Stone doves, by: Oday Jasser Al-Harbash

All these voices mix inside me, a numbness flows through my limbs, as if I am the one who drank the hemlock or took a sip from the river of forgetfulness. That would not have happened if humans could transform the music of nature into the music of words, and could use the powers of imagination to see what it suggests. A nightingale chirped before two thousand years, and its song transferred from the language of nightingales, to Latin, then English, then Spanish, then Arabic, to evoke in my mind the same anxieties and sorrows that Horatius inspired. Then some people come and say: poetry cannot be translated, and if they listened carefully, they would hear the singing of Horatius's nightingale. Number of pages: 493