Another measure of Iraq

The late great French Arabist Jacques Berque was fond of saying that more poets lived in the city of Baghdad than in all of France. To an American audience, this might be surprising, given the current daily media messages from Iraq: violence, ethnic conflict and more violence. It is true, occasionally, that mention is made of the great cultural heritage of Iraq -- Sumer, Assyria, Babylonia. But modern arts and poetry? Scarcely a sentence. Another issue is, of course, the dearth of good translations from Arabic to English.

Khaled Mattawa, an American poet of Arab descent, has begun to address the latter problem with translations of Hatef Janabi, Fadhil al-Azzawi and Saadi Youssef. His translation of Youssef’s “Without an Alphabet, Without a Face” has been recognized with the 2003 PEN Award for translation of poetry and is important for bringing a significant Iraqi poet to the attention of English-speaking audiences.

For centuries, critics and writers have debated not only the choice of work to be translated but also whether it is possible at all and, if it is possible, how the process should be undertaken. Readers can hope that the old days of “literal” rendering and the addition of historically appropriate embellishments to the original have been replaced because of a consensus that translation is itself a creative act that transforms a work into a literary event in a new language. In other words, for the English reader, good Arabic poetry should read like good English poetry. Mattawa has performed this task admirably. Youssef’s poems draw the English reader along, page after page, to appreciate the moving quality of the work, the precision and beauty of the images and the originality of the whole.

Who is Saadi Youssef? One of the major Iraqi poets writing today and one of the outstanding poets in the Arab world, Youssef emerged early in his life as a revolutionary willing to take poetic as well as political risks. His first book, published in 1952, followed the pattern of traditional Arabic poetry, which was committed to a rigid pattern of rhymed lines. (Mattawa does not include anything from this volume in “Without an Alphabet.”)

But that was soon to change. His next book, and all his work thereafter, followed from and developed upon the free verse movement of the 1950s, pioneered by poets Nazik al-Malaika and Badr Shakr al-Sayyab. No rhymes, or irregular ones. Lines of different lengths. The use of a single metrical foot instead of a set number of feet. In other words, revolution, a revolution that did not bring upon Youssef the scorn of critics, who had argued that al-Malaika and al-Sayyab wrote free verse because they could not master the old forms; Youssef had proved that he could. His technique is seen in “Night in Hamdan”:

This is Hamdan ...

tuberculosis and date palms.

In Hamdan we hear only what we say,

our night, the date palms, esparto grass,

and the old river

where lemon leaves on the water drift.

They are green like water

like your eyes, I say.

“Night in Hamdan” demonstrates why Youssef is so honored across the area. He refuses to write “platform poetry,” work eulogizing a leader, a political party, an ideological movement. Social criticism is there in the poem (tuberculosis, the scourge of the poor), but so are the beautiful natural landscape and the poet’s love.

As Mattawa points out in his informative introduction, critics have noted that Youssef prefers whispering to declaiming. “The metaphor of a whisper is appropriate as it captures both the intimacy and the urgency of an utterance,” he explains, “a short, intimate utterance that is half thought and half feeling.” Youssef is also known for his insistence on empirical observation by the poet -- of life, of nature; abstraction, symbolism come later, he says. The precision of his images illustrates this:

Soon the leaves will tire

Of their greenness ...

The early sparrow sends a feather

to pomegranate blossoms.

The metaphors eventually emerge, but stated simply:

Why do the years wear lead shoes?

Youssef does not lack a sense of personal irony, either:

I laugh at what I write today.

I say: “Saadi,

my reasonable sir,

what are you writing tonight?”

Yet, despite the irony and self-admonition, overall these are poems of exile. Youssef fled Iraq in the late 1970s, as Saddam Hussein was rising to power and Youssef was being pressured to join the Baath Party. Since then, he has lived in a bewildering variety of places in the Arab world but also in Cyprus, Yugoslavia, France and now England. Mattawa charts the poet’s peregrinations by arranging the poems roughly according to the places where they were written. Thus even the casual reader can follow Youssef’s moves and note developments and changes in topic and style. Politics is there, mostly in whispers but occasionally more forthright, as in a later poem, from 1995, “America, America”:

I love Mark Twain and the Mississippi steamboat and Abraham Lincoln’s dogs.

I love the fields of wheat and corn and the smell of Virginia tobacco.

But I am not American.

Is that enough for the Phantom pilot to turn me back to the Stone Age?

I need neither oil nor America herself, neither the elephant nor the donkey.

And further on, in the same poem, he writes:

Take the Afghani mujahideen beard

and give us Walt Whitman’s beard filled with butterflies.

Take Saddam Hussein

and give us Abraham Lincoln

or give us no one.

Despite the poet’s travels, his careful noting of the characteristics of each place and his clearly expressed sense of dislocation, the poet’s individual voice is constant. Mattawa writes that Youssef is admired in the Arab world for defending individual integrity and “reclaimed lived experience” in an area torn apart by a century of colonialist civil wars -- and now by Western occupiers. Youssef’s stated belief in poetry as a unifier of disparate and desperate elements, as expression of individual identity, is a theme he returns to often. In “Poetry,” for example, he writes:

Who broke these mirrors

and tossed them

shard

by shard

among the branches? ...

L’Akdhar [the poet] must gather these mirrors

on his palm

and match the pieces together

any way he likes

and preserve

the memory of the branch.

Bitterness, hope, loss, love: These seemingly incongruous emotions surface and resurface throughout Youssef’s work, as in one of the poems written in Algeria and beautifully rendered by Mattawa:

Country where I no longer live,

my outcast country,

from you I only gained a traveler’s sails,

a banner ripped by daggers

and fugitive stars.

“Without an Alphabet, Without a Face” highlights only a small part of Youssef’s lifetime work, which includes 30 volumes of poetry, seven books of prose and translations into Arabic of major world classics, such as those by Federico Garcia Lorca, Constantine Cavafy, Walt Whitman, George Orwell, Nuruddin Farah and Wole Soyinka. PEN and the Lannan Translation Series and, above all, Khaled Mattawa are to be congratulated for this introduction to the poetry of Youssef, a contribution to the literature of the world.