Fady Joudah’s first poetry collection, The Earth in the Attic, won the Yale Series for Younger Poets. He is also the translator of Mahmoud Darwish’s recent poetry collection, The Butterfly’s Burden (Copper Canyon Press, 2006).
I read “The Dice Player” in its entirety in an Arabic newspaper right after Darwish read the poem for the first time in Ramallah in June 2008—what would be his last public appearance in that city.