The ravages of war
Modern Poetry in Translation No.19, Iraqi Poetry Today, Guest editor Saadi Simawe, London: King's College, 2003. ISBN 0-9533824-6-X
With the US currently bent on flattening Iraq in pursuit of its burgeoning imperialist ambitions, surely there could be no more appropriate moment to give a voice to the poets of Iraq in English. In his Introduction to Iraqi Poetry Today, the editor, Saadi Simawe, says he hopes that 'translating poetry might contribute to the appreciation of other civilisations and even to peace in the Middle East'. It's heartbreaking to report that the admirable sentiments expressed by Simawe are completely scuppered by the unrepresentative and largely appallingly translated volume he has edited.
Let's start with the poets Simawe has excluded from Iraqi Poetry Today. I appreciate that the great majority of people reading this review won't know much about Iraqi poetry and may well glaze over at the sight of lots of names in Arabic, so suffice it to say that Simawe himself gives a list of 12 poets he refers to as 'important' who are not represented here. Out of the three Iraqi poets widely acknowledged as the most significant writing today, Sargon Boulus, Hasab Al-Sheikh Ja'far and Saadi Youssef, only the latter makes it into Simawe's selection. This is like producing an anthology called Irish Poetry Today including Seamus Heaney (because he's too famous to ignore) but leaving out Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon. Many of these 12 poets have already been translated into English, sometimes very well, so it's not as though their work, including unpublished translations, is unavailable, had Simawe been concerned with assembling a genuinely representative selection of contemporary Iraqi poets. Indeed, Simawe's only significant academic contribution to Arabic literature appears to be a special edition of Arab Studies Quarterly entitled 'Modern Iraqi Literature in English Translation', so he must be well aware of these other translations and translators.
Of the 40 poets included here who apparently exemplify Iraqi poetry today, one was born in 1890 (the Kurdish poet Sheikh Selman) and five others between 1900-06. Fourteen are dead, some quite recently, others, such as Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab, died as long ago as 1964. One, Ronny Someck, also crops up in MPT No. 14: Palestinian and Israeli Poets; in that volume he counts as an Israeli poet, having emigrated to Israel from Iraq aged nine in 1960. Whilst any anthology of contemporary poets is bound to create controversy about who's in and who's out, it's worth noting that a large number of the poets found here were completely unknown to the leading Arab poets and academics I've contacted. One, Sajidah Al- Musawi, is even a mystery to the editor; and another, Jawad Yaqoob, died age 36 last year before publishing any of his work at all. Why these two poets were included, while 12 poets acknowledged to be 'important' were left out, is a mystery far more gripping than the identity of Ms Al-Musawi. The problem with this edition of Modern Poetry in Translation is that many people reading it will be completely new to Iraqi poetry and, by default, will regard it as an honest and definitive selection of contemporary poetry from Iraq. Already The Guardian has republished part of Simawe's Introduction (not his list of excluded poets though) and selections from some of the poets in the volume.
However, despite my serious reservations about Simawe's skewed version of who's who in contemporary Iraqi poetry, what damns this volume way beyond redemption is the scandalously low standard of translation. Honestly, there were times when I was reading this book when I became convinced some of the poems must have been translated via one of those instant-translation engines on the web. Let me give you my favourite example: the opening of a poem called 'The Happiest Man in the World' by Gzar Hantoosh, which, in the hands of Simawe and his co-translator Ellen Doré Watson, has become, 'Lushly I walk, like flowers under the bitter orange,/ towards my friend the poet.' Lushly I walk? Has anyone, ever, in the history of English, walked lushly? What the hell do they mean? And how on earth is walking lushly 'like flowers under the bitter orange'? Am I missing something here? Poor Hantoosh will hardly be the happiest man in the world if he ever discovers how his poetry's been massacred in English.
Of course, not all the poems in this anthology are so laughably bad. Most of them are just frustratingly mediocre or pedestrian. Like these lines, picked absolutely at random, by Shakir Al-Samawi. This is a poem called 'Wake' (which I presume means 'awake' rather than 'a wake') from a short sequence called 'Quartets of Inner Whispering' (sic), translated by Simawe and Chuck Miller:
Midnight sleepless heart
no companion or thought to still the
loneliness
no dream to redeem the soul
the perplexed eye sees complete desolation.
No effort whatsoever seems to have gone in to turn Samawi's lines into poetry in English. Sure, it's nothing compared to what was done to Hantoosh, but page after page of this kind of thing makes you truly despair, believe me.
It's worth pointing out that Iraqi Poetry Today does not hold a monopoly on badly- translated Arabic poetry. Crimes against the English language are so frequently committed that I've got into the habit of reading 'through' the versions, changing infelicities in my head as I go, trying to follow the logic of the imagery in order to work out what the poet might be up to. It's a bit like trying to listen to jazz on a shortwave radio: once in a while a clear, gorgeous image breaks through the fuzzed static of this strange version of English which dominates poetry (and not necessarily Arabic poetry) in translation. Perhaps the best way to read this stuff is to assume it's been translated into Translish or Englation and forget comparing it to English in the first place. But I get tired of reading poetry like an anthropologist, appreciating it largely because it informs me of things I never knew about places far away. I want poems to be poetry not useful information.
One of the peculiar perversities of Iraqi Poetry Today is that some of the poems ruined here are already available in good English versions. Fair enough if Simawe and his team wish to render perfectly decent poems in Arabic into their extraordinary version of English in the hope that no one will notice quite how much damage they've inflicted on the originals, but why exactly have they picked on poems which anyone familiar with Arabic poetry in translation could turn to as an immediate confirmation of their ineptitude? For example, two poems by Abdel-Wahab Al- Bayyati, 'The Birth of Aisha and Her Death' and 'Elegy for Aisha' can be found in Salma Khadra Jayyusi's excellent anthology, Modern Arabic Poetry (New York; Columbia University Press, 1987: the best available introduction to Arabic poetry if you're interested). In Jayyusi's edition, these poems are beautifully translated by Sargon Boulus (one of the three major poets excluded from Iraqi Poets Today) and Christopher Middleton; here, they're rendered as a ham-fisted embarrassment. Ditto Mohamed Mahdi Al-Jawahiri (at his peak in the '30s and '40s, so not exactly writing 'today'): his 'Lullaby for the Hungry' appears in Jayyusi in a lyrical version by Issa Boullata and John Heath-Stubbs, the opening of which begins:
Sleep, You hungry people, sleep!
The gods of food watch over you.
Sleep, if you are not satiated
By wakefulness, then sleep shall fill you.
The version in Iraqi Poets Today, translated by Terri De Young, opens:
1) Sleep, hungry folk, sleep
may the food gods protect you,
2) Sleep, for if you do not eat your fill
awake, then surely you will be in dream land.
Of course translators often go back to redo earlier versions. But turning out palpably inferior versions of poems widely available in the most influential anthology of Arabic poetry in English is so weird you start to wonder what's really going on here. (Simawe's co- translations of the most important Arab poet, Mahmoud Darwish, in the MPT Palestinian and Israeli Poets are so far from the mark they almost appear to be bad on purpose.)
Something especially weird has happened to the Kurdish poets (haven't the Kurds suffered enough?). If you think the Arab poets are badly translated, the way the Kurds have been treated is enough to make you weep. The great Bekes (Faiq Abdulla Beg) is rendered into English in doggerel which is well beneath nursery-rhyme standard, as the opening of 'Bright Star' demonstrates:
You bright star of the space
About you I am in a mess
I watch you but cannot guess
Who's set you in that place?
But at least Bekes is represented by poems addressing the heavens. The hapless readers of Iraqi Poets Today will go away with the impression that Bekes's son Sherko Faiq (here given the horrible Americanised title of 'Bekes Jr'!), one of the most admired poets in Kurdish Iraq, can produce nothing but sentimental, simplistic propaganda. The same is true of the other four poets writing in Kurdish, whose poetry here is notably crude and bloodthirsty.
It's no surprise that the poem I enjoyed most is absolutely untranslatable: a transcription of a largely-improvised performance by the most popular Arab poet, Muzaffar Al- Nawwab, whose cassettes (he doesn't publish his poems) are passed eagerly from hand to hand. The extraordinary skill and complexity of his pun, rhymes, rhythms and references, his ability to joust with the range of classical Arabic poetry, are simply beyond representation in English. What does come across, even in this pedestrian version of a very old poem (recorded in 1977), is the scale of his task, the intensity of his vision and the scabrous vitality of his attacks on the Arab political establishment.
Only two poets out of the 40 here are well translated, by which I mean that the translations read as though they're poems in English. One is the aforementioned Israeli Ronny Someck, translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden. The other is the leading Iraqi poet, Saadi Youssef. I presume even Simawe realised someone might notice if he excluded all three of the major contemporary poets of Iraqi from his anthology. And given that, unusually for an Arab poet, Saadi Youssef already has a book of (excellent) translations published in the US (Without an Alphabet, Without a Face: Selected Poems; Graywolf Press, 2002: buy this too!), perhaps it would have been a step too far for Simawe to set his linguistically-challenged translators loose on Saadi Youssef. He's simply too important, and too well translated already by Khaled Mattawa, to subject to such treatment. (It's a real pity Simawe didn't also include Mattawa's wonderful translations of Fadhil Al- Azzawi rather than the inadequate versions published here.)
It's the warmth and humanity of Saadi Youssef's inclusive poems which mark him out as one of the greatest living poets writing in any language today. He has revolutionised contemporary poetry in Arabic through his tender attention to the details of everyday life and his rhythms which are close to everyday speech. This fragment, from a long poem called 'The Trees of Ithaca', perfectly describes Saadi Youssef's own generous achievement:
He is building boats out of the ribs of speech
unfolding sails out of the scent of lemons
and bringing nearer cities that were ravaged by plagues
and raiders, and brothers, and history...
Sometime around 2230 BC, a Sumerian poet wrote the earliest known lament for a city ravaged by war. The city in question was Nippur, for thousands of years the religious centre of ancient Mesopotamia, the world's first civilisation. Today, Nippur is a great pile of dusty Sumerian rubble in the desert 100 miles south of Baghdad. And as I write this on the eve of St Patrick's Day 2003, I wonder what fierce destruction will have been visited on the people and the cities of Iraq (hasn't Saddam Hussein done enough to them?) by the time you read this, and how many more laments Iraqi poets will need to write in the years to come.
Reviewed by Sarah Maguire
(c) Sarah Maguire 2003
