Reading Iraqi poetry
Two years ago, I worked with Daniel Weissbort, translating Palestinian and Israeli poetry. As a result of our conversations, we conceived the idea of devoting an issue of his journal Modern Poetry in Translation to Iraqi Poetry Today. We hoped that translating poetry might contribute to the appreciation of other civilisations and even to peace in the Middle East. It seems our dream has failed. Our hope for peace in the Middle East has all but disappeared after the horrors of September 11 2001.
In spite of these international, national and personal challenges, our faith in poetry abides. We continue to believe in its ability to represent the best aspects of human culture. I felt that translating Iraqi poetry and publishing it in English had become for me a desperate effort to save what remains of Iraqi humanity and culture in the face of a brutal dictatorship and war. As the drums of war clamoured throughout the Islamic world, I could not help feeling like the Chinese student who, in 1989, stood in the path of tanks in Tiananmen Square, exemplifying Ernest Hemingway's belief that human beings can be destroyed but not defeated. Although I lost faith in politics long ago, I still believe in the power of the word, and especially in the power of translation.
The globalisation of capital threatens to extinguish the spirit of each culture, but one positive change has come with this movement. It has shed light on the importance of translation. Translation can, of course, be seen as a tool that facilitates the globalisation of capital and thus contributes to the overall deadening of cultures, but when poetry is translated, it works against these effects. The particularities of one culture, expressed through poetry, can be appreciated by readers of another because of translation. My work on translation from Arabic into English and vice versa has thus been immensely spiritually rewarding, for in the process of translating, I have discovered and rediscovered many aspects of my own culture.
My work has also been intellectually challenging, for in order to translate certain words, idioms, phrases and cultural significations from Arabic into English, I have to transmute myself into an English-language reader. That experience frequently provides me with a unique double perspective on both the Arabic and English languages. Therefore, I have begun to realise the importance of collaboration between native speakers of the source language and native speakers of the target language in any effective translation. More specifically, translating poetry requires not only familiarity with the two languages, but also knowledge of the poetic sensibilities of the peoples and literary traditions of those languages.
Hence, most of the poems translated in Iraqi Poetry Today have been read and emended by American poets working with near literal translation. This collaboration, when successful, results in "Arabic" poetry that is transplanted into English without losing its particular Arabic signification. Since absolute translation is a myth, and since the literal translation is spiritless, if not meaningless, in most cases, such collaboration is essential in establishing a linguistic and cultural conduit between the two languages. Even if the translator has mastery over both languages, the translated work should be reviewed by experts in the two languages. Of course, even the best translation is inevitably the outcome of one particular interpretation, which accounts for the existence of multiple translations of classic texts such as the Iliad or the Arabian Nights .
As a society and culture, Iraq is ethnically and religiously complex. Some of the Iraqi Arab poets are ethnically Kurdish, Chaldean, Jewish and Sabean (or Men-daien). Since 1980, when the series of wars began, it has been difficult to find significant sources of Iraqi poetry and the new generation of poets who began writing under sanctions do not have access to publication.
Sometimes we wonder what the value is of rendering Iraqi poetry into English at this historical juncture. Whether we like it or not, English has become the world language, and thus has come to belong to people of all nations. Hundreds of the poets who live in exile have lost their audience and have begun either to write in English or to get their poetry translated into English or the language of their host country. The outcome of this hybrid poetics has become an important feature of western modernism: a phenomenon that has not yet been significantly explored. Some of the reasons for this neglect may have to do with the fact that major critics in the west are not familiar with, and some not even interested in, the languages of the colonised.
A majority of the Iraqi poets in Iraqi Poetry Today live in exile in the west. Five still live in Iraq. The Iraqi poetic styles range from traditional to modernistic to experimental and the major themes covered include love, war, fascism, sanctions, torture, prison, exile, communism, Sufism, nationalism, feminism, homeland, exile, colonialism and selfhood. In broad terms, the movement of modern poetry in Iraq between 1900 and 1945 began with the ancient traditional form inspired by neo-classical themes under European influence. In the early 1950s, the pioneer poets, al-shu'ara'a al-ruwwad, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Nazik al-Mala'ika, stimulated by their reading of western modernist poets such as TS Eliot and Edith Sitwell, began what is termed now al-sh'ir al-hur, free verse - free, that is, from the confines of the traditional two-hemistich line. This poetic revolution, which began in Iraq and spread through the Arab world, introduced new imagery, new metrical patterns and a new sensibility. In the 1960s, Iraqi poets, like poets all over the world, obsessively experimented with new stylistics and new philosophies. Many of them, rebelling against traditional thought, embraced existentialism, iconoclasm and nihilism that introduced the aesthetics of ambiguity and solipsism.
During those dynamic and sometimes chaotic years, the prose poem, qaissidat al-nathr , was born and faced fierce resistance, even from the practitioners of free verse. Although the battle against the prose poem is not yet over, one can clearly see that prose poets, like Fadhil al-Azzawi and Dunya Mikhail, have successfully proven in their powerful lyricism and intricate rhythms that prose poetry is legitimate and cannot be considered just prose.
· Saadi A Simawe, Iraqi Poetry Today, MPT 19, for £9.94 paperback ISBN 0 9533824 6 X at your local bookstore or from Central Books Ltd, 99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN email: orders@centralbooks.com. To subscribe to MPT, (two issues) UK and EC, £22.00 post-free, overseas £26.00 or US$40.00 post-free. Cheques payable to King's College London. MPT, The School of Humanities, King's College London, Strand, London WC2RF 2LS.