Maram Al-Masri was born in Latakia, Syria, and moved to France following the completion of English Literature studies at Damascus University. Her books include Métropoèmes, Je te regarde, Cerise rouge sur un carrelage blanc, Le Rapt, Elle va nue la liberté, Par la fontaine de ma bouche (Bruno Doucey), A Red Cherry on a White-tiled Floor (Copper Canyon), and the anthology Femmes poètes du monde arabe. Al-Masri's literary prizes include the Prix d'Automne 2007 de Poésie de la Société des Gens De Lettres, the Adonis Prize, the Premio Citta di Calopezzati, Il Fiore d'Argento, and the Dante Alighieri Prize. She is a member of the Parlement des écrivaines francophones and was appointed Ambassador of the Secours Populaire in France and citoyenne d'honneur of Vendenheim. In 2017, the Maram Al-Masri Prize was created, which rewards poetry and graphic works.

Hèlène Cardona books include Life in Suspension and Dreaming My Animal Selves (both Salmon Poetry) and the translations Birnam Wood (Josè Manuel Cardona, Salmon Poetry), Beyond Elsewhere (Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac, White Pine Press), Ce que nous portons (Dorianne Laux, Éditions du Cygne), and Walt Whitman's Civil War Writings (University of Iowa's WhitmanWeb). She has also translated Andrè Breton, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Aloysius Bertrand, Eric Sarner, Renè Depestre, Ernest Pèpin, Jean-Claude Renard, Nicolas Grenier, Christiane Singer, Lea Nagy, and John Ashbery. Her own work has been translated into seventeen languages. The recipient of over twenty honors and awards, including the Independent Press Award and a Hemingway Grant, she holds an MA in American Literature from the Sorbonne, received fellowships from the Goethe-Institut and Universidad Internacional de Andalucía, worked as a translator for the Canadian Embassy, and taught at Hamilton College and Loyola Marymount University. She is a member of the Parlement des ècrivaines francophones.

Books by Maram Al-Masri:

Other poems on the web by Maram Al-Masri:
Ten poems
Three poems
Seven poems
Three poems
Two poems

About The Abduction:

"With a tender eloquence that equals the French original, Hèlène Cardona brings into English a harrowing tale, The Abduction by Maram Al-Masri, of a new mother devastated by the abduction of her son, kidnapped by his father to be raised in Syria. Now, as the distraught mother powerfully notes, 'war rages within me.' Cardona vividly conveys both palpable love and the wisdom learned from tragic loss: 'To love, it is to prepare yourself / to be abandoned.' As The Abduction proves, Hèlène Cardona is a translator who has the exquisite sensitivity and erudition that this brave, vulnerable work deserves."
—Cynthia Hogue

"Using artfully spare language and repetition, Maram Al-Masri takes us deep into the emotional complexities of losing her young child to a patriarchal society. Hèlène Cardona's deft translations capture both the stark immediacy and haunting music of these moving poems, almost letting us believe they were written in English."
—Martha Collins

"In maternal bulletins, succinct, austere, and tender, the soul-ravaged speaker of The Abduction, like a Syrian Persephone, speaks from the wintry aftermath of her infant son's kidnapping ('dusk no longer has your eyes')—a shocking turn in a contentious divorce battle.The earliest poems in this remarkable sequence convey the female speaker's first euphoric observations of her child and arc to the windfall of her poignant reunion with her son thirteen years later. In the face of this domestic catastrophe, of patriarchal cruelty and callousness, Al-Masri takes a terse, almost elemental approach, employing silence and pared-down lyricism as able tools, reminding us of the the abduction poet's champion task ('to write / is to be the boat that saves the drowning') of seeking trusty, precise language for unbearable grief and waiting"
—Cyrus Cassells

"Each small stanza of The Abduction picks at the torn seam between parent and child. As the narrator peers ‘out a window/ I haven't cleaned for a long time,' we also see what has been snatched away. Arabic poet Al-Masri writes of the changed shape of her future, a devastation eloquently translated by Hèlène Cardona."
—Lauren Camp