Lebanese poet, novelist, and scholar Rula Jurdi released her first poetry collection last fall. These three poems are from Jurdi’s 2013 debut, Ghilaf al-Qalb (The Heart’s Peel), published by Dar Nelson in Beirut, and were translated by Michelle Hartman.
The three poems included here are Your Rhythm in the Reciter’s Chest, The Heart’s Peel, and Isfahan.
Your Rhythm in the Reciter’s[1] Chest
By Rula Jurdi, trans. Michelle Hartman
The visitors tremble with the clamor of his beat
For he can revive the musical notes,
And take away their life
When your eye falls upon him
You turn Arabic
And your tongue savors for the first time
A taste of the Sun letters,
When your ear becomes
His slave
When it is oppressive,
You will have seen
Both he who resurrects the dead
And those congregating around their graves.
The reciter says to language:
“Descend from up on high,”
It is overcome by his revelation
While you, unwillingly, bear witness
You recline so that his mourning voice may sleep
Joy eats from sorrow until it is satiated
You leave your passion on the ground,
Lying in its own blood,
Alone the reciter’s voice wakes up
And Mounts a horse like Burāq[2]
At that moment it flies
Beads of words then disperse
In your Arabian mouth,
Like an enslaved Sassanid princess
You speak with a faint Persian lilt
He drags your chaste letter “K” to his letter “S”
Unrolls it, lifts it up,
Then spreads it out Iraqi-style,
Never softened by his lips’ reproach,
Your heart arches inside of you
The senses forsake their homes.
You become divided within yourself
Just like the handkerchief in his hand
When the poem wounds him
Or he is left to his date-palm voice
You die at the flash of a tear
Echoes rain down on you
From bosoms
Together you remain silent
As if the worlds are falling,
Neither one of you
Is on the scale of the universe now,
Eyes shed their sparkles before him
Visitors repay his passion
But no one repays your love.
The reciter walks next to a wounded bird
To learn love
But you are neither sky nor water
You find it agonizing
That he sighs like a worshipper
Abandons you like the worshipped
When you hover at the brink, of a violent hunger
Inside you
Desire gossips about you until you give in
Tuck your hair back under night’s cover
And the living, speaking jasmine under the folds of your scarf
The reciter’s sweet basil is within his heart
And it overflows within him
He extends the veins to his lover
While your bond to him is more like a severed head,
If you reveal the joyful words
Wrap him up in his voice
Lest he feels cold
Then leave him with the visitors
So he may chant and burn for the beloved.
______
Appendix
[1] The reciter in this poem refers to the “Rādūd” in the Iraqi tradition who chants funereal hymns for the house of the Prophet, especially al-Husayn.
[2] Al-Burāq is the name of the mythical steed that transported prophets to spiritual worlds.
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The Heart’s Peel
By Rula Jurdi, trans. Michelle Hartman
She carried her small martyr
To the earth’s bottle
And entered it
At a two bows’ worth of distance or more
She saw the eternal fire
Like Rabi`a when she threw wool over her body
And so became a man even taller than other men
The honey-colored spider closes off the cave’s air
The prophet speaks with a book
So the Lotus holds in beautiful words
Prophet says to prophet: erase the direction of prayer
Take away the stations so I may pray
Move the Ka`ba to where she is
Place it before the smiling woman
Who has her martyr in her arms
Into a sky of clay she stepped out
She curved her only child
Like rising dough
And released him like a handkerchief
He flew around her hair and sang
He was neither a man nor a girl
He was a martyr
So she offered him letters
And took away all the heavens
She dragged her hair in clay
He said: This is a pomegranate for me and for you
So she let him go
Time’s chest is locked
Leaving the martyr to sleep
His mother clothed him
In twilight redness
And a tear that ripped open
The secret of the reign
He went out with his blood
Chanting, alone
Like the last Penitent in Ayn al-Warda
Her face wakes up to the defeat of a crescent
Between her and him
Is the heart’s peel
From the blue of the Mediterranean
She resurrects him and dies
Her face is his beautiful word
His word, a planet, a lock of hair
Fading between his childhood fingers
______
Appendix
Rabi`a, the ‘first’ or archetypal woman mystic in Islam
The Penitents tried to atone for their sins in abandoning Husayn, grandson of the Prophet in 680. They rose against the Umayyads around 684 in a place known as `Ayn al-Warda near the Syrian-Iraqi border and all of them died.
The original Arabic available here.
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Isfahan
By Rula Jurdi, trans. Michelle Hartman
The piazza is a rosary in the hands of passersby
Inside, you enter outside
The sky, a glass of gold
Behind you is in front of you
You are the carpet commanding all colors
Corners hide on the piazza’s page
Saffron is an interrupted conversation
The Bazaar: chests waiting in turn
To drop perfume in a scarf
The bridge reached the crescent’s altar
Laid thirty-three arches
The birds assembled, the sky fell
The king is Abbas,
And crowns are but a tattered rag
Unfitting for Isfahan
From the ink drop, sitting cross-legged in Kufi
From the fish stadium
From Nile blue in Qaysariyya’s light
Awakens Isfahan
The heart smells the lover’s mouth
And to the glowing moonlit night
Sings the pigeon citadel
The king is Abbas
The city a gift for half the world
As it becomes the other half
He can be soft on silver resting in the artisans’ hands
He can make his wife childless
Just when his son comes to look like him
Or appears to stride over his body
In his hand he carries the seven-colored stone
For a city other than Isfahan
With body parts flanked by palace and market
The king replaces his son’s slain shadow
And liquors up by a fountain of lemons
The sun has a palace, which emerges and disappears
The farsighted has only an eye or two
Man tries on the horse’s body
Running while the spears pant
A finger grips the morning’s hand
Like a child, Isfahan is afraid of losing her way
Milk is sleeping in thirsty mouths
A smell of it belongs to Isfahan
The four gates are women
And at the pond they are all visions
When Farhad left his horse alone
He and the carnation wounded each other
All the merry voices
Are stations for an elegant silence
Isfahan is born
From the beating on her copper,
The star orbits her and rests
When the drowned man slept
He laid not his eyes on her,
From musk, she handed him a board
And from his yearning, a seashore
Isfahan, a lock of hair
Unhurriedly braiding itself,
Beads of an echo in a broken necklace,
The Shirazi, for her sake, curved the lamp of fire
And frameless he found the world’s script
He was extracted from the city
When only he apprehended her beauty
The gazelle walked with him like a Qur’an
Bulls waved at him
Their flowers of jasmine
_________
Appendix:
[1] The meydan (meeting place) is the grand piazza in Isfahan.
[1] Qaysariyya: Entrance to the Royal Bazaar
[1] “Man tries on the Horse’s body”: The centaur-like Sagittarius, a mythical patron of the city.
In a Persian epic poem, Farhad throws himself from the mountaintop and dies after receiving false news of the death of his beloved, Shirin.
[1] Al-Shirazi or Mulla Sadra is a 17th-century philosopher who lived in Isfahan.
On the author:
Rula Jurdi is Associate Professor of Islamic History at McGill University in Montreal. She published a number of her poems in Lebanese, American and Iraqi journals and newspapers. She also published two articles on Emile Habibi’s novel Al-Waqā’i` al-Gharība fī Ikhtifā’ Sa`īd Abū al-Naḥs al-Mutashā’il, (The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessomptimist), which appeared in al-Ṭarīq and Edebiyat respectively. Her novel Al-Kathāfa: Qiṣṣat Ḥarb Lubnāniyya (Thick Air: a Lebanese war story) appeared from Dar Nelson in 2007. It weaves together three stories from the Lebanese civil war marked by displacement, death and futile love. Her poetry collection, Ghilāf al-Qalb (The Heart’s Peel) appeared in October 2013 from Beirut & Sweden, Nelson Publishing House. She participated in a number of literary and cultural forums in the United Stated and Canada including “Al-Andalus Remembered through Arabic Poetry,” at Yale University (1991); Literature in Translation and History at Skidmore College (1996), and “La liberté de créer,” by Le Cénacle culturel Liban-Québec in Montreal (2013). From the House of Iraq in Montreal, Consul General presented her with an award of appreciation and acknowledgement after reading her poems. This was part of an event that marked the designation of Baghdad by the United Nations as the Cultural Capital of the Arab world in 2013.
On the translator:
Michelle Hartman is Associate Professor of Arabic literature at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. She is also a literary translator and is currently working on the intersections of the theory, practice and politics of Arabic-English translation. Her research and teaching interests cover Francophone literature of the Arab World; Arabic literature and the politics of translation; women’s literatures; language use and literature; nationalism and literature.She was the second runner up for the Banipal Translation Prize 2009 based on her translation of Iman Humaydan’s novel Wild Mulberries. One of her main areas of focus in her research is the politics of translation from Arabic to English, particularly the way in which theory and practice do and do not come together. Her literary and translation research is primarily on women writers from Lebanon and Palestine. Her new book (to appear May 2014), Native Tongue, Stranger Talk is an anti-colonial reading of how women writers from Lebanon who write in French use Arabic words to advance messages about gender, nation, ethno-religious belonging and class in their novels.
