It was nearly a year ago that Library of Arabic Literature stalwarts Devon Stewart, Chip Rossetti, James Montgomery, Joe Lowry, Richard Sieburth, Michael Cooperson, Julia Brey, and Philip Kennedy met in Abu Dhabi to discuss Caliphs and Consorts, a forthcoming translation of anecdotes and poetry that was collected in Ibn al-Sa’i's Nisaʾ al-khulafa. However, it’s only now that the discussion of poetry, consorts, and collaborative translation has been posted online:

In the discussion — three clips from which are posted below — LAL executive editor Shawkat M. Toorawa made a forceful case for collaborative translating. “We know for a fact,” Toorawa said, “that our experience with collaboration has produced a better outcome, and a better product. And it’s made us better scholars.”

The Caliphs and Consorts project had begun a decade before, with a smaller group, when Joe Lowry suggested that they translate the text. They did, Toorawa said, “and then it languished,” until ten years later, when a group of them were invited onto the LAL board.

The LAL agreed to take on the text, “and we thought, well, maybe we should workshop it. Let’s not just go back to Joe and Devin and Michael and Shawkat and produce something. Let’s just take what they have. In whatever state it’s in. And maybe we should get together and workshop it.”

The group submitted the text to Julia Bray, who produced an independent report on the translation. According to Toorawa, the report said, in essence: “I think this is an exciting text, I think this is a wonderful selection. I think we have to revisit the translation.”

Toorawa said that this was humbling, and yet correct. He went on to suggest that if a translator can “become more humble,” then the translator’s work will be better.

Good translations are important because, Toorawa said, “The Library of Arabic Literature isn’t some esoteric, erudite series being published in Belgium and directed at the nine people who can afford the book and the six of them who actually care about it. The LAL is an initiative, the audience of which is the world.”

Bray added, in her presentation, that, “When we talked about collaborating, you probably thought we meant just sending each other emails and correcting each other’s typescripts.” But what the group means by collaboration is much more than that, she said, and includes the important element of an “outside” expert who is unaccustomed to the in-group jargon. In this case, the outsider is Richard Sieburth, who translates French poetry.

It was 2011, Bray said, that the group held their first workshop, “Which was designed to help us translate the most terrifying of all things to translate, which is poetry.”

Thanks in part to Sieburth, Bray said, “We felt hugely liberated from preconceptions and poor practices.”

Bray went on to speak about the collection, which was assembled by Iraqi historian Ibn al-Sa’i (d. 1276 CE), a prominent historian who was interested, Bray said, “in general political history as it was framed through the lens of women’s share in it.” According to Bray:

The first part of the book…contains material that had been doing the rounds for quite a while beforehand, but had never been presented in quite this light. The second half of the book consists of work that is closer to the author in time, and it concerns the great women of the Seljuk court, who were of a rather different kind from these early Abbasid, learned entertainers, who were also beautiful and sought-after.

Although it is a short work, Bray said, “I think it is going to be full of — not only interesting and in some cases delightful discoveries – but quite often perhaps, very important ones.”

In the second part of the discussion, Toowara invited the group to the stage to demonstrate how the collaboration process worked and to take questions from the audience. Toowara noted that Tahera Qutbuddin was missing from the group, as she was attending a conference in Cairo.

The group began by discussing their translation “Balm to the Eyes.” They listed a number of possible translations for قرة العين. They were, according to Toowara: “eye candy, harmony, eyes’ delight, lovely to look on, easy on the eyes, sight for sore eyes, and the one we selected provisionally, balm to the eyes.” He added, “Just for the record, I don’t like it. But some people love it.”

Certainly, other suggestions could be added: Wikipedia editors, for instance, like “solace of the eyes” or “consolation of the eyes.”

The group began by discussing the phrase “eye candy” and the reasons why this wouldn’t work. For instance, as it came out, Michael Cooperson noted, “Tahera Qutbuddin’s sister is called قرة العين, which really for me makes it impossible for us to call her ‘eye candy’.”

The group went on to address a number of other particular translation points, which can be seen in the video, and also addressed larger issues about translating poetry. James Montgomery noted, later in the discussion, that “there are many many beautiful poems in Arabic, and there are many ugly translations of those poems into European languages.” He added:

And this is one of the things we confront. And one of the things we’re interested in talking about is why do we think those translations don’t succeed? On one level, what the translator is trying to do is to capture everything that that translator perceives to be in the Arabic, in order not to leave anything out, in order not to miss anything, in order to take what is poetic about the original, leave it behind, and then resort to the dictionary and provide a kind of prose version of the Arabic.

Sieburth called this practice, of producing an accurate but un-beautiful version, “sight reading.” He opposed this to an “interpretive performance, Glenn Gould doing Bach as opposed to someone just sitting there doing all the notes.”

“We don’t want to do the notes,” Montgomery said.

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Beau Beausoleil, a poet who has tirelessly organized the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here project since shortly after the 2007 bombing of Baghdad’s central book-selling street, continues to hold onto the lit candle, and is asking poets and readers to organize events for March 5, 2014. At least 10 are already scheduled:

In a note to supporters, Beausoleil wrote that, “Organizing a reading is a relatively simple/complex matter (like everything else in this project) of gathering friends and colleagues to read poems and prose from the Middle East and North Africa as well as work that resonates with the ideas of the project. It can be held in a cafe or art space, in a university, or a library. It can be attended by 10 people or 50 people.”

At a recent event hosted by Poet’s House in NYC, focused on the al-Mutanabbi project, Beausoleil responded to an audience member’s question of “Why al-Mutanabbi Street? Why, if we are to remember a moment, is it the bombing of Baghdad’s central book-selling street? Why aren’t we remembering the US invasion of Iraq, or the embargo, or many other previous events?” I wasn’t recording the event, but later, Beausoleil reconstructed what he had said:

The readings scheduled for March 5, 2014 thus far are in:

1. The Collins Memorial Library, the University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, Washington – Coordinators – Jane Carlin and Jessica Spring

2. Washington D.C. – Coordinators – Helen Frederick and Casey Smith

3. Detroit, Michigan – Coordinators – Dunya Mikhail and Alise Alousi

4. Exeter, UK. – Coordinator – Catherine Cartwright

5. St. John’s Newfoundland, Canada – Coordinators – Patrick Warner and Tara Bryan

6. Herron Art Library, Herron School of Art and Design, IUPUI, Indianapolis, Indiana -Coordinator – Sonja Staum

7. Bristol, UK. – Coordinator – Sarah Bodman

8. London, UK. – Coordinator – Clare Skelton – Clare writes – “I’ll be organising a March reading, Beau – with children from my friend’s school and hopefully holding it in my other friend’s pottery studio!”

9. London, UK. – Coordinators – Hassan Abdulrazzak and Alan Ingram

10. Guarini Library, New Jersey City University, Jersey City, New Jersey – Coordinator – Melida Rodas

If you would like to organize a reading, please do contact mlynxqualey [at] gmail [dot] com, and I will pass along your email.

Beausoleil also, in his call for readings, shared the Manifesto of the Poets of Baghdad, which was written and read by the poet Abdul-Zehra Zeki in the place where the bombing took place, and Al-Mutanabbi Street, less than 24 hours following the crime.

The version here is trans. Inam Jaber:

It is here amid the debris of the bombing of Al-Mutanabbi Street,
near the smell arising from the burning treasures of the bookshops of Baghdad,
not far away from the bodies of the loved ones which are still buried under the rubble of the bombing,
that stand today, the poets of bereaved Baghdad;
shocked and startled amid the whistles of the destruction,
and the exhalation of the smoke,
and the floating particles of ashes,
hearing sounds of shooting here and explosions there,
to read their poems for death and life.
No surprise they are the sons of Baghdad who safeguarded its immortality.
It is Baghdad whose body is being snapped by death; whereas, its soul ascends with life and with the hope of extracting an opportunity from between the claws of death.
The poets are the soul of the city with its immeasurable feelings.

The poets of Baghdad, just like their great City, stand today looking along the horizon of freedom. But our degradation and slavery are still maintained by this gluttony for murder,
which blocks our broad horizons with the darkness of cellars.

We are caught between two powers: the power of hope to which we are holding tight, and the power that is trying hard to force us into the darkness of the deep cellars.
It is the result of this struggle between these two powers that may decide the fate of the City of Baghdad and that of its poets and its people.

After all, we have but one option. It is that of going forward supported by the immortal soul of our City and by the power of the will of its people, to live a free, dignified, secure and independent life.
It is our immortal soul and our great will to make the life we deserve and want.

We, the poets of Baghdad, look forward confidently to our friends and colleagues in poetry and culture in the Arab and Islamic world, as well as people everywhere, to raise their voices loudly in support of us and of Baghdad; a city which has significance in being the centre of civilization and one of largest cities of enlightenment in history.

The poets of Baghdad, who have always shared with humanity its suffering in defense of the values of justice and dignity, are looking forward to hearing the voices of solidarity with them, and with their City, in its ordeal in confronting terrorism and destruction.
These are the obstructions of the realization of the dream of Iraqis…to see a better tomorrow when they can enjoy their freedom, security, and independence.

We stand today with the debris from the bombing surrounding us on Al-Mutanabbi Street, at a time when we appreciate very well what this Street signifies for contemporary Arab culture. We also know very well the significance of the Street as far as the terrorists are concerned. This is why they targeted it. There are no police, nor government, nor occupiers here. It is a Street which is populated by books of different sects, books expressive of different ideas and trends, as well as of their sellers and buyers from all over the country.

To target Al-Mutanabbi Street is to target the very essence of Iraqi culture,
which extends beyond any differences.

Having said that, all educated people, wherever they might be, should not keep silent.
The voice of humanity should be louder than that of differences, and in favor of a human being’s right to live without fear and threats.

Show solidarity with us!

More:

10 Years Later: Artists and Writers in Search of a Common Street

‘Al-Mutanabbi Street’ Project Coming to Cairo

Sinan Antoon: Poetry Still Has a Home in Baghdad

‘Write, Even If It’s Imaginary’

Last week in London, the Poetry Translation Centre held another of its collaborative poetry translation workshops. Clarissa Aykroyd was there and shares her impressions:

By Clarissa Aykroyd

I’ve attended a few Poetry Translation Centre workshops now, but this one was particularly interesting. It featured the work of Sudanese poet al-Saddiq al-Raddi, and the poet himself, who now lives in London, was there.

One of the PTC’s stars and certainly one of my own favourite poets, Saddiq has a place in the overlapping African and the Arabic literary worlds. I’ve now read a reasonable amount of Arabic poetry in translation, but most of it has been, unsurprisingly, from North Africa and the Middle East. Saddiq’s work is deeply enriched by his Sudanese background and with the history of the region. Lush and beautiful, it is also extremely subtle and can be somewhat mind-bendingly complicated.

The poem we translated in the workshop, “Longing,” fell into the latter category and proved quite daunting. The translator who had produced the literal English version, Samuel Wilder, had selected a sequence of poems from which Saddiq had deduced that he was a) a bit of a romantic and b) possibly interested in Sufism, which is a huge influence on Sudanese poetry and was especially evident in these poems. The other poems were shorter, had charming details about butterflies, and while also complex were probably a little more straightforward. So, naturally, the group chose to go for the long, extremely difficult poem…

We had quite a large group for this workshop, led by Sarah Maguire, who is the head of the PTC and an award-winning poet — her last collection, The Pomegranates of Kandahar, was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize. The others participating, aside from the poet and the translator, included students from SOAS University of London, poets, translators who clung desperately to the multiple meanings of the original Arabic words which couldn’t be literally translated into English, and a jack-of-all-trades writer who kept trying to draw tenuous connections between the line we were working on and something six lines later. (That last one was me.) Such a multiplicity of perspectives was valuable but also complicated.

“Longing” proved to be a poem with few definite conclusions, but it repeatedly returned to the dialogue between things which are contrasting or in opposition in an apparent attempt to break through the limitations imposed by “too narrow vessels” (words) on their contents (the actual meaning or essence of things).

In working through this poem for a few hours with the group, I certainly appreciated the oft-expressed view that translation is the best way to engage closely with a poem. “Longing” proved to be a poem with few definite conclusions, but it repeatedly returned to the dialogue between things which are contrasting or in opposition in an apparent attempt to break through the limitations imposed by “too narrow vessels” (words) on their contents (the actual meaning or essence of things). To a certain extent, I was reminded of Paul Celan — which, interestingly, also happened when, in another workshop, we translated a poem by Ateif Khieri, a Sudanese poet who is friends with Saddiq.

I think the similarities with Celan involve a certain surrealism; a co-existence of precision and open-endedness; a loose line structure; and a willingness to break and re-form language to try and get closer and closer to the nature of reality. At least, that’s how it came across as we underwent the difficult task of bringing these very difficult but rewarding poems into English.

Most of Saddiq’s poetry on the PTC website, and in the chapbook of his work that they have produced, was translated by Sabry Hafez and Sarah Maguire. A few of my favourites include “In the Company of Michelangelo,” “Small Fox,” and “Garden Statues.” I’m particularly happy that I’ve been able to include “Garden Statues” in an anthology of verse and prose which I’ve just finished editing in my day job for LAMDA Examinations.

Clarissa Aykroyd grew up in Victoria, Canada and studied at the University of Victoria. She has also lived in Dublin and now lives in London, where she works as a publisher for LAMDA Examinations. She has published fiction, educational non-fiction, reviews and poetry, and currently blogs about poetry at The Stone and the Star (http://thestoneandthestar.blogspot.co.uk/).

Over at The Arabist, Industry Arabic has translated one of the absurd recent characterizations of an “activist” from Youm 7. Herein, the effeminate “male activist” reputedly is not a poetry-lover (although he likes to curse and use obscene expressions), but the manned-up “female activist” likes the “lewd poetry” of Fouad Haggag and Naguib Sorour:

I’m not sure whether any of Haggag’s poetry or theatre has been translated into English. Naguib Sorour (1932-1978) however, made international headlines in 2001, twenty-three years after the poet’s death. That’s when his son Shohdy posted Surour’s controversial poem “Koss Ummiyyat” (1969) online.

The poem — a long, dark satire in colloquial Arabic– was technically banned in Egypt but had been widely circulated via tapes and hand-copied manuscripts in the decades after its composition.

About a year after Shohdy Sorour posted the poem, Egyptian authorities apparently noticed it, and Shohdy was arrested in November 2001, charged with “possessing ‘immoral booklets and prints’” according to Wired. He was only held for a few days, but Shohdy’s case proceeded. He was sentenced to a year in jail and, as he waited on his appeal, Shohdy relocated to Russia. In his absence, the appeals court confirmed the verdict of one year in prison.

Surour’s work remains in an ambiguous space in Egypt — alternately celebrated and shunned by the establishment. In any case, you should explore Surour’s poetry, and — if you find you like it — goodness only knows what that says about you.

Parts of Naguib Sorour’s Koss Ummiyyat:

On SoundCloud (Arabic) 

From Sorour’s “Drink Delirium,” trans. Mona Anis and Nur Elmesseiri:

On Ahram Weekly 

A few lines from Lana Younis’s translation of Surour’s Protocols of the Wise Men of Riche:

Which begins “Read nothing be a lumberjack…”

Profiles:

From Brian Whitaker’s Al-Bab

From Youssef Rakha, on Ahram Weekly

If you’re in or near Philadelphia, PA — better still right by Villanova — Pierre Joris and Nicole Peyrafitte will be presenting on Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of North African Literature on Dec. 4:

I assume Connelly Cinema must be in the Connelly Center? But if you’re in the area, you likely know better.

The Egyptian colloquial poet Ahmad Fouad Negm died Tuesday morning at the age of 84, just before he was to travel to receive the 2013 Prince Claus Award for “Unwavering Integrity”:

Negm at Dar Merit in 2013 with novelist Mona Prince.

Publisher Mohamed Hashem told Ahram Online that he spoke with Negm on Monday, and that he seemed fine, but his voice was a “little heavy.”

Negm, according to Prince Claus organizers, was to be 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 was raised in a poor village in Sharkiya and spent most of his early years either in orphanages or in prison, where he was sent for forging documents. From these beginnings, Negm grew into a poet of unparalleled stature in Egypt, and wrote about the nation’s poor and disenfranchised like no one else.

With his daughter, the journalist Nawara Negm.

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. Andeel also translated a few excerpts on Mada Masr’s obituary.

Negm’s funeral was held at Al-Hussein Mosque in Cairo, located near Khan Al-Khalili bazzar; the blogger Zeinobia has organized photos.

Negm leaves behind his sixth wife and children of various ages, including Nawara Negm, a prominent journalist and blogger.

A few online responses:

Yesterday, towering Egyptian poet Ahmed Fouad Negm — who died at the beginning of this month at the age of 84 — was honored as the principal winner at the Prince Claus Award ceremony in Amsterdam: 

Anis receiving the award on Negm’s behalf. Image snapped from livestream.

Negm was to have received the award from Prince Constantijn, but instead Egyptian writer Mona Anis received it on his behalf. Video from the ceremony was streamed live online.

At the ceremony, it was announced that, for the few months before his death, Anis and Negm had been working on the “first serious translation” of Negm’s poetry into English, I Say My Words Out Loud, which is available online, published by the Prince Claus Fund.

Before reading a statement from Negm’s daughter Nawara Negm, an obviously moved Anis said that, “It is indeed a very sad moment for me, to be standing where Ahmed Fouad Negm should be standing.”

In the statement from Nawara Negm, Nawara said that her father’s death had not yet sunk in, and that, ”Even now, I feel that my father is playing a practical joke on us.”

“Being the restless person he was, my father hated sitting down,” Negm’s statement said. She said that he arrived in this world on his feet, and “He also departed from it standing firmly on his own two feet.”

Anis read from Negm’s 1978 poem “The Prison Ward” in Arabic, the poem organizers said Negm had wanted to read during the ceremony. Here, the first stanza from Anis’s English translation:

Image of Negm from Manawishi’s video.

Prison ward, listen in:
I’ve shaken the dice many times,
And gambled with everything on the big prize and lost,
And bitter though prison is,
I’ve never once wanted to repent.
having bid the night guards good evening,
every single one of them,
the bringi
the kingi
And the shingi*,
I say we’re wicked inmates all,
though the storeroom clerk
has given us different uniforms.
My first words are for the Prophet;
my second, for Job;
the third are for my estrangement;
the fourth, for my destiny;
My fifth, I will say that he who oppresses others
Will himself be defeated one day

After Anis’s presentation, there was a  short video about Negm’s life, directed by Ahmed Manawishi. In it, Salah Hassan called Negm a “giant” and said that “no ordinary language can convey his impact.”

Anis’s short collection of Negm’s work includes both Negm’s poetry and essays about him by Hala Halim and Marilyn Booth. There is another collection of Negm’s work in progress, by Arabic literature professor Kamal AbdelMalek, a book on Negm’s life and work in which, according to AbdelMalek, “there will be an appendix of a fair selection of his poems and prose writing in translation.”

Translating Negm is a difficult thing: Not only are his poems thick with Egyptian context, they also rely heavily on rhythm, sound, and rhyme. It would be ideal, for instance, if the PDF of the translation included an audio element. But in her translation, Anis does an admirable job in this difficult territory, often recreating rhythm, making English-language versions that also want to be read aloud. From “Mother Egypt”:

Let our words be preceded by our greetings to all who are listening,
Little sparrow chirping rhymed words full of meaning
About a dark land, a moon,
A river, a boat and a shore,
And fellow travellers on a hard journey

In the tribute AbdelMalek wrote after Negm’s death, he wrote that “Ahmad Fuad Nigm lived by his own principles. He was a fearless poet who spoke truth to power. And the truth he spoke was delivered with an impressive combination of force and beauty.”

Read the new collection:

I Say My Words Out Loud, poetry by Ahmed Fouad Negm, trans. Mona Anis

*Turkish military ranks given to the guards, meaning first, second and third.

Last November, New Directions issued a new chapbook in their “Poets in the World” series: 15 Iraqi Poets. The slim (60-page) volume was edited and introduced by Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail:

In some ways, 15 makes for a frustrating experience. Just as I’ve settled into Nazik al-Malaika’s voice, and begin raising up the structures of her world around me, I turn the page and am with Abdul Wahab al-Bayati. It’s the pitfalls of any anthology, certainly, although here there is only one poem per author, and some of them very short.

The brief collection begins with Badr Shakir al-Sayyab‘s “Rain Song,” and here we can brook no complaints: Although it is only one poem, and the reader may be left wanting a whole collection of al-Sayyab, it is a poem in which a reader can sit down, close the shutters, and sit for a long time. “Rain Song” is the longest in the collection, and this translation — from Lena Jayyusi and Christopher Middleton — does justice to the poem’s tonal shifts and incantatory power.

Certainly, I would’ve wanted to turn the page and find “Return to Jaykur” or “The River and Death,” but “Rain Song” is enough for an anthology or desert island. “And still the rain pours down.”

Nazik al-Malaika‘s “New Year” (trans. Rebecca Carol Johnson) which follows in the collection, is also a strong example of her work, a romanticism that has been taken into a new place:

If only memory, or hope, or regret
could one day block our country from its path.
If only we feared madness.
If only our lives could be disturbed by travel
or shock,
or the sadness of impossible love.
If only we could die like other people.

As translator Emily Drumstra has said, “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.”

Here as elsewhere, she inserts herself, interrogates the poem, asks questions of the translator.

After al-Malaika’s “New Year” is a short poem by Abdul Waha al-Bayati, “From the Papers of Aisha,” and here editor Dunya Mikhail’s note is important for thickening the reader’s experience of the poem. Here as elsewhere, she inserts herself, interrogates the poem, asks questions of the translator. She writes: “I asked the translator, Bassem Frangieh, if Aisha was dead in the poems, and he replied, ‘Aisha is never dead. She is hope, his hero, his lover, his savior, who is eternally alive.’”

The notes after each of the poems are what holds the collection together; they offer not just biographical information on each of the poets, but personal insights into their lives and why they write. She also describes encounters she’s had with the poets, such as when Yousif al-Sa’igh offered her a sketch inspired by one of her poems.

Outside of a few swaps — Badr Shakir al-Sayyab comes before Nazik al-Malaika, even though she was born first, and Sargon Boulus appears too early — the poems are ordered by the age of the poet, and the enigmatic Mahmoud al-Braikan, an important Iraqi poet who is very little-represented in translation, follows al-Bayati. After these is the controversial Yousif al-Sa’igh, who — although he affiliated himself with Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party — still wrote surprising and vulnerable poems, as in his “Dinner,” trans Saadi Simawe:

That is when I see
my sadness enter the kitchen
open the refrigerator door
take out a piece of black meat
and prepare my dinner.

His words take us along, upside-down and sideways, following a Möbius strip around his memories of Baghdad

After al-Sa’igh comes the towering Sargon Boulus (trans. Sinan Antoon), with “Elegy for Sindibad Cinema.” His words take us along, upside-down and sideways, following a Möbius strip around his memories of Baghdad:

where I walk
where my words want to rise like the stairs of a castle
like sounds ascending the lost scale
one note after another
in my friend’s notebook
the oud player who died of his own silence in the desolation
of exile

Poems by Saadi Youssef (“Cavafy’s Residence,” trans. Ferial Ghazoul) and Fadhil al-Azzawi (“Spare Time,” trans. Khaled Mattawa) follow. Both of them have a number of works available in English, with Youssef’s recent poetry collected into Nostalgia, My Enemy and translated by Sinan Antoon and Peter Money.

The collection also features work not written in Arabic — a short and somewhat flimsy work by Kurdish poet Sherko Bekas and Ronny Someck’s “Jasmine: Poem on Sandpaper,” translated from the Hebrew by Moshe Dor and Barbara Goldberg. Here again — although I found Someck’s statement that he was “only the pianist” in the Wild West saloon of Israel frustrating — it was also eye-opening to see how he viewed his role as an (Iraqi-)Israeli poet.

The last four poets are the youngest: Taleb Abd al-Aziz (the passionate and mournful “My Brother’s War”), Ra’ad Abdul Qadir (the slender “His Life”), Abdulzahra Zeki (the dual, overlapping “The Guard”), and Siham Jabar (the historically inspired “Like Hypatia in Ancient Times.”).

The easiest questions to ask are: Why didn’t you include (Abdul Kader El Janabi, Sinan Antoon, Sabreen Kadhim, Ahmad Matar, Ghareeb Iskander, Basim al-Ansar, Kajal Ahmad, etc.)? There are many other Iraqi poets, for instance, in the 312-page collection Baghdad: The City in Verse, ed. Reuven Snir, which also came out last year. But Mikhail’s slim chapbook has an intimacy and immediacy that Snir’s thicker and more scholarly feeling collection — which roams over thirteen centuries  – lacks.

Certainly, you can find several of these poems online, but the chapbook is worth having both for the poems themselves and for Mikhail’s questions and reflections.

Khaled Mattawa has been elected — along with Arizona poet laureate Alberto Ríos  — to the Academy of American Poets’ 15-member board:

Mattawa at the Tripoli International Poetry Festival.

The announcement was made on Wednesday. Both Mattawa and Ríos will serve six-year terms on the academy’s board and, according to a news release from the academy, “As members of the Board of Chancellors, Mattawa and Ríos will consult with the organization on matters of artistic programming, serve as judges for the organization’s largest prizes for poets, and act as ambassadors of poetry in the world at large.

Mattawa — who was born in Benghazi, Libya and emigrated to the US in his teens — is a poet, a translator, and an artist-activist who has worked to foster cultural events in Libya in the last two years. He has authored several collections of poetry, including his latest, Tocqueville (2010), and has translated many volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry, including his multi-award-winning collection Adonis: Selected Poems. As an artist-activist, he helped organize an international poetry festival in Tripoli, among other events.

This is hardly Mattawa’s first laurel: He is the recipient of the 2010 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the PEN American Center Poetry Translation Prize, and a Banipal Translation Prize, among other prizes. He currently teaches in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Academy Chancellor Marilyn Hacker called Mattawa “one of the best, most inventive, lyrical and intellectually challenging American poets of his generation. His work is as daring in its amalgam of poetic techniques as it is dazzling in the breadth of its subject matter.”

Previous chancellors have included some of the most distinguished poets in the U.S.: Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Lucille Clifton, Adrienne Rich, Yusef Komunyakaa, and John Ashbery.

From Khaled Mattawa:

Mattawa’s poems on Web del Sol

Mattawa’s work on Poets.Org

Conversation with Mattawa on PBS NewsHour’s Art Beat

Interview and “The Old House with Thee” on Blackbird

Mattawa’s translations on WWB

“Ecclesiastes,” from Mattawa’s most recent collection, Tocqueville,  reviewed here by Hilary Plum on KROand here by “aka Joe” on his blog.

The whole opening to Tocqueville

“Now That We Have Tasted Hope“

“After 42 Years”

“A poet dies twice: once when he publishes, and once when a statue is erected to him.” So said Iraqi poet Mahmoud al-Braikan, in a speech in memory of the great Badr Shakir al-Sayyab:

A Google doodle for al-Jawahiri, which must be another sort of death.

Al-Sayyab (1926-1964) — one of Iraq’s most gifted poets — lived and died in poverty. He was imprisoned and scapegoated by various successive regimes, and according to scholar and translator Ibrahim Muhawi, the last three years of his life “were indeed miserable,” as his poverty was compounded “with an incurable, degenerative…disease of his spinal cord…that led gradually to the paralysis of his legs and the deterioration of his nervous system, culminating in his death at the young age of 38.”

Al-Sayyab’s death did shake the world of Arabic literature, Muhawi said. By 1967, a new selection of his poetry appeared with an introduction by the Syrian poet Adonis. But it wasn’t until 1971 that he was claimed by the Iraqi government.

That’s when the Ba’athist regime, under Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, erected a statue to the poet. In 2013, the Iraqi Ministry of Culture did one better, announcing that al-Sayyab’s family home would be turned into a cultural forum “and a tourist museum that documents his poetry works and displays to the public his personal effects, pictures, scripts and audio recordings.”

Perhaps the museum will be beautiful, educational, and a home for poets and poetry. In any case, Al-Braikan, who died in 2002, would surely not approve. But just as surely, Iraqi poet Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri’s (1899-1997) second death, revealed last month and chronicled in Al-Monitor and As-Safir, is a bit unhappier. From Al-Monitor:

From بغداد.

Jawahiri’s statue has become a bad joke among intellectuals, the public and the poet’s family. Jawahiri’s granddaughter saw her grandfather’s history collapse in front of her. No one in Baghdad province gave the history of that cultural and poetic figure his due.

The province put up a simple statue that said nothing about Jawahiri. It was a simple statue made of some kind of plastic material in the middle of a pool, whose water was dyed green during the unveiling celebration. But all that ugliness was not enough. They surrounded the statue with a number of coffee pots of different sizes. The statue’s head was crooked, and the coffee pots made the scene look even more ridiculous. Jawahiri’s family rushed to the governor to try to fix the monument, which offended the history of a man buried in the Ghuraba cemetery in the neighborhood of Sayyeda Zeinab, Damascus.

Baghdad assassinated Jawahiri twice, once when it forced him into exile, away from the “Tigris River of goodness,” and another time by making for him a pathetic statue that is unworthy of his history.

The governor promised to fix the statue and to remove the coffee pots and coffee cups from around it so that the poet doesn’t get turned into a coffee seller after his death.

There’s no indication that the leftist poet would’ve been shamed or alarmed by an association with coffee-sellers. However, it’s not quite clear how the above statue won a competition that was apparently, according to the US Department of Defense news website al-Shorfa, worth 5 million dinars.

Although a popular and beloved poet – called by critic Salma Khadra Jayyusi in Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry ”undoubtedly the greatest Iraqi poet of his generation” — al-Jawahiri, with his classical style, has generally been ignored by critics and translators.

According to Jayyusi, “Poetry of a unique and uncommitted nature such as that of al-Jawahiri, which does not proclaim a new doctrine of poetry, is immediately marked out as ‘conventional’ and left untreated.”

Read: Two poems by al-Jawahiri, submitted by an anonymous translator.

Another image: of the statue.

There seem to be numerous studies, of late, about how fiction makes us better, more empathetic people. I suppose it’s possible. But for me, while reading good fiction can make me jittery with something akin to happiness, it’s reading a (good) poem that sends me back into myself, to the cold, clear air of a humanity I often forget.

Perhaps it’s in the shaking loose of words, the lack of narrative so overbearing elsewhere in life. In any case, poetry. Robin Moger at QISASUKHRA has published three newly translated poems by Yasser Abdellatif: “Night Tour,” “Rock and Roll,” and “Romance.” From the latter:

A black cat mewing like a siren,

Captive in the courtyard of a high tower

With walls as smooth as Fate.

Shall the mewl serve

To pick a hole in the walls of despair?

I dream of the cat as I try to pick a hole

In the walls of my sleep

To cross through to the other side…

All three are from Abdellatif’s 2009 collection, Night Tour. The first was previously trans. Youssef Rakha and previously published in Al Ahram, re-translated here.

Abdellatif also has a new short-story collection out (Settling Down and Setting Out: Stories and Tales), and his stories also borrow from poetic forms. You can read translations of his “Sorting Shelves” and “Country Train” on QISASUKHRA. If you’re interested in more Yasser Abdellatif, there’s also this.

Meanwhile, Prairie Schooner has – in its Winter 2013 issue — a poem, “Poem,” by al-Saddiq al-Raddi, trans. Mark Ford and Hafiz Kheir. It’s full of movement and absence:

I saw the angel
and the singing birds slaughtered.
I saw the horse,
the soldiers,
the grieving women,
the dead trees, and other women
inured to screams and wailing.
I saw the streets, the gusting wind,
the sports cars
racing by, the boats, the innocent kids.

I said, “Master of the Water, this is
how things are: tell me about the clay,
the fire, the smoke, the shadows, the smell
of reality.” Deliberately, I did not ask
about our homes.

And the Poetry Translation Centre has “The Earth Opens and Welcomes You,” by Abdellatif Laâbi, trans. from the French by Andre Naffis-Sahely.

Also: The Stephen Spender Prize 2014 is now open for entries. It offers publication and cash prizes, and invites translations of poems from “any language, classical or modern, into English.”

More on how to enter. Entries must arrive no later than midnight GMT on Friday May 23, 2014.

A few weeks before the passage of Tunisia’s historic consensus constitution — which was approved last night by an overwhelming 200-12 vote — a number of writers and poets communicated their hopes for the nation in an open letter to the newly appointed prime minister. The online magazine Tunisia Live translated these hopes and added some from “street poet” Majd Mastoura:

Mastoura, who is a founder of a “street poetry” collective that promotes writing in Tunisian dialect, told the magazine that he has few expectations for the new prime minister:

I can’t build high hopes since it is a caretaker government. Previous elected governments were unable to achieve anything. I am not really interested in addressing this government. As a young person I will continue to fight through my art and I encourage artists to do the same. The streets are ours and we will keep reclaiming them.

Indeed, Tunisian artists have insistently claimed and re-claimed space over the past three years, as for instance rapper Alaa Yacoub (Wled 15), who was jailed twice for an anti-police song.

The nation’s new constitution, translated into English and posted on Tunisia Live, guarantees “freedom of opinion, thought, expression, media and publication” and states that writing “shall not be subject to prior censorship.” However, this groundbreaking constitution also does leave room for censorship of work that touches on religion or criticism of the state:

The state is committed to spreading the values of moderation and tolerance, and to protect the sacred and prevent it from being attacked, and is also committed to prohibit charges of apostasy (“takfir”) and incitement to hatred and violence, and to combat them.

Popular rapper-poets Weld 15 and Klay BBJ were both arrested on charges that they had defamed public institutions and incited Tunisians to violence for the song “The Police are Dogs,” in which Weld 15 boasts that he will slaughter a policeman like a sheep.  Yet — despite arrests, violence, and uncertainty — the post-2010 poetry scene in Tunisia feels vibrant.

It was a poem by Abou al-Qassem al-Shabi (1909-1934) that became the anthem for the spirit of revolution that sallied forth in December 2010. And many poets, hip hop and otherwise, continued to re-write the world.

Luck, poetry, & love to the Tunisian people.

More about the “street poetry” group on Your Middle East:

Tunisian resistance one verse at a time

And now, the poems:

Abu al-Qasim al-Shabi’s “If the People Wanted Life One Day,” three translations

Mohamed Sgaier Awlad’s “The Will,” trans. Tristan Cranfield

Amina Said’s “You Who Are No Longer in the World’s Present Tense” and other poems, trans. Marilyn Hacker

Moncef Ouahibi’s “If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler,” trans. Sinan Antoon

Adam Fet’hi “Cavafy’s Whip,” trans. Camilo Gomez-Rivas

Mansour M’henni’s “Disagreement” and “Grain of Beauty,” trans. Keith Bosley

Mohammed Ghozzi’s “A Star,” “Horses,” “I’ll Not Stray,” and “Moby Dick,” trans. Issa J Boullata

Ali Znaidi’s “More More More” and other poems

Amel Moussa’s “Love Me,” trans. Khaled Mattawa, a section of which I’ve clipped from Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four: The University of California Book of North African Literature, where there is much more Tunisian verse:

I carry me on my fingertips.
I carry me on the galloping of my vision.
I wrap myself with a swaddling of my skin.
I embrace me, longing for myself.
I bless my flowing, my gushing.
I cradle me in my chest.
I glove these budding hands with poetry.

And from the World Policy Journal, the rapper Ferid El Extranjero:

Liberta! Speak out loud, discuss!
We are living in a strange society.
Where is our justice? We were born free, you won’t
stop us if you arrest us!
The press is the source of freedom,
It’s the light in the darkness,
Democracy is saying the truth.
A paper and pen against the wind,
Everything will be told.

Also, from the archives:

Q & A with Mohamed-Salah Omri: The Links Between Poetry, Politics, and Revolution in Tunisia 

In Tunisia: The Health of the Book

Understanding a Revolution through Iconography: Tunisian Political Cartoonist_Z_

The Syrian poetAkram Alkatreb will be speaking at the University of Chicago on Friday, January 31 at 3 p.m. on “Syria…memories, love poems, and places”:

Akram Alkatreb was born in 1966 in Salamiah, a city near Hama, in western Syria.  He got a law degree at the University of Damascus and worked as an art critic and journalist. He’s published four collections of poetry in Arabic and has lived in U.S. since 2001. Last year, a collection of his poetry was published as They Sleep in a Hurry. 

One of his poems, translated by the Syrian poet Osama Esber:

Yet more poetry

Abdul-Rahman al-Abnudi, born in the southern city of Qena in 1938, is one of the most important contemporary Egyptian colloquial poets. His work often returns to the joys and sorrows of the marginalized, and he has also written poetry for those struggling for positive change, including for imprisoned Alaa Abdelfattah (“The Prisoners’ Laughter”):

Although a number of al-Abnudi’s poems have been translated, mostly they have been translated in a rough and ready way by fans. “The Usual Sorrows,” which Cairokee adapted into the song “We are the People,” has also been so translated. Here, journalist Ahmed Aboul Enein gives the lyrics’ translation a go:

The Usual Sorrows

By Abdul Rahman al-Abnudi

trans. Ahmed Aboul Enein

From all corners of silent cities
Thousands of youth, crawling,
calling for the death of dawn.
Waiting dawn after dawn,
For the killing to stop,
Or at least for the grip to loosen.
And so they marched to demand
The grip be gripped,
And the palm extended.

Blood

Turned the square upside down,
As though it were molten copper.

I know of cities despised by light
And the grave that slumbers solemnly,
I know of shame and the birth of fire
And the prison in my heart has no walls.

I told him “No sir, I’m sorry,”
My country is worth the spring and morning.
The hum of spring still in my heart
The light of a lantern still in my voice.
The world still lives, it comes and goes,
Differentiating between dark and light.
No matter how much my country loses it’s never lost
Only a vast square is lost

We are the people
Who love beauty and are destined for the relentless path
We are the people
Who get stomped with boot and heel tips
We are the people
Who love beauty and are destined for the relentless path
We are the people
Who get stomped with boot and heel tips

I can only mourn my friends at night,
For I am intimate with the moon
And in it many months I’ve confided.
He who killed me is still at large,
And on the night of the funeral,
The moon was oblivious, it didn’t come
The star was ecstatic, however
It did not stop dancing in or shaking.
And when I passed away,
The door crowded, I was surrounded by loved ones
This one washes, this one shrouds, that one readies earth
I had asked that only the shoulders of brothers carry me
Brothers who ate together,
No treason or traitor among them.
Else my coffin mustn’t go through the door,
Oh how wonderful, to slumber on the shoulders of your friends,
To know who is true to you and who lies,
To look for the noblest of faces
In the time of treachery

We are the people
Who love beauty and are destined for the relentless path
We are the people
Who get stomped with boot and heel tips
We are the people
Who love beauty and are destined for the relentless path
We are the people
Who get stomped with boot and heel tips

[ABNOUDY VOICE OVER]

I looked around, thinking I’m amongst friends
Come see the world with my eyes,
The distractions of life prevented us from looking
And despite the nobility of pain and patience
We learned things, not least of which was caution
And we slept for amazing years
Passing the nights of our awaited dream
And the markets filled with convoys
Selling the pus of illusions, and boats
Offering the nation up for sale on the curb
Alongside thinking, the hungry, spiders, the humiliation of hunger

[END ABNOUDY]

You’re stagnation, we’re progress
You steal food,
We build homes.
We are sound when you demand silence
Yes, sound when you demand silence
We are two peoples, two peoples, two peoples
Look at where one is and where the other is
The line between both is drawn here
You sold the land, its tools, and people
In the market of the world,
Stipped her clothes off.
She became bare
Face, back, stomach, chest
She rotted even before she died

We are the people
Who love beauty and are destined for the relentless path
We are the people
Who get stomped with boot and heel tips
We are the people
Who love beauty and are destined for the relentless path
We are the people
Who get stomped with boot and heel tips

[ABNOUDY VOICE OVER]

Even if I am alone now
Soon with time
Generations will visit this cell
And definitely there will be a generation
Unlike the others
One that understands when it sees
And does not fear when it understands
You are the traitors even if I get it wrong
Take your prison keys with you and leave me my country
My country is not your country
And so he left
And I told myself
No one serves you as much as your jailer

[END ABNOUDY]

Watch the video from Cairokee:

More from al-Abnudi:

“Yamna,” trans. Randa Aboubakr

“Al Midan,” trans. students in Dr. Samia Mehrez’s “Translating the Revolution”

It hasn’t been a good few weeks for Arabic-writing poets. In Qatar, Muhammad al-Ajami remains in prison. In Iran, poet Hashem Shaabani, who published both in Persian and in Arabic, was  executed for being an enemy of God and the state, according to rights groups. In Egypt, the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) declared that “writing poetry became a more serious crimt than murder” afer two police officers were suspended for their poems:

Although Sameh Abdel-Zaher and Sameh Al-Saeedi were suspended for critical poems, ANHRI noted that “the Ministry of Interior refused to suspend those officers who are accused of killing scores of citizens, such as the officers in Alexandria, including Wael Al-Komi, and allowed them to resume their work or to transfer them to another places.”

ANHRI wrote in a prepared release:

Apparently, murder charge has become a violation that doesn’t necessitate suspension or preventive detention. Meanwhile, writing poetry has become a crime that necessitates breaking the pens of whoever write and suspending them.

In Iran, Arab-Iranian poet Shaabani and another man, Hadi Rashedi, were reportedly hanged in unidentified prison on January 27. According to Amir Taheri, writing in al-Sharq al-Awsat, Shaabani mostly wrote non-political poetry. “One of his odes is Homage to Karoun, Iran’s largest and only navigable river; in another poem he speaks of ‘the blonde sun of Khuzestan.’” Taheri also writes that, although Shaabani was not allowed to publish during President Mohammad Khatami’s eight-year tenure, the poet “was not prevented from organizing public poetry recitals in Ahvaz and several other Khuzestani cities.”

Taheri also writes that Shaabani is the author of the poem “Seven Reasons Why I Should Die”:

Seven Reasons Why I Should Die
By Hashem Shaabani

Sameh al-Saeedi’s poem, from ANHRI:

On March 13 — the day in 1941 on which Mahmoud Darwish was born — organizations in eleven Italian cities will stage readings “against the oblivion.”

The events are being coordinated by Chiara Comito, the blogger behind editoriaraba.wordpress.com. Comito was one of many Italians concerned by the pulping of many copies of Darwish’s poetry in Italian and its virtual disappearance from Italian bookshops. Although back copies are still available in some libraries, Comito says it is difficult to find Darwish in Italian.

She answered a few questions about the event she’s organizing and, more broadly, about Darwish’s poetry in Italian.

ArabLit: How many readings have you organized? Where will the readings be? Are you still looking for more to participate?

Chiara Comito: So far I’m coordinating the organization of eleven readings and I’m personally organizing the reading in Rome, the city in which I live. The readings will take place in the following cities all over Italy: Bari, Cagliari, Florence, Macerata, Messina, Milan, Naples, Rome,  Salerno, Turin and Venice. There will be public readings in Italian, Arabic, and hopefully other languages, talks by experts, screening of videos where Darwish performs his poems, workshops with students and much more. We are defining the different programs and I’ll constantly update the blog and the Facebook page with all the details.

Some amazing people responded to my “call for action” launched last December and have agreed to organize the readings in their cities: It would have not been possible to put up such an event without their invaluable help. And I’m talking of professors, students, Arabists, friends, cultural associations, bookshops. We are all united by the love for Mahmoud Darwish, his poetry and Arabic literature in general. And yes, if anyone else wishes to join us please contact me at: chiara.comito@arabismo.org!

AL: Can you explain why Darwish’s poetry is “disappearing” in Italy? What happened?

CC: The publishing house Epoché, which was the publisher who translated most of Darwish’ s poetry, closed down at the beginning of 2013. It was a small publishing house and was engulfed by the economic crisis. The unsold books went to the shredder and this means that if one wanted to buy a poetry book of Darwish could only hope to find it online (I myself bought a copy of Murale/ جدارية online a couple of months ago). It is almost impossible to find his books in an ordinary bookshop. Not to mention the other publishing houses who translated him: they did a good job (I’m talking about De Angelis Editore, Cafoscarina and San Marco dei Giustianiani) but none of them has recently published any of Darwish’s works so it is really difficult to find their books.

AL: Darwish’s poetry was very popular in France — according to Richard Jacquemond, Dariwhs used to sell more books in France in the 2000s than any living French poet. Did he ever have that sort of popularity in Italian?

With our event we wish not only to sensitize the Italian public on the disappearance of his poetry books but also, as one of the organizers in Milan wrote me a couple of days ago: “sensitize the public to the poetry because… Poetry saves your life.”

CC: Tough question. I do not want to sound negative, but I don’t think so: He is famous and renowned but not that much. Still, according to some statistics, Mahmoud Darwish, together with Adonis and Nagib Mahfouz, is the most translated Arab author in Italy. He came to Italy several times to perform in public readings and to participate in literary festivals, such as the Festivaletteratura in Mantua in 2005, the most famous Italian literary festival.

He is very much studied in the university courses of Arabic literature and he is also known and loved by non-arabist lovers of international poetry, but I wouldn’t dare saying his books sell, or used to sell, more than any other poet in Italy. Not to mention that many critics complain that poetry doesn’t sell very much in Italy (although the Italians love poetry), at least not as much as fiction.

With our event we wish not only to sensitize the Italian public on the disappearance of his poetry books but also, as one of the organizers in Milan wrote me a couple of days ago: “sensitize the public to the poetry because as Donatella Bisutti (an Italian poet and journalist) wrote: Poetry saves your life.”

AL: Which of his works have been translated into Italian?

CC: Poetry books:

• Come fiori di mandorlo, o più lontano (كزهر اللوز أو أبعد ), trans. by Chirine Haidar, Milano, Epoché, 2010
• Meno rose (ورد أقل), trans. by Gianroberto Scarcia and Francesca Rambaldi, Venezia, Cafoscarina, 1997
• Perche hai lasciato il cavallo alla sua solitudine? (لماذا تركت الحصان وحيدا) trans. by Lucy Ladikoff Guasto; Genova, San Marco dei Giustiniani, c2001
• Il letto della straniera (سرير الغريبة) trans. by Chirine Haidar, Milano, Epoché, 2009
• La mia ferita è lampada ad olio (collection of poems), trans. by Francesca M. Corrao; De Angelis Editore, Avellino, 2006;
• Murale (جدارية), trans. by Fawzi Al Delmi; Epoché, Milano, 2005.

Non-fiction:

• Una memoria per l’oblio (ذاكرة للنسيان ), trans. by L. Girolamo with E. Bartuli, Roma, Jouvence, 1997
• Oltre l’ultimo cielo: la Palestina come metafora (collection of different essays on Palestine), trans. by G. Amaducci, E. Bartuli, M. Nadotti; Milano, Epoché, 2007.

In the following months, a trilogy of Darwish works (only prose) is due to be published by Feltrinelli publishing house. The trilogy has been edited by Elisabetta Bartuli and translated by Ramona Ciucani and will include a new translation of Una memoria per l’oblio, as well as translations of In presenza dell’assenza (في حضرة الغياب ) and Diario di ordinaria tristezza (وميات الحزن العادي ).

AL: That’s good to hear, as those are all soul-shaking books. Are some of his poems available online in Italian?

CC: Yes, there are many: if you google “Darwish + poesie” you will find a good number of his poems translated in Italian available to read/share.

AL: Have you heard interest from any publishers after putting together this event?

CC: I have, but cannot tell you anything more.

There are plenty of poems out there this February 14 for the lover or lover-in-recovery. But for those who are not  yet in recovery — or don’t want to be — excerpts from Lebanese poet Yehia Jaber’s “How I Became a Suicide Bomber,” translated for the first time by Thoraya El-Rayyes:

By Yehia Jaber
Translated from the Arabic by Thoraya El-Rayyes

Had Satan bowed down to Adam
Eve wouldn’t have birthed this she-devil:
my love.

Plainly.
Without asking permission, like a heart attack
like a falling button from the shirt of the sky
like a lamp blowing out in the corridor
water cutting out in the tap
my muse, my electric generator, decided
to dim her face at the table
and slap me with the sentence
“Our relationship is over,
let’s be friends.”

Like a shoestring snapping at a cocktail party
our relationship snapped
and my love slipped away
not a hair out of place.
Where you going
Cinderella?
What to do with myself, crucified,
the nail of your stiletto
thrust into the crux of my soul.

***

At the entrance, you circle round me meowing an apology
you backstabber with nine lives.
You jump from the window
vanish through a gap in the door
and leave me your cat in the basket—
the cat, to keep me company
the cat, a present on Saint Valentine’s,
you Saint Lucifer.

Fine.
I’ll grab the cat by her tail
wave her round like a folkdancer’s kerchief
and dance.
I’ll pin her down in the bathtub
I’ll make her drown in the water, you desert,
her eyes remind me of yours
eyeballs bulging.
I see your nine lives
froth, floating.
And sit on the edge of the bathtub
smoking
like Clint Eastwood.

***

Your album is on the table
I’ll rip your pictures out with wax
I’ll dip your pictures in a teacup
so your face fades
and I see the milk of your eyes
floating skin in the cup.
No,
I have not seen enough
I am not quenched
I’ll put your smiling photo beside a mouse
and take your picture together
like twins, nibbling on the wheat sack
of my beating heart.

What next?
With a scraper
I’ll purge your face from the photos
pry the colour off with nail clippers
you barbed claw
I’ve forgotten what colour you are.
I’ll open your mouth in the photo,
shove an arsenic pill through your teeth.
Swallow.
Die before me in the album.
“Let’s be friends” you say.
I’ll exterminate your words with insecticide.

***

When you step out the door, beware
I’ll cast your nights in black
I am the darkness of darkness.
When you step out the metal gate, throwing a tear at the doorkeeper
I’ll knock on our neighbour’s door
and punch him
I’ll carry my hands, screwdrivers
to take apart the building joint by joint
and the tenants will tumble out
like apples into the streets.
I’ll follow you
plant explosives
in the neighbourhood cars.
I am the essence of gunpowder
churning wrath into TNT
burying a heavy landmine
under the mattress of Beirut.
I have a stable of booby-trapped stallions
and a thousand legions of masked birds
to pelt stones at the windows
of your house
of your eyes
you woman of glass.

Come back, save humankind
or I’ll become a suicide bomber.

More:

Moving Poems: A short film about Jaber

A podcast about Jaber’s work

In Al Jazeera’s ‘Poets of Protest.’ The full video.

Four poems by Jaber: “Nightmare,” “Without Philosophy,” “Greencard,” and “Without Literature”

“I am not neutral,” trans. Ashraf Osman

Thoraya El-Rayyes is a Palestinian-Canadian writer living in Amman, Jordan. Her translations of Arabic short stories have previously appeared in Saint Anne’s Review and World Literature Today.

Youssef Hussein Hamdan looks at Shukri Madi’s Mahmoud Darwish: Ideology of Politics and Ideology of Poetry (2013), which follows as “Darwish turns from the poet of resistance to the poet of freedom”:

By Yousef Hussein Hamdan

Mahmoud Darwish is the poet of transformations. Indeed, Shukri Madi, professor of literary criticism and theory at the University of Jordan, follows them in his latest book, Mahmoud Darwish’s Poetry: Ideology of Politics and Ideology of Poetry (محمود درويش: أيديولوجيا السياسة وأيديولوجيا الشعر), issued by the Arab Institute for Research and Publishing. The author contends that political ideology influences poetry and poetic imagination in various ways, particularly at the time of political struggles, as is the case of Darwish. However, it is clear throughout the book that political ideology is not the essence of poetry. In many ways, there is a struggle or a competition between poetic and artistic imagination and political imagination.

The title of the book points to an essential transformation in Darwish’s poetry. In his early poems, the political sound was loud and linked to specific historical moments, places (Palestine in most), events, and partisan perspectives. This gradually changed for the sake of the poetic sound, which is based on wide and comprehensive attitudes that include the entire human race and are situated beyond time, place, and specific events. This sound is prominently devoted to creativity and liberty.

The latter is more than the political sense: It is the liberty from the pressure of time, place, anxiety, illness, death, specific historical events, one-sided views, and significantly previous identified poetic forms.

Importantly, while transformations in Darwish’s poetry relate to conscious changes in the philosophical and life perspectives, it does not in any way mean, the author repeatedly insists, that Darwish gave up his and his people’s national and human rights. Rather Darwish attempted to look at this issue from a wider point of view, as a human problem without being under the pressure of confrontation.

The author argues that, despite changes which appeared in the order of the poetic components of Darwish’s poetry, the human being is always occupying the centre.

Hence, Darwish gave voice to the “other” or to his enemy in many of his poems. This allowed him to dismantle the other’s argument from within, in order to release him from narrow ideological and political illusions. In this sense, the concept of freedom is by no means limited in Darwish’s poetry to himself or his own people — rather it includes the enemy. The author argues that, despite changes which appeared in the order of the poetic components of Darwish’s poetry, the human being is always occupying the centre. He depicts this by drawing a triangle in which the human being permanently occupies the heart of the triangle. In Darwish’s early collections of poems, the issue of freedom represents the base of the triangle, and the poetic value and the place (homeland) occupy two sides of the triangle. In Darwish’s later works, the poetic value is the base and freedom and the place (the world) are the two sides of the triangle.

This is simultaneous with, and requires, transformations in artistic understanding and poetic conceptions. Darwish’s later poetry shows that poetry is a special artistic entity which has a relationship to politics, history, religion, and reality, but is not any one of them. Poetry is not a tool to transport ideas and emotions, but it is an aesthetic experience which includes ideas and emotions. It is a special language figuration that aims at triggering poetic pleasure and “being questions” while establishing a new aesthetic cognition. Poetry is a never-ending search for a new poetic-writing system and form of the poem. The language and images are intense, metaphorical, philosophical, ambiguous, and filled with historical and mythical symbols. There are multiple poetic meanings and no meaning is absolute. The specific event gets beyond its time and place to highlight the human being’s emotions, questions, dreams of justice and equality, and anxiety of life and death. The lyric voices turn to scenery and cinematographic images. Therefore, this new form of poetry requires contemplation and interpretation, instead of explanation.

The author discusses many poems from Darwish’s early works and later ones, including poems from his collections: أوراق الزيتون Olive Leaves (1964), أزهار الدم Blood Flowers (1967), حالة حصار A State of Siege (2002), أثر الفراشة The Butterfly’s Burden (2009), and لا أريد لهذه القصيدة أن تنتهي I Do not Want This Poem to End (2009). These works demonstrate Darwish’s transformation from poetry that is laden with political, local, and national concerns to another universal poetic conception, which addresses humanity everywhere and all times.

It is a transformation from the ideology of politics to the ideology of poetry, within which Darwish turns from the poet of resistance to the poet of freedom.

In this kind of poetry, the entire world is the poet’s land; the individual “I” overlaps with the collective We, the We gets closer to the Others, and the We and others turn to be universal. Additionally, the strong occupier takes the image of the weak occupied; the latter looks to liberate the enemy and the self, and all ages (past, present and future) integrate in one life and so are all places in one land. It is a transformation from the ideology of politics to the ideology of poetry, within which Darwish turns from the poet of resistance to the poet of freedom.

Yousef Hussein Hamdan is assistant professor of modern Arabic literature and literary criticism at the University of Jordan.

Lebanese poet Ounsi al-Hage died on Tuesday after a long illness. He was 76.*

Al-Hage was born in 1937 in southern Lebanon, the son of Marie Akl and journalist and translator Louis al-Hage. The younger al-Hage began to publish his own short stories, essays, and poems in the mid-1950s, when he was still a high school student. After graduation, he worked as a journalist and contributed, with Youssef Khal and Adonis, to the establishment of the genre-changing poetry magazine Shi’r.

According to the author’s website, he published six collections of poetry and a book of essays, in addition to translating plays by Shakespeare, Ionesco, Camus, and Brecht into Arabic.

His poetry has been translated into a number of languages, and collections have come out in French and German. His work has also been translated to music.

From the poet’s website, an excerpt trans. Issa Boullatta:

Nothing has saved us, my sweetheart, but madness

When we jumped at the fresh loss

And met our shadows

And so, our darknesses illuminated us

And our laps became waves for the winds.

From 1992-2003, al-Hage was editor-in-chief of the Lebanese daily an-Nahar, and since 2006, he has been a leading columnist at al-Akhbar.

Al-Akhbar released a statement that said, in part:

Ounsi lit up our evenings with his glowing presence, his ever-lasting jokes, his witty sense of humor, and the critical eye of historic writers and professional journalists. Using his thought-provoking pen, he colored Al-Akhbar and added to it a sensitivity that we have always been proud of.

We will always be proud of what Ounsi al-Hajj left behind and his creativity from the 1950s when he helped in creating Beirut’s Golden Age through al-Shaar magazine, “Mulhak al thakafi”, an-Nahar newspaper… up until the peak of his career at Al-Akhbar.

Al-Akhbar has also changed the front page of their website to celebrate al-Hage’s life.

*This site, following Al-Akhbar, originally reported that al-Hage was 76 at his death. But Lebanese novelist and journalist Jana El Hassan corrects that al-Hage would have been 77 this summer.

Fawaz Azem has translated three new Syrian poems — one from Dima Yousf and two from Nihad Sayed Issa — all responding, in some way, to the nation’s current landscape:

By Fawaz Azem

Dima Yousf, courtesy of the poet.

Dima Yousf, a Syrian Palestinian born in 1986, graduated from Damascus University with a degree in Arabic literature and a teaching diploma. She teaches Arabic in Damascus schools, and is pursuing a graduate degree “but with a stay of execution.”  A recent post on her Facebook page reads “I have so many stories to tell, if I survive.”

Yousf’s poem is untitled.

#

Oh, if I only had a knife
like those that are forgotten on necks,
after massacres.
If I only had the fingers of a murderer
and his unblinking eyes.
If I could only utter the cry of his victim
the moment he gathers in the voices
from all four corners of the earth,
I would sharpen my knife with my teeth,
and the teeth of all those who, like me,
are unable to do anything, except bite their lips with regret,
and slaughter this year,
peering on us,
mockingly.
I would chop its body into tender meat,
so that the starving would eat.

Oh, if only the years were edible,
so that the starving would chew them,
and spit the bitter taste in our faces.
Oh, if only The Lord would see
the protruding bones of children,
and would do something,
anything,
so that we wouldn’t lose faith.
Oh, if only my heart were a god.

#

Photo courtesy the poet.

Nihad Sayed Issa, born on Sep.1, 1966 in Idlib Syria, graduated from the University of Aleppo with a degree in Electronic Engineering Technology. He lives in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and regularly publishes his poetry on his Facebook page, where he has a large following. Three of his cousins were recently killed, fighting the regime forces near Idlib.

According ot the poet:

This poem was written in the aftermath of the Al-Houla massacre. Al-Houla, a village in the province of Homs, was the scene of a massacre perpetrated on May 25, 2012 in which 108 people were killed, including 49 children and 34 women, and 550 people were injured. Following artillery shelling by the regular army, members of a pro-regime militia, together with members of the Lebanese Hezbollah militia, stormed the houses, attacking the inhabitants with knives and bayonets.

The Sacrificial Doves

From the darkness of the well, Joseph cries
“O children of Al-Houla, agony of the prophets,”
Jacob calls out, at the top of his voice,
“throw their shirts between my hands.”
Syria’s eyes have turned white with grief.
Job, in his patience, “Lord, a great harm has befallen the people of Syria,
Lord you are the most merciful of the merciful.”

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Syria, the Dream Maiden

Syria,
O maiden emerging from the dream,
……plucking the strings of the unknown,
……..slumbering in the fragrant moments on the pillow of the wind,
………waiting for tomorrow to come.

#

Fawaz Azem served for 26 yrs in the UN Arabic Language Services, first in the Arabic Translation Service, 1976-1982, and the remaining years in the Arabic Interpretation Section, 1982-2002. Since then, he’s been working as a free-lance Arabic interpreter and translator with the UN and private entities. He is based in New York.