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Our name is the first wound
No.1 2016
© Modern Poetry in Translation 2016 and contributors
ISSN (print) 0969-3572
ISSN (online) 2052-3017
ISBN (print) 978-1-91048-509-5
ISBN (ebook) 978-1-91048-510-1
Editor: Sasha Dugdale
Managing Editor: Deborah de Kock
Web and Communications Manager: Ed Cottrell
Design by Katy Mawhood
Cover art by Molly Crabapple
Ebook conversion by leeds-ebooks.co.uk
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Charlesworth Press, Wakefield
For submissions and subscriptions please visit www.mptmagazine.com
Modern Poetry in Translation Limited. A Company Limited by Guarantee
Registered in England and Wales, Number 5881603
UK Registered Charity Number 1118223
Modern Poetry in Translation gratefully acknowledges the support of the British Council and is proud to be part of Refugee Week.
MODERN POETRY IN TRANSLATION
The Great Flight
CONTENTS
EDITORIAL
GËZIM HAJDARI, six poems
Translated by VIKTOR BERBERI
BASUKI GUNAWAN, five poems
Translated by DAVID COLMER
LUCRETIUS, four excerpts from ‘On the Nature of the Universe’
Translated by EMMA GEE
CAITLÍN MAUDE, four poems
Translated by DOIREANN NÍ GHRÍOFA
SAKYIL TSETA, ‘Rebkong’
Translated by TENZIN DICKYI
NGARMA, ‘An Old Man’s Present’
Translated by TENZIN DICKYI
LOUISE LABÉ, four sonnets
Translated by OLIVIA MCCANNON
CHRISTINE DE LUCA, ‘Arne Ruste in Shetlandic’
CLARE POLLARD, ‘Lines after Rābi(ah al-Bașrī’
BHASKAR CHAKRABORTY, three poems
Translated by MANASH ‘FIRAQ’ BHATTACHARJEE
NED DENNY, ‘Wheel River’ after Wang Wei
Focus
RIBKA SIBHATU, ‘In Lampedusa’
Translated by ANDRÉ NAFFIS-SAHELY
Five Assyrian Iraqi Poets
Translated by JAMIE OSBORN and NINEB LAMASSU
AMIR POLIS IBRAHIM, ‘The Crucifixion of Baretle’
BAYDAA HADAYA, ‘Severed Lips’
ABDALLA NURI, ‘The Great Flight’
BARZAN ABDUL GHANI JARJIS, ‘My Mother’s Heart’
ANAS AOLO, ‘My Beloved Baghdede’
CARMEN BUGAN, ‘A Walk With My Father on the Iron`Curtain’
AMARJIT CHANDAN, four poems
Translated by the author and JULIA CASTERTON
MAYA TEVET DAYAN, ‘My Sister’
Translated by RACHEL TZIVIA BACK
HABIB TENGOUR, two poems
Translated by CAROLINE PRICE
Three Ethiopian Poets
Introduced by CHRIS BECKETT
ALEMU TEBEJE, ‘Greetings to the People of Europe!’
Translated by CHRIS BECKETT and the author
HAMA TUMA, two poems
Translated by the author
GEMORAW, ‘For the Voiceless People’
Translated by CHRIS BECKETT and ALEMU TEBEJE AYELE
MOHAMMED DIB, three poems
Translated by MADELEINE CAMPBELL
DON MEE CHOI, ‘A Short Piece on Migration’
GOLAN HAJI, ‘A Light In Water’
Translated by STEPHEN WATTS
MAJID NAFICY, two poems
Translated by ELIZABETH T. GRAY, JR.
NASRIN PARVAZ, ‘Writing in the “Host” Language’
YOUSIF QASMIYEH, ‘If this is my face, so be it’
Translated by the author
JUAN GELMAN, from ‘Under the barbaric rain’
Translated by KEITH PAYNE
SHASH TREVETT, ‘Glottophagy’
Essays & Reviews
SHASH TREVETT, Those Destined to Bear Witness
An anthology of Tamil poetry from the Civil War
BEVERLEY BIE BRAHIC, A Sensitive Earthquake Zone
Two new collections by Chinese women poets
CAROLINE MALDONADO, The Artist and the Poet
A Spiritual Journey in Bashō’s Footsteps
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
EDITORIAL
Molly Crabapple, the cover artist for this special refugee issue of MPT, sent me a portrait in response to the poems I sent her from the issue. When I asked Molly to write about the subject of the portrait she replied:
This is a portrait of my friend Zoza, a Kurdish artist from Aleppo. An early supporter of the revolution, Zoza finally had to leave Syria in 2014, and now, like so many Syrians in exile, lives in Gaziantep, Turkey. We met working on a mural at a school for Syrian refugee kids in the border town of Reyhanli. Zoza paints like Francis Bacon sometimes, but his day job is working as a graphic designer for an NGO supporting refugees.
The striking thing about Hozan Kaya Jan (Zoza), in Molly’s sketch, is his realness. There is no possibility that this man, with his electric-blue-inked curls and his thoughtful, slightly sardonic gaze, is a figment of anyone’s artistic or journalistic imagination. He looks out and challenges us to reduce him to an infographic or a statistic. He stands in iconic opposition to the ugly notions of refugees swarming into Europe like rats or cockroaches, or even the apparently more positive notion of pitiful hordes of victims. Zoza is a separate and complex existence, as we all are: complex, ineffable creatures, caught somewhere on this planet and dealing with it as best we can.
Molly responded to the poems in this way, because the poems are also irreducible. The voices in this focus issue are so blastingly individual, that even the noise of flight and migration recedes when you read, for example, Nasrin Parvaz’s anger at the discrimination inherent in not offering asylum seekers the opportunity to learn English, or Amarjit Chandan’s chance meeting with a Punjabi compatriot in the Barcelona metro. What general point can be drawn from this focus, except that politics and war have the power to make us all homeless, wandering, and dependent on the kindness of strangers? We’d better hope that when it happens we meet with more compassion than many refugees have had from us.
I was anxious that publishing poems seemed an empty gesture. After all, I reasoned, what current refugees need right now is not poems, but aid: warmth, food and medical help. But the response of the Assyrian poets published in the issue, many of whom are living in refugee camps, persuaded me that publishing this work as part of a focus on refugees was the right thing to do. The President of the Syriac Writers Union said that it had ‘turned their sadness into happiness’ to know their poems had reached the UK. It mattered to them that their voices had not been extinguished as their ordinary lives had.
And what can we do, except to continue to believe in our own form of the Republic of Letters: MPT as a virtual and metaphysical utopia where poets of all races and places meet and share poetry? It’s a minute and fragile vision, and the tiniest drop of cynicism pollutes it in seconds like a pipette of radioactive material. Yet it lasts: fifty years after it was founded at a point of cataclysm in Europe, it continues quietly publishing its republic of poets in the face of war and cataclysm around the world.
Sasha Dugdale
MPT is donating all the royalties from its fiftieth anniversary anthology Centres of Cataclysm published by Bloodaxe Books to the Refugee Council. More details at www.bloodaxebooks.com
HOZAN KAYA JAN: ‘OK this paintin
g started a long time ago when i first left Aleppo and came to Turkey. It’s keeping together from the first day all the personalities i have all the faces i live on daily basis, all the memories i don’t wanna let go, all former life i had i never wanna forget. […] It’s the bodiless form, i don’t know if it’s a correct word, i feel i am having… big dreams yet no legs to go forward.’
GËZIM HAJDARI
Translated by Viktor Berberi
Gëzim Hajdari’s many poetic works range from the sparse, at times lapidary, lyric, to the dramatic monologue (Maldiluna, ‘Moonsick’), to the epic (Nur: Besa ed eresia, ‘Nur: Oath and Heresy’), to contemporary translations of traditional oral forms (I canti dei nizàm, ‘Songs of the Nizam’) and the expansive poem-denunciation (Poema dell’esilio, ‘Poem of Exile’). The arc of Hajdari’s career demonstrates the courage with which he has held tight to his own voice, however at odds with contemporary trends in Italian literature. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Hajdari’s work is its complete dedication to renewing poetry’s task of speaking as the voice of its time. As he tends the memory of a people’s past, Hajdari documents the existential condition of the exile and migrant and calls his readers to an encounter with other worlds.
An outspoken critic of both the Communist and post-Communist political class in Albania, Hajdari has collected accounts of the innumerable literary figures persecuted under Hoxha’s regime in his Gjëmë: Genocidi i poezisë shqipe (Funeral Lament: The Genocide of Albanian Poetry). Indeed, his entire output can be read as a struggle to restore a voice to the voiceless, whether those suppressed by a brutal dictatorship, those who have been forced to abandon their homelands, or the others left behind to suffer poverty and violence. The following poems are characterized by a movement across borders (cultural, political, linguistic) and between present and past, looking back from Hajdari’s current home in Italy to the landscape, language and legends of the Albanian province of Darsìa. Hajdari’s great gift to Italian literature lies in his having brought to bear in his contemporary poems in Italian the richness of an ancient Balkan, and, more specifically, northern Albanian, epic tradition.
Perhaps in the Naked Hills of Darsìa…
Perhaps in the naked hills of Darsìa
my fragile verses will be buried
under the dry thorns of the pomegranate tree
struck by the icy winds of the East.
Far from the young girls’ loves
that will never know their anguish,
solitary under the black sky
like the robin in the darkness of winter.
The rustling of the grass, the blackbird’s song
will accompany their lament.
While autumn’s brief nights
will cover them with a pale moon.
The Ones Who Continue to Flee in the Snow…
The ones who continue to flee in the snow,
leaving behind them shrunken skies,
fragile, trembling walls,
are at the mercy of an unknown home
and the night’s pale moon.
Why are they driven to obliterate memories
and give up their nostalgia?
And the ashes of the dead, the altars,
what will they come to?
Turn toward recollection, bless
the trampled flowers, the water of the wells
from which you have drunk,
they will protect you through the exile you have undertaken:
among enchanted woods
and pitiless seasons.
You Exist in the Face of Winter…
You exist in the face of winter
as a wound. Motionless and foreign
in an imperfect space, never welcoming,
waiting for the sand’s even silence
to speak to you in secret.
Don’t be astonished by the wandering river and new trees
that were not here before. All around the transience
of things, the disappearance of poets who bind
heaven to land, will continue.
It is said we will die in opposing lands.
My years: an escape into the unknown
and waking again frightened in the night.
I Fall Back into the Nothingness…
I fall back into the nothingness
and keep my secrets hidden.
On the hills
the wind moves
the white sheets
of the dead.
Anonymous faces are silent
because they are unable to cry.
To whom does one turn
in this sterile land?
Like a sorrowful monk
I bury in the dark soil
flowers fallen from the almond tree.
Every Day I Create a New Homeland…
Every day I create a new homeland
in which I die and am reborn,
a nation without maps or flags,
celebrated by your deep eyes
that follow me always
on the voyage toward fragile heavens.
In all lands I sleep, enamoured,
in any home I wake a child,
my key can open any border
and the doors of any black prison.
My being is eternal return and departure
from one fire to the next, from water to water.
The anthem of my nations: the blackbird’s song
that I sing in seasons of setting moons,
moons that have risen from your brow of darkness and stars
with the eternal will of the sun-god.
How Poor We Are…
How poor we are.
I live from one day to the next in Italy,
you, in our homeland, can’t even drink a coffee.
Our fault: we love,
our sentence: to live alone, divided
by dark water.
I will come back in the fall like Constantine,
in our native hills you have already gathered the oregano
I will take with me into my empty room.
Now I live in place of myself
far from that land that without pity
devours its children.
NOTE: In the poem ‘How Poor We Are…’ Constantine, or the Knight of Death, is a character from the most beautiful of the oral tales of the Arbëresh, the ethnic Albanian communities of southern Italy. These tales have as their principal motif the besa, the traditional Albanian word of honour.
BASUKI GUNAWAN
Translated by David Colmer
Basuki Gunawan (1929–2014) was an Indonesian who travelled to the Netherlands as a student in the early fifties and ended up staying and becoming a respected sociologist. As a family friend I was asked to read the English translation of a poem that he had written at his funeral in 2014: ‘I Fill the Earth With My Song’. There had never been a Dutch version and the original Indonesian was thought lost, but looking at the English, and the German translation it had been based on, I was struck by the power of the poem. There were a few points where I wondered if the right translation choices had been made and this led me to do a search which, immediately and to my surprise, yielded an Indonesian site with the original versions of this and twelve other poems as well as five short stories, all published in the mid-fifties.
The site was dedicated in part to ‘forgotten’ Indonesian writers and maintained by Veronica B. Vonny, who in 1997 had written her thesis on Gunawan’s work, arguing that he had been unfairly neglected and had actually played a leading role in introducing existentialism, surrealism and nonconventional narrative forms into Indonesian fiction. She, in turn, besides being saddened to have missed the opportunity to contact her literary hero herself, was amazed to discover that he had lived such a long life and fascinated to hear that he had also written an excellent novella in Dutch.
An appraisal of the Indonesian originals of the poems showed that the 1950s German translation had been quite free and the 1960s English
translation had drifted even further away from the originals as a result. These new translations give precedence to the original Indonesian.
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