Hussein Habasch – Schreiben auf dem Gesicht der Zeit

With the bilingual edition of a new selection of his poems in the Kurdish original and in translations into German, the poet Hussein Habasch presents poems that impress with their differentiated and precise pictorial quality. For many years Habasch has become his Kurdish and German readers the epitome of the extraordinary art of breathing lively life into seemingly daring metaphors and thus repeatedly conveying joy to his readers both in his linguistic artistry and in the pleasantly flattering sounds of Near Eastern worlds.

As a Kurd living in Germany, Habash is not only aware of his people’s experience of suffering, but in his poems he also knows how to make a German readership feel his people’s longing for state integrity in a surprisingly plausible way.

“Hussein Habash … a Kurd who lives here in Germany and writes wonderful poems. I haven’t read anything this nice in a long time.”  Hilde Domin (Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 1999)