Elizabeth Winslow

Liz Winslow is a graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her translation of Dunya Mikhail’s The War Works Hard won a 2004 PEN Translation Fund award and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2006. She also translated Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, Dunya’s second collection from New Directions. Other translations and works of original fiction have appeared in many magazines, including Banipal, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Louisville Review, World Literature Today, Circumference, and Variety. She lives in Las Vegas.

Diary Of A Wave Outside The Sea

Poetry by Dunya Mikhail

Translated by Elizabeth Winslow

When Part One of Dunya Mikhail’s Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea was published in Cairo, the newspaper Al-Ahram said: “In this remarkable and spellbinding text, one is reminded of ancient epics and mythology: of Gilgamesh’s quest to undo his tragic loss, of Sisyphus’s perseverance after being condemned to perpetually roll a boulder. The beautiful gush of words depicting a merciless and indifferent world reasserts almost existentially that to survive in an alienating universe there is no alternative but to (re)create incessantly.…
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The War Works Hard

Poetry by Dunya Mikhail

Translated by Elizabeth Winslow

“Yesterday I lost a country,” Dunya Mikhail writes in The War Works Hard, a subversive, sobering work by an exiled Iraqi poet, and her first collection to appear in English. Amidst the ongoing atrocities in Iraq, after decades of wars and hundreds of thousands of deaths, here is an important new voice that rescues the human spirit from the ruins. Embracing literary traditions from ancient Mesopotamian mythology to Biblical and Koranic parables, and to Western modernism, Mikhail’s poetic vision transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries with liberating compassion.…
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From [Winslow] I learned that proficiency in two languages is not enough to produce the best translations; the translator must not only fall in love with the text, but also have the irresistible urge to possess the text by rewriting it into her native language.

—Saadi Simwawe
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