Daniel Behar specializes in modern Arabic literature, and specifically works on the literary and historical context for the rise of the modern prose poem in Syria. His work approaches this material by means of broad comparative frameworks such as translation studies, world literature, and comparative modernisms. He is also a published translator of Arabic poetry into Hebrew and English. His publications and talks have focused on the following themes:

 

• Poetry translations in Syria as a crucible for new poetic styles
• Aleppo as a node in the network of literary modernity
• Dynamics of center and periphery in modern Arabic poetry
• Modern Arab-Jewish culture and its relation to the Arabic literary canon
• Poetry of witness globally and in Syria following the civil war
• Socialist realism in Syria and as world literature
• Modes of engagement with disaster and war in the Arabic novel
• Hebrew literature after 1967 in comparison to its Arabic counterpart
• Qasida poetics in Hebrew poetry

 

His forthcoming book, Syrian Poets and Vernacular Modernity (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), builds off of his dissertation project and enlarges its comparative scope. It provides a thick sociological, aesthetic and linguistic description of an area of vernacular poetics in Arabic that was forged as a response to political distress in al-Asad’s Syria and informed by trends of literary and historical globalization. The book charts the ways in which this poetics changed the landscape of modern Arabic poetry and poetry criticism.

The following image is a handwritten manuscript version from one of the key texts in this book:  Riyad Saleh Hussein’s poem “A Small Narrow Room and Nothing but That.” Being deaf and encumbered by a heavy speech impediment, Hussein was one of the prominent figures in establishing the prose poem in Syria. He died at the tender age of twenty-eight. His poetry is celebrated today by the younger generation that participated in the protest movement against the regime.  My translation runs as follows:

 

And ever since I was born with no homeland

And ever since the homeland became a grave

And ever since the grave became a book

And ever the since the book became a jail

And ever since the jail became a dream

And ever since the dream became a homeland

I have been looking for a small, narrow room

Where I can breathe freely.