If you’re in England, the High Impact Tour approaches, where seven Dutch poets (including Palestinian-Dutch poet Ramsey Nasr) will tour through Oxford, Birmingham, Liverpool, Sheffield, Norwich, and London. (If you’re not in England, the Cairo Book Fair is coming up.)
Yesterday, the “literature of the low countries” tour posted a translation of Ramsey Nasr’s “the house of europe” (by David Colmer).
If you haven’t read David Colmer’s “rules for translating (poetry)” crafted for ArabLit, you should. Colmer was shortlisted for the prestigious Popescu Prize for his translation of Ramsey Nasr’s Heavenly Life.
But I believe the English translation of “the house of europe” first ran in Traduit de L’Arabe back in November, along with essays by Ahdaf Souief, Abdelkadir Benali, and Taha Adnan, among others.
the house of europe / het huis van europa
my neighbour conceived a continent
a rolling realm where features are few
no wind or echoes, just furnished plains
to make our lives complete and long
the citizens are civilised to uniformity
rough edges gone and rounded off
like their languages, their coins and tomatoes
they roll on down the road in peace
it also thrives in me, this endless
longing for order, domesticity
my neighbour and I accept each other
we are the froth on our ideals
but sometimes when the world’s on fire
just before I go to sleep
I think softly of my origins
and smell you in the distance
where, under smoothly boyish skin
a pit of gaping contradiction
awakes a hundred-thousand-fold
a hole full of celts and cathars
etruscans, moors and magyars
reeking of milk and manly hides
of visigoths and proto-slavs
lapp hunters head up north
vandals settle at gut level
my flesh bulges and starts to melt
basque! saxon! merovingians
hook onto tender ribs
in hordes I fall apart and come together
turning into a good barbapapa
for all my travelling forebears
that’s europe with the works
my neighbour conceived a continent
but I need a room for my guests
a home for my mixed origins
or simply a barrel to sleep in
I need a place with discomforts
with old-style corners: badly arranged
draughty and incomplete, but real –
something to grip between cellar and roof
build me a rusty house against
the dizzy myths of the field of blackbirds
against the poppies of poperinge
and the gold teeth of auschwitz
against a prospect of mist and purity
build me a difficult, painful house
Credit: High Impact Tour website
You can also watch Nasr’s ‘High Impact’ film:
England, not UK 😉
Picky, picky. “That island thingie full of Anglos.”