In the early 2010s, translations of Ghayath al-Madhoun’s poetry into Swedish and Dutch quietly did what we now call going viral: they circulated through European literary networks with a velocity and reach that no Arabic-language edition could have achieved on its own, and they laid the foundations of the professional image that sustains him today. In Arabic literary circles the rumor circulates that al-Madhoun is the only living Arab poet in 2026 who can live off his poetry. As his Hebrew translator, I can attest that the rumor is plausible, even if matters might be more complex than the formula suggests.
No poet in our media-saturated world can live off book sales and royalties alone. What al-Madhoun traffics in ‒ with remarkable proficiency ‒ is his image: a carefully curated performative personality that crosses fluidly between media, genres, and institutional contexts, and that makes him an attractive figure for the European cultural infrastructure willing to underwrite ambitious creative projects. The Klas de Vylders stipendiefond for immigrant writers in Sweden, the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin residency scholarship, appearance fees at poetry festivals across the continent, film commissions, book commissions, anthology curation ‒ these are real revenue streams. This is not a criticism. It is a description of what a successful 21st-century poet actually looks like: less a solitary figure bent over a manuscript than something closer to what we might call, without condescension, an influencer, a digital creator whose medium happens to be verse, and whose platform was built not by follower counts but by the slower, more durable machinery of literary translation. And underneath all of it ‒ the image, the institutions, the viral spread ‒ lies what made it possible: a poetic voice so kinetically charged that it survives translation into thirty languages and arrives in each one still crackling:
صَدِّقُوني / تستطيعون إِدراكَ حُزْني بلا مترجم / فهو حزن كرنفالي (“ستوكهولم”، لا أستطيع الحضور 2014)
Believe me / you can grasp my melancholy without a translator / for it is a carnivalesque kind of melancholy. (trans. Daniel Behar)
As his Hebrew translator I also can attest that al-Madhoun’s carnivalesque melancholy – served in the warm personable address of a trusted ṣadīq, a good friend – is indeed uncontainable. The poems are sensuously embodied in the Arabic language, they are native to it, captivatingly so, but they do not originate in Arabic so much as pass through it. I have by now received countless responses from readers who felt awakened, rattled, recharged by the Hebrew versions. My standard, slightly evasive, reply has been that I deserve no special credit: that I functioned as a medium rather than an author, and that what makes al-Madhoun’s poetry translatable ‒ almost recklessly translatable ‒ is precisely its excess, the sheer surplus that overwhelms any single language and spills irrepressibly into the next.
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