Plain Talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
I have just finished reading excellent English translations of two verse plays by Egypt's poet laureate Ahmed Shawqi. The translations were undertaken by Jeanette Atiya, a professor of linguistics at Ain Shams University.
What distinguishes the two translations is that Atiya has opted for verse in her rendition. Without doubt, it takes both courage and great talent to produce an impressive equivalent of the Arabic original. Atiya's translations of Majnun Layla (English title Quais and Laila ) and Masra' Kilyubatra (English title The Death of Cleopatra ) are accurate, fluent and inspired -- which proves the adage that a good translation should read like an original.
Reading the two plays in English brought back a number of memories. I was reminded of how, back in 1946 when I was a cultural attaché in our embassy in London, I sat next to TS Eliot during a performance of his Murder in the Cathedral at the first Edinburgh Festival. On that occasion we had a discussion about what he called the swan song of verse drama. I spoke to him about Shawqi's verse plays and he listened with great interest. At the time there were no English translations of our great poet.
The other memory that comes back to me was a meeting with Michael Billington, the Guardian 's drama critic, during a visit to London sponsored by the British Council. Our discussion centered on verse drama -- Eliot's as well as the younger Christopher Fry whom the critic believed "helped to revive English verse drama".
Going through Atiya's translations I was also reminded of a passage from Eliot's Selected Prose about verse drama. It has been "generally held", he writes, that verse drama should either take as its subject matter a mythological theme, or else should centre on "some remote historical period" far enough from the present for the characters not to be recognisable as human beings, which then gives them license to speak in verse.
Shawqi may have held the same view when he wrote the two verse plays in hand. The two love stories that he re- fashions have long since been the stuff of high poetry. Cleopatra, as Maher S. Farid writes in his introduction to Atiya's translations, "has had a long history on the English stage." Farid enumerates the many plays that take the queen's life as their subject matter, and remarks that it was probably in a French translation that Shawqi read Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. His play, in certain respects, Farid continues, "is a response to Shakespeare's: re- writing, correcting and revising it."
Indeed, Shawqi's play can be regarded as a defence of the Egyptian queen, showing that, though her ancestry was Greek, she had the fate of Egypt at heart. He depicts her as a proud queen who prefers suicide to being taken as prisoner. In Atiya's accomplished translation, "Caesar may desire, / But his request is not easy to acquire, / He wishes to make of me, to the Romans, an exhibition / As part of his war spoils on the return from his expedition, / Thus exposing Egypt, and the power of this nation, / Its crown of centuries, the throne of eras, / To scandalous humiliation. / But Octavius has made a miscalculation: / He cannot reach his target with me through deception."
Atiya's translation of Cleopatra's last soliloquy is really a masterpiece. It is a passage I so enjoy reading in Arabic and now it is a joy, a sad one at that, to read it in such wonderful English verse. There is another very moving speech by the queen, here as a mother, when she bids her children farewell: "Farewell, my young ones, / May God your orphanhood guide / to sufficiency and uninjured pride." Then there is Anubis' memorably nationalistic speech: "I swear you cannot claim to be brave, / For you have not invaded Egypt, / But you have opened for Rome a grave."
Is it too much to ask that these two plays be included in the syllabus of English departments? Even though Death of Cleopatra was originally written in Arabic, now that it is available in English, and given Shawqi's response to Shakespeare's take on the queen, it does much to enrich our reading of the English canon.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/787/cu3.htm