Golan Haji & Marilyn Hacker on the Inseparable Natures of Writing and Translating

The two introductory texts below — on life, writing, and translation — appear in the newly published trilingual collection Another Room to Live In: 15 Contemporary Arab Poets.

By Golan Haji

Translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker

In the mid-1990s, I often went to the library of the American Cultural Center in Damascus, located at the foot of Mount Qassioun, in a calm little street beneath the shadows of fragrant Peruvian pepper-trees. Alone, I dove among the enchanting words of poets I had barely heard of, armed with the huge tome of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Reading occupied most of my time. I found a certain consolation, tinted with despair, in that library’s books, especially in its poetry collection, exclusively American, but very rich. I admired the fact that certain American poets had included translations they had done in their collections, as a natural part of their creativity. Translating poetry, like writing it, is a way of reading the unknown. For me, these are two inseparable activities. The “original” poem never ceases to dissimulate itself, and all the rest is nothing other than a “translation.”

In that American library, which has never re-opened since March of 2011, I began to translate poetry written in English into Arabic. I began with the selected poems of Mark Strand. This collection was the first translation I published. Among the happy accidents that literature offers us, and through which it can reweave our souls, that was where I first found Presentation Piece by Marilyn Hacker. That was long before meeting the poet in Casablanca, fifteen years later. In Casablanca, not in Damascus or Aleppo, as she would have wished. We became friends, and she gave me, simply by her presence, a courage that I lacked at that difficult moment in my life. It was through her own translations of French and Francophone poets, published in bilingual books, that I began to read French at the beginning of another “new life,” this time in France.

Years have gone by, sometimes cruelly, since that first encounter. Years pass like slaps in the face, says a Kurdish proverb. Now, by tacit agreement, we often communicate in French. It’s history that placed us where we are. The history that changed my life so abruptly, and that still is reshaping it, leaving nothing intact in its wake.

We are too well aware of the dangers of drawing parallels between history and writing. Still, we’ve chosen, among others, several prose poems from the sequence Disappearances. I wrote them in 2011 and 2012, after having learned of the literal disappearance of some of my friends in Syria. In these “letters” to the absent, these exchanges between two solitudes, the reader is not faced with the pages of a book, but at the border of a world that no longer exists. We find ourselves considering lives that are over, but that don’t stop returning, after a loss that exceeds any description, pushing the human spirit to its own limits. These poems don’t ask to be decoded or defined. I don’t think that they are elegies. I wanted to stop myself in my memory, within it, the way we live delaying the fallout, with all those mouths open in silence, all those interior voices that can heal you or rip you apart. That rip is literature’s point of departure, that then distances itself, and no one knows where it goes.

Saint Denis, February 2022

By Marilyn Hacker

When I was in Dar al Bai’da in 2012 for the Argana Poetry Prize award, a young dark-haired man with an aquiline nose and impressive eyebrows came up to me in the hotel coffee shop one day, embraced me like a long-lost cousin, and introduced himself… He was the Syrian Kurdish poet Golan Haji, we had a mutual friend in the British poet James Byrne, then the editor of the poetry magazine The Wolf, who had visited Syria a few years earlier— when international poetry festivals still happened there.  I was enormously pleased that a Syrian poet should be there, that there was this familial-feeling connection between us, that he should have even heard of me, and I was eager to read his own work, as far as I was able.

As “translation” is the focus of this anthology, I have to underscore the difference, for me, between translating from French, which is my second language, that I began to acquire in grade school, which I “live in” most of the time, and read for my own pleasure or information, a poetry anthology, a novel, the daily newspaper, as often as I read In English, and Arabic, which I only began to learn much later in life (in 2007 , to be exact) which I’m still struggling to acquire, often without daily practice, and no longer young.

Still, one of my main goals, if not the only initial reason, in studying Arabic, was to read poetry, in a language that has encouraged poetry, and kept it at the heart of its culture and even, sometimes , its politics. Very early on, I began attempting translations, which I’d then go over line by line with my tutor or an Arabophone friend, and the faithful dictionary: short-short stories by Zakaria Tamer, some of Darwish’s early poems, Andrée Chédid’s fables….

Golan Haji and his wife, French writer and Arabic to French translator Nathalie Bontemps, moved to France in 2012: it was no longer safe for them to stay in Damascus. Golan, who had trained as a physician, had also taught himself English in Syria , well enough to carry on a conversation about anything , well enough to read poetry and fiction voraciously, even well enough to translate poems from English into Arabic. So the conversation we’d begun in Morocco continued at length and at more leisure, in one or sometimes an amalgam of languages.

One day Golan sent me, as an email attachment, a group of engaging, haunting prose poems, entitled , in Arabic, “Disappearances” all in the form of “ letters” to, mostly, named people, often referring to incidents in a shared childhood or adolescence that turn, in the texts, mysterious, or ominous. None of them are directly about the regime’s exactions, or the failing revolution, or the situation of the Kurds, and yet it seemed clear to me that they obliquely were.  I began to translate them, spending a couple of hours a week with another literary Syrian friend going over the translations, and reading the poems aloud in Arabic… before I even dared show my attempts to Golan. I was very pleased when I could, and did.

Golan is probably one of the most versatile poets and essayists of his generation in Arabic, or perhaps in any language. Poems and essays of his have been translated into English, and into French, by some of the best translators, usually writer-translators, working. He himself has translated numerous poems and essays from English into Arabic. He has an intense interest in the work Arab visual artists, and has been publishing germinal essays on their work: see for instance his piece on the Syrian painter Fatih al-Modarres, on the site of the Atassi Foundation.

You can find Haji’s poems in Another Room to Live In: 15 Contemporary Arab Poets from Litmus Press.

Golan Haji is a Syrian-Kurdish poet, essayist and translator with a postgraduate degree in pathology. He lives in France. He has published five books of poems in Arabic: He Called Out Within The Darknesses (2004), Someone Sees You as a Monster (2008), Autumn, Here, is Magical and Vast (2013), Scale of Injury (2016), The Word Rejected (2023). His translations include (among others) books by Robert louis Stevenson and Alberto Manguel. He also published Until The War , 2016, a book of prose based on interviews with Syrian women.

Marilyn Hacker is an American poet, translator and critic. She is Professor of English emerita at the City College of New York. Her books of poetry include Calligraphies (Norton, 2023), Blazons (Carcanet, U.K. 2019), and A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton , 2015).