For the next few months, ArabLit will be running a series of interviews and essays on Iraqi poetry: with poets, critics, translators, and others. 

Basim al-Ansar: ‘Poetry Is the Source of All the Arts’ 

Poet Basim Alansar was born in Baghdad in 1970. He has been publishing his poetry since the early 1990s and, since 1998, has made his home in Denmark. In 2009, he the only Iraqi poet to be named one the Hay Festival’s “Beirut39,” a list of 39 promising Arab authors under 39. He said:

Poetry is the source of all the arts, and literature and science. It’s the spirit of existence, the meaning of our lives. And I meditate a lot on the essence of existence and the meaning of life. This is perhaps what made me predisposed to poetry.

Read more and explore his poetry.

Khaled al-Maaly: Poetry Worldwide Has No Boundaries

Poet and publisher Khalid al-Maaly was born in as-Samawa, Iraq in 1956; he left Iraq in 1979 and ended up in Cologne, Germany in 1980, where he founded the publishing house Al-Kamel Verlag. He writes poetry in Arabic and German, and has translated works by a number of Arab poets. 

Of course there is contemporary Iraqi poetry; residence means nothing within this framework. But what is the state of this poetry or culture in general? In today’s world, Iraqi culture is scattered and torn. There are no serious or oppositional magazines, and there are very few serious publishing houses; the situation is not leading to a firm footing or growth for cultural traditions. You cannot count on the activities of official or semi-official institutions in Iraq; they are, regrettably, almost dead.

Read more and explore his poetry.

Sarah Irving has taken her first shot at videotaping a live event:

As Irving notes over at her blog, “It features [Sabreen] Kadhim reading Why Write This Poem and Water My Heart With A Jonquil in their original Arabic, followed by [Scottish poet Krystelle] Bamford reading the translation of …Jonquil and then her own poem Wake.”

She also wrote: “Not only was their poetry – in Arabic, in translation to English, and in original English – beautiful and moving, but we also got to hear a little about the pain and horror of life in Baghdad and how it helps to shape Kadhim’s poetry. And, despite that, we also got to witness how young women the world over, whatever circumstances they live in, write about love, relationships and how irritating men can be, as well as more melancholy subjects.”

The video:

“A Damaged Soul” is a new poem by Iraqi poet Sabreen Kadhim, translated by Ghareeb Iskander, who answered questions this week about Iraqi poetry.

A Damaged Soul

By Sabreen Kadhim

Deeply, my soul was writing something

or singing

or sobbing

or dancing

or bleeding

I don’t know..

Deeply, I was              dying.

Ghareeb Iskander is an Iraqi poet living in London. He has published collections of his own work (Sawad Basiq, Mahafat Alwahm, Af’a Gilgamesh), criticism on Arabic poetry, and translations of poets both from Arabic to English (Badr Shakir al-Sayyab) and English to Arabic (Derek Walcott). 

Iskander has also been involved in the Reel Iraq project, along with Ryan van Winkle and Lauren Pyott, who were part of last week’s Iraqi poetry feature. He answered questions about his own poetry and the festival:

ArabLit: You participated in Reel Iraq. What did you most enjoy about this experience? What did it bring, as a literary festival — to its authors and its audiences — that was different from other literary festivals?

Ghareeb Iskander: Back in January 2013 I was invited by Ryan van Winkle, the literary manager of the Reel Festival, and Dan Gorman co-founder of the Reel Festival, to join a poetry translation workshop called Found in Translation with four poets based in Scotland (John Glandy, Jen Hadfield, Krystelle Bamford and William Letford) and four Iraqi poets (Sabreen Kadhim, Zahir Mousa, the Kurdish poet from Kirkuk Awazan Nury and me).

The translations have been done literally through Lauran Pyott (Arabic / English) Hoshang Waziri (Kurdish / English), and Dina Mousawi helped in interpreting between the poets. In Shaqlawa in Erbil we did quite few translations. And as poets we had to work poetically on these translations. It was like an intensive course, but it was really useful and enjoyable. This is indeed what was special, enjoyable, and therefore different about this festival.

At that time we were invited to read our original and translated poems in the Erbil Literature Festival, held by the British Council, to promote the exchange of British and Iraqi writing and give opportunities for the Iraqi audiences to experience the presentations of contemporary literature. It also offered the British writers and poets a chance to further their knowledge and experience of the Iraqi modern literature. Therefore, the advantage I suppose was for both sides: the writers and the audiences.

I am hoping to repeat the same experience when I go for a poetry reading at Edinburgh International Book Festival.

AL: Are there particular characteristics, or challenges, do you think, when translating Iraqi (Arabic) poetry into English? That are different from translating other Arabic poetries? 

GI: I think so. Even though Iraqi Arabic poetry is almost at the same standard linguistic level in all the Arab world, there are cultural, social and political and even poetic differences.

As a translator, you have to know these characteristics and differences to convey them to different linguistic, social and cultural systems. These differences also exist in poetry from the same country. A translator has to understand the nature of the poetry he / she is going to translate; for example, translating Adonis, whose poetry is stylistically based on using abstract images and semantically on using philosophical, deep, and sometimes even ambiguous ideas, differs from translating Muhammad al-Maghut, whose poetry is based stylistically on the narrative images and semantically on using common and everyday issues.

I think as every poem has its own circumstances during its writing; its translation has the same conditions. In translation, we don’t only convey the linguistic system of the source text to a different linguistic level of the target text. Especially in poetry, we convey all levels (linguistic and non-linguistic) which are melted to build a poem. In that sense, what applies to the Syrian poets applies to the Iraqi and Egyptian poets, etc.

AL: You recently wrote about translating Sayyab into English. Why hasn’t Sayyab received more attention in English? Have you translated any of his poems into English?

GI: When I decided to study the translations of Sayyab’s poetry, I was shocked when I found that there’s just one book in English about the pioneer of modern Arabic poetry!

The only book is Placing the Poet by Terri DeYoung, an academic study about his life and poetry. Yes, there are a few anthologies and journals specialized in Arabic literature in English which published some of his poems, especially his famous poem “Unshodt al-Matar” [Rain Song]. I studied its translations into English and translated the poem myself, and I have recently published a book about it supported by the Iraqi Cultural Centre in London (ICCL). The ICCL also commissioned John Glandy and I to translate poems by Hasab al-Sheikh Ja’far, an Iraqi leading poet living in Baghdad.

The dearth of translations of Sayyab into English is part of the lack of translation institutions and publishers specialized in translating Arabic literature. I think without these institutions and publishing houses we cannot make any significant progress in this domain.

AL: What about issues in translating your own poetry? Do you feel there are things that come across differently, or have different weight, as you listen to the poems in English and in Arabic?

GI: I think any literary translation should be different from/to both the source and the target languages. A translation is, as it is said, the third language. It’s the result of the dialogue between the source and target languages. A translator who masters this dialogue which is based on his /her knowledge of original and translated texts linguistically and culturally and it also depends on the condition of the process and the psychological state of the translator.

AL: Is there a national “Iraqi” poetry? Or many Iraqi poetries?

GI: As you know Iraq is a multicultural country: Arab, Kurd, Turkmen, Assyrians, Sabeans, Shabaki, Yazidis. We cannot imagine any culture, no matter how marginal it is, that occurs without poetry. But there are two ‘main’ poetries in Iraq: Arabic poetry which is part of Arabic poetry in general, and Kurdish poetry which is presented in Iraq through the works of some important Iraqi -Kurdish poets such as Abduallah Quran and Shirko Bekas.

AL: Where do you find your readership? Are they still in Baghdad? Or in London, Cairo, Beirut, elsewhere?

GI: I am an Iraqi poet writing in Arabic, and most of my books were published in Beirut and Baghdad. Some people have read me through the English translations of my poems (e.g. Chariot of Illusion 2009 in London as a part of Exiled Writers Ink project).  I worked with John Clarke, a London-based poet, and we translated each other’s poems, which we presented at the Poetry Café in 2010 as a part of the Oriental Forum’s events. And as previously mentioned, other poems were translated into English as part of Reel Iraq by John Glendy and Jen Hadfield. I am working now with the English poet Chrys Salt to translate a selection of poems which we will present in the Wigtown Festival in October.

AL: Whose work, of contemporary poets, do you admire and find sustenance in? How do you hear about new poets?

GI: Most my readings now are about English poetry, not just British.  I have just translated into Arabic the last poetry book of Derek Walcott. It is now in print. I often re-read Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Auden, and Philip Larkin etc.  And the classic Arabic poets such as Abu Nuwas and parts of Abu Tamam and al-Mutanabbi. But from time to time I reread my favorite Arabic contemporary poets such as Sayyab, Adonis, etc. In terms of current poetry scene, I attend events held by the Poetry Café, Poet in the City, Arabic cultural centers, etc, and read reviews about new poetry books in magazines and newspapers in English and Arabic.

AL: How do you stay in touch with the poetry communities in Iraq? Was that part of the appeal of the Reel Festivals? Do you feel part of the poetry communities in London?

GI: I often travel to Iraq and I have remained in touch with the poetry communities. The Reel Festival introduced me to new poets, but more importantly I established a good link with British poets.

Ghareeb Iskander also shared a poem he translated by Sabreen Kadhim:

“A Damaged Soul”

Previous Thursdays:

August 1: Basim al-Ansar: ‘Poetry Is the Source of All the Arts’ 

August 8: Khaled al-Maaly: Poetry Worldwide Has No Boundaries

August 15: Between Iraqi and Scottish Poetries: The Closest Thing to Magic One Could Hope to See 

Artist and writer Joy Garnett (@joygarnett) is working on a book about her grandfather, Ahmed Zaki Abushady, the Egyptian poet and bee scientist. She answered a few questions about AZ Abushady, his work, and her book project:

ArabLit: When did you first become interested in your grandfather’s life and work (in a serious way)? What role did family stories play? Can you describe your current book-project and what it will encompass?

AZ Abushady as a young man. 1909.

Joy Garnett: The book is a family memoir and an adventure story – a love story – that focuses on Abushady’s life, his work as a poet and bee scientist, and his premature death in relative obscurity in the US. It’s not a biography in the conventional sense. I have an inside story to offer, told through family members and Abushady’s own voice. My discovery of  an archive containing his letters and decades of correspondence was a pivotal moment. They reveal how his personal story is entangled with political and cultural conflicts played out from 1922 to 1946 in Egypt. Central to the story is the point of view of my aunt Safeya, the source of so much of this material. She is Abushady’s oldest daughter and the last living family link to that time. So, I am telling an idiosyncratic story partly through her, and in a way that I think anyone will relate to, whether or not they’re interested in Egypt. Specialists in Modern Arabic poetry and Egypt between the wars will, I hope, be interested as well.

I grew up hearing stories my mother told me about her childhood in Alexandria. Abushady loomed large, but his significance was related in broad strokes. It was all a bit vague and romantic. I was in college when I started to get a real sense of who my grandfather was. I started studying fusha at McGill’s Institute of Islamic studies and got into a conversation with an Egyptian classmate. She set me straight.

When I finally got to Egypt, it was on a student loan. I enrolled in the American University in Cairo’s summer language program. I was twenty. I made a point of looking for Abushady’s books and asking questions about him. I started to figure out who my family was. Once back at the Institute, I sought out critical articles about his poetry, but this was premature. The bulk of critical writing in English was still being written.

In my twenties, I stopped studying Arabic and Abushady altogether. I decided to pursue an art career instead. There was a point when I realized it was either him or me, and I had to make a choice. Many years passed where I barely thought about him, and then a few years ago I felt the pull. Even dead, Abushady is a force of Nature.

Abushady’s student ID card, from Medical School in Cairo.

When my mother, aunt, and uncle started to grow old and sick, I was jolted back into thinking about this project. I taped interviews with them.  I had a day job in a museum library that gave me free access to things like JSTOR and interlibrary loans. And of course, this time around I have the Internet.

I’ve spent the past couple of years traveling to different archives and doing research independently to try to piece together the many parts of Abushady’s life, which is not easy. As a physician, bacteriologist, beekeeper, agricultural and social reformer, poet and publisher, he defies categorization. I want to bring together what I’ve discovered about his main achievements in a single narrative. I would like to show the extent of his influence on Modern Arabic poetry as well as his impact on bee husbandry in England and Egypt. For him, poetry and bees were deeply interconnected. But of course, no one in Arabic literature circles knows much about his bee science contributions and vice versa. The connections are interesting.

AL: Does it get into other family history? For instance, your great-grandmother’s Cairo literary salons? 

JG: There are some colorful characters in the extended family. My great-grandfather, Maitre Muhammed Abushady Bey, was a big lawyer and a pal of Sa’ad Zaghlul. Legend has it that he could get anyone off no matter how serious the offense. His milieu included many writers and poets who exerted an early influence on his young son. I’ve had difficulty extracting more than a few details from that earlier time. I’ve had better luck with the period following Abushady’s return to Egypt in 1922  after ten years living in England. A creative DIY urban scene greeted him, and he was perfectly suited for it. Our close cousins through my great-grandmother, Amina (née Nagib) were the painters and satirists Seif and Edham Wanly, who were integral to the Egyptian artist “scene” in Alexandria. They were part of my grandfather’s circle, which included poets, writers, journalists, cartoonists, calligraphers, painters, sculptors, composers, etc. The Wanly brothers provided illustrations and cartoons for Abushady’s various publications. Edham was very close with my aunt, and they exchanged letters regularly until his death in 1959.

There was also an evil stepmother, an atheist grifter, several instances of unrequited love and a string of tragic, youthful suicides. There are probably too many intrigues to include in one book.

I made an unexpected discovery concerning my grandmother, Abushady’s first wife, Annie. They met when he was a medical student in London, and she was English, of course. Her maiden name was Bamford. It turns out that she was descended from the radical labor organizer, Samuel Bamford, who was a poet in the Lancashire dialect. Her father was a member of the Oddfellows, a centuries-old mutual organization that presaged trade unions. So she came from a long line of radical working class poets who believed in things like financial support for working people and free healthcare for the poor. I believe Annie had a significant influence on Abushady’s vision for social reform. She may have provided the inspiration for his feminism. He was promoting women’s suffrage in Egypt in the 1930s! And he named his two daughters after Huda Sha’arawi and Safeya Zaghul. He actually wanted to institute the principles of England’s Co-operative Movement in Egypt, which shows his romantic, against-all-odds brand of idealism. He was a Wafdist like his father, and as a nationalist he wanted, of course, to see an end to the British occupation. So his Anglophilia was complex, if not conflicted.

AL: Do you remember when you first read his poetry? To what extent are you/the reader interested in it as poetry, and to what extent as part of his story (as an Apollo founder, as an experimenter, an innovator)? What about his other works, literary criticism & historical works & theatre? Will some of his translated work be a part of your book? Do you think some of his works, translated, would interest English-language readers today? Or, re-issued, Arabic readers today?

JG: I can’t speak to what would interest English-language or Arabic readers today. Poetry as a rule attracts a special readership. Arabic poetry of that period is of great interest to scholars. I tried to read Abushady’s poetry while I was at McGill. The Institute has a number of volumes of his poetry in their library. But it was rough going. There was no way, and there is still no way that I, or even many native Arabic speakers, can get a handle on what he was enacting in the Arabic language through poetry. The only people I know who can easily read the poetry of the period and who know and feel what he was doing with language are Arabists and linguists. The rest of us may have to take their word for it. Sadly, most of the translated excerpts I’ve found in dissertations and such are inadequate if not downright awful. It’s probably the most difficult thing to do, to translate poetry. You have to know both languages intimately, and you have to be a poet.

But I do know someone who meets all of these criteria, and who has agreed to translate one of Abushady’s love poems for the book. So that’s very exciting. Apparently, love poetry was his strong suit. When he published his diwan Zaynab in 1924, it was new, fresh — unlike anything that had been done. It helped open the way for what developed into an era of creative experimentation in poetry.

AL: How would you describe the influence of the Apollo, in Egypt and beyond, especially considering such important figures as Kamel Kilani, Abu-Qassem El-Shebbi, Ahmed Shawqi were involved? What role did your grandfather play?

JG: In the Arab world, poetry was stagnating. People were aware, whether they were happy about it or not, of the new kinds of writing being produced elsewhere in the world. There was a very real interest in Modernism across all the arts. Abushady’s vision was for a truly contemporary Egypt. He believed the only way forward was through hybridity and inclusiveness, discussion and debate. In Apollo he published criticism and reviews as well as poetry. He also rather infamously published monographs authored by himself and others on topics such as poverty, religious faith, women’s suffrage, and atheism.

When the great Bengali poet and Nobelist Rabindranath Tagore visited Egypt in 1926, he stayed with Ahmed Shawqi. There is a very moving passage in one of my grandfather’s diaries about their meeting, and about their shared belief that poetry offered a universal language. Abushady really believed that international peace could be achieved and that poetry played an active role in the process.

Apollo’s Society, some members posing in the garden in 1935.

Abushady’s poetry journal Apollo (1932-34) stopped publication for financial reasons after only two years, but its influence was disproportionate to its run. The group of poets, writers and artists he assembled around it, which he called “Apollo’s Society,” and the work they produced, represents the first wave of Modernism in Arabic poetry. And that wave was sustainable. The journal was also unique in that it reached out to writers beyond Egypt’s borders. Abu-Qassem El-Shebbi, as you mentioned, the great Tunisian poet whose verse became popular again in Tunisia and Egypt during the revolutions of 2011, published his poetry for the first time in Apollo.

Abushady generally played an avuncular and diplomatic role, encouraging young poets like El-Shebbi, and publishing their work at a time when the more established, conservative publications refused to do so. Shawqi was the éminence grise, bestowing a certain validation and authority. After Shawqi passed away, Khalil Mutran took his place as the president of Apollo’s Society. So while there was a new vision and encouragement of creative risk-taking, there was also a sense of history and lineage. The intention to link with tradition was made clear through the involvement of these esteemed, elder poets.

AL: And for you, how does this research/writing fit into the rest of your work? Visual art, cultural appropriation/borrowing? How does it resonate with your other projects?

JG: I have always been interested in the archive, and my work as a visual artist, whether painting or new media, has long been research-based. In other words, the contents of the archive I’m researching determines to a large extent the nature of the resulting project. The earliest instance I can think of where I was conscious of this way of working was in the late 90s, when I was compiling declassified images and films of US atomic tests and producing paintings and agitprop. I decided to organize the many links to source material that I had amassed in the form of a website: http://TheBombProject.org  For some years I continued to work on it and add to it. Now it stands as an archive of the project itself, and to the time prior to the advent of RSS feeds and social media, when people aggregated links on static websites.

Now I find that I am dealing with a large, ungainly and fragile physical archive, the Abushady archive amassed by my mother and aunt. It’s extraordinary that it exists at all, and I’ve only recently become aware of how extensive the material is. I’m actually still unearthing parts of it. The fact is, no one in my family for several generations has ever thrown anything away. I have ephemera from 1930s Egypt that includes movie tickets and playbills. I have visas, student ID cards, and death notices. Abushady kept carbons of seemingly every letter he ever sent, and he saved every response. In some instances he collated the full correspondence of several years in chronological order. I found personal letters in both English and Arabic, cables, sketches, and of course, an enormous number of photographs. The visual information tells a story all its own, of course, and has been essential to my writing this book. But it is massive enough, visually startling and significant so as to present a separate project.

So, this is the archive that I am dealing with as a visual artist. After I organize it all, I will need to scan it and digitize it online. Essentially, the project is a portable museum, an open access, virtual Abushady museum. I proposed this project for post-doctoral work, and I have a place offered me at Winchester School of Fine Art at the University of Southampton, in their PhD program for visual artists. It is a program that emphasizes interdisciplinary research across the arts. I am looking for funding so that I can start. In the meantime, I have a book to write.

Front cover of Apollo, Feb 1934 issue.

Dunya Mikhail, former literary editor at The Baghdad Observer is the author of the Griffin-shortlisted collection The War Works Hard, trans. Elizabeth Winslow, as well as the Arab American Book Award-winning Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea. Mikhail has six poetry collections in Arabic; the most recent one is The Iraqi Nights (Mesopotamia Press, Baghdad, 2013), which should be forthcoming from New Directions next year; this year, she was also named a Kresge fellow for literary arts, and she generously agreed to be part of our ongoing series on Iraqi poetry:

ArabLit: How do you see your work as fitting in to the history or histories of Iraqi poetry? What traces of Iraqi or other Arab poets can we find in sifting through your language or your relationship to language? Have you ever thought of yourself as being of a particular “school” or generation of poets? Are there poets with whom you particularly identify, either because of their work or their biographies?

Dunya Mikhail: My poetry was first published in the Iraqi media in the 1980s. For that reason, critics referred to me as one of the ’80s generation of poets. The Iraq-Iran war (1980-1988) had great influence on our poetry, such that we were also called the war generation. When that war ended, critics began to prepare their theories for a “post-war generation.” However, we had only a short break of peace before other wars started: the invasion of Kuwait and Desert Storm.

In response, I published an article in the Baghdad Observer, reminding those critics that there might be no post-war generation, as the war seem be to be contiguous. It was an ironic article, in which I objected to the whole situation. I had some trouble as a result: an official came to my office at the newspaper and asked me for further explanation. But, at the time, the managing editor supported me and the case ended with a warning to “be careful what you write.”

I am not a real fan of dividing poets into generations, as I believe that poetry is an individual experience and its relation to any grouping comes later, but I’ll use the term since it’s a tradition in Iraq. During college, I used to share my poetry with other poets of my generation, such as Adnan al-Sayegh, Abd al-Razzaq al-Rubaie, and Reem Qias Kuba. We didn’t have MFA programs in Iraq, but our meetings, sharing, and feedback served as informal MFA. I also identified with writers from the previous generation, such as the fiction writer Lutfiya al-Dulaimi.

We attended weekly readings at the Union of Iraqi writers on Wednesdays and watched movies at the cinema club on Thursdays. Most of Iraqi poetry has been written by men — you can count the female Iraqi poets on your fingers — and most of the Iraqi men, including poets, were soldiers in the battlefield. This was not by choice: During the war, men were called to serve in the army and would be killed if they refused.

As soldiers, male poets used vocabulary related to face-to-face battles. I am not talking here about the tropes of “heroism,” which was a feature used by some regime-friendly poets who helped mobilize soldiers. As a female poet, I had a different style of writing, and my war poetry was more concerned with the impact of war on the home, on the street, and on the soul.  We witnessed a lot of trash literature in the 1980s, when the Iraqi soldier was depicted as a hero with no fears. The other trouble with Arabic poetry was the systematic amoodi poetry which required certain rhymes and rhythms that had been established by al-Farahidi in the 3rd century.

I enjoyed amoodi poetry only when Um Kalthum sang it; otherwise, I was fascinated by translated poetry from other languages because, among other things, it didn’t have such a restricted system and didn’t sound “perfect.” They called what we wrote “prose poetry” (qasidat al-nathir) and I disagree with that term. For me, writing is either prose or poetry, and simply because poetry has no rigid rhythms and rhymes, that doesn’t mean we should call it “prose poetry.”

AL: What poets do you read for sustenance? Which poets formed your reading- and listening-world when you were young, both popular (colloquial) and literary (fos7a) poets? What was your family’s relationship to poetry?

DM: My favorite Iraqi poet has long been Sargon Boulus, although recently I’ve also loved work by Taleb Abdul Aziz. I never liked everything a poet writes, not even my own poetry, which is why I only publish selections of what I write. I’ve also been fascinated by Muhammad Khudayir’s work of creative nonfiction, Basrayatha. But I was most influenced by mythology books from around the world.

My family didn’t know I was writing poetry until my first book was published (in 1987). It helped me that they didn’t interfere, and they were supportive whenever I wanted to buy books. They thought that I would specialize in math, because I was good at it. My father wanted to send me to America to study when I graduated from secondary school. The government didn’t give me permission to leave the country because the law was, “You can’t study abroad at your expense during the time of war.”

I went, instead, to study English literature at the University of Baghdad so that I would learn English and be ready when the law changed. I graduated and the law didn’t change, but I became so busy with friends and poetry that I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t leave until 1995, after the publication of my Diary of A Wave Outside the Sea, which was full of metaphors about the war. Another official questioned me, and this time the warning seemed serious.  I left in a hurry with one suitcase.

AL: Do you remember when you first began to think of yourself as a poet? And when you committed to that as your identity? And why? 

DM: The first time I thought of myself as a poet was in secondary school; I used to give poems to my classmates as gifts for their birthdays. But I had my first experience with literature on the roof of my childhood home in Baghdad, where we would sleep summer nights. My grandmother used to tell me animals fables, which fascinated me. I asked her for a book of those fables, as I wanted to read them myself and see pictures, but she kept telling me that she didn’t have the book, and that they were “just stories told from generation to generation.”

But in the morning, when the sun and some flies woke me up, I went downstairs and started to write those fables in my notebook my own way, and I illustrated them.  Then, when I was about twelve years old, I wrote what I thought of as a poem for first time. That was on a ship on the Tigris River with family and relatives. My cousin, who was standing there with me, made a paper boat from that poem and threw it into the river. We enjoyed watching it drift away.

AL: How do you continue to relate to the world of Iraqi poetry, both fellow-poets, poetry-critics, and poetry-readers? Through the internet?

DM: In the suitcase I left Iraq with, there were, among other things, handwritten letters by friends and other writers. I didn’t use the computer until I came to America. It was like magic: How you open the windows inside windows and they stay there, reduced or enlarged. Now, like others, I communicate through the internet. I love to communicate with poet Fadhil al-Azzawi on matters of poetry.

AL: What do you think the current place of Iraqi poetry is within all of Arabic poetry? (Do you think of it as sharing any characteristics with Palestinian poetry, because of the shared exile?) Has Iraqi poetry changed significantly in the last generation, do you think, with so many poets in exile around the world?

DM: Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once said, “Be Iraqi to become a poet.” The challenge, however, for Iraqi and Palestinian poets, is how to speak about the matters of the country and the world without falling into what’s narrowly termed as “political poetry.” Exile opened new horizons for poets, especially those who deal with foreign languages. The second language makes you more sensitive towards your native one, so you start to think more carefully about the way you write. Also, Iraqi poets suffered from censorship and from exile in their own homeland.

Previous Thursdays:

August 1: Basim al-Ansar: ‘Poetry Is the Source of All the Arts’ 

August 8: Khaled al-Maaly: Poetry Worldwide Has No Boundaries

August 15: Between Iraqi and Scottish Poetries: The Closest Thing to Magic One Could Hope to See 

August 22:  Ghareeb Iskander on Iraqi Poetries and the ‘Third Language’ of Translation

August 22: Ghareeb Iskander’s Translation of Sabreen Kadhim’s ‘A Damaged Soul’

Selections of Mikhail’s poetry from Poetry International Web:

• THE WAR WORKS HARD  
• PRONOUNS 
• YOUR EMAIL 
• BAGS OF BONES 
• THE AIRPLANE 
• IRAQIS AND OTHER MONSTERS
• SHOEMAKER 

Iraqi poet Nazik al-Mala’ika is best known for the important role she played in the development and popularization of Arabic “free verse” (or taf’ila poetry) in the 1950s. But while she is well known as a pioneer, her verse itself is less well-known, and largely absent in translation. Emily Drumstra has translated one of al-Mala’ika’s poems for Jadaliyya, “Revolt Against the Sun,” and is currently at work on another translation. She talked about translating al-Mala’ika:

ArabLit: Why did you choose to translate al-Mala’ika? What drew you to her work, about the work itself and/or about her life? 

Emily Drumsta: I was initially drawn to al-Mala’ika because of her reputation as one of the pioneers of “free verse” (al-shi‘r al-hurr) in modern Arabic poetry. Most literary-historical accounts of Arabic poetic modernism cite her and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab as the pioneers of this new form, which is often erroneously equated with the English and French versions of “free verse” and vers libre. A more descriptive term for al-shi‘r al-hurr is “taf‘ila poetry,” named for the feet or metrical units that make up the lines. While many scholars have delved into al-Sayyab’s poetry at length to elaborate its formal and thematic features, very few seemed to have engaged with al-Mala’ika’s work on a similar level. I wanted to know what exactly were the forms that al-Mala’ika pioneered—the concrete, technical elements especially. How different were they from the traditional Arabic meters, often called the “Khalilian” meters, for the eighth-century scholar al-Khalil Ibn Ahmad. And what exactly made them “free”? How was this form of “free verse” similar to or different from the British and French versions? As I soon discovered upon reading al-Mala’ika’s criticism and poetry, there was very little that was “free” about taf‘ila poetry, and an immense and largely understudied discourse surrounds the question of “freedom” in poetry—a discourse with important social political implications.

In short, al-Mala’ika seemed to be an important turning-point figure—someone who earnestly sought to remake the familiar structures of pre-modern poetry without completely losing them, to transform Arabic poetry for a new century without completely unmooring it from its metrical roots. Among the modern poets of the 1950s and 60s, she seemed like one of the few who recognized that these metrical roots are precisely what has cemented poetry’s popular appeal in the Arab world, as well as its traditional reputation as the “register of the Arabs” (diwan al-‘arab).

AL: Can you talk a little bit about her importance to the poetry of her moment? Thus far, as I’ve asked poets about their influences, many have mentioned al-Sayyab, but no one (yet) al-Mala’ika. How do you see her space and place in Iraqi poetry, in Arabic poetry, in “world” poetry?

There is no question that al-Sayyab has had a much wider influence than al-Mala’ika. I’m not sure of the exact reasons for this (I’m sure there are many, each specific to a particular poet), but I think it is in part because al-Sayyab was much faster to embrace the language, symbols, and themes associated with “Tammuzi” poetry—that is, poetry that abandoned the tropes of Romanticism to explore myths of regeneration and renewal borrowed from the poetry and criticism of T.S. Eliot, James Frazer, and others.

In many ways al-Mala’ika actually fits better with the Arab Romantic poets than she does with the “modernists”: she is more concerned with articulating deeply felt emotions and sensations than she is with elaborating new models for cultural regeneration. And yet her concern for Arabic poetic form is also, I would argue, quite political. Unlike her modernist contemporaries, al-Mala’ika was not ready to throw out the old Arabic meters entirely. Instead, she sought to reconfigure and adapt them for a new era without letting poetry lose its “Arab-ness”—that is, its rootedness in the undulating long and short vowel patterns of the Arabic language. Without these undulations, the careful constructed-ness of poetry (shi‘r or nazm—literally, “arrangement”) would be little different from the “scattered-ness” of prose (in Arabic, nathr, which shares its root with the verb for “to scatter”). How does one transform something and simultaneously retain a trace of what it once was? Al-Mala’ika’s struggle with this paradox was very interesting to me.

Many other poets and intellectuals in the 1950s and 60s—among them Jabra Ibrahim Jabra–criticized al-Mala’ika for her rigidity and insistence on maintaining the taf‘ila or “foot” as the building block of Arabic poetry. In contrast with these critics, I think al-Mala’ika’s metrical stringency about has important political implications. As Ghassan Kanafani wrote of poetry from occupied Palestine in 1966, “The modernist poetry that we are now seeing in the Arab capitals is less able to spread as a form of literature commensurate with resistance than traditional poetry.” He was referring to the fact that the traditional, Khalilian meters facilitate the spread of poetry in popular venues—such as protests, marches, weddings, and funerals—by adding a dimension of performativity and collectivity to the verse. Meter facilitates memorization and transmission; it makes poetry easy to chant and repeat in large groups. When poetry abandons the traditional meters, it also abandons this popular appeal; it becomes limited to the sphere of an elite literary coterie. I think al-Mala’ika was actively aware of these things, and they go some way to explaining her rigidity where meter is concerned.

As far as “world” poetry is concerned, I must admit that though my degree is in Comparative Literature, I’m still not really sure I know what this means (besides being a euphemism for “Western” poetry). Arabic poetry has such a long and complex history; a major part of what interests me about al-Mala’ika is her immense concern for that history, its specificity, and its almost sacred status in Arab (and particularly Iraqi) culture.

AL: Why “Revolt Against the Sun”? What did you find in this work that made you want to share them with English-language audiences? What have you discovered as you translated, in terms of her work, its various strands, its trajectory? 

As a student of Arabic literature engaging with the politics of literary form, I’m interested in the ways tradition emerges in supposedly “modern” works—the concrete, technical, structural ways writers rework traditional or conventional elements for new purposes, whether in terms of form or thematic content. This type of reworking is what drew me to “Revolt Against the Sun.” In the Arabic poetic tradition, women poets were relegated almost exclusively to the realm of elegy, and have long been celebrated as excellent elegists—but only as elegists. It was supposed that women had a greater sensibility for grief, and were thus better able to capture and lament the experience of death in words. As a poet and scholar well schooled in the tradition, al-Mala’ika was certainly aware of this timeworn stereotype. But rather than outright reject it—rather than totally discard that traditional positionality—she both embraces and repurposes it in “Revolt”: the poem’s speaker takes on sadness not as a biological imperative, but as a form of defiance and refusal. “Sadness,” the speaker says, “is the form of my revolt and my resistance.” It is thus a poem in which form itself truly is political, as it offers a critique of the Arabic poetry’s historical gender/genre politics.

The reconfiguration of traditional tropes for modern purposes is also what drew me to “A Song for Humanity.” This very long poem uses the ancient topos of “crying over the ruins” (al-buka’ ‘ala al-atlal) to mourn the destruction — both psychological and material — wrought by the Second World War.

AL: US poet Adrienne Rich said she “suspected” that translations were not bringing al-Mala’ika across properly, saying, “One reads, guessing: is this or that poem actually more remarkable than translation can suggest? is it, in translation, bound, like Prometheus, on the rock of its its language and cultural references? Has the translation been timid, binding itself within the literal, or within an idea of Anglophone poetic language (e.g. ‘wondrous’) which, to an American eye and ear, seem artificial?” What do you feel Rich may or may not have been missing as she read Mala’ika in translation?

What a wonderful quote! I’m curious to know which translation(s) Rich is referring to here. Regardless though, I think she makes some important points about al-Mala’ika’s poetry in general, and about the “bounds” of Anglophone poetic language in particular. As I mentioned above, some of al-Mala’ika’s biggest literary influences were poets like John Keats, Lord Byron, and Thomas Gray. (She translated Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” and an excerpt from Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” into Arabic).

I think because she has generally been understood as a Romantic poet herself, translators have relied on the language of the British Romantics when carrying over her melancholy meditations into English. This often lends the English verse a flavor of sentimentality and “artificiality” that just isn’t there in the Arabic. Let’s take Rich’s “wondrous” as an example. Though I’m not sure which poem she’s referring to above, the original word is probably ‘ajib or some other variation on the root ‘ayn-jim-ba, which in Arabic lacks the lyrical resonance of “wondrous,” though “wonder” has long been the acceptable English equivalent. I myself struggled against the restraints of Anglophone lyricism when translating “Revolt Against the Sun,” as is probably evident in the translation. Of course, as it is with any translation, much of what Rich was “missing” when she read al-Mala’ika’s verse in English were the creative ways it reconfigured and repurposed the familiar elements and tropes of the pre-modern tradition: embracing the elegiac position as a defiant or resistant one, reworking the trope of “crying over the ruins” (al-buka’ ‘ala al-atlal), etc.

In these heady postmodern days, we tend to dismiss the political importance of Romanticism, not only as a Western movement, but also for its global aesthetic resonances. Many of the most “modernist” Arab critics and poets were profoundly influenced by the humanistic message of the Romantics—their commitment to ideals like liberty, freedom of expression, and the notion of poetry as a kind of prophecy. Adunis himself often returns to Jibran Khalil Jibran in both his critical and poetic work, and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra wrote volumes of essays on figures from William Blake and Lord Byron to the American Walt Whitman. (My favorite of these essays is titled “Byron and Satanism.”)

AL: As Erica Wright noted in Guernica around the time of al-Mala’ika’s death, there has been a good deal of Anglo attention to al-Mala’ika as a poet (a Google doodle, many obituaries in major newspapers), but not to her poetry. Why do you suppose she has been so little-translated?

ED: On a practical level, perhaps some of what explains the “Anglo attention” for al-Mala’ika is the fact that she studied in the U.S. on two separate occasions, first studying literary criticism at Princeton in 1950 (when it was still an all-male school!), then earning her Master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1956. In many ways, she was just as much a scholar of English poetry as she was a poet and critic working in Arabic. I think she might have readily admitted this.

There may also be a more general explanation for why there is more interest in the figure of the poet than in her poetry—not only in al-Mala’ika’s case, but as a general trend. In the West—both in academic and non-academic literary circles—I think we are more interested in the byline than in the specifics of the poetry. We are constantly hunting for resonances with our own lives, for easily digested kernels of knowledge about other cultures, but rarely have the patience for the intense language training that would sharpen our sensitivity to form and questions of audience, transmission, etc. These are the things that I find most interesting in al-Mala’ika’s poetry, this balance between tradition and regeneration, but they are also elements that are not necessarily available to all audiences.

A more practical reason why al-Mala’ika remains so little translated might be because translators are intimidated by the way she sought to combine the traditional metrical and popular aspects of Arabic poetry with a more expressive sensibility. This is something that’s quite difficult to translate, as it emerges more in the history surrounding the poetry than in the work itself. In other words, you either need to include a lot of footnotes, alter the meaning of the words significantly to achieve a similar sonic effect in English, or sacrifice the interesting structural features of the poetry altogether. I think as scholars and teachers of Arabic literature, if we’re going to include al-Mala’ika in our narratives of Arabic modernism (as we should), we ought to spend at least a little time with the mechanics of her poetry and explore the potential that form itself can communicate a political message.

An excerpt from al-Mala’ika’s ‘A Song for Mankind’:

Trans. Emily Drumsta

Also by al-Mala’ika:

“Revolt Against the Sun,” trans. Emily Drumsta, on Jadaliyya

“New Year,” trans. Rebecca Carol Johnson, on WWB

“Love Song for Words,” trans. Rebecca Carol Johnson, on WWB

Previous Thursdays:

August 1: Basim al-Ansar: ‘Poetry Is the Source of All the Arts’ 

August 8: Khaled al-Maaly: Poetry Worldwide Has No Boundaries

August 15: Between Iraqi and Scottish Poetries: The Closest Thing to Magic One Could Hope to See 

August 22: Ghareeb Iskander on Iraqi Poetries and the ‘Third Language’ of Translation

August 29: Dunya Mikhail: Writing Without Falling Into Narrow ‘Political Poetry’ 

Emily Drumsta is a Ph.D. student and Jacob K. Javits fellow in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. Her research interests include modern Arabic poetry, literature in French and Arabic from the Maghreb, postcolonial theory, and translation studies. Her translations have previously been published in Jadaliyya and Circumference magazine. 

On Friday, Prince Claus Fund organizers announced the winners of the 2013 awards. The “Principal Prince Claus Award went to Egypt’s “poet of the people,” Ahmed Fouad Negm:

Image from Prince Claus website.

According to the news release, Negm is honored:

…for creating true poetry in vernacular Arabic that communicates deeply with people; for his independence, unwavering integrity, courage and rigorous commitment to the struggle for freedom and justice; for speaking truth to power, refusing to be silenced and inspiring more than three generations in the Arab-speaking world; for the aesthetic and political force of his work highlighting the basic need for culture and humour in harsh and difficult circumstances; and for his significant impact on Arabic poetry bringing recognition to the rich literary potential of the colloquial language.

Negm, who is 84 this year, is a poet of unparalleled stature in Egypt: A 2011 movie, “Al Fagoumy,” explored Negm’s life; a 2012 feature on Al Jazeera did the same. (It’s on YouTube for some.) There are countless recordings of Negm reading his poetry live and, later, on TV. Negm is particularly well-known for his work with Egyptian composer Sheikh Imam.

Promotional material on Alwan for the Arts once stated that, “if the Internationale were to have been written in Arabic, its author would likely have been Ahmed Fouad Negm.”

Negm has been little-translated into English, perhaps because it is so tied to the Egyptian context, but some individual bloggers have made attempts to bring his work across languages. Walaa Quisay translated his “What’s Wrong With Our President?,” “Who Are They And Who Are We?” along with many others. There’s also a new Kindle book (March 2013) by Mohamed F. El-Hewie that promises analysis and translation of Negm’s work.

Negm has been consistently opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood, comparing them with Israeli settlers of late, while praising al-Sisi, calling him a “second Nasser.”

Negm will receive his award in Amsterdam from Prince Constantijn while the other ten laureates will receive theirs from their respective countries’ Dutch ambassador.

Other Prince Claus recipients include Chileann writer Alejandro Zambra and Pakistani visual artist Naiza Khan.

But all 11 laureates are scheduled to travel for the ceremony: “For the first time ever, all 11 laureates will be present at the ceremony in Amsterdam,” the news release states, which will be held on December 11, coincidentally the birthday of Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz.

Emirati poet and filmmaker Nujoom al-Ghanem (@NujoomAlghanem) has published seven poetry collections and directed and produced four films. She has toured the UK with her poetry and has won several filmmaking awards, most recently for Amal:

ArabLit: You started out writing poetry, correct? Have you ever written stories? What made you jump from poetry to also producing films? 

Nujoom al-Ghanem: In the early days of my exploring writing forms I did write short stories, but this wasn’t the reason why I started making films. Basically, I decided to purse film for my higher education. I studied video production in Ohio University in the US, then went to School of Film in Griffith University in Brisbane Australia to do my master’s degree. I came back to my country full of passion and enthusiasm to make use of my learning and training in the professional world.

AL: What is similar between writing poetry and producing films? Is your poetry influenced by your filmmaking? Your filmmaking influenced by your poetry? 

NG: The similarity I would say not in the process or the technicality but the way we look at the aesthetic aspects and the approach to the story or character that is going to be filmed. I wrote poetry before I knew photography or learned cinematography. If there is an influence, it would definitely be the film that got inspired by the poetic way of observing and experiencing the world and reflecting it through the film-works. I think the poet doesn’t need to be a filmmaker in order to write, however, filmmakers need to learn how to be poets in approaching their ideas.

AL: When you have an idea, how do you know whether you want to express it in poetry or in film? 

NG: Ideas are born into their own forms and with their own characteristics, details, and features. The birth moment might help in deciding the outcome of the idea, however, and from personal experience, I realized that most of the time, the structure of the writing suggests the sort of artistic frame for the piece of work/idea.  There is something else that makes it more likely to be either a poem or a film, which is the language. A film would start with logical set of shots/scenes, whereas a poem will probably start with series of rhythmic words even if the style I’m adopting is free verse rather than metric. The film script is a technical document even if the final outcome is arty or poetic, whereas poetry is a clear aesthetic form that has its own sound and shape.

AL: How is your process for writing poetry similar to / different from creating a film? 

NG: Creating a film is a long, collective, technical and multi-stage process that requires preparation, planning, and consent agreements with other parties who I would like to call team members or shareholders. It’s more likely to be industrial rather than an individual sort of craft. Poetry is a very personal and a solo experience that is best performed when the writer is isolated or in a solitude so he/she could be in a good environment to produce – a sanctuary that is so familiar and intimate. Of course, not all the writers are the same, but most of the writers need to be on their own to work, in a cell, and sometimes distant.

AL: Would you ever stop writing poetry and focus entirely on film? Or vice versa?

NG: It’s not about making such decision, for poetry will always be part of the way I see things and the way I make my films.  I think one has to be sensible in following the inner call for the type of art the individual needs to produce. The form is just a frame-work.

AL: What other poets’ work is interesting to you? What other filmmakers? 

NG: I’m still fascinated by the classical Haiku poetry and feel that no human art could reach that intensive and comprehensive way of expression the way Basho, Buson, Issa, and Fuhaku have done in their amazing meditative way of noticing the things around them. Similarly in film I still feel amazed by the work of film masters such as Bergman, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Tarkovesky, Bresson, and others. This doesn’t mean that I’m cut off of the current cinema. In fact, I consider myself quite connected to today’s cinema and its movie-star directors. Maybe I’m nostalgic to evocative experiences and watching authentic cinema styles. Unfortunately, as in literature, the majority of what has been produced for the screen today becomes indifferent.

AL: You are writing scripts for fictional films — but not stories? You are not interested in writing stories or novels? 

NG: I had a personal dream that in the year 2013 I should publish my first novel. I’ve realized that I wrote a feature film script, which is equivalent in size and dramatic structure to a novel. I’m content that I’ve put together a massive fictional art-work that is ready to go to the next stage, which is production. In art, there is no limit or ceiling as long as you keep your own compass tuned towards the right direction.

Poetry:

“The World’s Heart” and “The Morning Starts with the Colour of Dust” by Nujoom al-Ghanem, trans. Khaled al-Masri

“Immigrant,” by Nujoom al-Ghanem, trans. Khaled Mattawa

More poetry on Jehat

A trailer for the film “Amal”:

This Friday, September 13, NYC’s Alwan for the Arts will host a salon, led by Mohamed Alwan, on Abul ‘Ala Al-Ma’ari. There will also be music by the Alwan Ensemble in celebration of the classical poetry of Al-Ma’ari, Al-Hallaj, Abu Nawas and the Maqam:

According to organizers:

This salon promises to be an enlightening evening of poetry and discussion with Iraqi-born Mohamed Alwan, who received his PhD in Arabic literature from the University of Indiana and taught at Georgetown, Harvard, and Tufts. The Alwan Ensemble accompanies this evening of poetics, delivering a transporting feast of well-loved songs, evoking the ambiances of Cairo, Baghdad, al-Quds and Aleppo, built around mesmerizing textures of rhythmic and improvisational intensity.

The Alwan ensemble includes George Ziadeh on ‘oud, vocals; Johnny Farraj on riqq, vocals; Zafer Tawil on qanun, violin, vocals; and Amir ElSaffar on santur, vocals. Tickets are $20 general admission; $15 students and seniors. More about tickets here.

Much has been written about al-Ma’ari; the Syrian poet has been translated here and there. His most well-known work, the Epistle of Forgiveness, ed. and trans. Geert Jan Van Gelder and Gregory Schoeler, is newly out from NYU Press.

I am generally not a fan of the translations that attempt rhyme schemes; I do particularly like Tarif Khalidi’s translation of al-Ma’ari’s “A Rain Cloud,” which appeared on the Angry Arab blog:

Although Iraqi writer Fadhil al-Azzawi is more widely known in English as a novelist (his The Last of the Angels, Cell Block Five, and The Traveler and the Innkeeper have been met with acclaim), al-Azzawi is perhaps better-known in Arabic as a poet. Both are true, as al-Azzawi’s work has moved between poetry and prose. He answered a few questions about his writing for our ongoing series on Iraqi poets and poetries:  

Fadhil al-Azzawi

ArabLit: A profile on Poetry International Web traces your earliest influences to the Qur’an, the Thousand and One Nights, and Turkish drunks singing their way home. Do you remember the first poems you read or heard that charged you with the desire to engage with this form? Or did you not separate out the idea of “poem” from the idea of “story”? What sort of writing did you first do as a teenager?

Fadhil al-Azzawi: I was still at an early age when I found my way to the fascinating world of the poetry. I remember also how I wrote my first poem. I read, in my schoolbook, a poem by Ma’rouf al-Rusafi, who was Iraq’s most famous poet at that time. The poem was short and simple, written in a traditional Arabic rhyme and rhythm, and it was about renewing friendship after a quarrel between two children:

Let us say we got to know each other just now!

Let us forget all what has happened between us!

In those years, families used to send children to the mosque to learn reading and Qur’an recitation before sending them to school. So I learned many parts of the Holy Book by heart. That helped me later to betterunderstand the classical literary texts.

The first book that filled my dreams with magic and fantasy was the Thousand and One Nights. I read it repeatedly and lived the erotic and heroic adventures of its figures. I found also a lot of pleasure in reading the ancient Arabic poems. And because I speak the Turkish language I discovered the charm of the Turkish quatrains, called “Khoriat” in Kirkuk, my hometown.

In primary school, I wrote a lot of poems, and at the age of sixteen I published my first poems in the literary magazines in Beirut and Baghdad.

AL: You mentioned that your mother (at your request) burned many of your poems when you went off to university. What was your family’s relationship to your poetry? And to poetry in general?

FA: Before leaving Kirkuk to study at university in Baghdad, I thought that all of what I had written before was merely a kind of “hand-training” at writing. I wanted to leave all that behind and begin anew. Before that, I had gotten from my mother one of the most important lessons of my life. When my mother knew from my schoolmates that I was writing poetry, and aiming to be a poet, she became angry and scolded me:

“We try to make you a man and work hard to secure your future, but you want to be a beggar.”

I replied: “A poet, not a beggar.”

She laughed at my naiveté: “And what is the real job of the Arab poets? Nothing but selling their praise poems, full of lies, to this sheikh or that governor, to this vizier or that king.”

I said: “I promise you I will not be like these people.”

In fact, my mother was not wholly mistaken. Most of the “traditional poets” in the past, but also in our modern times, used to put their poetry in the service of the dictators and despots.

In general, my family always supported me, and I think they were also proud to see people speak with respect about their son.

AL: Has your concept of poetry (what a poem is/isn’t) changed from when you were a teenager to today?

FA: I have never possessed a fixed “recipe” for what poetry is. Every time I sit down to write a poem, I face the problem of finding the right form for the poem I am planning to write. There are poets who spend a lifetime in writing the same poem. That means they repeat again and again the same form and language, and perhaps the same subject and the same theme in all their works. The poem that I write is different. Every poem should have its own idea, and necessarily every new idea will need a new structure or form. In fact, I try in every new poem to discover something new. I also like to play in my poems, not only with the language and the forms, but also with the meaning of the writing itself. If the concept of the poetry means writing poetry in a traditional form (as it is still possible in Arabic poetry) or in a modern form (free verse, prose poetry), I would say that I began writing my poems as a teenager in a modern form and am still using this form. But that reflects only a part of the truth about what I have really tried to achieve in every poem and every poetry book.

AL: You often cross genres. Is there a way in which certain ideas send you in the direction of a poem (or a story, or a novel)? Or do you figure it out as you are creating the work? Was there a tradition you drew on in crossing genres? Or were you aiming to use words in a new/different way?

FA: To turn an idea into a work of art, one needs to find the right genre for it. Anyhow, the idea will not count for too much before finding the appropriate literary form for it. Of course, there are ideas that can send you in different literary directions — of a poem or a short story or a novel — but the choice of the genre here depends on what are you going to say or to express in your work.

For example, when I was in jail, I wrote many poems about the prison life, but as poems they had to reflect or deal merely with certain images of prison life. But to say the whole truth about the real meaning of being in prison, of the complicated bond between the victim and his executioner, of the cycle of terror, I found myself writing my novel Cell Block Five. Anyhow, I often cross the barriers of genres to create a text that can be read in different ways: as a novel or a poem, as well as a short story or an essay.

My first published book in 1969 The Beautiful Creatures Of Fadhil al-Azzawi was a text in which I tried to unite different genres in one form. This was something new in modern Arabic literature, but it was not totally without roots in classical Arab literature. In most of the ancient prose texts, the authors mix lyrics with prose; in some cases, they even let their characters converse with one another in poetry.

AL: You founded a literary magazine, engaged with other poets and writers, and were part of a movement in a way that probably is unavailable to most young Iraqi poets today. Has Iraqi poetry shifted without those opportunities? Has it shifted with so many writers in internal and external exile?

FA: When we published the magazine Poetry 69 with its famous “Manifesto about Poetry,” we were attacked from all political and ideological sides: from the Ba’athists, who considered our manifesto as a direct challenge to their authority and their nationalist political and cultural project; from the communists, who saw in our manifesto “a Trojan Horse” for Western liberal ideology, because we highlighted the necessity of free and critical writing, and the importance of democracy in creating a new modern culture in Iraq and other Arab countries.

In the end, the authorities found no better way of facing us than of stopping us from publishing our magazine. Of course, the political and cultural conditions of Iraqi writers now inside and outside the country are very difficult; the exile-writers are scattered and most of them have gone astray; the others who are still living inside the country struggle only to survive.

In fact, we are now somewhere between comedy and tragedy. Under the dictatorship, we never lost the hope of changing the unjust regimes. After the occupation, we discovered how full of illusions we were. Suddenly, we found ourselves facing a large black void. There was nothing more to believe in. To be creative and to achieve something new and more human, you have to be able to dream and to hope. But the religious regime under the direct or indirect domination of the mullahs has done everything to destroy our dreams and hopes. That is the question.

AL: A few years back, you and Sinan talked about the place(s) of poetry in Iraqi life. Do you think poetry’s privileged position has shifted — in favor of novels and short stories? Or for other reasons? — during your life/worktime?

FA: Neither poetry nor fiction has nowadays a privileged position in the hearts and minds of the Iraqi readers. In fact, no one deals with the literature written after 2003 inside Iraq seriously. The new rulers, most of them religious, are against the modernity and do not read the contemporary texts on principle. The authentic literature in their opinion exists in the past alone. The texts and poems should have only one function: to praise Imam Ali, his son al-Hussein, and all the others in the prophet’s family.

Anyhow, we now have many novelists, and in the last five or six years many new Iraqi novels have been published and two of them (written outside Iraq) are shortlisted for the so-called Arabic Booker prize [the International Prize for Arabic Fiction]. But the number of those who still write poetry is also increasing in a very strange way. This happened because of the ease of publishing their poems in Internet. Of course, this development encouraged even the illiterates to be poets.

AL: There seem to be more ways to discover new Arabic novels than to discover new poetry. How do you discover new Iraqi and Arabic-language poets? What are you reading now that is exciting to you? Are there poems and poets to which you continually return throughout your life?

FA: Unfortunately, there is no real poetry to be discovered by those who stayed in Iraq. Most of the talented and good poets have left the country during the last two decades and obliged to live isolated from their readers. Even the good poets who stayed in the country preferred to resign, to seek refuge in what the Germans call “Die innere Emigration,” knowing that no one will care for what they could say, and worse than all that, they could be killed if they broke the sacred lines of the temple’s guardians.

Under the previous military dictatorships, the poets were always considered “dangerous” elements; their poems were no less powerful than rifles. Under the new regime, where the mullahs decide the type of the culture, the poets are considered “toothless wolves.” In a society emptied of millions of its best-educated people and morally destroyed, Allah’s voice silenced the poet’s howling.

Most of the books I read are books written in German or English. I read now one of the brilliant novels by the German novelist Thomas Lehr under the title “September” about 11 September and the occupation of Iraq.

The masters — who accompanied me throughout my whole life and from whom I can not learn enough — are so many that I feel ashamed to mention only some of them: Gilgamesh, Homer (The Odyssey), Dante (Inferno), Goethe (Faust), Imru’ul Qais in his erotic poems, Shakespeare in his plays, T.S.Eliot (The Waste Land).

More:

By Amira Abd El-Khalek: Fadhil al-Azzawi: ‘All These Genres Mixed Together’

Al-Azzawi’s poetry:

You can find excerpts of his work in translation various places: Words Without Borders, Poetry International, Banipal,  Jehat.

It’s Thursday, and thus time for a wrestling-with Iraqi poetry. This week, Sinan Antoon writes on Al Jazeera about how “Baghdad’s appearance has changed dramatically over 10 years – but its love of poetry and writing has not”:

In the essay, Antoon writes about his April 2013 visit to Baghdad:

I walked with my friend and publisher from our hotel on Abu Nuwas to al-Mutanabbi Street, Baghdad’s book market. I noticed something I had never seen in Baghdad before. There were so many stores selling equipment for the physically disabled.

The city he sees is, as you might imagine, not the one he left. But he goes on to talk about his publisher, Khaled al-Maaly, who participated in one of the early Q&As, and an evening of poetry:

My publisher, the Iraqi poet Khalid al-Maaly, organised a reading and book-signing at the Baghdad Poetry House right by the Tigris. I was surrounded by friends I had known for years through email, but was meeting them for the first time. The students from the Sada School, whom I had taught on Skype, were there too. The hope and thirst for life in those young eyes of my readers was my only solace. I still had a home in Baghdad. Poetry and writing was my indestructible home.

You can read the whole essay on Al Jazeera.

The Iraqi poetry series can be found here.

It’s not often that a major poet will attend a workshop on translating his poetry, but, next month, the Poetry Translation Centre (PTC) will have al-Saddiq al-Raddi on hand to discuss translations of his poems:

The workshop will be led by translator Samuel Wilder, and PTC notes, “Workshops where we’re lucky enough to have the poet with us are always particularly fascinating and we’re sure this will be a very special evening.”

Al-Saddiq was born in Sudan 1969 and grew up in Omdurman Khartoum, where he lived until forced into exile in 2012. Al-Saddiq’s first collection, Songs of Solitude, was published in 1996, and he has also published The Sultan’s Labyrinth (1996) and The Far Reaches of the Screen… (1999 & 2000). All three collections were published in one volume as Saddiq’s Collected Poems in Cairo in 2009.

About the workshop, the PTC notes:

The workshops are open to anyone who has the skills to translate the poetry of a living African, Asian or Latin American poet with an established reputation in their own language. You don’t need to send us your translations before you join us.

If you’ve not attended one of our workshops before, please read this before booking a place.

Workshop places are limited so advance booking is essential.

Workshops are free, although the translation centre isn’t averse to donations.

If you want to register:

• You can do so here.

Also:

• Sudanese poet Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi on Creativity, Politics, and Translation
• Partner and Group Translation: A Q&A With the Poetry Translation Centre’s Sarah Maguire
• Sudanese Poetry, Artifacts, and Politics

If you want to read al-Raddi’s poems previously translated by the PTC:

• A Body
• A Monkey at the Window
• A Star
• Are You the One?
• Bar
• Breathless
• Dream
• Ends
• Everything
• Garden Statues
• Horizon
• In the Company of Michelangelo
• Lamps
• Longing
• Nothing
• Only
• Poem
• Poem of the Nile
• Prayer
• Radiance
• Record
• Siesta
• Small Fox
• Some of Them Live with You
• Someone
• Song
• Sympathy
• Theatre
• Throne
• Totality
• Weaving a World
• Writing

Yesterday, I received my long-awaited copy of Baghdad: The City in Verse, trans. and ed. Reuven Snir. The small volume attempts to capture and reflect the history of one of the world’s great cities through its poetry, with offerings beginning in the 700s and ending in 2012: 

It is a stunningly good idea; in his preface, Snir thanks Harvard University Press’s editor-at-large Sharmila Sen for bringing the idea to him. The poems — I have not yet read all of them — reflect different faces of the city in its many different epochs. Baghdad is at once a delight: “People say, Do you want to make the pilgrimage? Of course, / I say, only after Baghdad’s delights expire.” (Abu Nuwas, 747ish-813ish) and a bore: “I am leaving; I despise her leaders. / I am abandoning her, bored and weary.” (Anonymous).

Certainly, there were poets — like Abu Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Maliki (? – 1031) who both praised and criticized the city: “Baghdad is a fine home for the wealthy / but an abode of misery and distress for the poor.”

Although there are moments of tragedy, such as the poems written after the civil war between al-Amin and al-Ma’mun, the poems until 1258 show a bustling and beautiful, if perhaps vain and self-obsessed, city.

The editor, however, has chosen to under-weight these years. About half of the poetry was recorded from 700 to 1900, while the second half of the collection is dedicated to poetry written from 1900 to the present — with only about 10 pages dedicated to the period between 1300 and 1900, between Hulagu’s invasion and before the nahda. Certainly, the later poetry will look more familiar to contemporary readers, and there is hardly a one we could ask to budge — maybe just the Ahlam Mostaghanemi poem. But the effect is to telescope the distant past and to weight the present far more heavily.

The book’s long introduction also telescopes 1250 years of Baghdadi history, from the city’s founding to present. As Snir writes, “Surely, there are not many cities in the world about which so many verses have been written over such a span of time!” And by such an array of poets from so many backgrounds — the editor and translator is himself an Iraqi-Israeli whose father loved Arabic poetry.

Indeed not, and we can map poetry back to moments and debates Snir mentions in his introduction; although perhaps the introduction, which is trying to do too much and gets tangled up in itself, in moments, would’ve been better as footnotes or section breaks throughout the collection.

The introduction concludes that “one cannot maintain that [Richard] Coke was wrong” in his assessment that the story of Baghdad is one of continuous war and “where there is not war, there is pestilence, famine, and civil disturbance.” The collection itself, at least the early poetms, tells a different story. I look forward to engaging and re-engaging with the rest.

Selected poems from the collection:

• [Stars Whirling in the Dark], by Muti‘ ibn Iyas (704–85)
• [Baghdad’s People], by ‘Ali ibn Zurayq Abu al-Hasan al-Baghdadi (?–1029)
• [A Qur’an in an Unbeliever’s House], by Abu Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Maliki (?–1031)
• The Books, by Mishil Haddad (1919–96)
• Mr. Edward Luka’s Profession, by Fadil al-‘Azzawi (1940–)
• [Happy in Baghdad], by Anwar Sha’ul (1904–84)
• Salute to Baghdad, by Adonis (1930–)
• Excerpts from This Is Baghdad…, by Sadiq al-Sa’igh (1938–)
• A Sorrowful Melody, by Bushra al-Bustani (1950–)

More from some of the featured (contemporary) poets:

• ArabLit’s Iraqi poetry series can be found here.

Bad news Monday from Qatar’s Court of Cassation: Poet Mohamed al-Ajami’s 15-year prison term was upheld as final.

Al-Ajami’s lawyer, Najib al-Naimi,  told media outlets that al-Ajami’s only remaining option was to appeal to the Emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, for clemency.

Al-Naimi told AFP that “I hope the emir will grant him an amnesty.” Reuters reported that the court’s decision had been reached in less than three hours. Al-Ajami was originally jailed for life last year, but in a February appeal, the sentence was reduced to 15 years.

Reuters also reported that a cousin of al-Ajami’s said there had been no communication with the new Emir about al-Ajami’s case. ”But the Emir knows of the case for sure and has the ability to pardon anyone of Qatar’s sons.”

According to al-Naimi, the poet has been held in solitary confinement for nearly two years.

“There is no justice,” al-Naimi told Doha News. “Our judicial system cannot be trusted.”

Al-Ajami was arrested in November 2011 after the YouTube publication of his “Tunisian Jasmine,” a poem that praised Arab uprisings and criticised governments across the region. The case against him was ostensibly about a 2010 poem that criticized the emir, although many believe authorities are punishing al-Ajami for his Jasmine poem.

Kareem James Abu-Zeid’s free translation of the Jasime Poem, which was read at an event in support of the poet in San Francisco:

Jasmine Revolution Poem

By Mohammad al-Ajami Ibn al-Dhib

Prime Minister, Mohamed al-Ghannouchi:
If we measured your might
it wouldn’t hold a candle
to a constitution.
We shed no tears for Ben Ali,
nor any for his reign.
It was nothing more than a moment
in time for us,
historical
and dictatorial,
a system of oppression,
an era of autocracy.
Tunisia declared the people’s revolt:
When we lay blame
only the base and vile suffer from it;
and when we praise
we do so with all our hearts.
A revolution was kindled with the blood of the people:
their glory had worn away,
the glory of every living soul.
So, rebel, tell them,
tell them in a shrouded voice, a voice from the grave:
tell them that tragedies precede all victories.
A warning to the country whose ruler is ignorant,
whose ruler deems that power
comes from the American army.
A warning to the country
whose people starve
while the regime boasts of its prosperity.
A warning to the country whose citizens sleep:
one moment you have your rights,
the next they’re taken from you.
A warning to the system—inherited—of oppression.
How long have all of you been slaves
to one man’s selfish predilections?
How long will the people remain
ignorant of their own strength,
while a despot makes decrees and appointments,
the will of the people all but forgotten?
Why is it that a ruler’s decisions are carried out?
They’ll come back to haunt him
in a country willing
to rid itself of coercion.
Let him know, he
who pleases only himself, and does nothing
but vex his own people; let him know
that tomorrow
someone else will be seated on that throne,
someone who knows the nation’s not his own,
nor the property of his children.
It belongs to the people, and its glories
are the glories of the people.
They gave their reply, and their voice was one,
and their fate, too, was one.
All of us are Tunisia
in the face of these oppressors.
The Arab regimes and those who rule them
are all, without exception,
without a single exception,
shameful, thieves.
This question that keeps you up at night—
its answer won’t be found
on any of the official channels…
Why, why do these regimes
import everything from the West—
everything but the rule of law, that is,
and everything but freedom?

You can listen to 2010 poem that got al-Ajami in trouble here:

More:

Doha News: Supreme court rules against Qatari poet, upholding 15-year jail term

AFP: Qatar upholds 15-year sentence against maverick poet

BBC: Qatar court upholds poet Mohammed al-Ajami’s sentence

Reuters: Qatari poet sentenced to 15 years in prison for insulting emir

There can be no series on Iraqi poetry without an engagement with Sargon Boulos. It’s coming. In the meantime, poet-novelist-translator Sinan Antoon has published two newly translated Boulus poems in Jadaliyya:

They are “Times” and “A Pebble.” The second is where Boulus’s gifts really shine through Antoon’s translation, Boulus’s talent for the sweep of imagery alongside the terribly small, for seriousness and humor:

There it is under your foot. Step on it if you wish. Step hard.

Then cross over. Fear not.
Among pebbles, it is no more than
a pebble.

Boulus’s collection Knife Sharpener  was published by Banipal Books, and Antoon has been working on a new collection of Boulus’s work. Many of the translations below are by Antoon.

Until the new collection is ready:

Two translations of “The Refugee Tells,” trans. Youssef Rakha and Kees Nijland

The Child of War, trans. Antoon

A Portrait of an Iraqi Person at the End of Time, trans. Antoon

To Imru’ al-Qays on his Way to the Inferno, trans. Suneela Mubayi (with commentary)

To the Master of the Banquet, trans. Antoon

The Meaning of My Prayer,  trans. Antoon

Two Poems: Railroad and A Pouch of Dirt, trans. Antoon

The Corpse, trans. Antoon

Siege, trans. Sargon Boulus and Alistair Elliot

Tea with Mouayed al-Rawi in a Turkish café in Berlin, The Letter Arrived, The Refugee Tells, and more, trans. Youssef Rakha.

A Butterfly’s Dream, trans. Kees Nijland (Arabic side-by-side)

A Man Fell On His Knees, trans. Kees Nijland (Arabic side-by-side)

A Refugee Talking, trans. Kees Nijland (Arabic side-by-side)

An Elegy for Sindbad Cinema, trans. Kees Nijland (Arabic side-by-side)

How Eastern Singing Was Born, trans. Kees Nijland (Arabic side-by-side)

I Came from There, trans. Kees Nijland (Arabic side-by-side)

Tu Fu in Exile, trans. Kees Nijland (Arabic side-by-side)

Four Poems: The Siege, The Borders, The Letter Arrived, and Incident in a Mountain Village, trans. Sargon Boulus

Four Poems: The Ziggurat Builders and O Player in the Shadows, The Legend of al-Sayyab and the Silt and A Key to the House, trans. Boulus

Young Iraqi poet Saif Alsaegh was born and raised in the Risafa neighborhood of Baghdad. He was born during the first Gulf War, in 1991, and studied one year at the University of Baghdad — majoring in journalism and working for the Ikhbariya News Agency — before he went to Damascus to study English in order to qualify for a scholarship at a US university. That’s where he is now, at the University of Great Falls in Great Falls, MT, with plans to publish his first collection of poetry, Iraqi Headaches, in December:

ArabLit: When did you begin composing poetry? Did you publish or perform your poetry in Baghdad?

Saif Alsaegh I started writing poetry at the age of 17 after I started having a lot of questions about Iraq, God, war, and religion. And traveling to the States and my brother who is a poet — I’ll talk more about him in a bit — inspired me to write poetry. I didn’t publish poetry in Baghdad, except through social media. First, I started writing in Arabic; I did not start writing in English until two years ago. I used to get positive feedback from my brother, who is the one who inspired me to write, and also from a few friends. And that helped me to keep on writing. (You can probably see some of Arabic poems on my Facebook page, still.) While in Baghdad, I did not perform or publish anything. The culture there is not encouraging and I was busy with journalism.

AL: What poets — in Arabic & in English — have inspired your interest in the form? Who do you read or listen to?

SA: After I started having a lot of questions (especially about God because I was a “good” Christian) and after I started doubting Christianity, I started talking to my brother Fady Alsaegh. Fady is, for me, the best poet in the Middle East. His writings and his book (Letters from the God of Fear) a poetry collection in Arabic is amazing. Reading Fady’s surreal poetry and the writers he recommended was a huge change of my writing style. So in Arabic I read for Fady Alsaegh, Badir Shakir Al-Sayab, Hassan Blasim, Kouthair Meery. I also read for French poets such as Rimbaud and Baudelaire, who changed the way I think. I love Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski, and many others. All the people I read for were, as I called them, the surreal, abstract and dark writers. I always liked free verse because I understand it more. I have never liked the old poetry in both languages, the rhyming poetry in Arabic and English.

The language is hard and the ideas are not very good. I like poetry that is simple but striking, soft but revolutionary. Music helped my writings a lot. Without listening to all the underground Arabic music, rock and roll, grunge music, and psychedelic music, I cannot write as well. I love Sufi music, grunge music (such as Nirvana), and old rock and roll such as (The Doors). I also like old Iraqi music such as Maqam music (qubanchi and nathim al Gazaly).

AL: Were you involved in any poetry circles or groups in Baghdad? What poetry circles/groups have you been involved with in the US?

SA: I was a little bit involved through my brother, in Al-Hiwar Café, which gathered a lot of the educated people and the artists of Baghdad. But that’s about it. We visited a few times a month and we conversed with people of that community. In the US, I was involved in the Great Falls poetry scene, in which I won a couple slam competitions. I also was involved a little bit in the art, poetry and theater community in my school, the University of Great Falls. But through the connections that I have, I have been performing in different states, such as New York, Oklahoma, California, Pennsylvania. Most of these poetry shows are organized by NGOs, universities, and people who have interested in poetry both in Arabic and English.

AL: You link poetry & performance: theatre, video, live readings, slams. Are you interested in amoodi poetry? Popular poetry in Iraq?

SA: I think all of these are linked together through the strong ideas you have about the topic you are writing about, mixed with music of course. Both words and music can change and link everything together. In most of my poetry shows I do have live music backing me up. Theatre can have poetry and music inside of it.

[W]hen you have the idea and you have the right atmosphere (which we did not find in Iraq, because people there are not encouraging) you can link all these together in different formats and musicality. I’m not sure about popular poetry! But I don’t like a lot of main stream poetry and music. Mainstream poetry in Iraq has weak ideas and it is very repetitive. I like abstract things and popular are mostly not different and abstract. Amoodi poetry is like the old English poetry, some of it is good but you cannot really understand it because of the complex language. The ideas behind it, for me, are not very satisfying or deep. I like free verse where you can be more creative with ideas rather than focusing on ,for instance, if the words rhyme together or not.

AL: How does poetry change for you when performed? To what extent do you think your poetry “must” be performed vs. just read on a page? How do each of the different forms — video, stage, slam — change the poem?

The old style of poetry is mostly written and that is what our culture in the Middle East believes in, even if they read it in public, it is usually done in a formal way, with people wearing suits at podiums. But when I perform, I imagine Jim Morrison…

SA: The old style of poetry is mostly written and that is what our culture in the Middle East believes in, even if they read it in public, it is usually done in a formal way, with people wearing suits at podiums.

But when I perform, I imagine Jim Morrison when he used to include his poetry during a song, while live music is playing. It is more of the experience of music, words, and the audience as a whole. Poetry can be read and that is fine, but when you hear it by the poet himself, you can experience more feelings and a better level of intensity that you cannot experience by only reading the poem. I don’t think that there is a “must” in the idea. I believe in both reading and performing. Performing can bring some poems to different dimensions, especially if the performer is good and in that mixture, there is some music.

AL: What do you think about the contemporary poetry scene in Baghdad? Fadhil al-Azzawi has said that thoere “are no poets” left in Iraq.

I disagree that there “are not poets” left in Iraq. There are good poets left in Iraq, but the poetry community is not giving them a chance. 

SA: I don’t think there is a great contemporary poetry scene in Baghdad, because if there is, the people who organize all the events could have given poets such as my brother who was praised by great Iraqi writers such as Hassan Blasim a better chance in publishing his poetry. I’m not very connected with the poetry scene in Iraq except for the good amount of knowledge from my brother and some experiences in the past. People there do not appreciate poetry as much, and the writers who are recognized won’t let other young ones enter the group (just like politics when the senior leaders who won’t let anyone in). I am not attacking the poets or the community; this is simply my opinion.

I disagree that there “are not poets” left in Iraq. There are good poets left in Iraq, but the poetry community is not giving them a chance. The poets and writers who had good luck left Iraq, unfortunately, to other countries where their writings are more appreciated. There are good poets in Iraq but they are being fought and there are good Iraqi poets who live in other countries.

AL: Why mix Arabic and English poems in the same collection? Are they cross-translated/bilingual or each language stands on its own?

SA: Only one section of my collection, Iraqi Headaches, will be original Arabic poetry, which I translated to English. The reason why is because I like writing in Arabic and I till this day write a lot in Arabic and I think it should be published too so people who speak the language can read it. Having both languages can give some of my readers (who are learning Arabic, or from Arabic heritage, or Arabic and English speakers) the chance to explore my writings in both languages, and to learn more about the style, the wording and the differences in the musicality of those languages. So my book is going to be a section of only English poetry, a short section of haikus in English, and another section of Arabic and English poetry.

Ferial Ghazoul and John Verlenden — both at the American University in Cairo — have won this year’s University of Arkansas Arabic Translation Award for their collection Chronicles of Majnun Layla and Selected Poems of Qassim Haddad, by Bahrain’s great living poet:

Qassim Haddad

Past winners of the Arkansas prize have included Samah Selim’s translation of Jurji Zaydan’s Tree of Pearls, Queen of Egypt (2012); Allen Salter, Rafah Abu Ennab, and Zahra Jhishi’s translation of Mahmoud Saeed’s The World Through the Eyes of Angels (2011); and Osman Nusairi’s translation of Reem Bassiouney’s The Pistachio Seller. 

As with these previous winners, Ghazoul and Verlenden’s manuscript will be published by Syracuse University Press. They also split a prize of $10,000 with the author.

This follows the $100,000 translation grant the pair received from the National Endowment for the Humanities to “create a comprehensive edition of Haddad’s work in English.”

This collection includes Haddad’s reworking of the Majnun Layla story, a cycle of poems inspired by the tragic story of a seventh-century Arabian poet. Excerpts have appeared in The Word, both of the Majnun Layla cycle and of Haddad’s selected poems.

From The Word:

This English translation strives to add a new voice to a classic of world poetry, and to a traveling work of literature that has found home in many settings and various genres. It offers another inflection on the legend; in Haddad’s hymn to Love, the legend is refashioned where love becomes the prime mover of the world. In a Dantesque glorification of the supreme power of love, Haddad undermines both the established and the conventional, poetically and thematically. He uses a variety of poetic modes—narrative, lyrical, aphoristic, and philosophically speculative. The translation is faithful to Haddad’s exquisite text and to the cadences of the original, reproducing the meandering phrases and the dialogical structure—all rendered poetically in English, in the conviction that poetics of both source and target language have to be articulated in a translation.

Nizami miniature: Layla and Majnun meet for the last time before their deaths.

Ghazoul and Verlenden have been translating as a team for nearly two decades: Their first project, Muhammad Afifi Matar’s Quartet of Joy, also won the Arkansas award, in 1997. They also translated Edwar Kharrat’s Rama and the Dragon (2002) and a number of poems.

Excerpts from The Word:

Majnun Layla

Selected Poems

More on Haddad:

Professors Receive $100,000 Grant to Translate Qassim Haddad

Frangieh’s essay on Haddad, “Qassim Haddad: Resignation and Revolution”

Qassim Haddad on himself

An Al Ahram profile of Haddad, “The penman of Manama,” by Rania Khallaf

Selected poems:

Five poems by Qassim Haddad on Jehat, in Arabic and English, translated by Mohammed A. Alkhozai

“Stone” and “Words from a Young Night” on Blackbird