Farewell to Salma Al-Khudari Al-Jiyusi

The Palestinian critic and poet Salma Al-Khudari Al-Jiyusi passed away at the age of 95 on Thursday evening in the Jordanian capital, Amman. Al-Jiyusi was born in the Palestinian city of Safed in 1928 to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother. She obtained a PhD in Arabic literature from the University of London and taught at several major universities, producing many significant literary works. The late Al-Jiyusi was engaged in the debate surrounding the renewal of Arab poetry and was an active voice through her critical writings in a number of Arabic journals. She authored the special report for the "Nobel" Prize that contributed to Naguib Mahfouz winning the award. Since the 1960s, she worked concurrently on translations to and from Arabic, translating notable books such as "The Achievements of American Poetry in Half a Century" by Louise Bogan (1960), "The Humanity of Man" by Ralph Barton Perry (1961), "Poetry and Experience" (1962), and the first and second volumes of Lawrence Durrell's "Alexandria Quartet," "Justine" and "Balthazar." The late Al-Jiyusi received numerous Arab honors, including the "Jerusalem Award for Literary Achievement" (1990) from the "Palestine Liberation Organization," the "Cultural and Scientific Achievement Award" from the "Sultan Al-Owais Cultural Foundation" (2007), the "Sheikh Zayed Book Award" (2020), and the "Mahmoud Darwish Award for Creativity" (2023).