Der Tod backt einen Geburtstagskuchen
Hamed Abboud | Larissa Bender
“Und obwohl mein Herz schwach ist und mein Panzer ‘made in Russia’, würde ich dich von ganzem Herzen lieben, während ich im Herzen meines Panzers bin.”
Jury comments
“Where is the ivory tower where you can hide from all this death?” asks the poet Hamed Abboud, who has escaped from Syria. The war sticks to his shoes, coming up on every page of his prose miniatures – a poetic language that desperately and bitterly refuses to also fall victim to war. Abboud writes about the destruction of the civil war, the passivity of the world, how the land is laid to waste, the disaster takes its toll, and about the devastation of the soul. “What kind of life is this?” Larissa Bender has translated this poetic-political outcry and the literary energy of these sentences into wonderfully clear German. — Michael Krüger
Author: Hamed Abboud
Hamed Abboud was born in Deir Ez-Zor, Syria in 1987. In late 2012, the writer fled from Syria and initially worked as a journalist in Egypt. Via Dubai and Turkey he moved to Austria, where he has lived since 2014. Abboud regularly publishes in newspapers and magazines in Syria and the Middle East, where he was already heard at public readings at the age of 18. Since his arrival in Austria, Abboud has appeared numerous times in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. His first volume of poetry The Rain of the First Cloud was issued in Arabic in 2012 by Arwad Publishers International. Abboud received the Jean-Jacques Rousseau scholarship from the Akademie Schloss Solitude Stuttgart in 2015.
Most recent publications:
- Der Tod backt einen Geburtstagskuchen, edition pudelundpinscher 2017
Translator: Larissa Bender
Larissa Bender studied ethnology, Islamic studies, art history and sociology in Cologne and Berlin. She is an Arabic translator, journalist and Arabic lecturer and has translated works by Abdalrachman Munif, Fadhil al-Azzawi and Youssef Ziedan as well as by various Syrian authors such as Samar Yazbek, Dima Wannous and Rosa Yassin Hassan. She also published two volumes of essays about Syria: Syrien – Der schwierige Weg in die Freiheit (Dietz Verlag 2016) and Innenansichten aus Syrien (edition Faust 2016).
Most recent publications:
- Niroz Malek: Der Spaziergänger von Aleppo, Weidle Verlag 2017 [Le promeneur d'Alep, Paris 2015]
Translator’s website: larissa-bender.de