This Translation Tuesday, prose poems come in from Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun, translated with care by Catherine Cobham. A warning label alerts us to the peculiar nature of the metaphors in “Poet in Berlin”. Almadhoun’s poet starts, stops, and starts over, as if trying to get the metaphors in his head to express the correct thing. His slow progress perplexes the detective trapped in the poem’s dense and mazey interior—he needs that warning as much as we do. In “Everything’s the Same” the sorrow of a sudden disappearance is ‘green’, ‘still fresh’, and we find grief and shock doing their customary thing. The poet stalks the house he once shared with the absent presence. Time is either stopped dead or winding backwards, his senses are heightened, and household objects take on a sudden, dangerous redolence.
Poet in Berlin
All the metaphors in this poem are based on a true story that has not happened before
A lonely man with green eyes and a blue gaze, searching for a woman carrying a forest, who went into the sea and did not return.
Lonely as a bench in a public park, most of those who have touched his wound think he is a poet from Berlin, but he is in fact a poet in Berlin.
He resembles a park bench, and therefore, he used to swear to passers-by that a woman he loved took him to the sea and brought him back thirsty, and in another account, in a poem they found in a pocket of his blue shirt, he said she brought him back from the sea thirsty, but she did not return. On the other hand, the Poetry Foundation in Chicago has not been able to verify the truth of the information contained in this poem.
A lonely man, in a city crowded with lonely people, he assured the German police that he took full responsibility for the disappearance of a woman as ripe as a peach tree.
The detective asked him to stop using metaphor, because the investigation report was not a postmodern poem, and in any case the sea could not possibly be a crime scene in this city, for even in David Bowie’s most defiant songs there was no sea in Berlin, then he added as calmly as an abandoned house, I cannot bring any charges against you at the present time, for as of the date of the writing of this poem, no official reports have been submitted about the disappearance of a woman who looks like the sunset, walks like a herd of gazelles, and loves summer and children. Furthermore, according to German law, there is no crime if there is no body.
A lonely man with green eyes and a blue gaze went into the sea to look for a woman who went into the sea and did not return, and he did not return.
Everything’s the Same
The green sorrow you left in my house when you went away is still fresh. Your voice that sits silent in the rocking chair looking at the song on the radio, the sweat from your palm stuck to the door knob, the groaning of the wooden floor in the bedroom under your bare feet, insomnia sleeping on the sofa like an old cat, everything is the same.
Your hair stuck in the comb’s fangs, your fragrance that flows like a time-out from the wall clock towards six in the evening, the condensation left by your breath on the window pane, your gazelle that gently preys on my fingers, and time that walks anti-clockwise in my room, everything is the same.
Your things scattered round the house like a minefield, the basket of dates you picked from a palm tree at the North Pole still on the table, the rendezvous afflicted with Alzheimer’s, your absence that arrives when you’re gone, and the silence that grows like a hand severed from a tree, everything is the same.
Your bright lipstick like a traffic light on the glass, the days that fall from the calendar, your electromagnetic spectrum resonating at short wave frequencies, your sunglasses observing the disruption of my lunar months, and your surreal presence like an olive tree in the north of Sweden, everything is the same.
Your fingerprints stuck to the faded roses in the vase, the winds of change blowing from the closed window, memories with amnesia, the Arabic kohl pencil that writes in English, and the night bird fluttering in my rib cage, radioactive as enriched uranium, restless as the vagabond poets and gentle as the Prophet Muhammad.
Translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham
Ghayath Almadhoun is a Palestinian poet born in Damascus, Syria, and emigrated to Sweden in 2008. Now he lives in between Berlin & Stockholm. He has published five poetry collections in Arabic and has been translated into over twenty languages. Almadhoun has collaborated with other poets and artists, and his poetry has been part of work by US artist Jenny Holzer, German musician Blixa Bargeld, and others. In English, his poetry collection Adrenalin was published by Action Books in 2017.
Catherine Cobham taught Arabic language and literature at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, for many years and was head of the Department of Arabic and Persian from 2011 until 2021. She has translated the work of several Arab writers, including Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, and Naguib Mahfouz. She has written articles in academic journals and co-written with Fabio Caiani The Iraqi Novel: Key Writers, Key Texts (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
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