New in Translation: Four Poems by Mohammad Abdelbari
Introduction by Huda Fakhreddine
To read Mohammad Albdelbari is to listen to the voice as well as the silence. In his poems, sound guides, punctuates, and makes meaning, but his silences are haunted by the echoes of familiar voices too. He draws on the Arabic tradition’s imaginative and creative memory, evoking the languages and worlds of its great poets as well as its masters of prose.
His poetry is a journey in the Arabic poetic landscape that extends from the Jahiliya to this day, and yet its arrival point is new and surprising.
Abdelbari is a Sudanese poet and writer. He has won multiple poetry awards and honors across the Arab world such as The African Arab Youth Award and Sharjah Award for Arab Creativity. He has published five poetry collections among them al-Ahilla (The Crescents) 2016, Lam yaʿud azraqan (No Longer Blue) 2020, and Ughniya li-ʿubūr al-nahr marratayn (A Song to Cross the River Twice) 2022. A volume of collected works is forthcoming in 2023 from Sophia Bookstore, Kuwait.
–
A Song for Crossing the River Twice
Translated by Huda Fakhreddine
Autumn arrives,
gold and gold unite:
color and soul.
The assembly flourishes,
the clear dry
greeting the wet obscure.
Charms of time flow,
elevating moments to epochs.
And here, I sit back
to witness nature slipping out of one marvel
into another.
A breeze grows into a youthful wind,
an adolescent cold aspires to its older self,
birds break open the South,
and songs lament the stalks to the field.
The clouds are on alert,
the trees escape green’s grip,
and there, a path where loss shines
like blood on a dagger.
Two dusks make a sunset,
of saffron and musk.
Here now,
ordinary grief
leads me to magnificent grief,
and then, a sadness takes hold,
soft like supple snakeskin.
Reckless, my imagination runs,
voiding the difficult gap between poor and rich.
And as my senses intensify within me,
the least of me aspires to the most.
See! I see the bareness of garments
as they wrap around to shield the bare.
Touch! I touch
the frailty of a thought not yet formed.
Taste! I taste
white conflicted between sweet and salt.
Smell! I smell
distance burnt in a voyager aged by the voyage.
Hear! I hear
the rumble of feathers falling on marble.
Here now,
where the glass condensed in the sun hasn’t shattered yet,
where short shadows
haven’t waned into their shorter selves,
and where wrinkles on the faces of ghostly trees
haven’t yet appeared.
Here I shall return.
The time has come
to return the sources to their source,
time to fall
into the scattered regrets of yellowed leaves,
time to long for the forest,
and how that forest longs for its wild roots!
Now that life, the sapphire, has uncovered its red secret,
I drag the nine elements of my dirge
in search of an element
to draw my soul out of its soul
as waters are drawn out of rivers.
Now I feel, now I know
that silk itself has never felt a silk like mine,
that I am the transformation,
a darkness slowly rising to light,
that vaster than my world
I am,
that in the seafarer
the sea itself can drown.
-From A Song for Crossing the River Twice
Labyrinth
Translated by Huda Fakhreddine
Where to my Jahili mystery?
Where to now
that no end is in sight,
and no beginning?
Where to,
when time has lost track of itself
having wandered in you
and veered?
When will you speak?
Even fog has forsaken itself
and cleared.
I am a neigh, angry and loud,
saying that the horse has rebelled
and seethed.
I fled toward my impossible face
but when I reached it,
it disappeared.
For a lifetime, I’ve been held back
from what I wanted because what
I didn’t want
adhered.
I’ve been broken down
in light and water, broken down
but no bow of color has yet
appeared.
I go out,
the oblivion of streets rises to its feet
I enter,
the air in the room
recedes.
I strained my intuition
but nothing proved true.
I exhausted my imagination,
but nothing was move
to be!
O desolation of the distant unknown,
O regret of a sword smeared,
I want you both.
Descend upon me. Fill me
the way a glass with wine
is bleared.
Here I sit on the edges,
and the last thing I’m capable of
is cheer.
-From The Crescents
Two Andaluses
Translated Omar Abdel-Gaffar
Like clouds and crescents,
they departed,
leaving their windows orphaned.
They departed
and the void has never found solace since,
the mountains no longer birthed hyachinths.
They departed,
without the names that protect them,
they, whose faces used to flow like honey.
They only carried with them a gleam of light
with which they carved
metaphor into marble
Here they are,
place has collapsed around them,
time itself forsaken them.
They slipped into the poem, as it came to a close,
and they gathered in memory
like ruins.
The cracks of the night ask them:
When and why?
How? Who? If? And for what?
They arrived in the desert on the seventh weeping night,
and set up their yearnings
like tents.
They are our voice, haunting and obsessive.
When reigned in, it swells.
They are the salt of our bodies.
We will not be blind to this nor oblivious.
We can never be like water
which forgets that it forgets,
and resists both the journey and the settling?
Rivers have no past or history or longing.
Eternally forward they move.
They flow on.
Never in its life did a river stop,
to greet ruins.
It is as though the one who first
released the river to flow,
made looking back a sin.
Oh friend, Andalus, the place, is near,
only an arrow’s span away.
Greet her open doors and enter.
Embrace the friendship of the wine.
Leave your eyes,
two Ummayads yearning for Damascus,
to their melancholy.
Do not fear Castille.
She is menacing and hostile no more.
She told your shadow as it surrendered: “Disappear
only to return seldom, after absence.”
This is your share of the return, call, as I do,
“visiting old friends.”
Oh Friend, Andalus, the time, is distant.
So be to the forlorn a guide.
Granada is beyond reach, not a place, but time, she is,
now in ruins.
Do not be fooled by the light.
Above you a star slumbers,
her light not fizzled out yet.
The muwashshaḥ has abandoned its arrangement,
and the hawk on banners now flies away a dove.
Do not question the doors. See them as they are:
Paintings and the painter unknown.
As you grow old in this echo,
hanging your days on smoke,
describe to me how you have fallen into elegies,
and let us find each other,
as stranger and stranger do.
-From The Crescents
Walls
Translated Omar Abdel-Gaffar
Though language is within my reach–
silence is my share of Babylon.
I consort with the gods of Olympus.
I am only absent
to reveal a perfect presence.
I opened for Meaning a single path.
My lightning sparks within
and strikes inward.
I usher all my things towards the doors
so that I may recline alone in the inhabited void.
For trees lose their wisdom
when they befriend
a passing shadow.
In the ancient niches,
I complain of what my ramblings and queries
have unearthed
Vision allows me to witness only its death
as the sea only manifests itself
in waves on the shore.
The strange guest haunts me,
Leaving me alone
in the bewildered’s prayer.
Every time language turns
to exult in itself,
it brings my endings
back to my beginning.
At the limits of heaven, I write:
“Sorrow belongs to the names,
and all the names are mine.”
Oh stone staircase to the dead,
take me to them, as they
rehearse their infinite bewilderment:
Take me to the dead,
that I might find freedom, even as
I drag my shackles and chains.
The dead lift me
as wounds elevate the warrior.
There is no path except to taste my own blood
and drop the burden of distance from my shoulders.
I am in absence now:
a word, beyond the impossible, still in need of a speaker.
And perhaps I am not,
for every being
drowns in liquid time.
Excessive in existence,
I sprout in both the murderer and the murdered.
My mirrors have always failed
to capture my face in a likeness.
I find no solace in places,
as if I dangle from a moon
without mansions.
The paths tell me
“Your people are here.
Now is your turn to receive this truth
passed down from one traveler to another.”
-From The Crescents
Huda Fakhreddine is a writer, translator, editor, and associate professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). Her translations of Arabic poems have appeared in Banipal, World Literature Today, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly, Middle Eastern Literatures, among others.
Omar Abdel-Ghaffar is a JD/PhD student in History at Harvard University. His research focuses on late medieval Islamic law and court procedures.