / of the chambers of her heart”; “like muscles your destinations slackened, and you sagged”—and see if you are not, in your brokenness, gently calmed.’—Yasmine Seale, 4Columns