By M Lynx Qualey

JUNE 10, 2022 — Those who attended a translation symposium hosted by the International Network for the Study of Lyric on Thursday evening  had the great pleasure of listening to Yasmine Seale’s first public talk about her translation-in-progress of the work of al-Khansa (c. 575-646), which is forthcoming from the Library of Arabic Literature. 

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This collection won’t be the Library of Arabic Literature’s first foray into translating al-Khansa’s work. One of the great elegist’s most famous poems appears in their first-ever book, an anthology of classics assembled and translated by the scholar Geert Jan Van Gelder. In Van Gelder’s translation, the poem is ultimately unsatisfying, perhaps in part because of its de-contextualization. Reading it alone among a multitude of other classic works in translation, one would be hard-pressed to understand why al-Khansa was called, as Seale reminded listeners, the greatest poet among both humans and djinn. 

Indeed, Al-Khansa is remembered not only because she was among the first women writing in Arabic whose compositions are still extant, but also because her poems have remained influential. This is particularly remarkable since she wrote in only one form: elegies. As Seale noted, “Women did not write qasidas. Women have always composed poetry in Arabic, as far back as we can see, but it was difficult for them—for reasons of custom and decorum—to excel in other genres than the elegy.”

Yet, within the constraints of the elegy, Seale said she reads attempts to address a multitude of other things, to make contributions to other genres.

Elegy, as Seale said, is a particular challenge to translate. Grief is repetitive, and “Al-Khansa’s laments circle their objects with anguished insistence. A half-blind prowl around a person and a theme.”

Library of Arabic Literature executive editor James Montgomery, in his slender cahier Loss Sings, made similar observations about al-Khansa, repetition, and grief. He translated a few of al-Khansa’s poems in and among personal essays that reflect on his own grief, as well as on the sorts of literary forms that evoke and heal grief. In so doing, Montgomery created a fresh context into which the reader could imagine, and relate to, al-Khansa. But Montgomery decided not to translate the whole diwan. In an interview from earlier this year, he told AJ Naddaff, “I felt in the end it would then become some form of emotional vampirism.”

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In Seale’s description, al-Khansa’s 40 poems that mourn her brothers who died in battle are “by turns despairing and defiant, vengeful and tender.” 

She, like Montgomery, noted the difficulty of bringing the poems close to the contemporary reader, since the works live by a set of conventions that seem remote. “This is a moral universe that is interested in revenge and retribution,” Seale said, “perhaps more than justice as we might understand it.”

That said, she drew the poems close to our contemporary concerns by saying she saw “the central question in all Khansa’s poems is really what to do when someone has been unjustly killed. And, in that sense, they belong to a world which is still ours, and could not be closer.”

But, whether we relate to al-Khansa’s moral universe or not, the translation challenges of this project remain many.

“To the obvious problems of translating many poems of similar style and theme, elegies add another, one of tone,” Seale said. “Complaint is risky, exhausting at length. The challenge, as I see it, is to find a way between the Scylla of shrillness and melodrama, and the Charybdis of monotony and cliché. Between being too much and too much of the same.”

Yet, she added, her instinct was to “treat repetition not as an obstacle to be avoided, but as an aesthetic principle, a theme to which each poem brings its slender variations. Pattern is not a problem if it’s interesting to look at.”

At the symposium, Seale read from her translation of the same poem translated by Van Gelder in the LAL anthology. His translation opens somewhat bombastically: “Be generous, my eyes, with shedding copious tears / and weep a stream of tears for Sakhr!” 

Seale, meanwhile, turns this line into a stanza; as one participant noted, it thus emphasizes movement, perhaps also bringing the poem closer to orality:

The poem, as she notes, begins with the vocative and then the word for eye. Although the vocative is still in common use in Arabic, the English “O” feels both literary and antiquated, which was an effect she didn’t want, “because the Arabic is more simple and intimate, more everyday.” And then there’s the striking image of the single eye, “like a floating eyeball, being addressed.”

Many of al-Khansa’s poems begin in this way, Seale said, with these two words, or variations on them. “The poems read to me almost like diary entries, or letters addressed to the eye. ‘Dear Eye,’ they all seem to begin. I thought for a while of beginning all the translations with the phrase, ‘Dear Eye.’ In the end, I’ve gone for just the word eye. Partly because I like the homophone, that this might be the I, the letter I.”

She added: “These are poems are sleeplessness, addressed to a phantom figure who both is and isn’t the self.”

Then she shared a little of her process:

Seale noted that while here the use of “eye” may seem more free or modernist than the more conventional rendering “o my eyes,” in fact it “arises quite directly from this rather old-fashioned close reading of the text in its particularity. It’s certainly my experience that the deeper one goes into the surface of a text, the stranger it becomes, and the more likely one is to find something fresh in translation.”

She went on to discuss her choice of lavish, which “seems to contain that double edge of an open-handed showering generosity that threatens to become unbridled, even dangerous.” In this context, she said, she thought of the poem’s profusion of synonyms. “In a single line here we have five words, one of them repeated, to describe crying. It’s an excessive line about excess.”

The poem, in Seale’s translation, ends with the tender vengefulness she mentioned at the opening of her talk.

The collection does not yet have a release date.

By ArabLit Staff

Iman Mersal’s The Threshold, translated by Robyn Creswell, finally has a release date and a cover from FSG Books.

This long-awaited collection brings together poems from Mersal’s four extant books of poetry. They are in English translations that, Creswell writes in his introduction, were worked and re-worked over many smoky Skype calls, until their tense, storytelling musicality finally evoked the feeling of entering Mersal’s world in Arabic. Some of the poems — such as “The Visit” / “A Visit” — appeared earlier in Khaled Mattawa’s English translation. “A Visit,” in this new translation, is now much more alive, with a form and pacing that echoes the feeling of breathing heavily on stairs, pausing at the threshold, looking around an unfamiliar room.

“A Visit” is animated by infidelity, and betrayal, Creswell writes in his introduction, is both a motif that recurs and an artistic principal. The poems here betray their ancestors, although they also return to them, as in “Self-Exposure”: “I should tell my lover, / Be grateful for my infidelities. / Without them I wouldn’t / have stuck around long enough / to discover the open window in your laugh.”

As in Mersal’s prose, there is an entanglement of genres: concerns borrowed from her academic work; stylistic elements from confessional poets and epistolary novels; portraits of family and friends and frenemies; dark humor that is also social reportage and critique. As Creswell writes in his introduction, Mersal shares with Charles Simic and Wislawa Szymborska a “mistrust of bombast” and an “interest in the everyday surreal.” She is also, in a poetic move that feels wholly Egyptian, relentlessly funny.

The collection is coming mid-October and can be pre-ordered on the MacMillan website; we will have critical or creative entanglement with it in the coming months. Meanwhile:

Poetry by Iman Mersal, in translation by Robyn Creswell

Some things escaped me

Respect for Marx

It seems I inherit the dead

Black Fingers

Map Store

 The Idea of Houses

Raising a Glass With an Arab Nationalist

The Window

Video

On Women’s Voices in Arabic Literature

Motherhood and its Images: Recapturing Motherhood in Photography – Iman Mersal

Podcasts

Listen to the Iman Mersal episode of Bulaq (English)

Listen to the Iman Mersal episode of Maqsouda(Arabic)

Other books by Mersal, in English, French, and Spanish translations

How to Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts, tr. Robin Moger

These Are Not Oranges, My Love, tr. Khaled Mattawa

Sur les traces d’Enayat Zayyat, tr. Richard Jaquemond

Geografia alternativa, tr. Ossorio Menéndez and Laura Salguero Esteban

These poems appear in Egyptian Rana al-Tonsi’s forthcoming collection “الناقص” (“Incomplete”).

Translated by Sara Elkamel

Final Barrenness 

Sometimes

The sky doesn’t draw its drapes

As the first long, desolate night descends

We are third-class patients

Or, the less vulnerable

We are the victims of wisdom

The moment the window opens

And the air pushes its way through

Without appropriate exhalation

We know now

What the years have done to us

The bed that has been vacant for years

Of all the dead bodies and martyrs

Must finally be left barren

So it may stand tall

And watch its soul infinitely fall

Over strange arms.

All I smell

Is the stench of an iron

Abandoned on run down clothes

Until they caught fire

And a wet circle

And white teeth

Undoubtedly unsmiling

And dreams that die

When there are no longer balconies to leave from

And I have been writing poems for a while

I don’t exactly know

If this is my pain, or theirs.

But I Always Lose

Through one of the runaway doors

That’s where I found myself

*

A fairy is dragging me from one light to the next

And nothing escorts me

But laughter

*

We are incomplete fragments

Gestures hiding behind one another

The fragments of uncertainty

Glimmer

In absence

*

I brought the eyes home

The glances towards deprivation

I caught sight of no one

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I am full of fractures

What scares me is that I’m trembling

*

Superheroes alone

Accomplish everything

The normal way

*

All women who commit suicide look alike

All women who haven’t committed suicide look alike

Someone has opened a window

To bring a large stack of colored paper into the house

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The circus is in my wallet

The animals dance in the night

Laugh without a sound

They have no idea how to hide in a circus

*

The fighting in my head is never-ending

A phone is ringing

*

The world’s new discoveries

Pain, solitude and despair

*

You will sleep in my arms

And you will come out of my body as a sparrow

*

Is there a way to contact heaven?

I wage wars against myself

And I always lose

Loneliness

There are others who inhabit this heart just as I do;

I love them eternally.

And there are madmen on bikes I mistook for magical

whom this journey did not seize;

my luck failed to thrust me between them.

And there is you,

perched on the maps of the world

lighting a fire

speaking to me of loneliness

on a shore that departs and returns

like someone with no desire to leave home.

To my only friend:

I wish you were here,

so we could take a long walk

together.

Rana al-Tonsi is an Egyptian writer and poet. Born in Cairo in 1981, al-Tonsi is the author of nine collections of poetry, most recently Index of Fear (Dar Al-Ain Publishing, 2018).

Sara Elkamel is a poet and journalist currently based in Cairo. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. She is the author of the chapbook Field of No Justice (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021).

These three translations of Asmaa Azaizeh’s “Dragonflies” appeared in the first issue of ArabLit Quarterly, which came out in the fall of 2018. We re-run it here in celebration of Women in Translation Month.

Dragonflies

By Asmaa Azaizeh

Translated to English by Yasmine Seale

Millions of years ago, there were no winged creatures.

We all crawled around on our bellies and paws

to arrive.

We arrived nowhere in particular,

but the rough ground coarsened our bellies

and our paws stretched out like mountains.

Every time we stopped in the shade of a tree,

one of us would shout: “Here we are!”

A fantasy mightier than mountains.

Millions of years ago, dragonflies emerged from narrow streams.

The water was heavy on their backs, 

like a tightening in the chest,

so they asked creation for wings, 

that they might perceive anguish 

as clearly as stones on the riverbed.

Since then, we all fly,

millions of wings and planes cloud the sky,

humming like hungry locusts.

But not one of us has asked creation

to deliver us from the fantasy of arrival. 

In our chests, the same tightening.

*

Libellen

By Asmaa Azaizeh

Translated to Dutch by Nisrine Mbarki

Miljoenen jaren geleden waren er geen gevleugelde wezens

Wij kropen allemaal op onze buiken en poten tot we aankwamen

We zijn nergens in het bijzonder aangekomen maar onze buiken schraapten over de harde grond. Onze poten gingen door alsof ze moedige bergen waren. Telkens als we in de schaduw van een boom stopten riep een van ons: we zijn er! 

Het was een illusie hoger dan de bergen 

Miljoenen jaren geleden kwamen de libellen uit trage smalle rivieren

het water was te zwaar op hun ruggen als een samentrekking in het hart, ze vroegen het universum om twee vleugels om de pijn helder te kunnen zien als gruis op een bodem

Sindsdien vliegen wij, allemaal

Miljoenen vleugels en vliegtuigen bedekken de hemel en zoemen als hongerige sprinkhanen

Niemand heeft het universum gevraagd ons te bevrijden van de illusie van het aankomen

Onze harten trekken nog steeds samen.

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Libellules

By Asmaa Azaizeh

Translated to French by Maïté Graisse

Il y a des millions d’années, il n’existait pas d’êtres ailés

Tous, nous avancions sur le ventre et sur les pattes pour arriver

Nous ne sommes pas arrivés à un endroit en particulier. 

Mais nos ventres ont commencé à se solidifier à cause des aspérités. 

Nos pattes se sont allongées comme des montagnes colossales. 

Chaque fois que l’on s’arrêtait à l’ombre d’un arbre, 

l’un d’entre nous criait : « Nous sommes arrivés ! » 

Illusion plus haute que les montagnes

Il y a des millions d’années, des libellules sont sorties de petits ruisseaux. 

L’eau pesait sur leur dos, 

comme une contraction dans le cœur ; 

elles ont demandé à l’univers deux ailes 

pour distinguer la douleur 

aussi clairement que le gravier du lit de la rivière

Depuis lors, nous volons, tous

Des millions d’ailes et d’avions voilent le ciel, 

bourdonnent comme des criquets affamés

Mais personne n’a demandé à l’univers 

notre délivrance de l’illusion de l’arrivée

Dans nos cœurs, la même contraction

*

Also read:

‘The Dance of the Soma’ and Being a Stranger

Yasmine Seale’s thread of Asmaa Azaizeh translations

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Asmaa Azaizeh is a poet, performer, and journalist based in Haifa. She was born in 1985 in the village of Daburieh, in the Lower Galilee, Palestine. In 2010 Asmaa received the Debutant Writer Award from Al Qattan Foundation, for her volume of poetry, Liwa, published in 2011 with Dar Al Ahliya, Jordan. Asmaa has published four poetry collections. Don’t Believe Me If I Talked To You Of War was published in 2019 in Arabic, Dutch, and Swedish. Her poetry has been translated to English, German, Spanish, Farsi, Swedish, Italian, Greek and Hebrew, among others. Asmaa became the first Director of the Mahmoud Darwish Museum in Ramallah in 2012. For several years, Asmaa worked as a journalist for Palestinian and Arabic newspapers, as well as a presenter for Television and Radio. 

Yasmine Seale is a writer and translator living in Paris. Her reviews and essays on literature, art, myth, archaeology and film have appeared widely, including in Harper’s, The Paris Review, The Nation, frieze, The TLS, Apollo, 4Columns, and the London Review of Books blog. Her poetry, visual art, and translations from Arabic and French have appeared in Poetry Review, Literary Hub, Asymptote, Rialto, Seedings, Partisan Hotel, Wasafiri, Two Lines, and anthologies with Comma and Saqi presses. She is the author, with Robin Moger, of Agitated Air: Poems after Ibn Arabi, out now with Tenement Press. Other work includes Aladdin: A New Translation (2018) and The Annotated Arabian Nights (2021), both out with W. W. Norton. She is the recipient of the 2020 Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Poetry and of a 2022 PEN/HEIM Translation Fund Grant. In 2022-23 she will be a fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, based in Paris.

Nisrine Mbarki is a writer, poet, columnist and literary translator. She is also an editor and programmer for the Winternachten Festival. She writes short stories, theatre scripts and poetry, and translates poetry from Arabic into Dutch. Her poems and columns are regularly published in Dutch literary magazines. She has appeared at festivals such as Poetry International, Globale in Bremen, Winternachten, Read My World, the Felix Poetry Festival in Antwerp and the Nacht van de Poëzie (Night of Poetry). She is co-founder and artistic director of the theatre company Landgenoten, for which she wrote Club Paradis(2016), which was staged in the Netherlands and Germany. Her debut poetry collection Oeverloos (Endless) was published in January 2022.

Maïté Graisse was born in Bolivia in 1990 and grew up in the Belgian Ardennes. Her passion for languages and books pushed her toward translation. After a year spent in Cairo, she studied Arabic and English at ISTI. She is a freelance translator who works for several cultural, artistic and literary centers and festivals, having translated work by Ali Bader and Mahmoud Darwish, among others.

For Women in Translation Month (#WiTMonth), four poems, newly translated by poet-translator Sara Elkamel, by poet-translator Aya Nabih. The poems appear in Nabih’s poetry collection Exercises to Develop Insomnia Skills, published by Kotob Khan Books in 2015.

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Selected and translated by Sara Elkamel

Resection

The tree that used to stand in front of our house was chopped down last night, on account of road renovations. Remains of roots and yellow leaves are all they left behind. Today, I experiment with the terror that barrenness has spawned.

What could I expect, now that the barrenness I spent a lifetime raising like a child—to the extent that I used to call “getting rid of things” a hobby—had become my enemy? After I quit my job and extracted all the clocks from my room, I noticed that the large clock had left a barren space on the wall—one you could stare into in the absence of infuriating hands. Since then, everything seemed normal, except for time, which no longer seemed at all. I began to excise the furniture and gadgets from the room, as though I was practicing the art of letting go, until it was empty of everything but the bed, and the old wooden desk after I had arranged its drawers to match the barrenness. I had opened its three drawers a few days earlier, and taken out inkless pens; books I had intended to read; boxes of Ketophan that had failed to free me of my headaches; an old hole-punch; a faded photograph, cut out arbitrarily, of Abdelhalim—specifically, his portrait in the polka-dotted shirt; satin ribbons that will have no use; jars of empty watercolors, and old letters from my friends that would stay up all night in the desk-drawer, and force me to keep them company. Then I pushed the drawer shut on the origami birds.

I have discarded days in the wastebasket to make room for barrenness, and I seriously considered setting them on fire, to do my part in making the world a lighter place. But today, it seems that everything around me is giving me a taste of my own medicine, and banishing me.

I have been staring into the wasteland this room has become since this morning, thinking how great it is that my anxiety is gone, but I don’t know what to do now with a house without a tree, and birds that will never again chirp, and a window locked out of terror.

Complications of Love

If I lean against the bedroom wall someday, mourning the passage of time, I will despise my thoughts—absolutely all of them. Sometimes, I am nothing but my thoughts. For that reason, O world, let me become outraged at you for a while—for your distance. Your dawdling delays my rapture, which begins on fast roads. Now, an equal distance separates us. But if you should take one step away, I will take two, and if you should take two, I will murder you with a clear conscience. I have made the necessary preparations. The colored cellophane paper I will wrap around you occupies a designated corner in the room. The blood I will not agonize over removing. The knives I am hiding in a safe place, and I inspect their sharpness from time to time, only when I am feeling sad; meanwhile, you stay exactly where you are, savoring the sight of my love decomposing.

Side Effects

Deconstruction

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Nabih’s work also appears in The Tahrir of Poems (2014), ed. and tr. Maged Zaher.

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Aya Nabih is a translator and writer born in Cairo. She holds a BA in English Language and Literature from Cairo University and MA in Audiovisual Translation from Hamad bin Khalifa University. She translated Lydia Davis’s collected short stories Varieties of Disturbance into Arabic, and her poetry collection Exercises to Develop Insomnia Skills has been published by Al-Kotob Khan. She was an artist-in-residence in Marrakech, Casablanca and New York, as part of a dance and poetry residency organized by Tamaas.

Sara Elkamel is a poet and journalist currently based in Cairo. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. She is the author of the chapbook Field of No Justice (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021).

“Wedding” is one of four wedding poems by Saudi poet Fowziyah Abu Khalid, tr. Moneera Al-Ghadeer, included in the Fall 2022 issue of ArabLit Quarterly. Read more about the issue from guest editor Nashwa Nasreldin, and find out how to buy or borrow a copy.

Wedding

By Fowziyah Abu Khalid

Translated by Moneera Al-Ghadeer

I’ve been dreaming of a wedding since the splash of

the first wet ink

I see myself

a Bedouin bride

a gypsy bride

a city bride

I see a bride 

vision cannot reach

I am a cotton bride

I am a rain bride

and when the wedding approaches

I wear a sparkly gown 

its trail a long river that flows into the ocean

I wear a lace veil holding its tip 

a blue bird escaping from Twitter

I wear earrings that drink from the expanse of Summan desert

I wear gold that shines on my Facebook page

I braid my long hair with pearl necklaces and jasmines 

I carry diamonds and false jewels 

which my slender body cannot bear

I place the traditional

makeup on my face

my smile appears so distant and mysterious on Instagram

like the Mona Lisa, no one knows

whether she is smiling or sad

I hear ululations trilling out inside me

like church bells on the eve of Good Friday

I see my story on Snapchat

itched by other eyes 

I straighten my posture

I walk down the aisle

covered with arms of ornaments

I stand vigilant, unspeakably lost

on the wedding stage

at once waiting for Godot

waiting for the barbarians

waiting for a thunderbird

or Al-Buraq

at once waiting for the man of my dreams

I only ever long to meet myself 

all this mad love

honoring the attempt 

to regain my freedom

and avoid the abduction of the wedding night

*

Fowziyah Abu Khalid is one of Saudi Arabia’s leading modern poets and is considered the first prose poet in Saudi Arabia. Her first collection, Until When They Abduct You on Your Wedding Night?, was published in 1974. Her poetry has been translated into English, French, and German, and she has won many prestigious awards.

Moneera Al-Ghadeer was a Visiting Professor of comparative literature in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University and was a Shawwaf Visiting Professor at Harvard University. She was a tenured Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She has published Desert Voices: Bedouin Women’s Poetry in Saudi Arabia (I.B. Tauris, 2009) as well as many articles, book chapters, and translations.

This poem is from Yamani’s most recent collection, Farewell in a Tiny Triangle, published by Dar Almutawassit.

Love

By Ahmed Yamani

Translated by Omar Ibrahim

Love

was a single blow

from neither an axe

nor a hand,

a bucket of cold water

where the head and legs swim

a hospital bed

and blood dripping from the bedroom to the bathroom

*

Love

was vomiting

in friends’ houses

where they ran here and there

searching for a hope of survival

*

Love

was painful like a rose’s thorn 

in the wet garden of a deserted house

where a lonely man once lived

then was buried inside a room

*

Love

was that room,

the immortal shoe of the man,

the worn-out curtain

that covered his remains

*

Love

was the man’s only servant

who hit the meddlesome boys

then went away

to cry, 

lonely,

lonelier than the owner of the house

*

Love

was the moment

the boys were struck

as they climbed 

mulberry trees

in the abandoned garden

*

Love

was never the mulberry tree

*

Love 

was her,

with her round face

and moonstruck eyes

who was only ever there once.

*

Love 

was a leap

from the tenth floor,

that left fragments on the ground

*

Love

was the dropsof blood

from the sidewalk

to the ambulance

*

Love

was the skinny body

they threw out of the car

*

Love

was the car that crashed into the lamppost

*

Love

was the locked wardrobe

inside the locked room

in the grandparents’ locked house

*

Love

was the doorman’s lit cigarette

*

Love

was the thief

who went to rob

the grandparents’ house

*

Love

was the sick woman

the horror of her withered body

her eyes 

the boiled food

they took to her

*

Love

was the axe that strikes

*

Love

was the hand holding the axe

*
Ahmed Yamani is an Egyptian poet based in Spain. He holds a PhD in Arabic Literature from Complutense University of Madrid where he currently serves as an Associate Professor. He has published five poetry collections and was previously awarded the Rimbaud Prize in 1991, the 39th Beirut Prize in 2010, the Poets from Other Worlds Award in Spain in 2015, the House of Translators Scholarship in Zaragoza, Spain in 2011 and the Fairmont Studio Writers and Artists Centre Award in 2012 from the United States of America. His poems have been translated into nine languages, and he has participated in poetry festivals in Egypt, France, Spain, Lebanon, London, Algeria, the United Arab Emirates, Italy, Morocco and Medellin (Colombia), as well as numerous translations from Spanish to Arabic.

Omar Ibrahim is an Egyptian literary translator, poet and essayist. He translated Mahmoud Morsi’s collection of poems It’s Time I Confess into English, and his Arabic translation of H. P. Lovecraft’s novella The Whisper in Darkness was on the bestselling list of many bookstores. He also has his own poetry collection, titled Fragments of My Mind, and two upcoming translations.

*

Above a Floor of Lament 

*

As he tried to finish painting her eyes

The painting drowned in tears 

* 

All the carpets of kings are red 

And so are their costumes 

* 

He screams into his glass: 

Why do you set fire to my heart’s curtains

Instead of washing them? 

* 

When I ignite an idea 

They extinguish it with urine 

* 

The river of my soul 

Is full of  the fish of exile 

* 

Ugly poets 

Slather their poems with cosmetics

*

From: What I Sleep for Today (2016) 

*

Cosmic Thread

*

The Indian man who won’t stop kneading

his wife’s feet on the subway

is at a loss over what to do 

for the remaining stations.

*

So he starts rubbing her legs,

draped over the thighs of the carriage

with the repose of a small rhinoceros.

*

His fingers burrow as if foraging 

for something hidden beneath the flesh,

and when he dozes off, he clenches her foot, 

frightened the AC would blow her away.

*

What if there was a flesh-colored woolen thread

crossing over the borders of one’s body,

tasked with gathering every stitch of the soul?

*

Now, try to press down on your own contours.

Begin with the outer linings of your thighs.

Poke them gently with your forefinger;

one poke after the other, 

to the very end of the body.

*

Or draw a jagged line

traversing the sands of grease

*

until you arrive, with the Indian man,

at every station. 

*

From: Words Don’t Come Easy (2022:Unpublished) 

*

Arresting a Poem 

*

In the evening, 

the ocean dusts its body

of all the moans cast into it. 

*

And in the evening, 

soldiers snatch the ocean’s poem 

off the street’s cheeks. 

*

…We look it in the face: 

The words wail in pain… 

*

From: What I Sleep for Today (2016)

*

Mona Kareem is the author of three poetry collections. She is a recipient of a 2021 NEA literary grant, and a fellow at Center for the Humanities at Tufts University. She held fellowships and residencies with Princeton University, Poetry International, Arab-American National Museum, Norwich Center, and Forum Transregionale Studien. Her most recent publication Femme Ghosts is a trilingual chapbook published by Publication Studio in Fall 2019. Her work has been translated into nine languages, and appear in LitHub, The Common, Brooklyn Rail, Michigan Quarterly, Fence, Ambit, Poetry London, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Poetry International, PEN English, Modern Poetry in Translation, Two Lines, and Specimen. Kareem holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton. She has taught at Princeton, Tufts, University of Maryland College Park, SUNY Binghamton, Rutgers, and Bronx Community College. Her translations include Ashraf Fayadh’s Instructions Within (nominated for a BTBA award), Ra’ad Abdulqadir’s Except for this Unseen Thread (nominated for the Ghobash Banipal Prize), and Octavia Butler’s Kindred.

Sara Elkamel is a poet, journalist and translator living between Cairo and NYC. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Yale Review, Gulf Coast, The Cincinnati Review, Poet Lore, Poetry London, Best New Poets 2020, Best of the Net 2020, among others. She is the author of the chapbook “Field of No Justice” (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021).

By Ghassan Al-Jibai

Translated by Ghada Alatrash

I am as you’ve always known me

Arms crossed over my chest

Like a stone bridge

Lying on my eternal back

Putting my feet up

Dirt fills my mouth and eyes

And the smile never leaves me.

I do not speak—I do not see your beloved faces—

But I hear you breathing above the soil

And I feel the roots of chrysanthemums

As they suck the dampness around me.

I am as I’ve always been

Waiting for my relatives to declare me

A martyr for freedom.

*

I am far from you now, eyes cannot see me

Close to you, untouched by fingers

I am farther than the planet of silence

And closer to the sanctuary of soil

You call it a grave

And I call it a flowerpot.

*

Dawn will not wake me after today

And the evening will no longer blame me

I’ve left in your hands

All the affection and nobility between us:

I left my small dreams in your care

I left my share of the blue skies and light

All that I possess of the remaining years of my life

I gave to you.

I left my warm finger in yours

So that I may live in you

As that is what I’d lived for.

*

I left everything that I inherited from humanity over the centuries

Love, knowledge, beauty, art, and freedom.

I left the rain glistening like teardrops on the green grass

I left the sun’s rays shining there, behind the mountain,

And the blossoming trees as they bloom and flower in the gardens

I forgot about the ugliness and meanness of humans

I forgot about betrayal, injustice, villainy, and lies.

I carried with me the best memories of you

And I forgave you.

*

Now, I am living another life

I live among the hatching chicks

And in the seeds of wheat and basil

In the jasmine as it climbs the mud houses

And knocks on the old wooden windows, calling out:

I am the smile of sadness

O people

Gift of the poor, the deprived, and the homeless

God sent me specifically to smile at you

To guard your dreams on your balconies.

*

And I sleep in the flowerpot

You call it a grave

And I call it a vase.

*

Also read the poem in the original Arabic.

*

Ghassan al-Jibai (1952-2022) was an acclaimed poet and dramatist whose works included The General’s Coffee and Banana Fingers. After studying theater in Ukraine, al-Jibai returned to Syria, where he was imprisoned for a decade. Once released, he taught theater in Damascus, yet was banned off and on from teaching at the university, including after expressing support for protesters in 2011. His writing often returned to the subject of Syria’s notorious prisons. He appears in Hala Mohammad’s 2006 documentary Journey into Memory.

Ghada Alatrash, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the School of Critical and Creative Studies at Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, Canada. She holds a PhD in Educational Research: Languages and Diversity from the Werklund School of Education, the University of Calgary, and a Master’s Degree in English Literature from the University of Oklahoma. Her current research speaks to Syrian art and creative expression as resistance to oppression and dictatorship.

OCTOBER 22, 2022 — Syrian poet Riyad al-Saleh al-Hussein died on this day in 1981, at the age of 28. As Ibtihal Mahmood wrote back in 2018, his poetry remains “bold, invincible, and ‘simple like water, clear like a bullet’ — with a breathtaking prophetic trait immersed in blue.”

Today, three poems, selected by Ghada Alatrash, to commemorate his life and writing.

The Dagger

By Riyad Al-Saleh Al-Hussein

Translated by Ghada Alatrash

The man died

A dagger in his heart

A smile on his lips

The man died

The man promenades in his grave

He looks up

He looks down

He looks around

Nothing but soil

Nothing but the shiny grip of the dagger in his chest

The dead man smiles

He pats the grip of the dagger

The dagger is his only friend

The dagger

A dear memory from those above.

*

A Moon

By Riyad Al-Saleh Al-Hussein

Translated by Ghada Alatrash

Everything that the shepherd has said to the mountain

And to the river and the trees

And everything that people have said and didn’t say

In dancing arenas and on battlegrounds,

I have told you.

About the girl who sings at the window

And the gravel that breaks under the wheels of the train

About the cemetery that has been sleeping happily for centuries,

I have told you.

A flower from my body, every morning

I pick for you and throw it into the streets

For leaders, wisemen, and thieves to trample

And a flower from my body, every evening

I collect its crumbled petals and gather them for you,

And I talk about all that has happened to me.

Once, I sat by you and cried

My heart a burning field of rice

My fingers hanging like the tongues of dogs on summer days.

I wished to express myself with actions:

To break a glass

To open a window

To sleep

But I couldn’t

What do I talk about after twenty-six years

Or after twenty-six bullets fired into emptiness?

I am tired of talking, of debt, and work

But I will never tire of freedom

And here I am, dreaming of one thing or a few things:

That the word becomes bread and grapes

A bird or a bed,

That I wrap my left arm around your shoulder

And my right around the shoulder of the world

And say to the moon:

Take a photo of us.

*

The Flag

By Riyad Al-Saleh Al-Hussein

Translated by Ghada Alatrash

Take a look at him

Just look at him

His body had disintegrated

A long time ago

And still he carries the flag of freedom.

*

Riyal Al-Saleh Al-Hussein died at 28 years of age in 1981.  

Ghada Alatrash, PhD, is an Assistant Professor and Director at the School of Critical and Creative Studies at Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, Canada. She holds a PhD in Educational Research: Languages and Diversity from the Werklund School of Education, the University of Calgary, and a Master’s Degree in English Literature from the University of Oklahoma. Her current research speaks to Syrian art and creative expression as resistance to oppression and dictatorship.

By Fadi Azzam

Translated by Ghada Alatrash

*

On the underground

I sit and contemplate the ceiling.

London passes over me.

*

The roots of trees have not yet reached my train car.

The graveyards are raised above the tunnels.

*

From below

The city is peaceful.

*

The screeching of wheels against the winding steel rails 

Resembles that ache of a heart in countries shattered by barrel bombs.

*

The doors open.

A clear, resolute voice

Penetrates the tunnels in my head:

<Mind the gap.>

*

I shift positions.

New passengers take their places in the car

Others leave.

Time and cars travel in a continuous stream.

The moment a car stops is the same moment

The passengers are moving.

*

Their faces are hollow

Stiff 

As tree trunks.

Their gazes 

Broken

Salty.

*

I taste the salt in my puckered mouth.

*

The one-line cosmic verse continues 

Like a commandment from a Holy Book that has not yet been written:

<Mind the gap.>

*

A great deal awaits you in London.

Or so you think.

Moments of living or letting go

An experience waiting to be lived.

*

The place in which you live

Has nothing to do with the truth you carry. 

An engagement ring

A withered rose in the buttonhole of a jacket

An idea

A memory.

*

I want to yell at the top of my lungs:

I came here

From there

From the great “Middle East”

To draw a map of a world without checkpoints.

I came from a burning land 

To rise from my own ashes.

I came from the roots of history and

Its gaps 

To dig up my own body.

I came from the great drought

Thirsty, like sand longing for water.

I came running away from my language

To continue to dream in it.

*

I came 

Wanting to die

In search of a beginning.

To ask:

Now that we have died, 

Why have we not yet arrived?

*

<Mind the gap.>

*

I receive a message from a Syrian poet

Who wanders in his sumptuous loneliness as he faces the world

And writes from the bottom of the gap itself:

“O the absence of those who returned.”^[1]

*

I stare at the faces that haven’t yet fallen into the gap.

*

A face disintegrated by silence,

birds pecking away at its crumbs.

*

Faces burnt by ice

Scarred with gashes

Pitted by emptiness.

*

Faces so familiar 

That they must be believed.

*

A clenched face

On the verge of vomiting out its bulging eyes.

*

A face ironed by the suns of Africa and wrinkled by the frost of Piccadilly Square.

*

An abandoned face, left behind by its owner.

A face loosened by an anaesthetizing London.

A sleepy face stuck between the end and the means.

A forgiving face,

Melting in tenderness,

Of a general in the army holding his child

His hands wet with the remains of blood that has not yet dried.

*

A face of a solider who lost an eye to the war.

Each time he sings

His eye returns.

*

A face chased by something ambiguous

Staring at nothing.

*

A face of an Irish poet who lost his beloved Belfast 

Amidst the thick smoke of his pipe

As he exhales an old anger.

*

A leavened face

Waiting to be baked one morning.

*

A face faster than its owner

Its lips racing.

*

A face scared of me

And I,

F. A., 

Am terrified of it.

*

Feminine faces 

Masculine 

Gender-neutral

Crammed close to one another

Waiting at the mercy of the voice that returns

Clear

As Mozart’s rattle:

<Mind the gap.>

*

I stare at the map. 

The train must have descended into the deepest depths of London.

The new station glistens with silence.

The warning voice ebbs

The passengers pour out and in 

Leaving behind poems holding onto the ceiling straps.

*

A postmodern poem

Full of bills

And dating apps. 

*

A pure poem

Lamenting its loneliness

Sterile

With no mention of breasts

Or streaming salty vulvas

And syphilitic penises.

*

A vernacular poem,

Like a mirror,

Recited by a rapper

Who spits on mirrors.

*

A poem that breaks taboos

Tells the untold

Written by a poet

Who lies naked 

Fucked by metaphors.

*

A poem about love

That castrates love

And glorifies a cigarette

After masturbation.

*

A poem that boasts of victories,

Unable to attain an erection.

*

A poem full of questions 

And exclamation marks

While the child blurts:

 “The king is naked.”

*

A poem on Ecstasy

Written under the influence of plants and hangovers 

About light and shadow

Resembling the calamities of Aldous Huxley.

*

The train stops. 

*

Silence quivers

To the rhythm of Plath’s last breaths.

*

I close my eyes and the whole world dies.

I open them so that all is born again.

*

I mind the gap.

I climb the stairs

To the light at the end of the tunnel.

*

I release a breath imprisoned since birth.

The world begins to emerge 

Little by little

Anew

Innocent as the moment of condemnation

Plain as life and death

Amazing as your kohl-lined eyes

Offering honey, coffee, and warmth on the ice of absence.

*

Behind me 

The once-mighty voice

Wanes:

<Mind the gap.>

__

Note: All modifications to the original poem were made with the permission of the poet.

^[1] Issa Idris

*

Fadi Azzam is a Syrian novelist and writer, and is the author of Sarmada (2011), longlisted for the 2012 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, as well as Huddud’s House (2017), longlisted for the 2018 International Prize for Arabic Fiction.  He was the Culture and Arts Correspondent for Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper. His opinion columns have appeared in the NY Times and a number of newspapers across the Middle East and Arab Gulf.  

Ghada Alatrash, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the School of Critical and Creative Studies at Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, Canada. She holds her PhD in Educational Research: Languages and Diversity from the Werklund School of Education, the University of Calgary, and a Master’s Degree is in English Literature from the University of Oklahoma.  Her current research speaks to Syrian art and creative expression as resistance to oppression and dictatorship.

*

Also read:

An Excerpt from Fadi Azzam’s ‘Huddud’s House’

New Poetry in Translation: Fadi Azzam’s ‘If You Are Syrian These Days …’

Poetry in Translation: Fadi Azzam’s ‘This Is Damascus, You Sons of Bitches’

At the end of 2022, NPR named Nancy Mounir’s Nozhet El Nofous one of the “11 best experimental albums of 2022.”

Reviewer Lars Gotrich writes that the album “is a conversation with the past. The Cairo-based composer and instrumentalist weaves aching arrangements around crackling recordings of 1920s Egyptian singers. In translations provided, we grasp how Mounir’s own violin, bass and piano dance seamlessly with beautiful Arabic poetry of love, torment and darkness — characters who express longing and sorrow with the same nostalgic verve of what Brazilians call saudade. The ghostly effect, however, isn’t haunting, but an empathetic hand across time.”

Here, the lyrics of four of the songs, shared by Simsara Records and award-winning translator Katharine Halls:

*

Nancy Mounir is a versatile multi-instrumentalist, arranger, and composer, a key member of Egypt’s independent music scene. Mounir plays a range of instruments—including violin, piano, bass, theremin, and the traditional Egyptian bamboo flute called the kawala.

Katharine Halls is an Arabic-to-English translator and a 2021 recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for her translation of Haytham El-Wardany’s Things That Can’t Be Fixed. She was awarded the 2017 Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation for her translation, with Adam Talib, of The Dove’s Necklace by Saudi author Raja Alem. The novel was also shortlisted for the 2017 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.

By Fadi Azzam

Translated by  Ghada Alatrash

–If you are Syrian these days,

you stand shielded and exposed, 

you are the awakening and the delusion, 

and the dream and the nightmare, 

all in one breath. 

–

You are a breath that freezes in the sweltering heat 

and melts in the chill of this world.

–

If you are Syrian these days,

you are a symbol for a tent, disappointment, fear, betrayal, 

and the purling of a streaming wound as it runs from your body, the Tigris, and from your eyes, the Euphrates.

–

If you are Syrian these days,

you are urged to attend etiquette schools, where everyone is there to civilize you, to advise and guide you, to speak for you and silence you, to identify your class and where to classify you, to put you together and disperse you, and to release and restrain you–

schools where they teach you lessons about how God creates heavens and things from carnage;

how the victim should ask to be pardoned by the executioner;

how a country is burnt in the name of the son;

how to kiss the hand that kills, the shot that assassinates, and the missile that obliterates;

and how flowers are accused of treason.

. . . 

If you are Syrian these days,

you will be approached by those who pity you and asked for a photo amidst the massacre.

Meanwhile your brothers in the Gulf are cloaked in their whimpers, and strangers continue to shed their fleeting tears on your sacrificed child—tears that send you sailing in barren dinghies and onto waters whose depths thirst for you.  

And you become glorified in your drowning, while the world vomits up more tents for you to sleep in—just to sleep.

And the heavens grant you free visas, every minute, without even checking your identity papers for as soon as you begin to speak, you are identified as Syrian—“from there, from hell itself.”

–

If you are Syrian these days, and someone asks your country of origin, tell them: 

–

This is where I am from.

My ill-fated and extraordinary fortune has brought me to hold onto a country where there is no place, 

yet I cling to the very place as the country betrays me. 

I am from Syria, an end worthy of history, and a beginning worth living.

I am from an abundance of pain, 

from blood that continues to run and has not yet coagulated nor become sticky, and I come with an unexplainable arrogance.

–

I am from there, where you will find reflections, victims, captives and gifts stacked under “The President’s Bridge.”

I am from a country where all is renewed—the Exodus, the crossing of Moses, the crucifixion of Christ, the pains of Muhammad, the plight of Al-Hallaj, the killing of Suhrawardi, the beheading of John, the Immaculate Conception of Mary, the revenge of Joshua, the detaining of Zenobia, the revelation of Zainab’s breasts, and the rolling of Hussein’s head amidst a contemporary drama that no longer needs to resort to history.

–

To be Syrian these days,

you might as well announce the World’s death certificate 

and speak out in the face of all the suspicions and condemnations.

–

You are a calamity that the universe has not yet witnessed.

You are a nobody.

You are the blazing scandal in the face of this era.

–

To be Syrian these days is to be overcome by an unexplainable sense of pride, 

one that will never be understood by the perpetrator, the victim, the spectator, the clown, 

or anyone for that matter who does not know what it means to be enamored of Syria.

–

To be Syrian these days is to experience things in their extremes. 

If you love, you are murdered.

If you hate, you cannot be reconciled;

If you remain silent, you will die; 

and if you speak, you will kill.

–

If you have an addiction to Syria, you have no options for treatment, for neither leaving nor staying can be of help.

–

Syria is the epic of history,  

an amalgam of pain mixed with regret, 

and the pleasure of seeing things for what they are, the shock giving us hope.

–

Syria is the novel that de Sade did not dare write,

the poem that could not be penned for its extreme violence,

and the narrative whose inscription is tattooed on the guarded tablet of God.

–

To be Syrian is to be forced to accept Syria as Assad’s Syria or as God’s Syria, 

for today no one accepts her as Syria.

–

To be Syrian is to need to dilute the purest of Syrian alcohol to preserve the intoxicating taste in the sublimity of her wine.

–

And you cry, “O, Syria!”

Your heart spells out her name letter by letter. 

And you are answered with showers of bullets.

–

To be Syrian these days, whether you like it or not, you know all too well the meaning of death and hardly any of the joys of life.

–

To be Syrian these days is to be something and its opposite and to be destroyed by your other half. 

–

To be Syrian these days is to be a Palestinian for eternity, 

and an Egyptian until the last Pharaoh, 

and a Tunisian dragging Bouazizi’s wheelbarrow on the path to Golgotha while continuing to burn every day, 

and a Yemeni with a heart that beats once for Sanaa and another for Aden, 

and a Libyan keeping the commandments of Omar al-Mukhtar, and a Meccan carrying the spirit of Abu Dhar al-Ghafari with his stick and the curse of having to live alone, to die alone, to be resurrected alone.

–

To be Syrian means to be a lock that lost its key, abandoned by the door, forsaken by its home, and punished for being locked up!

–

If you are Syrian, then regardless of how hard you try, you will not escape.

You cannot escape.

To wherever you may have fled, no matter how much you deny or disclose, or how you may have thought you escaped, 

the accusations will find a way to sneak up on you, 

pounce on you, 

and arrest you,

for nothing more than the honorable charge of being Syrian.

For no matter how far you may have wandered away from her,

Syria is always wondrously and readily with you, taking on anything and everything.

It’s astonishing how the regime continues to cling to her while she birthed the revolution, 

and how thieves claim to be her “protectors” while liberators are enslaved within her.

–

Much ink bleeds at her doors.

A new sea was born from the spilt salt, from the purity of the raw wound, from the silk of her saliva flowing with the alphabet;

from the rustle of her seductive apricots and the whispers of her precious pollen; 

from the unfolding fragrance of her panic-stricken jasmine flowers as the massacres strike; 

from the chimes of secret kisses from beneath the balconies of her humble homes;

from the names of her breathtaking rivers;

from the eloquence of her seductive sighs and moans;

from her ten lakes and thousand hills of charm;

from her abundance and voluptuousness;

from the weeping of her church hymns as they embrace the calls of mosques and melt together in a frenzy of glorious wailing;

from the burning glow of her fire, from her destruction, from her innermost secrets, from her chagrin and pride, from the shrines of imams and saints, from her greater blue-eared starling, from her ravenous locusts feeding on her bliss submerged in “Qamar al-Din;”

from the alabaster in the souls of her children;

from the ecstasy of being in the presence of her Lote-Tree of the Farthest Boundary;

from a wet soil that does not have a chance to dry before it is re-drenched in her sacred blood;

from the scandal of eternity, from the manifestation of oppression, from a stain of love met with utmost cruelty, unscathed by the cleaver, manifesting into sour rain dripping in the color of plums.

–

O esteemed one, O Syria.

The laughter of your kind women is talisman set loose in the wind.

Your clouds, entrapped with fragrance, scatter it in the shape of a Damascene woman moseying along on the edge of light,

or as a woman from Aleppo emerging from the end of the day,

or a woman from Homs overflowing with all kinds of rhymes and at whose feet all languages bow,

or a woman from Deir ez-Zor soaring over the Deir ez-Zor Suspension Bridge and perching at the height of a palm tree weighed with morning dew,

or a Kurdish woman whose heart overflows with the morning songs of Kaveh the Blacksmith,

or a woman from Hama steering the waterwheels to the pulse of her longing,

or a woman from Hauran listing the names of martyrs in a verse of Ataaba, pronouncing to the world the miracle of patience, 

or a woman from the coast suddenly emerging from the waves of Arwad, 

or a Bedouin woman whose face-tattoos were forgotten, in an embrace, on the shoulder of a knight from Raqqa, 

or a woman from the Golan who welcomes those who have come in place of the ones who left their dreams hanging on clotheslines, 

or a woman from the mountains trapped between the groans of grapes and apples.

–

I am from the country of a million stories and one ruler.

I am from a country whose wounds are demeaned into laughter, and whose similes, metaphors, and rhetoric debased into ugly poetry.

I am from a country of the utmost cruelty, of expired love, and a bounty of looming deaths.

I am from Syria, my brothers and sisters; but don’t you dare pity her, 

for in her dwells enough life to reconstruct the entire world and enough graves to accommodate all of you.

I am from a country that will be loved until the end of repentance, but has been forsaken to the ends of grief.

–

Those who hold her waist will feel grass grow on their wrists.

Those who dance with her will be swept off their feet.

Those who embrace her will assuredly be overcome by a light-headedness and may be carried away by a breeze.

Those who kiss her will bring misfortune upon themselves, for every passing day will feel like a fallen tree, their dreams besieged by pine needles.

Those who accompany her must acquiesce to being both victim and prey, must be trained in all possibilities of life and all scenarios of death, and must know how to deviate from the rules.

–

No one can begin to fathom this daring, arrogant, and beloved named Syria, 

a beginning at any given moment and all ends at once.

–

O my country, O Syria

O, you, my country.

I see you how are attempting to erase the saddening memories and how you are seducing me with your irresistible charm.

I see that you have forgotten how to sing although your trees are the notes to music.

I see how the hearts of your lovers have resisted a history of hateful invaders and have refused to be polluted by their poisons.

You are a homeland bombarded with stray and thundering birds, 

with groans of suffering humans in every direction, 

with barbarous worlds not yet visited by documentary film cameras, 

and with sailors sailing ships of bitterness, ones who once sang a national anthem to the “Guardians of the Homeland” but today are chanting “Jannah Jannah Jannah. Heaven, heaven, heaven.  Heaven, O our homeland. O beloved homeland, with the most sacred soil.  Even your hell is our heaven.  ”^[1]

–

I see you how you rejected false poets and phony poetry.

I see, with a lover’s protective eye, crowds flocking toward your sacred abyss, 

swarming into the curve of your armpit and onto the slope of the arch of your breast, 

on the edges of your acute wit, 

and near the rivers of your abundant tears streaming from your sad gaze and quenching a fertility promised in the days to come.

O how fertile, O how majestic, O how wondrous, you are my country.

–

Light a fire under me and awaken me, for the stench of blood has put me to sleep.

Bring us back less Syrian and more human.

All the criminals will depart;

the one who laughed at us will depart;

the deceived ones will depart;

the one who caused us all this pain, the maker of nothingness, the one who unjustly pressed charges and distributed blood shares—

He will depart.

–

And you, O Syria, will rise like a middle finger in the face of this world!

–

You will roar at those who killed you and ate baklava while your blood streamed, and you will cry out:

I am the country who never dies.

I am the country whose young men and women rise to its skies dancing.

I am the country who is not fit for mourning.

I am the country whose tailors sew, with the patience of her mothers, burial garments for every executioner.

*

Note: All modifications of the original poem were made with the permission of the poet.

*

Fadi Azzam is a Syrian novelist and writer, and is the author of Sarmada (2011), longlisted for the 2012 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, as well as Huddud’s House (2017), longlisted for the 2018 International Prize for Arabic Fiction.  He was the Culture and Arts Correspondent for Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper. His opinion columns have appeared in the NY Times and a number of newspapers across the Middle East and Arab Gulf.  His piece, “If you are Syrian these days” was recently published in Gutter magazine.  

Ghada Alatrash, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the School of Critical and Creative Studies at Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, Canada. She holds her PhD in Educational Research: Languages and Diversity from the Werklund School of Education, the University of Calgary, and a Master’s Degree is in English Literature from the University of Oklahoma.  Her current research speaks to Syrian art and creative expression as resistance to oppression and dictatorship.

^[1] A translation of the opening lines for the song “Janna Janna Janna [Heaven, heaven, heaven]”—a song that became an iconic chant sung across peaceful protests in the Syrian revolution.  

Editor’s note: If you want to assist with earthquake relief, Mohamad Kaboub has assembled a spreadsheet of some organizations and their donation links; there are also many individual initiatives on the ground, such as this one to house Syrians arriving in Istanbul.

Introduction by Huda Fakhreddine

To read Mohammad Albdelbari is to listen to the voice as well as the silence. In his poems, sound guides, punctuates, and makes meaning, but his silences are haunted by the echoes of familiar voices too. He draws on the Arabic tradition’s imaginative and creative memory, evoking the languages and worlds of its great poets as well as its masters of prose.

His poetry is a journey in the Arabic poetic landscape that extends from the Jahiliya to this day, and yet its arrival point is new and surprising. 

Abdelbari is a Sudanese poet and writer. He has won multiple poetry awards and honors across the Arab world such as The African Arab Youth Award and Sharjah Award for Arab Creativity.  He has published five poetry collections among them al-Ahilla (The Crescents) 2016, Lam yaʿud azraqan (No Longer Blue) 2020, and Ughniya li-ʿubūr al-nahr marratayn (A Song to Cross the River Twice) 2022. A volume of collected works is forthcoming in 2023 from Sophia Bookstore, Kuwait.

                                                                                                –

A Song for Crossing the River Twice

Translated by Huda Fakhreddine

Autumn arrives,

gold and gold unite:

color and soul.

The assembly flourishes,

the clear dry

greeting the wet obscure.

Charms of time flow, 

elevating moments to epochs.

And here, I sit back

to witness nature slipping out of one marvel 

into another.

A breeze grows into a youthful wind,

an adolescent cold aspires to its older self,

birds break open the South,

and songs lament the stalks to the field.

The clouds are on alert,

the trees escape green’s grip,

and there, a path where loss shines

like blood on a dagger.

Two dusks make a sunset, 

of saffron and musk.

Here now,

ordinary grief

leads me to magnificent grief,

and then, a sadness takes hold,

soft like supple snakeskin.

Reckless, my imagination runs,

voiding the difficult gap between poor and rich.

And as my senses intensify within me,

the least of me aspires to the most.

See! I see the bareness of garments

as they wrap around to shield the bare.

Touch! I touch

the frailty of a thought not yet formed.

Taste! I taste

white conflicted between sweet and salt.

Smell! I smell

distance burnt in a voyager aged by the voyage.

Hear! I hear

the rumble of feathers falling on marble.

Here now,

where the glass condensed in the sun hasn’t shattered yet,

where short shadows 

haven’t waned into their shorter selves, 

and where wrinkles on the faces of ghostly trees

haven’t yet appeared.

Here I shall return.

The time has come

to return the sources to their source,

time to fall 

into the scattered regrets of yellowed leaves,

time to long for the forest,

and how that forest longs for its wild roots!

Now that life, the sapphire, has uncovered its red secret,

I drag the nine elements of my dirge

in search of an element

to draw my soul out of its soul

as waters are drawn out of rivers.

Now I feel, now I know

that silk itself has never felt a silk like mine,

that I am the transformation,

a darkness slowly rising to light,

that vaster than my world

I am, 

that in the seafarer

the sea itself can drown.

-From A Song for Crossing the River Twice

Labyrinth 

Translated by Huda Fakhreddine

Where to my Jahili mystery?

Where to now 

that no end is in sight,

and no beginning?

Where to,

when time has lost track of itself

having wandered in you 

and veered?

When will you speak?

Even fog has forsaken itself

and cleared.

I am a neigh, angry and loud,

saying that the horse has rebelled

and seethed.

I fled toward my impossible face

but when I reached it,

it disappeared.

For a lifetime, I’ve been held back

from what I wanted because what 

I didn’t want

adhered. 

I’ve been broken down 

in light and water, broken down

but no bow of color has yet

appeared.

I go out,

the oblivion of streets rises to its feet

I enter,

the air in the room 

recedes.

I strained my intuition

but nothing proved true.

I exhausted my imagination,

but nothing was move 

to be!

O desolation of the distant unknown,

O regret of a sword smeared,

I want you both.

Descend upon me. Fill me

the way a glass with wine 

is bleared.

Here I sit on the edges,

and the last thing I’m capable of

is cheer.

                                    -From The Crescents

Two Andaluses 

Translated Omar Abdel-Gaffar

Like clouds and crescents,

they departed, 

leaving their windows orphaned.

They departed

and the void has never found solace since, 

the mountains no longer birthed hyachinths. 

They departed, 

without the names that protect them, 

they, whose faces used to flow like honey. 

They only carried with them a gleam of light 

with which they carved

metaphor into marble

Here they are,

place has collapsed around them,

time itself forsaken them. 

They slipped into the poem, as it came to a close, 

and they gathered in memory

like ruins.

The cracks of the night ask them:

When and why?

How? Who? If? And for what?

They arrived in the desert on the seventh weeping night, 

and set up their yearnings

like tents.

They are our voice, haunting and obsessive.

When reigned in, it swells. 

They are the salt of our bodies.

We will not be blind to this nor oblivious. 

We can never be like water

which forgets that it forgets,

and resists both the journey and the settling?

Rivers have no past or history or longing.

Eternally forward they move.

They flow on.

Never in its life did a river stop, 

to greet ruins.

It is as though the one who first

released the river to flow,

made looking back a sin. 

Oh friend, Andalus, the place, is near, 

only an arrow’s span away.

Greet her open doors and enter.

Embrace the friendship of the wine.

Leave your eyes, 

two Ummayads yearning for Damascus,

to their melancholy.

Do not fear Castille. 

She is menacing and hostile no more. 

She told your shadow as it surrendered: “Disappear

only to return seldom, after absence.” 

This is your share of the return, call, as I do, 

 “visiting old friends.”

Oh Friend, Andalus, the time, is distant.

So be to the forlorn a guide.

Granada is beyond reach, not a place, but time, she is, 

now in ruins. 

Do not be fooled by the light.

Above you a star slumbers, 

her light not fizzled out yet. 

The muwashshaḥ has abandoned its arrangement, 

and the hawk on banners now flies away a dove.

Do not question the doors. See them as they are: 

Paintings and the painter unknown.

As you grow old in this echo, 

hanging your days on smoke, 

describe to me how you have fallen into elegies, 

and let us find each other, 

as stranger and stranger do.

                                    -From The Crescents

Walls

Translated Omar Abdel-Gaffar

Though language is within my reach–

silence is my share of Babylon.

I consort with the gods of Olympus. 

I am only absent

to reveal a perfect presence.

I opened for Meaning a single path. 

My lightning sparks within

and strikes inward.

I usher all my things towards the doors

so that I may recline alone in the inhabited void.

For trees lose their wisdom

when they befriend 

a passing shadow.

In the ancient niches, 

I complain of what my ramblings and queries 

have unearthed 

Vision allows me to witness only its death

as the sea only manifests itself

in waves on the shore. 

The strange guest haunts me, 

Leaving me alone

in the bewildered’s prayer.

Every time language turns

to exult in itself, 

it brings my endings

back to my beginning.

At the limits of heaven, I write:

“Sorrow belongs to the names, 

and all the names are mine.”

Oh stone staircase to the dead,

take me to them, as they 

rehearse their infinite bewilderment:

Take me to the dead,

that I might find freedom, even as

I drag my shackles and chains.

The dead lift me

as wounds elevate the warrior.

There is no path except to taste my own blood

and drop the burden of distance from my shoulders.

I am in absence now:

a word, beyond the impossible, still in need of a speaker.

And perhaps I am not, 

for every being

drowns in liquid time.

Excessive in existence,

I sprout in both the murderer and the murdered.

My mirrors have always failed

to capture my face in a likeness.

I find no solace in places,

as if I dangle from a moon

without mansions.

The paths tell me

“Your people are here.

Now is your turn to receive this truth 

passed down from one traveler to another.” 

                                    -From The Crescents

Huda Fakhreddine is a writer, translator, editor, and associate professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). Her translations of Arabic poems have appeared in Banipal, World Literature Today, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly, Middle Eastern Literatures, among others. 

Omar Abdel-Ghaffar is a JD/PhD student in History at Harvard University. His research focuses on late medieval Islamic law and court procedures.

ArabLit Staff

Two years ago, in response to a panel event about women’s writing in Arabic, we wrote that, “One of the greatest gaps in the translation of Arabic literature into English is the translation of poetry by women.” However, since then, several key collections have appeared — Iman Mersal’s The Threshold, tr. Robyn Creswell, Maya Abu al-Hayyat’s You Can Be the Last Leaf, tr. Fady Joudah, as well as innovative works that move between languages, like Zeina Hashem Beck’s O — with even more forthcoming, notably Mona Kareem’s collection I Will Not Fold These Maps, translated by poet Sara Elkamel, expected this May from the Poetry Translation Centre and Rania Mamoun’s Something Evergreen Called Life, translated by Yasmine Seale and out this month from Action Books.

This follows, at a little lag, the explosive energy of women’s poetry in Arabic. Back in 2017, Egyptian poet and novelist Yasser Abdellatif said, “It seems to me there’s been a wonderful female invasion of poetic territory. Or, as my friend Alaa Khaled said, Poetry lately has recovered its female character. From Syria alone, recent years have brought forward dozens of distinguished poets, among them a large number of Kurdish women writing in Arabic, and sometimes Kurdish. In Egypt, too, there is a clear quantitative and qualitative superiority of women poets over men.”

At a 2021 online event about women writing in Arabic, Iman Mersal said she’s had a long dialogue about this issue, with Abdellatif and others, and “we come up with different reasons, but really maybe it needs to be studied. So far, Yasser might talk about masculinity and femininity. Old female poets in the ’40s and ’50s used to borrow the masculine voice. I think since the ’90s, female Arab poets don’t have to do this at all.”

Mersal, who referred to “prophecy” as an earlier mode of modern Arabic poetry, particularly in poetry written by men, said that now, “prophecy is defeated. The masculinity is defeated. But it doesn’t mean that this will make a woman a good poet, just because she is not a prophet or masculine. There are so many things that we need — I don’t even know what it is.

“For me, actually, I think we are impacted by male writers who are writing now, and they are writing about broken masculinity, which I don’t like either. So maybe women are free of this, relatively.”

Or, she suggested: “Maybe they are marginalized, so they have more opportunity to think, to write.”

Iman Mersal added that in addition to twentieth-century Syrian poets Saniyah Saleh and Da’ad al-Haddad, when she thinks about canon, she thinks a lot about the work of contemporary Iraqi poet Siham Jabbar, who she called “one of the most remarkable voices in modern Arabic poetry. And she is not present at all. Why? I don’t know.”

Indeed, Siham Jabbar — and many others — still have not been engaged in English translation. In honor of Women in Translation Month, we end with a list of 15 more Arabic works by women poets, which you should read in addition to 1) Iman Mersal’s The Threshold.

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2) Saniya Saleh, Complete Works. In translation, you can read “Cure Your Slavery with Patience,” tr. Marilyn Hacker, “The Condemned Lakes,” tr. Hacker, and “The Only Window, in Disrepair,” tr. Robin Moger, as well as Mersal’s essay about looking for Saleh.

3) Maya Abu al-Hayyat’s You Can Be the Last Leaf, translated by Fady Joudah. This wry, funny, psychologically nimble collection was one of our favorite reads of 2022.

4) Da’ad al-Haddad. About this poet, Golan Haji has said, “Regardless of the superlative “most notable” woman poet in the Arab world, I could mention Fatima Qandil or Sanyyah Saleh, but I’d love to talk about Da’ad Haddad who died in 1991. … Her “naïvety” is astounding sometimes, like raw brut art paintings.” In translation, you can read “Black is this night,” tr. Golan Haji

5) Siham Jabbar, As Old as Hypatia. About this collection, Mersal said, “I’d wish to see these poems read widely in the Arabic-[reading] world and translated into different languages.”

6) Rania Mamoun’s Something Evergreen Called Life, translated by Yasmine Seale. As Divya Victor writes of the collection, Rania’s voice speaks to us from the “ledge of fear,” in spare poems that circle around violence, loss, children, the body. “I am drowning/ without getting wet.” 

7) Soukina Habiballah, There’s No Need for You. Habiballah  introduces compelling and unexpected personifications into her narrative and filmic poems. You can read six poems in English, translated by Robin Moger.

8) Mouna Ouafik, Sharp Edge of Half of a Broken Plate. Ouafik is a Moroccan poet, short story writer, and photographer whose work was published in English translation for the first time in the anthology We Wrote in Symbols, as translated by Robin Moger; her writing on ordinary life and sexuality is simultaneously hot and banal. From “Orgasm”: “Quick as that, the tissues of my clitoris fill up with blood./ Each time I see white plastic gloves / I get turned on.”

9) Asmaa Yaseen, A Box of Colorful Stones. Yasser Abdellatif called this one of the notable collections he read in 2017.

10) Fatima Qandil, My House Has Two Doors. In a chapter in Arab Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide, 1873-1999, Hoda Elsadda writes that Qandil “gives voice to conditions of human existence that cannot be summarized or conveyed using other means of expression. She weaves the strands of her lexicon with the utmost care and then scatters them on paper, creating meanings that quietly pierce deep into the walls of consciousness.” In translation, read “Keys,” tr. Josh Beirich.

11) Amal Nawwar, Intimate to Glass. Golan Haji has said, “Amal Nawwar’s internal worlds in Hers Is Blue Wine and Intimate to Glass and The Jungle Woman originate from various experiences in Lebanon and abroad. Her dense poems grow like dark flowers at the edge of an abyss inside the poet herself, and no one can jump into it since it’s already full of restless words and muffled emotions.” In English, you can read four poems, tr. Issa Boullata.

12) Rasha Omran, A Secret Wife of Absence. In translation, you can read poems from the collection translated by Phoebe Bay Carter, as well as  three poems by Rasha Omran, translated by Bay Carter and Defy the Silence, a trilingual collection translated collaboratively by Abdelrehim Youssef, Kim Echlin, and Italian translator Monica Pareschi.

13) Rana al-Tonsi, The Book of Games. Al-Tonsi writes achingly and sparely on motherhood and love. In English, you can read poems from The Book of Games, tr. Robin Moger.

14) Asmaa Azaizeh, Don’t Believe Me If I Talk To You Of War. As ArabLit contributor Amira Abd El Khalek wrote of Azaizeh’s work, her “poems are potent yet delicate renderings of seemingly simple everyday things.” Read six of her poems translated by Yasmine Seale.

15) Hoda Omran, Naive and Cinematic. Yasser Abdellatif called this one of the notable collections he read in 2017.

16) Mona Kareem, I Will Not Fold These Maps, translated by Sara Elkamel. Or, since this isn’t out until May, you can read Femme Ghosts, which includes Kareem’s poetry in Arabic, English and Dutch. More here.

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You can also watch the 2021 Bookseller webinar on Female Voices in Arabic Literature:

This is the first in a series of co-translations, by Nina Youkhanna and Elliott Colla, of work by the towering Syrian poet Muhammad al-Maghut.

By Muhammad al-Maghut

Translated by Nina Youkhanna and Elliott Colla

In my mouth, another mouth

Between my teeth, other teeth.

My people… my compatriots… 

You who have shot me like a bullet outside the 

world

Hunger throbs in my gut like a fetus

I gnaw at my cheeks from the inside

What I write in the morning 

Disgusts me in the evening 

The person whose hand I shake at nine

I long to kill at ten.

I want a flower as big as a face,

A large hole between the shoulders

To let all my memories gush forth, spring-like

My fingers are sick of each other

And my eyebrows, two opposing foes.

I want to shake my body like a wire

In a remote graveyard

And fall into a deep well

Of monsters and mothers and bangles 

I have forgotten the shape of spoons and taste of 

salt,

Forgotten the moonlight and scent of children

My guts are full of cold coffee

And unseeing water

My throat, stuffed with scraps of paper and strips of 

snow

O ancient Water

O raw Water … how I love you.

With stiff collars that reach the chin, 

With sticky lips, with button-strangled wrists

We halt to eat

We stop to yearn

We pounce on flies with poems and handkerchiefs 

To glimpse a tree or a passing bird

With small feet that know no mercy

We lean on the earth

Tossing the countryside’s ribs from street to street.

I climbed the winding stairs hundreds of times

Clean, like cotton

Glossy, like myrtle leaves

Rising and falling, like a murderer’s dagger

With shoes of fame, and shoes of hatred

Hanging my wretchedness on wall nails

Fixing my eyes on far-off balconies

And rivers returning from captivity.

Under the yellow sky, I saw them all

Rich and peaceable 

Poor and monstrous

Millions of teeth crashing into the pavement

Millions of sullen faces

Lowering their gaze beneath the thunder.

I saw the rushed funerals

And the reins of barbarian horses burning in the 

streets

The workers tumbling from the highest stories

Ordered buried under the sad rain

With their tobacco and clothes and bundles of food

While in the desert, nothing rises in revolt. 

The wind whistles over their blood

And the small graves

Fall like dew drops on hats and coats.

I have seen the canned breeze

And the rain-pummelled newspapers

I have drunk the aged water

And licked cream mixed with breast blood

No doubts ever beset me

On this Earth sleeping like a baby

On this Earth hunching over like a butcher

Yet, through the windows

Through thousands and thousands

Of stars, of corpses, of fiery hammers

I have searched for a fatal blow to my face

For a small sea to wear on my feet

And for arrogant food 

To fold on my forearm like a sash.

I am weary of long ladders and victory halls 

I want to roast corn at sunset

To eat stones and pebbles at sunset.

I want to embrace any distant thing

A wildflower

Or a muddy shoe, the size of an eagle

I want to eat and drink and die

And sleep in a single moment

I am in a rush, in a rush

Like a cloud plagued by mange

Like a lonely wave chased by the sea.

نجوم وأمطار

في فمي فمٌ آخر

وبين أسناني أسنان أخرى.

يا أهلي .. يا شعبي

يا من أطلقتموني كالرصاصة خارج العالم

الجوع ينبض في أحشائي كالجنين

إنني أقرض خدودي من الداخل 

ما أكتبه في الصباح

أشمئز منه في المساء

من أصافحه في التاسعة

أشتهي قتله في العاشرة

أريد زهرة كبيرة بحجم الوجه 

ثقباً كبيراً بين الكتفين 

لتنبثق ذكرياتي كلها كالينبوع 

أصابعي ضجرة من بعضها 

وحاجباي خصمان متقابلان

أريد أن أهزّ جسدي كالسلك

في احدى المقابر النائية

أن أسقط في بئر عميقة 

من الوحوش والأمهات والأساور

لقد نسيت شكل الملعقة وطعم الملح 

نسيت ضوء القمر ورائحة الأطفال 

إن أحشائي مليئة بالقهوة الباردة 

والمياه العمياء 

وحنجرتي مفعمة بقصاصات الورق وشرائح الثلج 

.أيها الماء القديمأيها الماء النيئ… كم أحبك

بياقات صلبة تصل حتى الذقن 

بشفاه دبقة ومعاصم تخنقها الأزرار 

نقف لنأكل 

نقف لنشتاق 

نهوي على الذباب بالقصائد والمناديل 

لنلمح شجرة أو طائراً يمضي

بأقدام صغيرة لا تعرف الرحمة

نتكئ على الأرض

.ونقذف أضلاع الريف من شارع إلى شارع

كنتُ أصعد الأدراج الملتوية مئات المرات

نظيفاً كالقطن

لماعاً كورق الآس 

أصعد وأهبط كخنجر القاتل

بأحذية الشهرة، وأحذية البغضاء 

معلقاً تعاستي من مسامير الحائط 

غارساً عينيَّ في الشرفات البعيدة

والأنهار العائدة من الأسر. 

رأيتهم جميعاً تحت السماء الصفراء 

أغنياء ومسالمين 

فقراء ووحوش 

ملايين الأسنان تصطدم في الشارع 

ملايين الوجوه المقطّبة

تخفض بصرها تحت الرعد 

رأيت الجنازات المسرعة 

وأعنّة الجياد البربرية تلتهب في الشارع 

والعمال يسقطون من الأدوار العليا 

يقبرون باحكام تحت المطر الحزين 

مع تبغهم وثيابهم وصُرر طعامهم 

دون أن يثور شيء ما في الصحراء

الريح تصفر فوق النجيع

والقبور الصغيرةتتساقط كالندى على القبعات المعاطف  

رأيت النسيم المعلب

والصحف المرتطمة بالأمطار 

شربتُ المياه المسنّة 

ولعقت الزبدة التي فيها دماء الثدي 

ولم تساورني الشكوك أبداً

في هذه الأرض النائمة كالطفل 

في هذه الأرض المحدودبة كالجزّار 

ولكن من خلال الشبابيك

من خلال الآلاف المؤلفة

من النجوم الجثث والمطارق النارية

كنتُ أبحث عن ضربة قاصمة لوجهي 

عن بحر صغير أنتعله بقدمي 

وطعام متكبر 

أطويه على زندي كالوشاح. 

لقد مللت السلالم الطويلة وقاعات الانتصار

أريد أن أشوي الذرة عند الغروب 

. أن آكل الحجر والحصى عند الغروب

أريد أن أضمّ على صدري أي شيء بعيد 

زهرة برية

أو حذاء موحلاً بحجم النسر 

أريد أن آكل وأشرب وأموت

وأنام في لحظة واحدة

أنني مسرع مسرع

كغيمة أصيبت بالجرب

.كموجة وحيدة مطاردة في البحر

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Muhammad Al-Maghut (1934-2006), was a Syrian poet, playwright, and journalist. He is one of the pioneers of the Arabic prose poem.

Nina Youkhanna and is a doctoral student in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University.

Elliott Colla is associate professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University. He is author of Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity, and essays on modern Arab literature, culture and politics. He has translated works of contemporary Arabic literature, including Ibrahim Aslan’s novel, The Heron, Idris Ali’s Poor, Ibrahim al-Koni’s Gold Dust, and Rab‘i al-Madhoun’s The Lady from Tel Aviv. For full access to scholarly publications, visit: http://www.elliottcolla.com

By Ibtihal Rida Mahmood

“Now, I could repeat the same sentence over and over for an hour, and, in the end, I still won’t be able to convey the true meaning behind it,” says a melancholic, slightly agitated Nazih Abu Afach to Hala Alabdalla’s camera, as the two are parsing a sentence; a verse of poetry by Da’ad Haddad (1937-1991) that would later become the title of Alabdalla’s award-winning documentary:

I am the one who brings flowers to her own grave,

And weeps… from too much poetry.

“If she, Da’ad Haddad, wrote this poetry and no one heard of it, and it wasn’t published, and I found it in our house the same way I found her play, I would’ve attributed it to myself with a clear conscience,” Abu Afach continues. “Such poetry of such high quality, by my poetic and humane standards… I cannot remain unbiased before such poetry.”

In her poetry world, the sun is red. The moon is purple. Snow is ubiquitous. Winter is eternal. Childhood is made too ephemeral. Love is a tattered draft. Lonely women have mastered the game of waiting. Everyone is watching everyone through stained glass—sometimes through shattered glass. A khaki sweater is a poor woman’s fluffy mattress. There’s a guard at every place worth the trip. Mice carry guns. Monsters steal love, not money or Solomon’s mines. Silent poets destroy the world. Books open their mouths, hungry for freedom. A flower blooms in the throat at the break of silence. Death dries up.

Although Da’ad Haddad published two poetry collections—Correcting Death’s Mistake and A Crumb of Bread is Enough For Me—in the 1980s, the Latakia native’s literary influence and renown were to be posthumous, ushered in by the publication of The Tree Leaning Towards the Ground and There is Light after her passing in 1991 in Damascus, where she died at the age of 54. A full collection of her works was finally made available by the Damascus-based Dar al-Takween in 2018, prefaced by three Syrian poets: the late Bandar Abdel Hamid (d. 2020), Nazih Abu Afach, and Suzan Ali. 

Haddad often timestamped her poems; clearly, she wrote most of them during the wee hours. Was she an insomniac, a workaholic, or a dark romantic? 

It may be dangerous to draw conclusions about a writer’s character and lifestyle based solely on their work, but it is tempting to say the nocturnes of Da’ad Haddad, laden with metaphors of existential anxiety amounting to metaphysical nihilism, betray a deep sense of disappointment in the world, so deep that the poetess chose to build rapport with Death itself, perhaps even saw it as the only dignified escape:

And I am alone

I don’t have anything

I don’t have freedom

Except my heart, laden with love

Kill me… And win a dollar

There is a deafening cacophony of tones in these few lines. Beyond the overpowering ring of desperation, depression, and self-deprecation, there is a subtler tone of sarcasm, mocking the absurdity of it all and pointing at the negligible price of a life. In another poem, she surrenders her poetic persona to her loneliness, to the extent of drowning:

Here’s the lonely blue coffin

Here’s the lonely dress

Throw me, like a boat, into the sea

A cloak in this blue desert

The following night, she longs for company through her persona’s thirst for death, as she writes:

 How beautiful would it be to kill ourselves together

 In an abandoned well

 Alone

Our fingers stuck to the moldy wall

 How beautiful

 Is that abysmal oblivion

In the wells of the world

In the wells of African forests

 In the heart of the desert, anxious like fire

 How beautiful would it be to die together…

Her coveted death, however, was lurking around the corner, only five years ahead. As her physical world shrank through poverty and sickness, her poetic world expanded. And as with the Syrian poet Riyad al-Saleh al-Hussein (1954-1982), one cannot help but wonder if, during her life, she could see well into the future, as far as twenty years past her departure, when she wrote her poem “Get ready, the tools for embalming are ready”:

Small bare feet,

Race the mice in the alleys,

Raise a rock in their face:

While the mice raise… a gun!

The following poems by Da’ad Haddad are translated by Ibtihal Rida Mahmood.

I Will Count My Steps

O dreary path!

O path of love!

I will count my steps,

Loneliness taught me to count.

***

My mother carried me one day, and you

Dropped me one day.

That twinkle in your eyes, sometimes strobing, sometimes faint.

I will count my steps,

Loneliness taught me to count.

***

The guard was vigilant

Two treacherous eyes, and binoculars.

I hurried before my foot stepped amiss

Before nightfall, alone

I will count my steps,

Loneliness taught me to count.

***

Going back, someone held my hand.

Behind his eyes, I hid:

Here’s warmth, and shelter.

I will count my steps,

Loneliness taught me to count.

***

My fearful heart was broken

But I kept it

And was always stronger than my memory

So that I wouldn’t forget

To count to ten.

And when you held me with the tenderness of a penguin

My heart stuttered

I said: One—

Looked in your eyes, lost my way, and said:

Two, ten…

 Feb 19, 1976

سأعد خطواتي

!أيها الدرب الموحش

!يا درب الحب

سأعد خطواتي،

.فالوحدة علّمتني العد

***

،أمي حملتني يوماً، وأنت

،أوقعتني يوماً

،بعينيك ذلك الوهج المتوهج حيناً، والخافت حيناً

..سأعد خطواتي

.فالوحدة علمتني العد

***

..الحارس كان بالمرصاد

،عينان خبيثتان، ومنظار

،أسرعتُ قبل أن تخطئ قدمي

قبل أن يهبط الليل، وحدي،

..سأعد خطواتي

.فالوحدة علّمتني العد

***

،في العودة، أمسك أحدهم بيدي

،خلف عينيه، اختبأت

،هنا دفء، وأمان

..سأعد خطواتي

.فالوحدة علمتني العد

***

،قلبي الخائف.. كان بائساً

،ولكني احتفظت به

وكنت دوماً أقوى من ذاكرتي

..كي لا أنسى

..أن أعد إلى العشرة

وحينما ضممتني إليك بحنو طائر البطريق

..تلعثم قلبي

..قُلتُ: واحد

:نظرتُ في عينيك تهتُ.. قلتُ

..اثنان، عشرة

19 شباط 1976

I Am the One Who Brings Flowers to Her Own Grave

I am the daughter of the devil

I am the daughter of this crazy night

Daughter of my own awareness

And my friend. I

Am the oldest of people

My wine is in my veins

I’m the one who brings flowers to her own grave,

And weeps—from too much poetry.

Atop my blush, palaces are built.

He strolls in my blood

And the poppies

Snatch my stupor from my field.

These cushions are for the maids

And those are my stolen gems

My knives are startling

And from my eyes, the rain falls.

And the world—is my home.

Close your eyes—

I will pass by alone.

Like the tip of a spear—

When your tears—rain down.

***

Night of March 17-18, 1:30 a.m. 

أنا التي تحمل الزهور إلى قبرها

…أنا ابنة الشيطان

…أنا ابنة هذه الليلة المجنونة

…ابنة وعيي

وصديقي… أنا

…أنا أكثر الناس عتقاً

…أنا خمري في شراييني

،أنا من تحمل الزهور إلى قبرها

.وتبكي… من شدة الشعر

،أعلى حيائي تبنى القصور

،يتنزه… في دمائي

،وزهور شقائق النعمان

…تخطف من حقلي شرودي

،هذي الوسائد… للوصيفات

،وتلك أحجاري… المسروقة

،وسكاكيني يُجفل منها

،ومن عيوني يهطل المطر

…والعالم… داري

،أغمضوا… أعينكم

،سأمرّ وحيدة

…كحدّ الرمح

…حين هطول… دموعكم

***

الواحدة والنصف من ليل 17-18 آذار

Whom May These—Concern?

I will write about love,

and the fire—and the firewood—

and the sun—and freedom—

and the daily waiting.

And whom may these—concern?

This mind-wandering, this sadness,

And this intimacy: open up!

I am passing by, retreating, alone,

And my basket is empty.

In my hand are sticks of firewood

In my eyes: a hut, and a forest

Fledglings

And a wait—

***

January 30, 1986

هذه الاهتمامات… لمن؟

سأكتب عن الحب،

…والنار… والحطب

…والشمس… والحرية

…والانتظار اليومي

!وهذه الاهتمامات… لمن؟

…وهذا الشرود والحزن

!وهذه الألفة… افتحوا

…أنا أمر مودّعة ووحيدة

…وسلّتي فارغة

،وبيدي عيدان حطب

…وبعينيّ… كوخ… وغابة

…وصيصان

…وانتظار

***

30 كانون الثاني 1986

The Tree Leaning Towards The Ground

-43-

Three children

Are digging my grave in the snow:

Loneliness, and sadness, and freedom.

Three innocent children

Their faces red from fatigue

From the thirst to bury me.

Three children:

Loneliness, and sadness, and freedom

Under showers of rain, or snow

They dig—

They dig deep, and the snow—

is deep—deep—deep—

A forsaken lake.

***

2/26/1989

الشجرة التي تميل نحو الأرض

-43-

…ثلاثة أطفال

.يحفرون قبري في الثلج

…الوحدة والحزن والحرية

…ثلاثة أطفال… أبرياء

…إنهم حمر الوجوه من التعب

…ومن الشوق لدفني

…ثلاثة أطفال

الوحدة والحزن والحرية

تحت وابل المطر… أو الثلج

…يحفرون

…إنهم يحفرون بعمق، والثلج

…عميق… عميق… عميق

…بحيرة منسية

***

26/2/1989

There is Light

-18-

You show up, unhurried—

Assured of the outcome.

Leave—

Or else—

My departure is—near—?!

Summer 1987

ثمة ضوء

-18-

…تأتي متمهلاً

…واثقاً من النتائج

…ألا، فارحل

…وإلا

!فرحيلي… قريب…؟

صيف 1987

*

Ibtihal Rida Mahmood is a Jordanian American writer and translator based in New England, USA.

This is the second in a series of co-translations, by Nina Youkhanna and Elliott Colla, of work by the towering Syrian poet Muhammad al-Maghut. Read the first poem, ‘Stars and Rain,’ here.

By Muhammad al-Maghut

Translated by Nina Youkhanna and Elliott Colla

Sweet the eyes of women in Bab Touma.

So, so sweet

As they sadly gaze at Night and Bread and Drunks.

Beautiful, those gypsy shoulders on beds…

That gift me tears and lust, Mother.

I wish I were a colorful pebble on the sidewalk,

Or a long song in the alley.

There, in the hollow of slick mud

That reminds me of hunger and vagrant lips

Where small children

Spill forth like malaria

Before God and dark streets.

If only I was a damask rose in some garden

Picked by a melancholic poet at day’s end

Or a tavern of red wood

Frequented by rain and strangers

From my wine- and fly-stained windows

Comes a lazy racket

Down to this alley of ours where despair and green

eyes are made

Where emaciated feet

Graze aimlessly in the shadows.

I yearn to be a green willow near the church

Or a gold cross on a virgin’s breast

Frying fish for her lover returning from

the coffee house

In her beautiful eyes

Flutter two doves of violet.

I yearn to kiss a young child in Bab Touma

From whose rosy lips

Comes the scent of the breast that nursed him

For I am still alone, still cruel.

I am a stranger, Mother.

أغنية لباب توما

حلوه عيونُ النساءِ في باب توما

حلوه حلوه

وهي ترنو حزينةً إلى الليل والخبز والسَّكَارى

…وجميلةٌ تلك الأكتافُ الغجريةُ على الاسِرّه

.لتمنَحَني البكاء والشهوة يا أمي

ليتني حَصَاةٌ مُلَوَّنَةٌ على الرصيف

أو أغنيةٌ طويلةٌ في الزقاق

هناك، في تجويفٍ من الوحلِ الأملس

،يُذكِّرني بالجوع والشفاه المُشرَّده

حيث الأطفالُ الصِّغار

يتدفّقون كالملاريا أمام الله والشوارع الدّامِسة

ليتني وردةٌ جوريةٌ في حديقة ما

يقطفني شاعرٌ كئيب في أواخر النهار

أو حانةٌ من الخشب الأحمر

يرتادها المطرُ والغرباء

ومن شبابيكي الملطَّخة بالخمر والذباب

تخرج الضوضاءُ الكسوله

إلى زقاقنا الذي ينتجُ الكآبةَ والعيون الخضر

حيث الأقدامُ الهزيله

…ترتعُ دونما غاية في الظلام

أشتهي أن أكون صفصافةً خضراء قرب الكنيسه

،أو صليباً من الذهب على صدر عذراء

تقلي السمك لحبيبها العائد من المقهى

وفي عينيها الجميلتين

ترفرفُ حمامتان من بنفسج

أشتهي أن أقبِّل طفلاً صغيراً في باب توما

،ومن شفتيه الورديتين

،تنبعثُ رائحةُ الثدي الذي أرضَعَه

فأنا ما زلتُ وحيداً وقاسياً

.أنا غريبٌ يا أمي

*

Muhammad Al-Maghut (1934-2006), was a Syrian poet, playwright, and journalist. He is one of the pioneers of the Arabic prose poem.

Nina Youkhanna and is a doctoral student in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University.

Elliott Colla is associate professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University. He is author of Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity, and essays on modern Arab literature, culture and politics. He has translated works of contemporary Arabic literature, including Ibrahim Aslan’s novel, The Heron, Idris Ali’s Poor, Ibrahim al-Koni’s Gold Dust, and Rab‘i al-Madhoun’s The Lady from Tel Aviv. For full access to scholarly publications, visit: http://www.elliottcolla.com

By Eiman Abbas El-Nour

My niece’s wedding was supposed to take place today. My daughter’s final exams were scheduled for tomorrow morning; she and her cousin were preparing their bridesmaids’ outfits and carefully planning the time they would spend at the party in order not to interfere with their final revision. 

I had everything planned, thought about everything except what has actually taken place.

Our beloved homeland is burning! 

Behind this nightmare is a long political farce.

The family is now scattered all over the world. Stories of harrowing ordeals at the border crossing, loss of worldly possessions, and an unimaginable degree of stress and fear.

And we are constantly reminded that we are among the lucky ones!

Though safely distant from the fray, perpetually tied to our phones, grasping for any scrap of news from home; from our loved ones on scrambled lines with poor reception.

Two Gazelles from Home^[1]

You dance inside my glass mug

Turning the water crimson

I inhale your vapour and taste home

I tell my stories to the date palms

I write my songs to the sun 

Hiding in your water

White, Blue, and hot orange

A carnival of harmony

I cross the bridge on foot

And walk through the marketplace

The place and space is mine

Since my first breath of life

I greet everyone by name

Wave to our old neighbour 

On his deck chair

Guided by the aroma

Of the fenugreek pudding on the stove

I reach my port of call

When I can’t see your beaming face on the horizon

How can I mend my soul?

What should a girl do

When she cannot swim 

And the bridge is blocked?

When the confluence is a memory

How can I find my compass?

Farewell to Everything Green

I stretch my hand to reach you

Come closer

I feel you near 

I smell your sweetness

My heartbeats are painfully racing

Is it because my brain is running?

Ah! How cruel are the moments

When they are filled with thorns

My roses are dead

My gardenia breathed its last kiss in the air 

And succumbed to its fate

Even the resilient cactus

Went 

Scared to live alone in the vast emptiness

I am trying to talk to you like I used to 

When the evening creeps in with a smile

When I couldn’t tell from your giggly eyes 

If you needed a drink

Do you hear me now?

Or the sounds of war have  

Deafened you forever

Maybe if I read my calming verse

And curse the devil 

A thousand times

I open my eyes 

To find all this the union of all my nightmares

^[1] Referring to a popular Sudanese tea brand (Al-Gazaltain Tea / شاي الغزالتين)

*

Eiman El-Nour is Associate Professor in English Literature at Neelain University and Ahfad University. She is also Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. She specialises in teaching African Literature and her main research themes include African women’s writing, Sudanese literature and Sudanese orality.

This is the third and last in a series of co-translations, by Nina Youkhanna and Elliott Colla, of work by the towering Syrian poet Muhammad al-Maghut. Read the first poem, ‘Stars and Rain,’ here, and the second, ‘Song for Bab Touma,’ here.

By Muhammad al-Maghut

Translated by Nina Youkhanna and Elliott Colla

Three spears beneath the rain…

Three spears in my heart…

These are my final songs

This is the anthem of defeat.

O my migrant blue birds,

You are cold like frost

You remind me of night and swollen breasts in autumn

Of extinguished windows in the village…

And the sobs of soldiers in strange cities.

I am done

Smoke rises from my heart.

O bleak sky of ink:

Is there no passing cloud?

No small shack in the foothills of pain?

I sleep on thorn, while they sleep on silk

I write on woman, on stars, on desire

Adoring litter in the streets

I am sick of you, Beirut,

You silken cancer.

No woman, no freedom

No honor, no wealth

Can rid my heart of this despair

Let me die on mountaintops

Let me flutter like an eagle underfoot.

You, my enemies and loved ones

You who read me on saddles and bareback

You who feed on my sorrow like fierce dogs

I will throw this pen to the wind

Bury it like a bird

In white snow

And depart on a horse of ink

Never to return…

سماء الحبر الجرداء

..ثلاثة رماحٍ تحت المطر

..ثلاثةُ رماح في قلبي

هذي هي أغنياتي الأخيرة

.هذا هو نشيدُ الانكسار

يا طيوري الزرقاء المهاجرة

إنك باردةٌ كالصقيع

تذكرينني بالليل والأثداء المحتقنة في الخريف

..بنوافذ القرى المطفأة

.وبكاء الجنود في المدن الغربية

لقد انتهيت

الدخان يتصاعد من قلبي

يا سماء الحبر الجرداء

أما من غيمة عابرة؟

أما من عرزال صغير على سفوح الألم؟

أنام على الشوك، وينامون على الحرير

أكتب عن المرأة والنجوم والشهوة

وأعشق فضلات الشوارع

لقد سئمتك يا بيروت

يا سرطاناً من الحرير

لا المرأة ولا الحرية

لا الشرف ولا المال

يزيل هذا اليأس من قلبي

دعيني احتضر فوق الجبال

.دعيني أرفرف كالنسر بين الأقدام

وأنتم يا أعدائي وأحبائي

يا من تقرؤنني فوق السروج والصهوات

يا من تقتاتون على حزني كالكلاب الضارية

سأقذف هذا القلم إلى الريح

سأدفنه كالطائر

بين الثلوج البيضاء

وأمضي على فرس من الحبر

…ولن أعود

*

Muhammad Al-Maghut (1934-2006), was a Syrian poet, playwright, and journalist. He is one of the pioneers of the Arabic prose poem.

Nina Youkhanna and is a doctoral student in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University.

Elliott Colla is associate professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University. He is author of Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity, and essays on modern Arab literature, culture and politics. He has translated works of contemporary Arabic literature, including Ibrahim Aslan’s novel, The Heron, Idris Ali’s Poor, Ibrahim al-Koni’s Gold Dust, and Rab‘i al-Madhoun’s The Lady from Tel Aviv. For full access to scholarly publications, visit: http://www.elliottcolla.com