Perdition (trans and intro by Sara ElKamel)

Roses take their own life
above the rim of my bed
as my mother
tries to tuck me into the desert of life

*

In the courtyard of my soul
is a small devil;
a newborn

*

Another ship
asphyxiates
the ocean’s larynx

*

The moon spills a cloud
into the sky’s breast

*

Ideas drown in a spasm
and the poem lays crucified
over the notepad’s knees

*

The night is strangled
by a choker of stars

*

A tear
attempts martyrdom
out of my eye’s abyss

NOTES ON THIS POEM

Running through Mona Kareem’s three Arabic collections of poetry is an undeniable solitude, captured in portrait after portrait of the poet herself, of nameless cities, and of women protagonists who seem to have been forsaken by the world. Presented in a remarkably lyric voice, Kareem’s work holds up mirrors – of varying degrees of lucidity – to the many selves, as well as the bodies, of her subjects. The images that we see reflected strike a memorable balance between the visible and the conceptual, the tangible and the surreal.

The poems I have translated from What I Sleep For Today (Nova Plus Publishing and Distribution, 2016), namely ‘Souvenirs’ and ‘Perdition’, illustrate the poet’s intentional conflation of the body and the world around it – both material and immaterial. Everything becomes a body – has a body – in her poems, even the poem itself. The ocean has an asphyxiating larynx, the speaker’s eye is an abyss, and ‘the poem lays crucified | over the notepad’s knees’.

Written more and a decade earlier, while Kareem was still a teen, the poem ‘Cities Dying Every Day’, from the collection Absence with Amputated Fingers (Dar Sharqiyat, 2004), is a kind of elegy for cities. Like many of her poems, this one presents us with an individual experience in an indifferent, or perhaps even an unkind, city – one that wishes to excavate even our lungs. The speaker here, and recurrently across her oeuvre, seems to be in a state, at once, of terror, and of extreme loneliness; she is abandoned even by autumn.

* Modern Poetry in Translation - Issue no. 2 of  2022

ثلاث قصائد

أبراكادابرا

 

 

 

ينتابني الخوف أحيانًا

 

أغمض عينيَّ وأبطئ من حركة أنفاسي

 

أذكِّر نفسي بالكلمتين السحريتين:

"الآن + هنا"

الآن: اليوم الخميس ١٠ مارس

هنا: شقتي في بوسطن

 

 

أبدأ بعدّ محتويات جسدي:

رأس، عينين، كتفين،

بطن ذي مرتفع خافت،

فخذين، ساقين، أصابع غريبة الأطوال

 

كل شيء سليم وفي مكانه

 

 

أتفحص المكان من حولي:

المرنطية ترفع يديها ببطء

باتجاه القمر، تزيح جزءًا من ياقتها

إلى اليمين، وتضرب باليد الأخرى

على صدرها

تمامًا كما تفعل جدتي

وهي تغوي قمر بن هاشم

 

 

أحدق في السجادة المليئة بالمثلثات

أتابع كيف يترابط الواحد بالآخر

أو بالآخرين. لكل مثلث

عدة مثلثات مجاورة. لكل منهم

ضلع نبت من جسد الآخر وسيموت معه.

أتيه في عالمهم الغريب

أتخيل أني أسير في شارع مثلثي

ذات مساء جميل وهادئ

لا أركز في تفاصيل ما أرتديه

أو أسجل الألوان

 

مشهد بالكاد تتحدد خطوطه

لكن رأسي يظهر فيه

 

 

وعلى الرغم من أني أتبختر

على الأرجح قاصدة مكانًا يبعث فيَّ السعادة

فإن الخوف لا يزال معي

في جيب بنطلوني الذي لا أعرف لونه

يخرج منه مثل جني

 

 

مرة يستحيل رجلًا يخيفني بكلمتين

فأرد عليه بكلمات أكبر وألسع

تجعل منه محط سخرية المثلثات

التي بكركراتها فقط يهدأ روعي

 

 

ومرة يستحيل وحشًا

أقتله بعشرين طلقة

أو أكون قد نسيت مسدسي

فأكر عنقه بأظافري

أو أكون قد قصقصتها صباحًا

فأقطعه بأسناني

تنغرس في جسده

كالأشواك

 

 

مرات أصل منهكة

إلى الشارع المثلثي

أتجاهل الرجل كثير الكلام

وإن رأيت الوحش

أتحرك بخطوات ثابتة

إلى الناصية الأخرى

 

 

لو لم أقرر الآن عد المثلثات

كنت سأعد مكعبات الأرضية في المتجر

ولتخيلت ظهور مخلوقات أخرى

تتوعدني وتدفعني لأن أكون العنقاء تارة

والغول تارة أخرى

 

 

كثيرًا ما أنجح في إنقاذ نفسي

أركض أركض أركض

إلى نهاية العالم

أو أقف بشجاعة

لأخلص عليهم بدم بارد

 

 

دائمًا ما ينتهي المشهد على ذات المنوال:

جسدي يتصبب عرقًا

ودمائهم لا أثر لها

في مسرح الجريمة

الكلمات لا تأتي

الكلمات لم تعد تأتي، بنفسي صرت أذهب إليها. أتصل بها، أشاهد صورها على الإنستغرام، أنثر قلب حب بعد ولادة كل منها بثوانٍ. المنشورات والميمات التي تشاركها لم تعد تحمل رسائل مشفرة لي. لست قارئها المفضل، قارئها الأمثل، قارئها الشبيه. بطّلت تـ@ني في فيديو ضاحك، رقصة ممتازة، أو نص ثوري. أتفرج كيف تقضي أيامها من دوني، تذهب في تمشية صباحية تبعدها أكثر عني، أحيانًا تقطع المسافة على دراجة، أو يأخذها شخص جديد بسيارته إلى الميناء - على الأرجح روائي متعسر. 

هو أيضًا ستهجره، مزاجية وخلقها ضيق. إن لم تصمد مع شاعرة نثر، كيف لها أن تتحمل العيش مع تسع شخصيات من ثلاثة أجيال تتوزع في قارات أربع بين حربين وعلى وشك الثالثة؟ سينتهي به الأمر معي في ذات النفق. ثم ستستبدله بكاتب تجريبي يمزج بين جنيس وآخر. تجعله يشعر بأنه خاص جدًّا، بل استثنائي، حب حياتها الأول والأخير، ستعطيه كتب كيليطو وتسهر معه الليالي تحدثه كيف أن العرب اخترعوا الجنس لا المؤلف، وأن المؤلف هرطقة غربية، أن المؤلف لا بد من أن يموت، بأجناسه بتجريبه، كله على بعضه يموت. ستتركه عالقًا بين الأنواع، مفشوخًا بين نص مدوَّر وآخر مقطَّع، وسنضطر أنا والروائي إلى إنزاله عن الصليب.

تتكدس قلوب حبي في عمود جانبي على شاشتها، تنز فوق بعضها، يتداخل الأحمر بالأحمر، يصبغ إبهامها حين تلامسه بالخطأ. تنزعج أحيانًا من كثرة قلوبي، بكل قسوة تفرغ الحُجرات من أي أثر لها، تأخذ وسادتها التي تحججت بها لتفادي قضاء الليل معي. كم حاولتُ إغلاق الصمامات لتظل حبيسة. احتجَّت بمشهد درامي، بل وهددت بإلقاء نفسها من على الشرفة الثانية لـ "التاجي". قطَّعت شراييني، الوغدة المتوحشة، حتى النبض جعلته يسري تائهًا إلى صفحات الغرباء. 

أرسل إليها قصيدة أو أغنية أعجبتني وذكرتني بها. أقرأ كلمات الأغنية بأذني أولًا، ثم أبحث عنها على غوغل أو في تعليقات يوتيوب لأقرأها كسطور. أحرص على أن تكون الأغنية خاصة بها، عنها، عنا، عن المفقود، الممكن. أحيانًا ترد، بتملل، كمن يبحث عن نهاية. كل الترجي في أغنياتي الشرقية لا يرف فيها جفنًا. الدخلة الموسيقية - التي هي سجادة الأغنية – تقطعها في لحظة. حتى الموال، ذاك الحجر الذي يحرك جوف البحيرة، تثب فوقه في خطوة. الوجع الذي يصعد سلالم الروح ويسري إلى أنامل العوَّاد، الكمنجاتي الذي سلَّم رقبته إلى مقصلة الفراق، عازف القانون وهو يداعب الفراشات التي نبتت ليلة البارحة في بطن عاشق غرير. كلهم تتصفحهم في كوبليه أو اثنين قبل أن تغلق النافذة أمام فم المطربة المشرع. 

تُشعرني بالحرج، بالثقل. أقترح أن نلتقي، أقدم دعوتي بصوت هادئ، في حال رفضت – كالعادة – يكون باستطاعتي تقبل جفاءها بروح رياضية. كانت حين تأتي تقضي أيامًا عندي، تأكل وتدخن وتصنع فوضى فيها أغلب ذكرياتنا. كانت تحضر في الأفراح والوداعات، وبشكل أقل في الجنازات، وفي الأسابيع الأولى من كل حب. رغم أنها تغار من عشاقي الجدد، إلا أنها تعلم أنهم طارئون. 

والهة

عند المدخل، وقفت امرأة لوط وقد سخطها الفنان إلى شكل أقسى مما فعل الرب. لم يحافظ على جسدِها الملحي، بل رممها بالبرونز لتظل حبيسة الأزلية. ليس بإمكانها زيارة جيرانها لتخبرهم عن زوارها الجدد، حتى عتبة الغاليري لا يمكن لها تجاوزها. ساكنة محنطة، تسمعُ الحوارات العابرة وترصدُ الوجوه بعينين فارغتين من التشويق. تمر من أمامِها أجناس شتى كل يوم: جن وإنس وملائكة وأنبياء. كانت في حياة سابقة تتلّوى إن اضطرت إلى الحفاظ على حكايا الغرباء في بطنها، تدور في الحي، تستَفرغها واحدةً تلو الأخرى. 

الآن لم تعد تشكلُ خطرًا على الأسرار. الآن، تدفعُ والهة ثمن حنينها السريع، ثمن شغفها بالماضي، الذي اضطرها إلى إلقاء نظرة أخيرة على سَدُوم. في نظرة، بالكاد سجلت ألوان حياتها، بالكاد حبست رائحة الصباح قبل أن تضيع مع الجغرافيا، بالكاد ابتلعت لغةً ستنتهي أحلامها بانتفائها. في النقطة الحدودية، ليس مسموحًا للمهاجر أن يشغل نفسه بأي شيء سوى اللحظة الراهنة. قالوا إنها بالتفاتتها فضحت هوية الرب. أو أنها في أعماقها آمنت بأن سدوم بريئة، بأن سدوم لا تستحق أن تدك هكذا حد الرماد. 

ربما لو انتظرت والهة الوصول إلى الكهف قبل أن تترك للحنين أن يغمرها، لذهبت قصة الكونية في اتجاه آخر تمامًا. بل ربما انتهت في ذاك الكهف واسترحنا. لمَ لم يتفهم الرب أنها أرادت فقط ما يكفي لكتابة قصيدة أطلال؟ هل لأن الطلل حصر على الرجال؟ 

صغيرة تبدو فوق المكعب، رأسُها كما جنين لا موهبة له في الصراخ. جردها الفنانُ من ذراعيها ورجليها. لربما خاف الفنانُ أن تهرب امرأة لوط من الغاليري وتعود مرة أخرى إلى العالم السفلي. 

* مجلة آسيمبتوت

Three Poems

Abracadabra  

Fear sometimes washes over me

I close my eyes and slow down my breathing

I remind myself of the magic words:

Now + Here

Now: It is Thursday, March 10

Here: My Boston apartment

I begin by counting the contents of my body:

One head, two eyes, two shoulders,

A slightly elevated belly,

Two thighs, two legs, and fingers of peculiar length

Everything is intact, and in its place

I inspect the space around me:

The prayer plant slowly lifts her hands

Toward the moon, shifts her collar

To the right, lays the other hand

On her chest

Mimicking my grandmother’s seduction of God

In her night prayers

I stare into the triangle-strewn carpet

I trace how each triangle intertwines with another

Each triangle

Has several neighboring triangles. Each of them

Has a rib that grew from someone else’s body, and with which they will die.

Arriving in their strange world

I imagine walking through a triangular street

On a beautiful, quiet evening

Paying no attention to the details of my outfit

Or to the colors that materialize

The scene’s contours are obscure

But in it, my head appears

And although I am strutting,

Probably towards a place that will revive my happiness,

The fear is still with me

In the pocket of my pants (What color are they?)

Sticking its head out like a genie

One time, the fear takes the shape of a man who startles me with a couple of words

So I respond with larger, sharper words

Which makes him a laughingstock for the triangles,

Whose roars calm me down

And another time, the fear is a monster

I slay with twenty bullets

Or, I would have forgotten my shotgun

So I prick his neck with my nails

Or, I would have clipped them in the morning

So I pull him apart with my teeth

Which drill into his body

Like thorns

Sometimes I arrive exhausted

At the triangular street

I ignore the garrulous man

And when I see the monster

I take steady strides

Toward the opposite corner

Even if I hadn’t decided to count these triangles right now

I would have been counting cubes on the supermarket floor,

And I would have imagined the emergence of other creatures

Which threaten me, and drive me to become sometimes a phoenix,

Sometimes a ghoul

I often manage to save myself

I run, I run, I run

To the end of the world

Or, I stand there bravely

To finish them off in cold blood

 

The scene always ends on the same note:

My body is drenched in sweat

And there’s no sign of their blood

At the crime scene

Words Don’t Come Easy

The Word no longer comes to me; I now go to her myself. I call her, I flip through her Instagram photos, hurling hearts seconds after the arrival of each one. The posts and memes she shares no longer carry encrypted messages aimed at me. I am no longer her favorite reader, her ideal reader, her like-minded reader. She has stopped mentioning me in a funny video, an exceptional dance, or a revolutionary text. I observe the ways she spends her days without me. She goes on a morning walk that further distances her from me; she sometimes bikes, or is driven to the port in a new person’s car—most likely a struggling novelist.

Him too she will leave—she is moody and irritable. If she could not make it last with a prose poet, how will she ever stand to live with nine characters from three different generations, spread out across four continents, between two wars, about to become three? He will end up in the same boat as me. She will then replace him for an experimental writer, who blends one subgenre with another. She will make him feel very special—exceptional even—the first and last love of her life; she will give him Kilito’s books, and stay up all night positing that it was Arabs who invented genre, and not the author, and that anyway, the author is a Western heresy, and that the author must die, together with his genres—sub or not—and his experimentation—they must all die. She will leave him swinging between genres, torn between prose blocks and verse, and the novelist and I will end up having to take him down from the cross.

My hearts stack up in a column on the side of her screen, bleeding into one another, red seeping into red, staining her thumb. Sometimes, disturbed by my onslaught of hearts, she callously empties my heart chambers of any trace of her, removing even her pillow, which she often used as an excuse to avoid spending the night with me. O, how I’ve tried to fasten my valves to keep her captive. She fought back dramatically, and threatened to fling herself off my coronary. She slit my veins, that savage bitch; even my pulse she let wander like a stray into the pages of strangers.

I send her a poem, or a song I enjoyed, and that made me think of her. I read the lyrics with my ears first, before I search for them on Google or in YouTube comments, to read them in verse. I make sure the song could only be about her, about us, about what has been lost—what’s possible. Sometimes she responds, aridly, like someone looking for an ending. She bats no eye at all the pleading in my Arabic songs. She skips the musical interlude—the song’s carpeting—in an instant. Even the Mawwal—that stone that moves lake beds—she walks right over. The sorrow that climbs the soul’s stairs and into the oud player’s fingertips, the violinist who surrenders his neck to the guillotine of separation, the qanun player caressing the butterflies that sprouted, just last night, in the belly of a new lover: she leafs through them all in one or two verses, before slamming the window shut on the singer’s gaping mouth.

She humiliates me, weighs me down. I suggest meeting; I offer my invitation calmly, so that when she turns me down—as usual—I would receive her aloofness with sportsmanship. When she spent her days with me, she would eat and smoke and wage chaos where most of our memories still live. She would always show up to weddings and farewells—occasionally to funerals—and in the first few weeks of every love affair. She may be jealous of my new lovers, but she also knows they are disposable.

 

Lot’s Wife

Lot’s wife stands near the entrance, deformed more radically by the artist than she had ever been by the Lord. The artist didn’t preserve her salty body; instead, he restored her in bronze, crafting a prisoner of eternity. She can’t visit the neighbors to gossip about her new visitors; she can’t even cross the gallery’s threshold. Mummified and silent, she overhears fleeting conversations, surveils countenances with incurious eyes. People of various races— jinn, humans, and angels—walk past her daily. In a past life, she squirmed if she had to carry strangers’ stories in her belly—she would wander the neighborhood, disgorging one tale after another.

She is no longer a threat to secrets. Now, Lot’s wife pays the price for her fleeting nostalgia, her passion for the past, which compelled her to take one last look at Sodom. Looking back, she barely managed to archive the colors of her life, barely captured the morning’s scent before it went missing, together with geography. She barely swallowed the language whose extinction would turn her dreams obsolete. At the border checkpoint, a migrant is not allowed to occupy herself with anything but the present moment. It has been said that in turning back, she had compromised the identity of the Lord. Or that in her gut, she believed Sodom innocent, wrongly battered to dust.

Perhaps if Lot’s wife had waited until she got to the cave before letting nostalgia overwhelm her, the plot of cosmology would have gone in an entirely different direction. In fact, it might have ended in that cave, and left us in peace. Why couldn’t the Lord understand that all she wanted was to write a poem about ruins? Is it because men have a sole claim to ruin?

She looks tiny on the plinth; her head like a newborn with no talent for wailing. The artist has stripped Lot’s wife of her limbs. Perhaps he feared she would escape the gallery, and travel back to the underworld.

translated from the Arabic by Sara Elkamel

Asymptote

Hope Dissidents - tr. Sara Elkamel

 When we die,

the cemetery keeper tires
of surveilling our graves’ windows.

We trace the memory of rain —

but it dances in the distance
where the lilies quake the earth
until its dreams unwind.

When my grandfather burned his cave,
the demons came out to meet him
with wedding preparations.

And as the dream verged on a nightmare,
he danced; my mother’s tail
bowing to the nudeness of silence.

I have resigned myself to hymns,
unlike my grandfather;
winter villages ignite in his heart
every bakery, a long way
from the sounds of hope.

Our roof embraces a crew
of honorable dead people.

Near the bends of light
my grandmother briefly abandons her modesty
to bake the past’s dough
for a Reader of Nostalgia,
who takes everything she wants from her
yet prescribes she swallow
more sadness
for her grandchildren’s sake.

That’s why, grandmother,
don’t approach the catacombs of hope;
we are but its dissidents.

* Published in GUERNICA magazine. 

Four poems - tr: Sara Elkamel

The Migrant Poet Slaughters His Voice

One scorching summer
—warmer than the previous summer,
and cooler than the next—
the poet journeyed from the upper south
to the lower south.

He descended, and at the fringe of a rock,
slaughtered his voice. Just like that, calmly,
his narrow eyes squinting in distress.
He did not read Al-Fatiha, nor did he pledge
this sacrifice to Allah.

The poet was exasperated that his voice had become a metaphor;
he wanted to see the blood of his voice, its lard and flesh,
its lineage—to hear its chords vibrating
even if a single utterance would cost him his life.

In our language, he finds himself placing nouns before verbs,
tainted by the lyrical I, perhaps. He picks words
that had wilted until they turned to gold. Wiping away
the dust of the centuries, he plants them in small pots.
The poet thinks he can
heal the dumb, and revive the dead.

Meanwhile, in their language, he crosses mountains and oceans
leaving a talisman on every tree
to find his way back.

He hauls a mountain from the slopes of California,
and flings it into the Gulf of Mexico
before it floats, once again, atop an oil pipeline.

Every morning, I wake up to his voice;
I slam the window in its face, and go back to sleep.
I let him jumble the clocks, talk to me about the prose poem—
how it stands like a bare trunk, interrupting the horizon:
They have stolen our music

and nothing's left but the voice
that reaches me across time zones
afflicted with insomnia, burdened with beginnings,
stuck—like an eternal cry—
in the chasm of time.

Western Poets Kidnap Your Poems and Call Them Translations

Mona Kareem on the colonial phenomenon of rendition as translation 

1

Earlier this year, an English translation of Yi Lei, a prominent poet of the ’80s generation in China, was released by Graywolf Press. Tweets and headlines in the American press rejoiced, stressing how this Chinese Emily Dickinson has been brought into English by none other than the Pulitzer prizewinner Tracy K. Smith. They marvelled at such feminist collaboration, our best woman poet and their best woman poet, meeting in verse. ‘An encounter with Tracy K. Smith eased the late Chinese poet’s emergence into the Anglophone world,’ declared the New Yorker. The verb ‘eased’ struck me; like an unwanted pregnancy, her poems arrive in English—a ‘second life’ to use the article’s Benjaminian wording. Tracy K. Smith has no knowledge of Chinese, and as such, I doubt that she knows enough about Chinese poetry and where Yi Lei stands among her generation, or the place of her poetics within their literary domain. In the introduction, written without the co-translator, Smith makes no mention of any other Chinese poets, nor does she contextualize Lei’s work. She describes her as a revolutionary voice, tells us about her brief friendship with Lei, comparing her to one American master: ‘she was huge-hearted and philosophical, on intimate terms with the world in the way of Walt Whitman, one of her literary heroes.’

Smith does not hide her anxiety at the nature of this work yet she does not frame it as a non-translation, or perhaps an anti-translation: ‘I accepted the fact that the music of the original, which I wasn’t capable of recognizing in the Chinese, or gleaning from David’s intermediary translation, could not be a component of my concerns as a translator.’ After all, it is no strange phenomenon for Western poets, from Ezra Pound to Ted Hughes, to hire a linguist or a literary scholar to compose a ‘rough translation’ to then make an adaptation of the text. I hold no objections against adaptation as a form of translation, nor am I interested in guarding definitions of translation but am rather interested in examining how such co-opting of literary translation speaks of a larger attitude toward non-western literatures. Sometimes it is the author of the original text who partners in this process and, where not versed in the target language or its literature, this yields a collaboration distinct for its uneven power relations. Last July, Graywolf announced a new translation, or an adaptation, of Dante by Mary Jo Bang, another beloved woman poet of America. It announced in a tweet, ‘Congratulations to Jo Bang on her release,’ to which I couldn’t help but respond, ‘Congratulations to Dante!’ 

This phenomenon of Western poets calling their renditions translations has always baffled me. Everywhere else in the world, poets might commit the sin of translating a text via an intermediary language which they speak (a translation of a translation) but never would they hire someone to give them a rough draft of the original to then workshop the hell out of it! One can’t help but wonder, if the resources are available for a rough draft, if the enthusiasm is present to ‘ease’ a text into a new language, then what is it that stops western poets and publishers from leaving the task of translating someone of the caliber of Yi Lei to a qualified translator? After all, Chinese is not some obscure language of the Norwegian outskirts, it’s literally the largest language in the world when we count native speakers! In his review of Smith’s adaptation, Andrew Chan writes about the state of confusion he found himself in, wary of the ‘false conclusions’ that Smith’s ‘unfaithful renditions’ would leave the English-speaker with. Chan, who has read the poetry of both Smith and Lei (in the original), is able to tell how Smith’s renditions were decorated by an aesthetic contrary to Lei’s work, a musicality specific to Smith, a drastic difference in style and tone. What poets who are not translators fail to understand is that it is exactly ‘style, tone, and content’ that makes or breaks a translator. Chan too is aware of this phenomenon, offering examples beyond poetry, where the translator takes liberty in not only domesticating a text, but making of it a ‘loose’ adaptation. It is indeed a form of textual violence.

As an Arab poet, I can tell you that stories of what western translators do to our work make a favourite subject in literary festivals, late-night gatherings, and zoom events. One cannot miss the sense of ‘guardianship’ western translators practice over us—how they filter us, make us lyrical, oblique, politically-correct, or appealing. A sense of paternity is at practice by which the western translator takes your hand and guides you into the darkness of the abyss, especially if you do not speak their language. Often, you naively believe in them, after all this is not a matter of ill intentions, the two of you work on the belief that it is a ‘collaboration,’ and as so, whatever it yields, might be worth the while!