Seeing Ramallah

Can poets be great prose writers? Can a writer's quality be judged in translation? After having read I Saw Ramallah by the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, my answer to the first question is, "Why not?" And to the second, it is clearly yes if one is fortunate to have Ahdaf Soueif as one's translator.

The experience Barghouti describes--a displaced person is allowed to return to the hometown from which he was forcibly separated, not in conditions of freedom, but in an awkward power-sharing ar...