Maria Dahvana Headley
on translating Qasmūna bint Ismā‘il
These two poems were written by the eleventh-century Iberian Jewish poet Qasmūna bint Ismā‘il. Very little is known about her, and only a few poems survive, written in Arabic. For these translations, which were included in my 2017 story, “The Orange Tree,” about a female wooden golem and the poet who commissions her to be built, I did literal translations and then played with them. The story was in the Best American Fantasy and Science Fiction volume edited by N.K. Jemisin.
about the author
Qasmūna bint Ismāʿil sometimes called Xemone, was an Iberian Jewish poet. She is the only female Arabic-language Jewish poet attested from medieval Andalusia, and, along with Sarah of Yemen and the anonymous wife of Dunash ben Labrat, one of few known female Jewish poets throughout the Middle Ages.
about the translator
Maria Dahvana Headley is an American novelist, memoirist, editor, translator, poet, and playwright. Her work includes Magonia, a young-adult space-fantasy novel, Queen of Kings, an alternate-history fantasy novel about Cleopatra, and The Mere Wife, a retelling of Beowulf.
photo by Yan Zhang
