A dangerous and indispensable art

January 18, 2006

As an American poet, I see my country represented in Iraq by an inept and cruel military occupation, and by a government whose cultural insensibility, at home and abroad, is absolute. Given the first Gulf War, twelve years of disabling sanctions against the Iraqi people, the coup of the last American election, requiring only the terrorist assaults on home soil to complete consolidation of power into the grasp of the rich and bloody-minded – I begin this review in some anger and bitterness, but with profound gratitude for the project, Iraqi Poetry Today.

My life would be unthinkable without poetic translation – my own limited efforts to learn from and work with poems in French, Dutch, Italian, Russian, Yiddish, Urdu, Spanish, assisted by dictionaries, literal translations, native linguists, other poets’ versions, and the ancient and durable tradition itself. We translate for infusions from poetries we’re able to read, and seek out or collaborate on translations from those we cannot read, for illumination of the poetic core of literatures we could not enter any other way. And for other reasons too, having to do with what in poetry is inimitable, intransigeant, telegraphic, musical, explicit, indirect, physical, impalpable, unmistakably human as the human face, yet varied as faces are.

To carry the intrinsic nature of a poem from one language to another can mean to make another poem; unweave strands into a new texture; experience the expressive limits of one’s mother-tongue; make love with a new person, in a different body; work with an unfamiliar medium – to feel the material contradictions of art. In a volume with many co-translators, there is bound to be a mixture of strategies ranging from the literal to the most inventive ends of the spectrum.

Poetry from the Arab world was first opened up for me by Salma Khadra Jayyusi’s magnificent Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987) in which she rightly says that since there can be no “perfect equivalence” in the translation of poetry, “the task of translating [is] not only a major aesthetic undertaking but also a crucial social responsibility.” (Jayyusi, xxiii.) Subjective, emotional experience everywhere lives and converses in poetry. Yet, subjective emotions exist of necessity in dialogue with objective conditions. Poetry springs from a nexus of individual and shared experience, above all an experience of location – geophysical realities, visible landscape, spaces marked out by religion, education and politics, poverty and wealth, gender and physiognomy, subordination and independence. Poetry both articulates new upshootings of particularity and grows out of a traditional compost. And it is often written in a desire to change the composition of the very soil from which it grows.

In his introduction to Iraqi Poetry Today, Saadi A. Simawe admits to a disappointed hope for his undertaking: that “translating poetry might contribute to the appreciation of other civilizations and even to peace in the Middle East. It seems [in the light of September 11 2001] that our dream has failed.” I want to urge him not to abandon hope. Conflicts waged by political/economic powers may be carried on light-years behind immense transformations in public consciousness. In the twenty-first century war is an anachronism maintained through advanced technology and manipulated emotions, on behalf of corporate power, in the name of chauvinism. Yet old notions of heroism and glory, still pushed by the warmakers, are fraying. An enormous international revulsion against war showed its face in mass demonstration upon mass demonstration during the months before Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld invaded Iraq. That revulsion has been a presence in poetry for centuries.

Simawe goes on to say: “The globalization of capital threatens to extinguish the spirit of each culture, but one positive change has come with this movement. It has shed light on the importance of translation. Translation can, of course, be seen as a tool that facilitates the globalization of capital and thus contributes to the overall deadening of cultures, but when poetry is translated, it works against these effects.” I agree in principle but would argue with the generalization. A poem is indeed something different from advertising copy or a bestselling novel or computer manual or mass-circulation magazine. Yet whose poetry is translated, from and into which languages, what of the poetry actually translated can get published and receive international distribution, what poets (and what poetics) are disseminated, and who decides these matters – such questions vibrate beneath Simawe’s claim. The corporatization of publishing and book distribution, the funding support for cultural journals, the class and gender relations which create an international literary/intellectual elite, all come into play here. (Of the forty poets in this anthology, just four are women, one of whom, Sajidah al-Musawi, is described as “an Iraqi woman poet, writing in Arabic. No further information about her is available.” I can’t but wonder why. One, Nazik al-Mala’ika, now living in Egypt, is considered “the most important woman poet and critic in the Arab world.” With Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, according to Salma Jayyusi, she liberated Arab poetry from formalism. Of the thirty-odd translators, incidentally, fifteen are women.)

Reviewing a booklength poem by Egyptian poet Muhammad Afifi Matar, Saadi Simawe and Carolina Hotchandani note “how influential English translation has recently become on the literary standard in the Arab world. Whether or not a piece of literature is translated into English practically determines the artistic value of that work. At this early stage of globalization it is difficult to determine whether this phenomenon is enriching Arabic literary tradition.”

In his introduction to Iraqi Poetry Today, Simawe observes that, “. . . whether we like it or not, English has become the world language, and thus has come to belong to people of all nations. Hundreds of the poets who live in exile have lost their audience and have begun to write either in English or to get their poetry translated into English or the language of their host country. The outcome of this hybrid poetics has become an important feature of western modernism.” So, western poetry is enhanced. At the same time, “major critics in the West are not familiar with, and some not even interested in, the languages of the colonized.” Indeed, and a Western reader like myself may approach an anthology like this sketchily versed, or not at all, in the literary contexts and traditions behind the making of the poems.

Clearly reflected, however, are politically repressive conditions such as those within Iraq under the dictatorship, and the Iran-Iraq war, which sent most of the poets in this book into exile. Five of the forty still live in Iraq; the majority are scattered in Damascus, London, Germany, California, Denmark, Geneva, Egypt, Detroit, Israel, Cambridge Massachusetts, Tripoli, Sweden; some, like Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati and Sa’di Yusif, having moved for a lifetime “from exile to exile.” Most of them have been identified with the Left and have paid the price. The loss, to any country, of its creative and rebel spirits, is more than just a “brain drain”. These are the damages wreaked by brutalities from within. (The deaths of more than 300,000 Iraqi children alone from acute malnutrition, first as a result of economic sanctions, the mortality rate rising after the US and British invasion in March, represent an incalculable national loss inflicted by brutalities from without.)

Standard Arabic, Hebrew, Iraqi dialect and Iraqi Kurdish are the languages of these poets. The Kurdish editor, Muhammad Tawfiq Ali, suggests the internal tensions of an ethnic minority poetry in a brief, somewhat ironic essay centering on Goran and Bekes, pseudonyms of the father-figures of Kurdish modernism. “The stark irony,” Ali tells us, “is that the proletarian poet [Goran] wrote in the social dialect of the bourgeoisie, whereas the nationalist [Bekes] wrote in the dialect of the working class and peasants . . . Goran’s poetry is formal, indirect and subtle: Bekes is informal, direct and popular or simple.” I wish that Ali had said more about the politics of Kurdish nationalism (and internationalism) from which these and later Kurdish poets such as Bulland al-Haydari emerged. The relationship of nationalism and language (or vernacular) is of special interest where poetry is concerned, as cultural resistance to ethnic or colonial domination.

I have found myself, by default, reading these translations more for images and themes than for their verbal quality. In part this has, obviously, to do with my own outsider relation to the languages they were written in and the traditions they represent. But the versions also seem uneven: many feel to me at one or two stages of craft behind the level of poetic rendering that Khaled Mattawa, for example, Libyan American and himself a fine poet in English, has given to the poems of Sa’di Yusif, both here and in the recently published collection, Without an Alphabet, Without a Face: Selected Poems of Saadi Youssef (St. Paul Minnesota: Greywolf Press, 2003) or of many poems in Jayyusi’s Modern Arabic Poetry, or Nathalie Handal’s The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology (New York/Northampton: Interlink Books, 2001.) There are phrasings which trouble me, as in Fawzi Karim’s “What Was My Choice?”:

In an affecting and immediate poem, with memorable images such as the “friends circling your glass like a crescent,” exile as surgical excision, the rolling of soundless dice, lapses into awkward English syntax are especially jarring. Phrases like “peel yourself of whom you love,” “the burden of exile than in memory,” “the question in the middle/of exiles” (at the core of exile?) “prefer to watch, like a trap” (preferring?) “the tripwires of another” (another’s tripwires?”) “in order that we perform for him” (to perform for him?) seem to need more attention to values of the ear. Similarly, in two poems by Abd al-Karim Kassid, the word “stature” is used where “body” or “figure” is meant; “stature” refers only to height or dimension where an entire corpus is implied here: “The tree is a stature/ and the leaf, an eye.”

To transfer the tonalities of Arabic (in which most of the poems were written) into English would be, I assume, a challenging task, akin to rendering the music of Spanish or Russian. Sometimes a single word seems ill-chosen, particularly when repeated over and over: as “calamity” in Murad Mikha’il’s long accumulative poem, “You Have Your Calamity and I Have Mine.” The word “calamity” is rather weak syllabically to bear the weight of many repetitions: why not “disaster”? Mikha’il is an Iraqi Jew and seems to address an Arab world of which he both is and is not a part. The poem is extraordinarily interesting but “calamity” sounds almost Victorian in the face of what it’s evoking.

As I’ve gone deeper into this collection, the flaws have seemed almost negligible beside what I’ve carried away from the whole (“almost” because each word in each poem/translation does matter.) There is the remarkable transcription of Mazaffar al-Nawwab recitating his long poem, “Bridge of Old Wonders” for a live audience. Al-Nawwab, described as “the most popular poet in the Arab world,” is a performance poet whose works circulate almost entirely through pirated cassettes. The poem moves from invocation through rich and allusive imagery into symbolic narrative, from delicacy to machismo, from a “high” poetic tone to colloquialism and dialogue, from Iraqi cities to a Palestinian refugee camp, from mourning to scathing invective whose objects range from oil sheikhs to the “Arabs of silence” to Yasir Arafat to Henry Kissinger. For all its declamatory intensity, it’s highly layered and textured, requiring the many notes provided for the Anglophone reader, as if T.S. Eliot and Amiri Baraka had spent a long night together.

Finally, Iraq’s great innovative woman poet, Nazik al-Mala’ika represented here by ten pages of poetry. “Jamilah and us” addresses the moral problematics of protest poetry – in this case, the many poems written on the imprisonment and torture by the French of a young Algerian resistance fighter:
Her longer poems here suggest an impressive authority of voice which in the English doesn’t quite carry over; the invocative “To Poetry” is marred by phrases like “raving fragrance,” “heaving with yearning.” The largeness of her scope and vision are most apparent in the mystical-political “The Hijrah [Migration] to God” which begins as an ecstatic praise-song and ends:
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? How have twentieth century movements in Arabic poetry,from traditional to modernist poetics, with blendings of both, found correspondence in English? Is it mere chance that the poems by Ronny Someck, born in Baghdad but living most of his life in Israel, seem verbally so fresh and audacious? Yet gathered here, these multiply-exiled, strongly-identified voices possess an energy for which I can only re-affirm my gratitude.

Translation is a dangerous and indispensable art. Likewise, criticism of translation by one unfamiliar with the original languages must come with many caveats. But a complex and vivid humanity, an aching for freedom, resounding throughout this collection, should nourish the hope in which it was conceived and carried through – even as Iraq, its people, its poets, still dwell in hunger and under fire.
Iraqi Poetry Today. Modern Poetry in Translation No. 19. Guest editor: Saadi A. Simawe. Kurdish editor: Muhammad Tawfiq Ali. Series editor: Daniel Weissbort. London 2003.

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