“...Arabic poetry, classical and modern, has a profusion of symbols of a historical and cultural nature. This demands the use of a great number of footnotes, which may be heavy on the reader when it becomes necessary to read a footnote and then go back to the text. [...] When we realize that nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs must respect the conjugation and declension with the masculine, feminine, dual, and plural, the difficulty of translation and reception by the non-Arabic reader becomes daunting to both. Despite all these “predicaments” the poetry lover should not be discouraged.”
- Abdulwahid Lu’lu’a1
I condemn the reader -
who was not the intended target audience for a poem -
more than I condemn the fact that I am writing now
in
this “universal”
language.
Desires for universality,
For absolute access encouraged and maintained by the trends of capital,
has rendered both of us somewhat
incompetent…
Them to absorb nuances - paint strokes that differentiate
a masterpiece from a scribble on the margins of a
blank page -
me to express them as wholly as they are
felt.
“I express everything that I feel in my life
paint my strange spirit’s feelings in color
and I cry when the many long years lunge at me
with their frightening, eternal daggers
and I laugh at the fate that cruel time has decreed
for the wondrous human frame…” (Nazik Al Malaika, Accusations)
I implore you to imagine what the stanza in its
mother tongue must have
felt like.
They reckoned us to be the war generation,
by-products of unimagined futures,
French men in French history books with streets
named after them,
on the outskirts of the neighborhood
our old uncle never stepped out of his entire
life.
“The poetry lover should not be discouraged,”
but not un-like the bastard streets we navigate,
the translated nuances might not exactly
get you there.
Bilingual subconsciousness is a fickle
thing.
Harbored within what is innately vocalized in
waves and folds of that same mother tongue,
an impulse to acquiesce to the prevailing
globalized
valorized
crux and
culture…
- (diaspora daughters with big brown hair
listen to young girls sing
unrealistic songs in made-up English to have something to talk about
with their friends) -
…and an equally powerful but shackled impulse
to provoke,
apprehend,
denounce,
the bubbling ulcers
of neocolonial - neoccolloquial - hybridity,
the dissonance festering in the
poisonous fertile grounds between
identity,
privilege,
permission,
pronunciation.
“Given the non-specialist nature of the audience and the presumption that they are reading for pleasure, the most obvious strategy is to go for communication translation whenever possible. The more radical strategy of cultural transplantation seems unacceptable at least in part because the readership is going to expect, and presumably want, to read a story about Egypt with recognizably Egyptian features. Similarly, a radical exoticizing strategy seems unwarranted, because the readership is unlikely to understand all the exotic cultural terms, and may not be able to follow the storyline.” 2
The heart,
removed to understand it,
to study its valves and chambers,
is reimplanted in a new
body where it
succumbs to its own dissonance.
Scrolls of 9th-century music
theory
lay in a refrigerated echo chamber,
eyes gaping at the longevity of
the decaying,
preserved
paper.
Pleasure?
Can pleasure be transferred outside the confines of
the specific receptors needed?
How much that is colonized
is swallowed
under the pretense of what it does for
pleasure?
An 18th century
mystic poetry manuscript in Turkic and Farsi
can be yours for 700 american dollars,
and the version for your screen time
will claim to extrapolate
its notions and
nuances.
They say a book leads a
full life when it
transcends the entrapment of
its own language and
migrates, new knowledge to the
broader world outside smaller
worlds,
like an expat granted
long-awaited citizenship to be
free.
In Arabic writing, الترخيم
means omitting the final letter of a
word,
when calling, when calling out,
a decision to strip a word of its
fullness, of its practical function,
for
music, for
romance.
I will read kavita translated
and revel in the wonder of poetic
decision and nuance,
in the emotion I can imagine - only imagine -
stemming from the
left hemisphere of the
brain.
They will read us and
ordain us with prestigious awards
for all that we have said,
but they will not really hear
us.
Despite all these predicaments, the poetry lover should not be
discouraged.
1 Buland Al-Ḥaidari, Buland Al-Ḥaidari and Modern Iraqi Poetry: Selected Poems, ed. and trans. ʻAbdulwāḥid Lu’lu’a (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2023), xiii–xiv.
2 James Dickins, Sándor Hervey, and Ian Higgins, Thinking Arabic Translation: Tutor’s Handbook — A Course in Translation Method: Arabic to English (London: Routledge, 2002), p.26. Routledge.
#2 There is no possible way to write a poem about untranslatable words
Italicized to mean
you can suck on it
like a mango stone
in Sanaa
or a persimmon peel
in West Bekaa.
A single word
persistently stuck on it.
By the coast, it sounds
one way, sarcastic and trite -
in the desert,
an idiom
about keeping
hope alive.
Enter word, “ask anything”.
Try your luck with it
confines of generational
misthinking
validating your curiosity
with a generated,
gentrified
guess.
Concept grasped,
stir in your muck with it
color it beige and hang it
in a frame,
with a label,
indefinitely inaccurate
but future onlookers will believe
it is
truth.
#3 The Ship is a She
(Written jointly with friend and poet, Sarah Huneidi*… while preparing a research proposal titled “The Language of Loss: A Lexicon of the Untranslatable” and considering how the feminization and masculinization of words in Arabic, in and of themselves, are untranslatable and very hard to convey in terms of the added emotion and tonality they bring).
The ship is a she.
while the boat is a he.
The sea is a he
The waves are a she.
The city
The rose
The hour
And the sun - feminine.
But the night and the moon -
patience.
And time itself.
The lexicon aligns and misaligns,
arranges and rearranges
till words have a face.
War is a woman.
Death is a man.
What about the fire?
Life must be a she.
Alive and weeping, sleep and colors.
What happens to the soul of a thing?
Duality in pluralism, in multiplicity, in groups, and in many.
Language is feminine.
The word. The song. The poem.
But the book is masculine. And so is the heart.
And so is sand and mountain.
The wish, the star, the map, the compass all guide like a woman -
the road is a man.
The port is a he
but the lighthouse is a she.
* Sarah Huneidi is an editor, electronic musician, and video artist based in Beirut, Lebanon. She explores the intersection of sound, visuals, and text, using mixed media to obscure, layer, and subvert narrative conventions and poetics. In 2018, she co-founded Barakunan, an experimental publisher and media collective. She is also a co-founder of Shatr Beirut Poetics, a platform dedicated to reinvigorating poetic expression. Sarah freelances as an editor and copywriter, while producing audiovisual work that merges her creative disciplines. She has previous experience as a publishing assistant with independent publishers in London and New York and holds a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature from University College Dublin.