Born in Haifa in 1944, Olivia Elias is a poet of the Palestinian diaspora writing in French. During her childhood, she lived as a refugee in Beirut, but later moved to Montreal and then to Paris in the early 1980s. While she started to publish her poetry quite late in comparison to other poets, she has authored several collections since 2013. Her poetry is characterized as precise and rhythmic, and the Palestinian cause is a recurring theme throughout her work. Elias’ poem “Flame of Fire” opens:
I was born
In this
Eruptive time
When my country’s
Name was changed
Though Olivia Elias began writing poetry at a later stage in her life, she quickly gained maturity in the craft. With her third collection, Chaos, Crossing she reached an artistic peak, which has been brought into English in Kareem James Abu-Zeid’s translation. While the collection contains previously published poems, it also features poems which haven’t yet been published in French before. In this interview, Kareem James Abu-Zeid discusses his introduction to Elias’ work, the influences and intricacies of Elias’ poetry, and the process of bringing Chaos, Crossing into English for the first time.
Tuğrul Mende (TM): You studied French literature in the past. Can you tell me what drew you to the subject and what drew you to translate Olivia Elias?
Kareem James Abu-Zeid (KJAZ): It’s funny, because I did study French literature and poetry—French was my major as an undergraduate—but that wasn‘t how I discovered Olivia‘s poetry. She was introduced to me by another Palestinian poet, Najwan Darwish, in May 2020, and I immediately wanted to translate her work.
I wasn’t reading a lot of French poetry at the time, and I was mainly translating Arabic. All of the literary projects I had done up to that point were in Arabic. I do a lot of academic and professional translations from French and from German, but I hadn’t done many literary texts. Up until 2003, when I graduated from college, I was reading a lot of French poetry, but then I began translating Arabic and French literature dropped away a little bit in my translation life. So this project somehow felt like it connected those disparate parts of my life.
TM: What do you do differently when translating from those various languages?
KJAZ: I don’t consciously do anything differently. There are different things that happen and different challenges that arise with different languages, of course. For me, it always starts with understanding the source text, whatever its language. Then, hopefully, you develop a more empathetic connection to the source text, you really connect with it on a deeper level. The goal is to have the translation work as poetry in English.
There are different challenges with each language, and certainly with Arabic. When translating from Arabic to English, for example, the way the two languages work is so different that anything resembling a word-for-word translation is pretty much impossible. You’re forced to get very creative in terms of syntax, rhythm, etc.
With this project in particular, what I noticed is that I felt (for a little while) that I was going to be able to produce a translation that looked, at least on the surface, more like a mirror of the original French. I got lulled into a false sense of security, because the two languages are so close to one another in so many ways. But later on, I realized that the English wasn’t quite ”clicking” in the way I wanted, and that I couldn’t always mimic the French syntax or rhythms, or go with English cognates for French words—I had to step back a bit and really allow myself to recreate the texts as English-language poetry. I learned that there are unique difficulties when the languages are so close to each other as well. There were several times when I thought I had something good in English, and I was pleased, because in many ways it looked very close to the French. But then, when I managed to forget about the source text and just consider the English on its own, I realized that something was definitely sounding a bit “off” in my translation.
TM: What were your thoughts on the poems when you read them initially?
KJAZ: This was a new kind of project for me. I was excited just by the fact that it was Palestinian poetry written in French. I’ve translated a lot of Palestinian poetry, and I’ve studied the history of French poetry—from the medieval period to the modern day—in some depth, and this project brought those two strands together. At times it feels very much like what I think of as “Palestinian” poetry, and at other times it feels like it somehow fits into the tradition of French poetry.
The poetry really grabbed me from the get-go, and there’s some nice variety to the collection as well. There are poems that very explicitly call out injustices around the world, and others that very explicitly evoke Palestine and the land of Palestine, and there are others that are more personal and meditative, including many with Buddhist and Taoist undertones. Meditation is a major part of my life, and there was a period when I was spending several months a year on retreats, so those poems resonated a lot with me as well.
I should also say that I really like bringing an author into English for the first time—it’s one of the more satisfying aspects of my life as a translator. That was important to me with this project as well. Olivia had never had a book-length translation into any other language before, so I was excited to be that bridge. Her poetry was very powerful, but as a poet Olivia was virtually unknown in English, and wasn’t even particularly well-known in French, as far as I could tell. She’s very much in between different cultures, which can make it more challenging to really “break in” to the French literary scene, so to speak. She was born in Palestine and identifies as a Palestinian diaspora poet, but she mostly grew up in Lebanon, and then she lived in Quebec for a long time, and then in France. She’s very much in between all these places, and that informs her poetry.
Almost all of the Arabic-language authors I’ve translated for publishers, whether they were novelists or poets, were fairly major figures, at least in the Arabic-speaking world, and often internationally as well. So publishers were interested in them because of their status, or because of the prizes they had won. With Olivia’s book, when I was pitching to the publisher, it was really purely about the quality of the poetry, and not so much about the status or reputation of the poet. It was very different, for example, from pitching or publishing the work of Rabee Jaber (who had won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, which they call the “Arabic Booker”), or Dunya Mikhail (who had won numerous awards, and who was already widely translated into English), or Najwan Darwish (who had already been translated into over a dozen languages when I first started working with him), or Adonis (who is perennially mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel). With Olivia’s book, it was purely about the poetry, and I liked that.
TM: You mention that Elias is very much “in between” different countries and identities—what does it mean to write Palestinian poetry in French? And could you elaborate on how this “in between” is reflected not only in her history, but in her poetry as well?
KJAZ: Olivia’s family was forced out of Palestine in 1948, like so many others. We must remember that the threat that Palestinian identity faces is very much an existential one, so the fact Olivia identifies first and foremost as a Palestinian poet is a significant political act, and one that impacts her poetry in numerous ways. More specifically, she identifies as a Palestinian diaspora poet, and this is important. Given the fact that the Palestinian diaspora comprises at least six million people around the globe—a figure comparable to the total number of Palestinians living on the occupied lands of Palestine itself—it could certainly be argued that movement and displacement are integral components of contemporary Palestinian identity. It should thus come as no surprise that movement is present throughout the whole collection, which is very much a collection of crossings, of forced and desperate migrations, even if many of those crossings are doomed to failure. In Olivia’s poetry, these crossings are not exclusively Palestinian, but are more universal in scope, encompassing a range of geographies and political situations, though certainly the Mediterranean space is foregrounded.
In the poem titled “The Sea to Drink,” for example, we read:
she still had the sea to drink
before she could reach
the other shore.
Such poetic evocations of drowning and of the crossing’s failure is characteristic of this collection. This poetry very much dwells in the liminal, in the space between. Time and again, we see that one shore, one life, has been left behind, but a new life, the other shore, always seems just out of reach. The opening stanza of the poem Mediterranean I, which plays on the sonic qualities of that sea’s name, is one example of this:
The promise
of the other shore
contained in your name
grows more distant
each day
your Midday is fading
before Terrain.
But rather than moving forward, rather than advancing toward the other shore, the poem moves backward in time, toward a perhaps idealized childhood. “I’ve been dolphin in your waters,” the poetic subject proclaims, before diving more deeply into a kind of mystic communion with the sea, one where the challenges of life on either shore seem to be happily left behind:
there was only me
the sun at its
zenith
me and the blue
immensity.
TM: How hard was it for you to publish the collection?
KJAZ: It was quite quick and easy, actually. I began translating the book in May 2020, and finished it in September or October. I wrote to Brian Sneeden, who was the managing editor at World Poetry Books at the time, as I thought this would be a good fit for that press. And by December 2020, we had a firm “yes” from them. I signed the contract only about six or seven months after I started translating the book, which is very quick in the publishing world. Then Covid happened, and there were some editorial changes happening at the publisher as well, so it was another two years before the book came out, but that was happening everywhere at that time.
TM: You divided the book into four parts. What made you choose to divide it in this way, and how are they connected with each other?
KJAZ: Olivia was very involved in the translation process, and what we did first was get all the poems together. The book in English comprises the entirety of the French collection called Chaos, traversée, plus a couple older poems, and then about half of the poems in the English were new ones by Olivia that were previously unpublished in French. Once we had picked and translated all of the poems, we tried to really make it feel like an organic collection. The section divisions were Olivia’s idea, and it breaks up the book quite nicely. It gives it a feel of balance. We wanted to have some variety in each section as well—we didn’t just put all of the poems about exile into one section, and then all of the more Buddhist/Taoist poems into another section. We tried to mix it up.
TM: How different are Elias’ poems in comparison to younger poets?
KJAZ: I appreciate a lot of Olivia’s earlier poetry, but I really feel that she hits her stride with Chaos, Crossing, and reaches a kind of poetic maturity. It’s hard for me to compare her work to that of other poets, but I will say that I think she found her poetic maturity quite quickly. This is just her third collection. To me, it doesn’t feel like the work of someone who has only been publishing poetry for a few years now. It feels like the work of someone who has a whole poetic career behind them.
TM: How did you come up with the title Chaos, Crossing, and how did you choose which additional poems to include in the collection?
KJAZ: The title is the title of Olivia’s third collection in French, which is included in this book in its entirety. Those poems make up about half of the English book. The title also felt very appropriate for the book. In some ways, it’s even more enigmatic and open-ended in English than in French—there are even more interpretive possibilities. There are a lot of crossings in the book, a lot of poems about migrations, for example: from south to north across the Mediterranean, and from east to west and vice versa, and of course the crossings in Olivia’s own life, through Canada, Palestine, and France. There are also some very powerful poems in the book where the theme of “chaos” comes in very clearly, such as the one titled “In the Kingdom of Bosch and Orwell.” Those poems are very different in tone from the more meditative texts, and feel extremely real and realistic, and yet very dystopian. They’re forceful critiques of our contemporary world.
For the other poems in the book—the ones that were not from the French collection—the selection process was quite straightforward. Two criteria had to be met: First, the French poem really had to grab me. Second, I had to be able to make it work in English. Some texts work well in French, but then the English translation falls flat. That happens sometimes. But, if those two criteria were met, then we put the poem into the book. It was a very subjective process, of course.
TM: Could you give more detail on the contents of Chaos, Crossing, its themes and narratives, and perhaps delve into the intricacies of the language?
KJAZ: Like so much Palestinian poetry, one of the biggest themes is loss, and there’s an energy that seeks to call out and oppose the ongoing Occupation of Palestine. This is coupled with a forceful opposition to injustice and racism all around the globe, regardless of the specific geographies. This lends the book a more universal character. There’s a sense of chaos, of course, as evoked by the book’s title, a feeling that things are spinning out of control in this world of ours, and that something, surely, has to give. Migration is another very visible theme, and especially the “inverse crossings / from South to North” across the Mediterranean, as we read in the poem titled Europe.
In terms of language, there’s a kind of paucity to this collection, a rigorous minimalism that pays close attention to sonic effect, which I’ve attempted to convey in the English. The final stanza of the poem “Nothing to Do,” for example, a text that juxtaposes present-day Palestine and the tragic colonial history of the island of Grenada in the Caribbean, provides a nice example of this. Here is the poem’s final stanza:
so much pain the heart contains
so long this night of long knives
& so slow this dawn to rise
TM: Olivia writes in French, and is part of the Palestinian diaspora. Would the poetry be different if she had written it in Arabic?
KJAZ: Well, I know that a few of her poems have been translated into Arabic, but I haven’t read those translations, and it’s hard for me to go into hypotheticals. Plus, my feeling is that the French poetic traditions are part and parcel of Olivia’s poetry, even when there seems to be a critique of those traditions. There are many French poetic figures that come up and find echoes in the collection, such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Villon, Aragon. Plus, many of these poems have a kind of staccato rhythm, and it’s difficult for me to imagine what that would sound like in Arabic.
TM: You mention the “staccato” of Elias’ poetics, could you give an example of that?
KJAZ: One of the stronger examples of this is a poem entitled “Barca Nostra” (“Our Boat”). The title references a work of art that created quite a stir at the Venice Biennale in 2019. The Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel had retrieved the intact wreckage of a fishing boat that had set off from Libya to Italy with over 800 migrants on board—almost everyone on board that ship drowned in the Mediterranean after it collided with a Portuguese shipping vessel. Olivia’s poem has a unique form, in that it is shaped more like a prose work, but with spaced-out breaks in between the poem’s phrases. Here’s the beginning of that poem:
Their report cards pinned to their chests will not have saved them pathetic passports barely good enough for paper balls // loaded dice error message this world is not their home the white border closed to the children of the rusty trawler
There’s a certain choppiness to this poem, and one could argue that Olivia is attempting to replicate the waves that ultimately took the lives of the people on board that boat. The poem ends with the repetition of earlier lines and the failure of all such crossings: “this world is not their home forever closed the white border.”
TM: What makes French literary traditions “part and parcel” of Elias’ work?
KJAZ: On the surface level, there’s the fact that she explicitly evokes many of the larger-than-life figures of French literature, including François Villon, Louis Aragon, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Samuel Beckett (who is as much a part of the French literary canon as the Irish). But she often seems to be adopting more of a critical stance toward this tradition, as if she’s standing apart from it while at the same time being a part of it. There’s a verse in the poem “The Grace of Rain,” which I chose to leave untranslated (something I rarely do): Je est une autre (“I is another”). It’s a rewriting of Rimbaud’s famous utterance, but here the masculine subject of Rimbaud is transformed into a feminine one. It’s a powerful moment, coming as it does in the final stanza of the book’s final poem, and it is above all else a moment of hope in a collection that can, at times, feel quite bleak:
Je est une autre
& always
this child
who believed so strongly in the future.
And in another poem, Mediterranean II, in which she references “the disappeared” and “their sunken dreams,” she subtly evokes Paul Valéry’s famous poem Le cimitière marin (“The Cemetery by the Sea”) in her description of the Mediterranean as a new oceanic graveyard of migrants:
how could I forget your oceanic
trenches now turned
into cemeteries?
TM: While translating these poems, what challenges and difficulties did you come across?
KJAZ: I’ve been translating Arabic poetry for so long now, twenty years, that some things come very automatically and quickly to me—for a given turn of phrase or expression, four different options in English might just pop into my head right away. I don’t have the same kind of toolbox with French poetry. Normally, when I’m handing in a translation of an Arabic poetry manuscript to a publisher, the edits that come back are very light. But with this project, I relied much more heavily on the editing team at World Poetry Books. Three different editors—Matvei Yankelevich, Pauline Levy-Valensi, and Paul Gifford—went through this manuscript, and their work was indispensable.
TM: What is your favorite poem of the collection?
KJAZ: It’s hard to pick a favorite, but I like the poem called “Call” (“Appel” in French) quite a lot. It’s very short and hard-hitting, and also very relevant for our contemporary world.
TM: What makes “Call” one of your favorite poems?
KJAZ: Its brevity, its psychological intensity, and its strong rhythms. The refrain “18 years old the sea for horizon” is a haunting one for me. I feel that I can almost feel the longing, the response to the call to leave and migrate, to risk it all and seek a better life elsewhere, on other shores, no matter how dangerous the passage:
finally to obey the command
roll the dice
and cross the liquid wall
It’s very hard for me to read this work without being deeply moved.
TM: I was intrigued by the poem Step Stone Dream—what is the meaning behind the words used in the order they were set?
KJAZ: This is one of the book’s most enigmatic poems, and I hesitate to impose my own interpretation on it, as it might influence how others approach it. But there is clearly something at play here that has to do with regret, with the dream of a life that was lost, or that was perhaps never lived in the first place. There’s also a kind of moving forward that brings no “progress” at all. Each step forward is met alternately by “cold,” “dread,” “hunger,” “thirst,” etc. Similarly, the “stone” in the poem, which feels “more real” to the poetic subject “than his own existence,” seems to be evoking a home that was lost, or perhaps the dream of a home that never became an actual, lived reality.
TM: Finally, what is your approach to translation?
KJAZ: I first try to connect with the source text on an empathetic level, to feel into what lies beneath the surface, the underlying motivations of the text. I always try to have a clear vision for any poem that I’m translating—and then I let that vision guide my translation choices. I make sure that I’m not only translating meaning and sound, but also less easy-to-pin-down aspects such as “force” and “emotional impact.”
And, of course, the text has to work as poetry in its own right in English. This is an obvious point, but it doesn’t get spelled out enough, in my opinion. The poem has to be powerful in English, it has to sound—on the aesthetic level, if not the cultural one—as if it had been written by an English-language poet. If it doesn’t do that, then I have to keep going back and editing and re-editing. If it doesn’t work as poetry in English, then what’s the point of translating it?
We translators often justify our translations—to a reader or a publisher, for example—via the source text. In other words, we say: “This book is so great in language X, or so important in culture Y, that we simply have to have a translation in English.” There’s nothing wrong with that as a practical step, of course. But my goal for any translation I’m working on is the following: The translation should be able to justify its own existence even without the source text. In other words: The translation on its own should be so powerful or important that it serves as its own aesthetic justification. That’s what I strive for with each of my projects.
Kareem James Abu-Zeid is an award-winning translator of poets and novelists from across the Arab world. His most recent translations are Najwan Darwish’s Exhausted on the Cross (NYRB Poets, 2021) and Olivia Elias’ Chaos, Crossing (World Poetry Books, 2022). He is also the author of the book The Poetics of Adonis and Yves Bonnefoy: Poetry as Spiritual Practice (Lockwood, 2021). The online hub for his work is www.kareemjamesabuzeid.com.
Tuğrul Mende holds an M.A in Arabic Studies. He is based in Berlin as a project coordinator and independent researcher.
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