The first few lines of the Arabic original of “The War Is Over.”

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Nasser Rabah’s poem “The War Is Over,” translated from the Arabic by Wiam El-Tamami, appears in our new Spring issue, no. 251. Here, we asked both Rabah and El-Tamami to reflect on their work.

1. Nasser Rabah

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

I live in Gaza. In the early months of the war, we weren’t expecting it to last for so long. I kept telling my children that it would all be over in a few days, in a week—and every time, I was disappointed. It’s a sad thing, to be proved wrong in front of your children. But somehow, out of stubbornness or self-protection, I started denying reality, believing in my own optimism. I said to myself, The war is over. I jotted that sentence down in the Notes app on my phone, and left it there.

The next day, I asked myself, What would I do if the war was over? I thought, I would go to the graveyard to visit my friends whose funerals I hadn’t been able to attend. So I wrote down one more sentence—“I’ll go to the graveyard.” I still wasn’t thinking of it as a poem. But then poetry overtook me, and I wrote, “I’ll take bread, a lot of bread, one loaf for each friend.” When the stanza was finished, I felt a rush of adrenaline, that nervous energy that accompanies the birth of a new poem. And I kept going.

How did writing the first draft feel to you? Did it come easily, or was it difficult to write? Are there hard and easy poems?

This poem came to me with the softness and fluidity of a revelation. My mind felt like it was floating in the air of these words. Some poems are exhausting, wrenching. But in rare moments, moments of divine grace, a gift falls from the sky—this was one of those.

I remember exactly how I felt. I was trying to remain composed—to keep my body still, my breathing even, and my mind from thinking. My fingers were recording what I was receiving without the interference of my mind. A poem will run away if it senses that you’re too eager—that you’re chasing it, or excited by its presence. A beautiful poem is a shy creature. It will flee immediately if it feels you rushing ahead. Patience and calm can help a poet catch a big fish.

After I wrote the first eight stanzas of the poem, I stopped. In the following days, the lines kept playing in my mind, like a song. I asked a few people, neighbors, street sellers, drivers, “What are you going to do when the war ends?” One of them said, “I’ll sleep for a week.” Another said, “We’ll clear the rubble.” Another said, “I’ll walk down the street without being afraid of planes.” I wrote it all down. The poem became twelve stanzas long.

When did you know this poem was finished? Were you right about that? Is it finished, after all?

This poem caught my attention from the first moment. Every time I moved on to a new stanza, I was nervous that I wouldn’t be able to reach a full-length poem. When I got to eight stanzas, I stopped, and felt that it was finished. But in the coming days, the poem was like a magnet, drawing more and more lines to itself. Some poems stop growing on their own, and there are others that need to be stopped firmly, so that they don’t fall into unnecessary, gratuitous chatter. So I sent it off to be translated—thereby declaring its completion!

What was the challenge of this particular poem?

It was difficult to condense some of the lines, to distill the language, while preserving the intensity of the poem’s meaning. Because the poem is composed of a series of independent stanzas, I had to make sure none of them disrupted the harmony of the whole. I didn’t want one stanza to be louder than the others, drowning out the sad, quiet ones—no matter how angry I was, no matter how much I was screaming on the inside.

Do you regret any revisions?

Regret is a nihilistic emotion. Maybe we should regret things more important than revisions to a poem. Treating a poem like a precise mathematical equation robs it of its artistic spirit. I like poems that have some flaws. There are no perfect poems, just as there are no perfect human beings. So why would I regret revising a poem?

2. Wiam El-Tamami

How did translating the first draft feel to you? Did it come easily, or was it difficult? Are there hard and easy translations?

The first pass at a translation is always a surprise. I never know whether a text will come to life in the new language, how it will look and sound and feel. The image that comes to mind is that of a magician pulling a string of colored handkerchiefs out of their ear. In this scenario, I am both the one doing the pulling and the one watching what is emerging.

Sometimes the voice is there right away—it just clicks into place—and I am jubilant as the words emerge, as the sentences unfurl. Yes, yes, yes. In these rare instances, translation can feel almost like an act of unspooling.

With some pieces, however, there’s a lot of heavy lifting, slotting things here and there, trying this and that and then throwing it out again—and you still end up with an awkwardly arranged room. Arabic–English literary translation in particular involves a lot of deconstruction and creative reconstruction—of grammatical structures, for example.

Most translations are somewhere in between. You are peeling away, paring down, working hard to come closer. If and when you tune into a voice that feels right, the rest becomes easier. I have that experience when writing my own work as well. I could be working on a new piece for some time, trying to find my way into it—but once I’ve found the first line, it feels like I’ve found the beginning of the path.The translation of this poem was one of those rare instances where the lines just fell into place. Effortless. Weightless. How lovely and curious to hear that it was the same for Nasser, writing it.

The fact that the poem is very visual certainly made it easier to translate. It’s a series of scenes, simple and concrete. It’s simpler than other poems of Nasser’s—perhaps deceptively so. Nasser’s work is often woven through with figurative language—striking, startling imagery—which can be both beautiful and challenging to work with in translation. But there’s little of that here. Some of his poems also have lines that tend toward pathos, which I find particularly difficult to render in a way that stays faithful to the original but doesn’t sound over-the-top in English. Literary Arabic tends to have more capacity for big statements and big sentiments.

How was the editing process? Do you regret any revisions?

Nasser and I are good friends. We have a very playful friendship, full of banter, and I’m also brutally honest with him about his work. To his credit, he takes it very well, even welcomes it. So I’m very comfortable suggesting edits, and he’s very generous in discussing and considering them. And sometimes he reminds me (as he has mentioned here) that poems don’t have to be perfect. I still have a lot to learn about that, I think.

With this poem, for example, there was an additional line at the end of the eighth stanza in the original Arabic:

The war is over.
The children go back to their schools, and find them inhabited by the displaced.
The workers head back to the factory, and find a pile of rubble in its wake.
The doctors return to the hospital, and find it riddled with disease.
Everyone is afraid to go back home, for fear they will
find it gone.
And then they all ascended to God.

The last line felt like overkill to me—one step too far—and I suggested we cut it. Nasser agreed, and the stanza now ends on “find it gone.”

Srikanth Reddy and other Paris Review editors also suggested some very helpful edits. My favorite changes were to the ninth stanza, which originally read:

The war is over.
The birds, who have seen everything
—the killing, the destruction—
go on singing.
The soldiers also continue to sing.
The birds are not concerned with any of it,
and neither are the soldiers.

There was initially some back-and-forth about the wording of the penultimate line—perhaps “troubled by” instead of “concerned with”?—but then the editors came back with the brilliant idea of cutting out the last two lines entirely. I think the ninth stanza is now much stronger as a result:

The war is over.
The birds, who have seen
everything, everything,
go on singing.
The soldiers also continue to sing.

There is one revision that I do regret, though (unlike Nasser, I do regret edits sometimes). The eleventh stanza originally began:

Fifteen thousand children in the balconies
raining gifts down on the passersby:
Eid clothes, colored shoes, books they no longer need,
dead smiles, their mothers’ tears.

The editors suggested “Thousands of children” instead of “Fifteen thousand,” and we went with that revision. I was in favor of it at the time—more and more people are being killed, monstrously, every day in Gaza, so it seemed to make sense not to name a particular number. But now I wish we had pinned that insane figure, documented it in this poem. Now I look at the word thousands with anguish and feel that it doesn’t even begin to do justice to the scale of what is happening.

Not that any of the figures are fathomable. More than fifty thousand Palestinian people have now been killed over the past year and a half, including seventeen thousand children. Over one hundred thousand Palestinian people have been wounded, including twenty-five thousand children. These figures don’t take into account the many thousands still missing, those still buried under rubble, and the massive numbers  of people who have died of so-called indirect causes, like treatable wounds and preventable illnesses, due to the deliberate decimation of health-care facilities in Gaza. They don’t take into account the hundreds of thousands of people who have lost homes and limbs and livelihoods. The slaughter of Palestinian civilians continues unabated, along with the destruction of all means of life. As I write this, in late May 2025, all food, fuel, medicine, and cooking gas have been blocked from entering Gaza for almost three months. Those who have not been killed by the relentless bombardment are being starved to death. By the end of April, sixty-five thousand children had already been hospitalized for severe malnutrition.

Nor do the “figures” begin to account for how this feels for every one of the two million Palestinian people who are still living under siege in Gaza, living in fear and horror and dignity, trying to build and create and save what they can every day, while watching their homes, their lives, and the lives of their children being systematically destroyed. The war—the genocide—is not over.

Nasser Rabah’s debut collection in English translation is Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece.

Wiam El-Tamami is a Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize–winning writer, translator, and editor whose work has been featured in Granta and The Common.