Arabic | Iraq | Poetry | United States
October, 2020Faleeha Hassan and I have news we find exciting: she has signed a contract with Amazon Crossing to write a memoir for them entitled The War & Me, and she has written, and I have already translated, its first three chapters. The doorways to this opportunity for us were her novella Butterfly Voice, which I have translated but which we have not published, and my translation of I’m in Seattle, Where Are You?, the new memoir by Iraqi author Mortada Gzar, forthcoming from Amazon Crossing in April 2021.
- William Hutchins
Arabic | Iraq | Short Fiction
May, 2020I have translated one novel by Mahmoud Saeed and several of his short stories during the past decade. On two occasions we did a joint reading at ALTA conferences, and these both proved memorable for me, because Mahmoud is such a lively raconteur, even when his subject matter is heartbreaking. The short story featured here was the first he wrote after he took a brief trip home to Mosul, Iraq to see his sisters, after the city was liberated from ISIS, only to find that his beloved Mosul no longer exists. An account of his devastating trip home, also in my translation, precedes his short story.
- William Maynard Hutchins
Arabic | Iraq | Memoir (excerpt) | Sweden
January, 2020Dr. Manhal Sirat was born in Mosul, Iraq, and has lived in Sweden since 1991. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Mosul in 1977 and his M.S. in Geology from Baghdad University in 1982, graduating first in his class. He was then arrested and sentenced to life in prison by a Revolutionary Court. He was imprisoned in a special section of Abu Ghraib prison, one reserved for political prisoners. He was released under a general amnesty proclaimed in 1986, after serving forty-five months in prison. He left Iraq after the Desert Storm (aka Gulf) War and sought political asylum in Sweden. He was awarded his Ph.D. in Earth Sciences by the renowned Uppsala University in 1999. Since then he has worked in numerous universities in Sweden, the US, Jordan, Germany, and finally in the United Arab Emirates. He has also served as a petroleum expert for the international firm Schlumberger in the UAE, and as a Geomechanics and Alternative Energy Specialist for the Abu Dhabi Company for Onshore Operations and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. Currently he is a geological and renewable energy consultant in Sweden. He has published three scientific books and more than forty articles in scientific journals.
The Migratory Bird is Manhal Sirat’s first literary work. A book of his poetry is awaiting publication. He has exhibited works of art in several shows, and one of these was purchased for the Public Library in Uppsala.
- William Hutchins
Arabic | Poetry (excerpts) | Tunisia
February, 2019The four poems featured here are from Adam Fethi's 2011 collection The Blind Glassblower. I selected the shortest pieces because they condense the major aesthetic and thematic orientations in this volume of poetry. Adam Fethi's consistent use of prose poetry shows a subversive aesthetic stance that confronts the traditional Arabic poem. His texts offer a new arrangement of the poetic textual space wherein rhythm is not necessarily provided by rhymes, but rather created by the visual distribution of lines on the page, the flow and suspension of words, and a playful use of punctuation.
The Blind Glassblower is a chronicle of a poet's life and works. Blindness is used as an extended metaphor to refer to the poet's alienation from a world that claims sight but is completely deprived of insight. Fethi defines poetry as an act of glassblowing, referring, on one level, to poetry as a craft, an idea found in ancient Arabic descriptions of poetry as sina'a (craft, trade, profession). On a deeper level, the act of blowing refers to the divine act of creation. The Islamic story of genesis turns to God's enunciation: "I blow into him [Adam] from my own spirit" (Surat al-Hajar, The Stone). Adam Fethi departs from the Romantic image of the poet-prophet emphasized in Tunisian Abu al-Qasssim al-Shabi's work, to appropriate the divine creative gesture.
Written in a simple language, divested from embellishment, these four poems use the voice of a young girl, who represents innocence and the potential for wonderment. The figure of the child joins the metaphor of blindness to designate a poetic agency free from corruption and capable of innovation. The simple language, however, provokes deep thought and meditation. The three first poems create an eerie world wherein acts of writing and reading are fused. The poet/glassblower, who is engulfed by a hole or lost in a path not trodden, enacts the act of reading wherein the reader may also be engulfed by the poem.
Tunisian poetry in English translation is rather rare. My translation stems from the urge to provide more visibility to Adam Fethi's wonderful work, already translated into French and Spanish.
- Hager Ben Driss
Arabic | Egypt | Short Fiction
November, 2018In my recent article published in World Literature Today, “Sheltering Words: Collaboratively Translating Montasser Al-Qaffash,” I write: “One of the reasons I love living in Cairo is the fact that everyone spins yarns: the porter, the maid, the taxi driver. No one has the corner on stories—many of these stories rely on rumor, humor, and hyperbole. Still, the problems of daily life are real and life is hard: many Egyptians vent their frustrations through anecdotes and jokes.” Montasser Al-Qaffash’s collection of short stories, At Eye Level, does just this—he takes humdrum problems and spins yarns around them. For example, in his story “To Describe It a Little More,” the narrator describes the relationships of tenants in a building through the eyes of one of its inhabitants. The narrator describes his father’s fascination with a ground-floor apartment, his dream residence. As a mature adult, looking back, the narrator understands that his father’s obsession with the ground-floor apartment masked an attraction to the widow who owned it, and his help in selling the apartment provided an excuse to call old friends. The complexity of his father’s relationship to the ground floor apartment--and of social relationships more broadly--is mirrored by the crossword puzzles the son would solve with his father.
- Gretchen McCullough
Last September, I responded to a request to help translate a few poems for Dareen Tatour, then in her second year of house arrest in Israel. Since then, her friend and advocate Yoav Haifawi has managed to ferry a few poems out of her house and into my inbox whenever he manages to visit--some small comfort for Dareen as her Kafkaesque trial unfolds, with Israeli authorities warping the meaning of words and gestures to try and prove that poetic expression and a few shared images on Facebook constitute incitement to violence and support for terrorism. Unable to secure a clean verdict, prosecutors have instead prolonged Dareen’s detainment month after month, with no end in sight.
Themes of detainment and repression have been prominent in Dareen’s stanzas since even before her arrest, with a dual emphasis on the plight of Palestinians and the suffering of women in an oppressive society, along with a dedication to express herself despite all the obstacles in her path. In these unpublished poems, which speak to her trial as well as other injustices she has contended with, Dareen warns those trying her of the hypocrisy of their actions, and (perhaps in some distant future) reflects on the toll that the challenges of life have taken from her. As I translated each line, Dareen’s words reminded me not to despair in a world where injustice seems pervasive and remedies often seem beyond my reach--some days there is nothing for it but to produce something that gives us joy, even as we hope for and work towards a brighter tomorrow.
- Andrew Leber
Arabic | Poetry (excerpts) | Tunisia
September, 2017The language of Ines Abassi is pregnant with simplicity and at the same time with depth. Her poetry relies on narratorial techniques to convey the pain of memory, trying to gather its bits in a transparent language that is imbued with symbolism and surreal flavours. Abassi’s fascination with storytelling is palpable throughout the body of her poems. She strongly believes in the story's power to expand the poem's investigative abilities, letting her explore the places that live on in her memory and are transformed by it. For instance, “A Whoop of Kohl,” the poem from which the collection takes its title, is written from the persona of an artist, perhaps Ines Abassi herself. In this poem, Abassi contemplates all the objects the artist needs in the art-making practice, relying on details, especially that of kohl, a natural cosmetic product cherished in the Middle East. Not only does the poem’s accumulation of images suggest a picture of a wounded memory, but also its internal rhythm, through the repetition of the word "memory," which heightens the theme of nostalgia that pervades the poem. In translating “A Whoop of Kohl” and the other poems, I have tried my best to preserve the beauty of nostalgia and to convey all those scarred pieces of memories portrayed by the poet. This is a humble attempt to present, in the English language, the wondrous complexity of Abassi’s poetry, which is tied up with poeticity and narration in such a way that it becomes a work of erasure and collage, highlighting the role of memory both in real life and in poetry writing.
- Ali Znaidi
Arabic | Poetry | Pre-Islamic Arabia
February, 2017By name, the qaṣīda is scarcely known to Anglo-American readers. It therefore bears mentioning that the qaṣīda is an Arabic poetic form, in fact the highest classical form, and that it was taken up throughout the African, Indian, Turkic, and Persianate languages of the Islamic world. Into the poetic traditions of Europe and the Americas, the qaṣīda has not made much of a crossing, with the exception of the Spanish-language casida (which borrows the name more than it does the poetic form). Its lack of presence in the West contrasts with the seeming naturalization of the ghazal, an Arabic-native mode that (after Persian poets gave new formal features to it) has been adopted by Western poets since Goethe. The fact that the Arabic ghazal derives from the qaṣīda has done nothing to raise the ancestral form’s profile in Western poetics.
Some obscurity in the matter is only natural. In modern Arabic, the word qaṣīda refers to a poem of almost any kind. Classically, however, it is a monorhymed suite of three or more thematic movements of no fixed length. The requirement that a qaṣīda be polythematic holds for the earliest sixth-century (CE) examples as it does for Arabic qaṣīdas of a thousand years later. The present qaṣīda is in four sections:
1. Amatory prelude (called in Arabic nasīb): verses 1-6
2. Wine song (khamriyya): verses 7-25
3. Travel exploits (raḥīl): verses 26-40
4. Praise of the patron (madīḥ): verses 41-58
There is a lot to say about all these sections, as well as their composer. Al-A‘shā (who died around 629 CE) was a pioneer of Arabic wine song, a mode already well developed in this poem. For their description of the blue-eyed tavern keeper and his milieu, the wine verses are of high literary as well as sociological interest. The ethnic alterity of the wine-seller remained a topos of Arabic bacchic verse (as in the poems of Abū Nuwās), and of historical drinking practice too.
One element of the travel section calls for comment because it is so typical. This is the description of the she-camel on whose back the poet’s heroic journey is made. For the raḥīl to be devoted to camel-description is common, and so is the likening of the camel to one of Arabia’s ungulates--whether a gazelle, an onager, or some other antlered beast of the wild. These subsidiary descriptions can run so long and deliver so much pathos that the camel is forgotten entirely. Once you become familiar with the trope of cross-species simile, it is an unbewildering source of charm. But no degree of familiarity voids the question: what motivates the persistent comparison of the domesticated camel to a hunted beast of the wild?
I leave the question open to workers in the growing field of Animal Studies. I also leave aside the political circumstances of the poem, beyond noting that it finds its dedicatee (a prince of pre-Islamic Yemen) at some odds with other members of the Ḥimyarite ruling class. (Line 44’s mention of Ḥimyar’s failure to guarantee a water supply may reference the early-seventh-century collapse of the dam of Ma’rib, which is mentioned in other poems by al-A‘shā, and in the Qur’ān at Sūrat Sabā 34:16). Al-A‘shā’s relationship to Salāma Dhū Fā’ish was one of propagandist to patron, and far from exclusive. In fact al-A‘shā is reckoned as the first Arabic language artist to turn praise-poetry into a professional career.
All but a very few of the editorial and interpretive decisions made in this translation are based in the commentary of Aḥmad ibn Yaḥyā, the late-ninth-century grammarian of Kufa better known as Tha‘lab (“The Fox”). Tha‘lab presents variant readings for about half the poem’s verses, whose number and sequence vary from manuscript to manuscript; over these and other textual issues my translation passes in silence. In Tha‘lab’s collection of al-A‘shā’s verse, this poem is number eight.
- David Larsen
Arabic | Lebanon/Egypt | Short Fiction
December, 2016Lana Abdel Rahman probes the internal world of her characters through dreams and memory. “The Sea Facing North” is from Abdel Rahman’s latest collection of short stories, Stories of Strangers. I kept returning to this haunting story, told with deceptive simplicity. Walking along the sea with a friend, a young boy is disturbed by a memory from his childhood, which he tells to his companion. When I asked Lana about “The Sea Facing North,” she told me a friend had told her the story about an honor killing. But she transformed a raw anecdote from daily life into a fable with repetition of images and details. The sea in Brazil brings up the memory of a sea from the past in Lebanon--which, in turn, forces the boy to relive the experience and tell the story.
- Gretchen McCullough
Arabic | Iraq | Short Fiction
October, 2016Earlier this month, The Guardian published an essay by Faleeha Hassan describing her experience living as an Iraqi refugee in the United States. You can find it here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/04/iraqi-refugee-living-in-america-some-wish-me-dead.
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).