"This is freedom. It is a winter thing that cannot be tolerated for long. In it one must constantly move, as we do now. In freedom one must dance, it is cold and beautiful. But do not fall in love with it, because this will make you very sad later. A person only exists in the areas of freedom for moments, and no more. We have crossed the limit now. Look at the wonderful path on which we are skating, how it is slowly dissolving. You can now see freedom dying. When you open your eyes, this will be a haunting scene The heart is yours many times.”
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Walser treats language in this novel with as much respect as one would treat a revered and close friend at the same time. Hermann Hesse
"Jacob von Gonten" involves a kind of parody of the traditional educational novel.
Christopher Middleton
This book collects selected texts by twenty-one male and female poets from different cultural and social backgrounds, regardless of the reasons and ways they left Syria, even though most of them left after the outbreak of the revolution in early 2011. Today they live in various countries in the Arab world and outside it, and many of them live in Germany especially.
These selections are an attempt to shed light on the Syrian poetic experience emerging in exile, which carries within it the diversity of poets’ styles, experiences, opinions and ages, and presents a picture of the reality of Syrian poetry abroad, without evaluating it, but rather as a witness to the changes occurring in poetry and parallel to the changes in the earth. Although the features of this experience have not yet crystallized, it demonstrates effective attempts to take Syrian poetry to other directions that will inevitably lead to new places in Syrian writing.