Friday Finds: Newly Translated Poems by Ahmed Shafie, Wadie Saadeh, and Muhammad Al Maghout
Over at Qisas Ukhra, translator Robin Moger has published several new poems:
First, he bought out two newly translated poems by the late Syrian poet and playwright Muhammad al-Maghout (1934-2006).
Although at least two collections of al-Maghout’s work have been published in English — Joy is Not My Profession and The Fan of Swords, trans. May Jayyusi and Naomi Shihab Nye — both are out of print.
Moger has translated “Horror and sex” and “The orphan.”
From “Horror and sex”:
In the dark
deep stagnant dark
where the wind roars
and the wet trees howl like women raped
he encircles me with his arms
and sinks into my flesh like louse eggs.
Also by al-Maghout:
An excerpt from Joy is Not My Profession (translator’s name too small to read)
“Roman Amphitheaters,” trans. Ahmad Diab
“Tattoo,” trans. Sinan Antoon
“Shade and Noon Sun,” translator not named
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Next was Wadih Saadeh’s “The grass,” which opens:
He wants to go back. In the wall of his house is a tuft of grass he wants to go back and see.
Guardian of the two stones and soul of their communion across the crack in that wall. The wall whose stones he laid stone against stone careful not to leave a space. But they found a soul and in a moment unattended a small space grew.
Saadeh, born in Shabtin, Lebanon in 1948, moved to Beirut at the age of twelve. In 1973, he self-published his first collection, Evening Has No Brothers, reputedly selling handwritten copies on the streets of Beirut.
After some itinerant years, Saadeh and his family moved to Australia, in search of social justice, and he’s been there since 1988. While his poetry often returns to a Lebanese landscape, it is also relentlessly interested in the possibilities of a future. As he wrote in the preface to his only English-language collection, A Secret Sky (1997): “Poetry is not just an expression of the past, it is an act of creation, a dream of renewal, the only way for me to recreate myself as I would wish to be.”
Also by Saadeh:
In Jadaliyya, you can find five poems translated by Sinan Antoon, from Sa’adeh’s collection Who Took the Gaze I Left Behind the Door.
Also in Jadaliyya, “An Attempt to Reach Beirut from Beirut,” translated Suneela Mubayi.
Poetry International Web has published various poems by Sa’adeh translated by Anne Fairbairn and published in the collection A Secret Sky (1997).
Two poems: “A Life,” and “Because of a Cloud, Most Likely,” both translated by Ghada Mourad.
Missing Slate published “Hey Allen Ginsberg, I Think That the Fan is Rotating,” translated by Maged Zaher.
Three poems, trans. Moger
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Last was a new poem by Ahmed Shafie, “pasta tree,” which ends:
what matters whichever way the branches reach is that we now have in an ordinary village whose name can be found in government files unlike Macondo a tree linked to a young woman a tree around whose trunk pasta with hot sauce has been thrown and a young woman who lives on light and water and a window which has not been closed and a geography teacher who climbs each night to the roof of his house and burns a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude to find it once more the instant he descends back to his rooms on a shelf without a particle of dust upon it to its right the bound volumes of the Story of Civilization and The Character of Egypt to its left deep in black grime what can we say about Manama? safely that it is the capital of the Kingdom of Bahrain and lies according to Wikipedia on the north coast of that country and that it is a touch more than twenty-seven thousand kilometres in extent no need to mention a dermatologist who is resident there according to the testimony of patients and friends and government records and yet despite this despite it all
Shafie is an Egyptian poet, novelist, and translator, author of And Other Poems (2009) and the novel The Creator (2013). He’s also translated work by Charles Simic, Billy Collins, Lucille Clifton, and others into Arabic.
Shafie was a 2014 International Writing Program resident; his translation of Russell Edson’s Collected Prose Poems was one of Muhammad Abdelnaby’s “favorite reads” of 2015.
June 9, 2017 @ 3:48 pm
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