topics: |  poetry | arabic | palestine

When I first encountered this book in a library (University of Rochester?), I was completely enchanted. The poems work beautifully as English poems. I found both Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim amazingly powerful - Darwish is a bit Nazrul-esque, but his voice is starker and the emotions more strident.

On the whole one of my top books of poetry, in any language. Amazing poetry - hard to see that they are translations! And according to at least one Arabic speaking reviewer (see excerpts from the Journal of Arabic Literature below), most of the poems are actually quite faithful as translations!.

In a bilingual edition with the original Arabic on the left.

This early text did a lot for the visibility of Palestinian poetry (and Arabic poetry) in the west. And the rest of us.

Excerpts

Mahmoud Darwish : The Earth is closing on us

						p.13

The earth is closing on us, pushing us through the last
	passage, and we tear off our limbs to pass through.
The earth is squeezing us. I wish we were its wheat so we
	could die and live again. I wish the earth was our mother
So she'd be kind to us. I wish we were pictures on the rocks
	for our dreams to carry
As mirrors. We saw the faces of those to be killed by the last
	of us in the last defence of the soul
We cried over their children's feast. We saw the faces of
	those who will throw our children
Out of the window of this last space. Our star will hang
	up mirrors.
Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the
	birds fly after the last sky?
Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air?
	We will write our names with scarlet steam,
We will cut off the hand of the song to be finished by our flesh.
We will die here, here in the last passage. Here and here our
	blood will plant its olive tree.

Mahmoud Darwish : When the Martyrs Go to Sleep

	  	  				p.15

When the martyrs go to sleep I wake up to guard them against
  professional mourners
I say to them: I hope you wake in a country with clouds and trees,
  mirage and water.
I congratulate them on their safety from the incredible event, from
  the surplus-value of the slaughter.
I steal time so they can snatch me from time. Are we all martyrs?
I whisper: friends, leave one wall for the laundry line. Leave a night
  for singing.
I will hang your names wherever you want, so sleep awhile, sleep on
  the ladder of the sour vine tree
So I can guard your dreams against the daggers of your guards and
  the plot of the Book against the prophets.
Be the song of those who have no songs when you go to sleep tonight.
I say to you: I hope you wake in a country and pack it on the a
galloping
  mare.
I whisper: friends, you'll never be like us, the rope of an unknown
  gallows.

Mahmoud Darwish : We fear for a dream

					p.17

We fear for a dream: don't believe our butterflies.
Believe our sacrifices if you like, believe the compass of a horse,
	our need for the north.
We have raised the beaks of our souls to you. Give us a grain of wheat,
   	our dream. Give it, give it to us.
We have offered you the shores since the coming to the earth born of
	an idea or of the adultery of two waves on a rock in the sand.
Nothing. Nothing. We float on a foot of air. The air breaks up
	within ourselves.
We know you have abandoned us, built for us prisons and called them
	the paradise of oranges.
We go on dreaming. Oh, desired dream. We steal our days from those
	extolled by our myths.
We fear for you, we're afraid of you. We are exposed together,
	you shouldn't believe our wives' patience.
They will weave two dresses, then sell the bones of the loved ones
	to buy a glass of milk for our children.
We fear for a dream, from him, from ourselves. We go on dreaming,
	oh dream of ours. Don't believe our butterflies.

Mahmoud Darwish : We Are Entitled to Love Autumn

						 p.19

We are entitled to love the end of this autumn and ask:
Is there room for another autumn in the field to rest our bodies like
  coal?
An autumn lowering its leaves like gold. I wish we were fig leaves
  I wish we were an abandoned plant
To witness the change of the seasons. I wish we didn't say goodbye
  to the south of the eye so as to ask what
Our fathers had asked when they flew on the tip of the spear. Poetry
  and God's name will be merciful to us.
We are entitled to dry the nights of lovely women, and talk
  about what
Shortens the night for the two strangers waiting for the north to reach
  the compass.
An autumn. Indeed we are entityled to smell the scent of this autumn,
  to ask the night for a dream.
Does a dream fall sick like the dreamers? An autumn, an autumn.
Can a people be born on the guillotine?
We are entitled to die the way we want to die. Let the land hide us in
  an ear of wheat.

Mahmoud Darwish : We are here near there

						  35
We are here near there, the tent has thirty doors.
We are here a place between the pebbles and the shadows.
   A place for a voice.  A place for freedom, or a place
For any place fallen off a mare, or scattered by a bell or the
   muezzin’s call.
We are here, and in a moment we’ll explode this siege, and in a
   moment we’ll free a cloud,
And travel within ourselves.  We are here near there thirty
   doors for the wind, thirty “was”,
Teaching you to see us, to know us, to listen to us, to feel our
   blood safely,
Teaching you our peace, We may love or may not love the road
   to Damascus, Mecca or Qairwan.
We are here within ourselves.  A sky for the month of August,
   a sea for the month of May and freedom for a horse.
We seek the sea only to retrieve from it the blue rings round
   the smoke.
We are here near there thirty shapes, thirty shadows for a
   star.

Samih al-Qasim : Abandoning

				p.63

I saw her
I saw her in the square
I saw her bleeding in the square
I saw her staggering in the square
I saw her being killed in the square
I saw her...I saw her...
And when he shouted
Who is her guardian?
I denied knowing her
I left her in the square
I left her bleeding in the square
I left her staggering in the square
I left her dying in the square
I left her...

Samih al-Qasim : End of a discussion with a jailer

						p.77
From the window of my small cell
I can see trees smiling at me,
Roofs filled with my people,
Windows weeping and praying for me.
From the window of my small cell
I can see your large cell.
			p.77

Contents

Introduction							   7

Mahmud Darwish

The Earth Is Closing on Us					  13
When the Martyrs Go to Sleep					  15
We Fear for a Dream						  17
We Are Entitled to Love Autumn					  19
Give Birth to Me Again That I May Know				  21
If I Were to Start All Over Again				  23
Is It in Such a Song?						  25
A Gypsy Melody							  27
We Travel Like Other People					  31
We Go to a Country						  33
We Are Here Near There						  35
Athens Airport							  37
They'd Love to See Me Dead					  39
The Wandering Guitar Player					  41
A Gentle Rain in a Distant Autumn				  47

Samih al-Qasim

Slit Lips							  53
Sons of War							  55
Confession at Midday						  57
Travel Tickets							  59
Bats								  61
Abandoning							  63
The Story of a City						  65
Conversation Between an Ear of Corn and a Jerusalem Rose Thorn	  67
How I Became an Article						  71
The Story of the Unknown Man					  73
End of a Discussion With a Jailer				  77
Eternity							  79
The Will of a Man Dying in Exile				  81
The Boring Orbit						  83
The Clock on the Wall						  85

Adonis

A Mirror for the Executioner					  89
A Mirror for the Twentieth Century				  91
A Mirror for Beirut						  95
Worries (A dream) 						  97
The Golden Age							  99
Song								  101
Prophecy							  105
Psalm								  107
The Wound							  111
A Woman and a Man (Conversation, 1967) 				  119
The New Noah							  121
The Seven Days							  127
The Peari (Dream--Mirror)					  129
The Minaret							  133
The Desert (The Diary of Beirut Under Siege, 1982)		  135

Review by Shawkat M. Toorawa, J. Arabic Literature, 1988

Abdullah al-UDHARI, trans., Victims of a Map.  London: Al Saqi Books, 1984.
167 pp.

If the object of this anthology of previously untranslated poems by Mahmud
Darwish, Samih al-Qasim and Adonis is "to provide English-speaking readers
with a sense of the frontiers of Arab poetry today" (p.8), then al-Udhari has
succeeded, perhaps even admirably, in bringing to this readership a selection
of some of the most urgent and impassioned verse by three of the Arab world's
most skilful and heeded poets.  Al-Udhari has brought together in one volume
fifteen poems by each poet which reflect each one's individual use of the
poetic tools at his disposal, his particular use of language, his use of
symbols to illustrate the nature of the condition of the Palestinians and,
particularly in Adonis' case, of the entire Arab world.  One cannot, however,
take seriously the assertion on the back cover that because of the facing
Arabic text "this anthology [is] a powerful learning tool for students of
Arabic".  Indeed, a number of the translations suffer from random
re-arrangement with no attention to the form of the originals, from patently
unacceptable renditions, and from misreadings and oversights that not only
alter the original meanings, but violate them outright.

After a brief introduction, emphasising the primacy of poetry in the Arab
literary tradition and explaining the selections, expressing "the fate not
only of Arabs or Palestinians, but also of humanity itself trapped in a
contemporary tragedy" (p.  7), the major section of the book, "the Poems",
begins.  Mahmud Darwish's poems are preceded by a biographical note, far more
interesting than the biographical notices to which we have become accustomed
in previous anthologies for its detail and inclusion of observations by the
poet himself about his art and his decision to write.  The first thirteen
Darwish poems are, the author tells Us, collected for the first time in book
form in Arabic.  No copyright or bibliographical information, however, is
provided for any of the poems in the entire collection.  This makes it
difficult for the Arabic reader to locate the sources from which the original
versions come and their dates of composition.  Whereas this may be an
oversight on the part of the publishers, it is a very unfortunate one.  The
English reader is a little more fortunate: on what would have been the
copyright page is the following acknowledgement "Some of these poems were
first published in the following magazines: "Stand, MPT, South, TR, South
East Arts Review and Index".

All of the Darwish poems are typically Darwish and contain the themes we have
come to expect from him, but the language is not strained or trite.  He has
matured since his younger days and continues to produce poetry of a high
caliber.  The symbols of wheat, dreams, rocks, songs, clouds, and hope are
still very much in evidence.  As with all good poets, however, Darwish
manages to forge these familiar symbols into a new language, immediate and
effective.  The first poem, "The Earth is Closing On Us" (pp.  12-13),
epitomizes the plight of the expatriated and disenfranchised Palestinian.
His banishment is not only from that which he may call a homeland but from
land itself:


	The earth is closing on us, pushing us through the last
	 	passage, and we tear off our limbs to pass through.
	The earth is squeezing us. I wish we were its wheat so we
		could die and live again. I wish the earth was our mother...

The ejected Palestinian must seek solace in that which is living, that which
is life, the grain of wheat:

With the exception of "The Wandering Guitar Player", the Darwish poems are
quite well translated.  We can only applaud the retention of the tone of
the Arabic in the translation of
	I congratulate them on their safety from the incredible event,
		from the surplus-value of the slaughter.
			("When the Martyrs Go to Sleep", p.  15)

Indeed, in the case of "Give Birth to Me Again That I May Know" (pp.  20-2
1), and "We Travel Like Other People" (pp.  30-31) for example, the entire
translations are superb.

It is most unfortunate that, occasionally, blunders, some quite serious, some
less so, must appear and taint the quality of the renditions.  In "A Gypsy
Melody" (pp.  26-29), al-Udhari has "And the country is far away," for
"bilidun ba-idatun" (p.  27) and "The silence" for "wa ramtu" (p.  27), not
so much a violation of the Arabic as an unexplained lapse into the definite
in English when the Arabic has quite clearly remained indefinite.  This
mistake takes on serious proportions in "Athens Airport" (pp.  36-37) where
the characters in the poem, embodying the various strata of society, are
referred to as "al-muwazafu", "al-muthqqafu", "al-adtbu", "al-muqdilu", and
so on.  The translator chooses to make these "An employee", "An
intellectual", "A writer", "A fighter", thereby removing the sense of the
everyman that these people represent in the definite.

"The Wandering Guitar Player" (pp.  40-45) is not well translated in parts.
For instance

	The guitar player is coming
	Tomorrow night
	When people go to collect soldier's signatures

[would be better served by the] lyrically and semantically faithful:

	The Guitar player shall come
	In the coming nights
	When people shall go forth to gather the signatures of the soldiers.

[AM: however, I doubt the poetic quality of this version by Toorawa]

And "Roaring" is a feeble "pfrirkhan milPa 'z-zawdbil" (p.  44).  We find
other errors in the Arabic that appear on the facing pages, typographical
errors.  The "khudhini...", line 9 of page 40, should read "khudhni" in the
masculine; the two "nucallamakum" on page 34 should read "nucallimakum"; and
there should be no tanwzn on "h-aratuhu", line 2, page 32.

The Samih al-Qasim selection is, for the most part, a series of very short
poems, all of which are savage indictments on the oppressing forces that have
sought to silence and mute the Palestinian voice, whether external or
internal.

	I would have liked to tell you
	The story of a nightingale that died.
	I would have liked to tell you
	The story...
		Had they not slit my lips.
				("Slit Lips", p.  53)

His images are fresh and arresting.  The loss and lack of identity that
Darwish attacked in his celebrated "Bildqa Huwiyya" ("Identity Card") are
re-examined in "Travel Tickets" (pp.  58-59) and in "How I Became an Article"
(pp.  70-71).  The lack of direction and closure from which he and his people
suffer are described in "Confession at Midday" (pp.  56-57) and in the terse
"Eternity" (pp.  78-79):

	Leaves fall from time to time
	But the trunk of the oak tree..

The familiar images are supplemented by a new series of symbols: "Bats: some
kind of apparatus" (p.  61), "the city square" (p.  62), "a strange
colourless cloud" (p.  75), "jasmine" (pp.  75 and 81).  Only at the last
poem, "The Clock on the Wall" (pp.  84-85), can be levelled Badawi's
accusation that, because of overproductivity, the poetry might sound "too
facile and mechanical" (M.M.  Badawi, A Critical Introduction to Modern
Arabic Poetry, Cambridge: CUP, 1975, 222).

Most of the translations do justice to the original but in at least two
cases, "Travel Tickets" (pp.  58-59) and "The Story of a City" (pp.  64-75),
the English is a travesty of the Arabic.  "Tadhikiru safarin" is reduced from
an eleven-line poem in the Arabic to a seven-line one in English; the
translator pays no attention to the passive mood, the absence of a second
person addressee in the opening lines and the explicitly stated addressee in
the closing lines; and the form of the poem is completely ignored.

[critiques the following a a poor translation:

	One day you kill me
	You'll find in my pocket
	Travel tickets

[which it may be, but tome it works rather well! - AM]


The third poet of the collection is cAll Ahmad Sacid, or, as he is better
known, Adonis.  Almost half the book is devoted to him and deservedly so
since he is perhaps the most "innovatory contemporary Arab poet" (p.  7)
writing today, though some do take him to task for occasional lapses into
obscurism.  He is the visionary, to coin from his own terminology, of a "new
poetry".  For Adonis, words must leap outside existing comprehensions, they
must become "a womb with a new fertility" (rakimun li-khzi,bin jadidin).

Adonis' innovative use of words is well represented by al-Udhari's
selections.  His enduring concern with writing and naming, for example, has
not become cliched and jaded.

	The earth rises in my body
	And tells my days to be its windows,
	And teaches my steps its name so they can be its letters
	And birds.
		("Song", p. 101)


All in all, the Adonis selections suffer from the most problems.  The
reasons for this are not clear: the errors do not seem to be the product of
ignorance, perhaps they are the price of haste.

Al-Udhari has provided us with some top-flight poetry by three of the
veritable masters.  If his translations leave a little to be desired, so be
it: his anthology can only serve to spur other scholars to translate and
retranslate these and other works.  After all, as Bonnefoy has said, we
translate to better understand a text.

Shawkat M. Toorawa
University of Pennsylvania