nostalgia, my enemy by Saadi Youssef
I often get weirded out by the imagery in modern Arabic poetry. The stuff that gets pushed out there in anthologies and in the other places where I've have limited access to it, comes off like weird overblown high-school-girl imagery. Just take a look at a grave for New York by Adonis (although, to be fair, how can we ever know how much he was channelling Lorca in New York, which would pretty much let him off the hook.) I know this is my own fault for not looking deeper. But what you get usually is lazy literal translations of Nizar Qabbani and Mahmoud Darwish. Stuff like this:
On a mare made of your virtues, my soul weaves a natural sky made of your shadows, one chrysalis at a time.
Come on, tell me that doesn't sound like an 8th grader with black painted fingernails wrote that. I've only recently conceded that there is great touching Alltäglichkeit evoking Arabic poetry in reading Youssef Rakha's translations of Sargon Boulus. So this collection of Saadi Youssef's work came at a perfect time. It's beautiful. It's imagery is wild and uses bizarre archetypes but because the translation is able to place them in amongst the everyday feelings of quiet private poetry, it's authentic. Take this section from a poem describing his longing for Iraq:
يا ما كنتُ آمُـلُ أن أرى وجه العراقِ ضحىً
وأنْ أُرخي ضفائرَه المياهَ عليّ ،
أنْ أُرضي عرائسَ مائهِ بالدمع مِـلْـحاً
I so hoped to see Iraq’s face in the morning. To loosen water’s braids over me. To satisfy its mermaids with salty tears.
Mermaids?!?! Yeah, mermaids. It's cool. It fits. It makes sense. And it's because the translation team of Sinan Antoon & Peter Money are so delicate with the imagery that they can make it fit. I thought a lot while reading these poems about Youssef's exile in England, and the influence of place on the imagery. Take the word mermaid for example. It immediately brings to my mind as a reader in America all of the Americana portrayals of mermaids. I just read a graphic novel about mermaids and steamboats on the Hudson in the 1800's and the image from the book was what I immediately thought of. But what does a mermaid look like to an Iraqi from Basra? Something more mythological and austere? A woodblock print from the Galland edition of 1001 night? Something from a novel by Jurji Zaydan (I'm not sure if he ever wrote about corsairs in the Gulf, I may be confusing him with Abdul Aziz al-Mahmoud)? Or would British literature have flooded Basra in the 40's when Youssef was growing up and flavored his imagination as per mermaids? This one image, this visual point de capiton, you see it's all very serious when you be so bold as to translate poetry. I mean, they could have even translated it literally as brides of the sea.
But with all of these challenges, the translators pull off a book of poems that gives you perfectly Saadi Youssef, an isolated irrelevant (I only mean in the political sense, by which I only mean in the communist nostalgia sense) poet watching it rain outside his house in England.
On a mare made of your virtues, my soul weaves a natural sky made of your shadows, one chrysalis at a time.
Come on, tell me that doesn't sound like an 8th grader with black painted fingernails wrote that. I've only recently conceded that there is great touching Alltäglichkeit evoking Arabic poetry in reading Youssef Rakha's translations of Sargon Boulus. So this collection of Saadi Youssef's work came at a perfect time. It's beautiful. It's imagery is wild and uses bizarre archetypes but because the translation is able to place them in amongst the everyday feelings of quiet private poetry, it's authentic. Take this section from a poem describing his longing for Iraq:
يا ما كنتُ آمُـلُ أن أرى وجه العراقِ ضحىً
وأنْ أُرخي ضفائرَه المياهَ عليّ ،
أنْ أُرضي عرائسَ مائهِ بالدمع مِـلْـحاً
I so hoped to see Iraq’s face in the morning. To loosen water’s braids over me. To satisfy its mermaids with salty tears.
Mermaids?!?! Yeah, mermaids. It's cool. It fits. It makes sense. And it's because the translation team of Sinan Antoon & Peter Money are so delicate with the imagery that they can make it fit. I thought a lot while reading these poems about Youssef's exile in England, and the influence of place on the imagery. Take the word mermaid for example. It immediately brings to my mind as a reader in America all of the Americana portrayals of mermaids. I just read a graphic novel about mermaids and steamboats on the Hudson in the 1800's and the image from the book was what I immediately thought of. But what does a mermaid look like to an Iraqi from Basra? Something more mythological and austere? A woodblock print from the Galland edition of 1001 night? Something from a novel by Jurji Zaydan (I'm not sure if he ever wrote about corsairs in the Gulf, I may be confusing him with Abdul Aziz al-Mahmoud)? Or would British literature have flooded Basra in the 40's when Youssef was growing up and flavored his imagination as per mermaids? This one image, this visual point de capiton, you see it's all very serious when you be so bold as to translate poetry. I mean, they could have even translated it literally as brides of the sea.
But with all of these challenges, the translators pull off a book of poems that gives you perfectly Saadi Youssef, an isolated irrelevant (I only mean in the political sense, by which I only mean in the communist nostalgia sense) poet watching it rain outside his house in England.
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