” It’s certainly my experience that the deeper one goes into the surface of a text, the stranger it becomes, and the more likely one is to find something fresh in translation.”
There was a point at which I thought: ‘translation is the vehicle I have been looking for all along for me to try and bring the poetry to life without suffocating or crushing it under this enormously academic super structure.’ Of course, you need all the academic stuff to get inside the poem.
“Like music from the courts of the Abbasid Caliphate after a decadent cybernetic makeover.”
The poetry of Al-Khansa (~575-646) has been little-translated, although notably it appeared in the slender and beautiful chapbook of reflections Loss Sings, by author and translator James Montgomery, one of the executive editors of the Library of Arabic Literature project.
