A Small Darkening Sky: Huda J. Fakhreddine on the qaṣīdat al-nathr, the Arabic Prose Poem

June 19, 2023 | in Interviews | by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Every great poem is a rebellion. . .

Working within the vast world of Arabic poetry, writer, translator, and professor Huda J. Fakhreddine has done much to elucidate the movements of literary forms throughout history, the necessity of constantly interacting with tradition, and the inner universe of poems as they communicate and exchange with one another. Through her extensive knowledge and sensitivity to the capacities of poetic language, Fakhreddine has demonstrated powerfully that, as in a piece by her father that she translated: “Poetry is the deepest sea, distant yet more urgent than surf breaking on rocks.” Here, in this wide-ranging interview, Alton Melvar M Dapanas speaks to her on the importance of form and meter, the necessity of removing Arabic poetry from reductive study, the ongoing engagement of reading and translation, and the intimate way she came to love and feel safe in the world of a poem.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Certain paradoxes and ironies made an impression in me after reading your latest book, The Arabic Prose Poem (2021): that the Arabic free verse, or the qasīdat al-tafīla, is not “free” in the way of its Anglophone (free verse) and Francophone (vers libre) counterparts, and that Arabic free verse poets like Nāzik al-Malāʾika and later on, Ahmad ʿAbd al-Muʿtī Hijāzī, are, surprisingly, the fiercest opponents of the prose poem.

Huda J. Fakhreddine (HJF): Meter is the marker of poetry in the Arabic tradition, even if symbolically and not fundamentally. It is the fence that separates poetry from other forms—even those that have strong claims to the poetic. The modernist movement of the 20th century was the first organized and theorized effort to jump the fence of meter; this doesn’t mean that the fence was not jumped before, only that it was not done so in such a collective and deliberate manner. The Arabic free verse poem was the result of that formal experimentation or innovation.

But a more accurate label than “free verse” is qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla. The tafʿīla is the single foot or metrical unit, and a pattern of tafʿīlas makes up a meter in classical prosody. The modern poets no longer committed to the meters in their full patterns, but simplified them or reduced them to their building units (the individual tafʿīla), and often in qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla, the poem is built on a single metrical unit and its variations. The term free verse (al-shiʿr al- ḥurr) is thus confusing and not very accurate, since such poems still adhere to metrical considerations. The use of the term free verse is a testament to the influence of translation in the formative years of the Arabic modernist movement—though, as I argue in the book, translation was not that most decisive influence. I think the conversation with the Arabic poetic tradition, even when antagonistic and fraught, is really at the core of that movement, and is the real springboard to its most significant contributions. This is also why the term qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla is the most reflective of the movement’s intervention in form and its thinking about the role of meter.

Contributor:

Alton Melvar M Dapanas

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Arabic

Place:

Lebanon

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A New Way of Thinking About Voice: An Interview with Robin Myers, Part III

August 17, 2022 | in Interviews | by Alan Mendoza Sosa

When you’re translating, you’re never entirely by yourself in your own head.

This is the third and last installment of my interview to poet and translator Robin Myers. The first part was published on May 11 and the second on July 7.

Alan Mendoza Sosa (AM): I would like to delve a bit deeper into the relation between creative writing and translation. How does being a poet inform your translation practice or the other way around?

Robin Myers (RM): Poetry led me into translation, and I started translating only poetry, so what feels absolutely shared by my experiences of both writing poetry and translating anything is this compulsive contact with language as a material thing, as something that you get to experiment with. It happens of course in writing prose, too, but I think there’s something especially tactile about poetry, and this sense that it always could’ve been otherwise. There’s just a kind of intoxication I’ve felt with poetry that has made me think about translation as a site for looking for freedom within constraints. I do think there’s something different about writing poetry and translating it, however, at least for me. When you’re translating, you’re never entirely by yourself in your own head. I mean, in writing you’re not either, really. As we’ve been talking about, there’s always this sense of where you come from and who you’re seeking with. But with translating you’re writing toward something and with something that’s already concretely there. When I start writing poetry again after a long time of mostly just translating, there’s a renewed sense of me making something up out of nothing, which is both thrilling and scary.

AM: And there’s also not a harsh division between writing creatively and translating. In a way, when you write, you are translating a continuous flow of language or ideas into the more precise form of a poem on the page. So we can even consider writing a self translation.

RM: Yes, and I love how Kate Briggs talks about that in This Little Art. It’s easy to overgeneralize this stuff—Briggs says something like, “Say it too fast and it all goes down the trap door.” Like, okay, all writing is translating, we can agree on that, but how do we keep from getting lost in the abstraction? How else can we get at the differences or the similarities between the two practices?

I’ll say that translating has also helped me get through my fallow periods as a poet in a really gratifying way. I am a fairly off-and-on poetry writer. I have periods of writing a lot followed by long, long periods when I don’t write at all. And that used to fill me with despair. Translation keeps me company during those times in a way that lets me know that I’m engaged with language and that I’m collecting things and learning.

Contributor:

Alan Mendoza Sosa

Language:

Spanish

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Translator’s Diary: Vincent Kling

November 27, 2017 | in Translator's Diary | by Vincent Kling

If it’s true that every translation must inevitably fail, this passage would be Exhibit A.

In this final installment of Vincent Kling’s translation column, En Route, Up Close, Kling discusses the difficulties of translating complicated works and considers whether one should remain loyal to meter at the expense of feel and fluidity. Kling explores translation in all its layered complexity, demonstrating with characteristic erudition and generosity the reasons why literary translation as a form resists the confines of any universally accepted code.

Two Hurdles for Translators

1. The Relatively Easy One. Two newly acclaimed releases, Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey and David Ferry’s of the Aeneid, have prompted some discussion about what elements can and should be reproduced as closely as possible and what should—or indeed must—be altered. Reviewers are mainly concentrating on meter, because it is usually agreed that Homer’s and Virgil’s dactylic hexameters come across awkwardly in English; even a technical virtuoso like Longfellow couldn’t always make six-beat dactylic lines work in Evangeline. Both Wilson and Ferry have opted for blank verse (beautifully rendered in both cases), and even strict Augustans like Dryden and Pope knew better than to espouse a line that’s too long for flexibility in English. It was Dryden, after all, who adopted the idea of “imitation,” of the need to respect the nature of the target language. Later, Richard Wilbur shrewdly recast Molière’s alexandrines into pentameter, a decision that finally made the French dramatist’s work performable, even palatable, in a meter that best follows the contours of English accentuation. Anthony Hecht similarly forged vigorous, muscular heroic couplets out of Voltaire’s six-stress lines in his “Poem upon the Lisbon Disaster,” an idiomatic, fast-moving translation that is at its most ‘faithful’ in changing six beats to five.

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Vincent Kling

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Translation Tuesday: To a Girl Sleeping in the Street by Nazik al-Mala’ika

October 3, 2017 | in Translations | by Emily Drumsta

"people are a mask, artificial and fake, their sweet, gentle exteriors hide burning hate"

Though best known as the pioneer of “free verse” in Arabic, Nazik al-Mala’ika was in fact a fervent defender of Arabic meter, both in her poetry and in her criticism. Indeed, her theory of free verse was not very “free” at all, but rather took the undulating metrical feet of classical Arabic verse as the basis for a new prosodic system. Where classical poetry is governed by fixed line lengths and strict monorhyme, al-Mala’ika’s prosody allowed modern poets to vary the number of feet in each line and weave their rhymes as they saw fit. “Meter is the soul that electrifies literary material and transforms it into poetry,” she wrote in the critical text Issues in Contemporary Poetry. “Indeed, images and feelings do not become poetic, in the true sense, until they are touched by the fingers of music and the pulse of meter beats in their veins.”

To honor al-Mala’ika’s belief in meter’s vitality—the way it can anchor meaning in the body, transforming ordinary speech into a form of incantation—I have rendered her metered, rhymed Arabic verse into English metrical forms that reproduce, in some form, the music of the Arabic. Where al-Mala’ika uses the mutadarik or “continuous” meter in Arabic, for example, I use anapestic hexameter, English’s answer to Arabic’s most galloping verse form. Al-Mala’ika’s poetry, with its balance between tradition and innovation, ultimately teaches us not to deal so violently with the past, but rather to tread lightly in poetry’s ancient footsteps. My hope is that my English renderings of her verse might begin to do precisely this.

— Emily Drumsta

To A Girl Sleeping In The Street

In Karrada at night, wind and rain before dawn,
when the dark is a roof or a drape never drawn,

when the night’s at its peak and the dark’s full of rain,
and the wet silence roils like a fierce hurricane,

the lament of the wind fills the deserted street,
the arcades groan in pain, and the lamps softly weep.

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