Written in the context of feminism, Lorde’s argument is that we must approach feminist questions intersectionally, to “deal with the differences between us [women].” What Lorde advocates for in the context of feminism, Syrian-Kurdish poet and novelist Salim Barakat (b. 1951) puts into practice, if obliquely, in the context of Arabic poetry and language. Woman is to Lorde what Arabic is to Barakat: if Lorde wants to expand the category of woman—which implicitly (read: normatively) means white cisgender woman—to include other perspectives from lesbian, Black, transgender women, and so on, Barakat wants to stretch Arabic poetry (and language) to include that which is not ethnically Arab—in his case, that would be the Kurdish. Operating under the umbrella of Arabic, Barakat “pacifically” (to borrow yasser elhariry’s term) lays claim to Arabic poetry with Kurdish names, cultural references, geography, and topography.
When the packs of wolves descend from the north, dragging their asses through the snow, howling and setting the locked barns and throats of dogs ablaze, I hear Dinoka’s death rattle.
This is an excerpt from “Come, Dinoka Breva, Take a Gentle Stab!” (1973), one of Barakat’s first poems in Come, Take a Gentle Stab, a collection sampling his poetry from 1973 to 2019, sensitively translated from the Arabic into English, for the first time, by Huda J. Fakhreddine and Jayson Iwen and published by Seagull Books.
Yet, insofar as Barakat imbues Arabic poetry with Kurdish, his project of defamiliarizing Arabic poetry becomes a success only by pushing the Arabic language itself to its very limits. “Arabic is not his first language, but he defiantly plunders it and lays claim to it,” Fakhreddine writes. “With his work,” she adds, “Arabic readers are on the threshold of comprehension, exceedingly conscious of themselves as explorers of what has thus far eluded them.”
In “Revenge,” Barakat, via Fakhreddine and Iwen, writes:
a.
The coats are all there,
the winds all there,
footprints deep in the snow, and the snow all there,
the lamps, houses, last apparitions, all there.
So gather in your tame hands all they can hold of perfection
and strive so the scene may be a tamed echo.
b.
An unease, like morning, preoccupies those approaching my end, and I—struggling under a great net—hang place—like a prisoner’s pants—on the line, that delicate line, running from the origin of comedy to your moan.
c.
the abundance of naught is I and will is my suspicion.
d.
Rage is the sign of night and water a thought ahead of its own completion.
e.
like a shoe polished,
like a nickel doorknob,
thus is your scream.
Here, Barakat forces, or forges, rather, equivalency and relationality where none is found, or anticipated: “unease, like morning”; “from the origin of comedy to your moan”; “the abundance of naught . . . and will”; “Rage . . . and water.” It is not only vocabulary that Barakat weaponizes, an effect most palpably felt when reading the original, but also the semantics of language. In moments like this, the translation will ipso facto contain a similar semantic force, that of literally forming images from disparate words.
But how does the feeling of “linguistic conquest” carry over from one language to another, when this invasion is linguistically contingent? This is a question I had asked myself in anticipation of Barakat’s work being translated into English. Do the translators have to conquer English to mimic the effect?
Fakhreddine, also a scholar of Arabic poetry, has previously written about Barakat’s poetry (the preface in the translation is an abridged version of her study), and she identifies poems that demonstrate Barakat’s conquest of Arabic. One of these poems, fully translated in the collection, is “Digression in an Abridged Context.” From the get-go, the reader anticipates the inability to make sense of the poem’s structure (“digression”), even if in a relatively short poem (“abridged”). Yet if Barakat promises digression—a chaotic, unkempt flow of words—then this expectation is immediately reversed: after reading the title, the reader comes across the number one, which evokes an ordered list, and definitely not a digression.
1.
Here the proofs, the fever.
With ink, you shade them from smug [tahattuk] certainty.
You trap words, so proofs may sleep upon their quarrels.
No roosters here
but flame prancing like cockscomb
and rebel life warding off the hidden context of spirits.
No affliction here but rose;
no stray spear but universe;
lightning the night’s disdain of place; and water mockery [thumma, al-miyah huzuww].
So why submit to higher wills, your ray broken,
why bestow upon pain the faith of the evening?
Fakhreddine points to the fact that the word tahattuk, translated here as “smug,” conjures up other associations with words that share the same root (h-t-k), such as “to tear up, to open, to rip, to unveil, to violate, or to rape.” To translate this word is to commit an inevitable violence on the original text—the polysemy is lost. On the other hand, the phrase “water mockery,” in the translation, could be read in many ways, either as “water is a mockery” or as the mockery of water (regardless of what these two phrases may mean, literally or metaphorically). Although the Arabic is clearer, it is as if the translators make up for the necessary stabilization of sense in some parts of the poem by dumbfounding sense in other parts. (This is but one example; the translators do that at various instances.) A more literal Arabic translation of this verse would be: “lightning the night’s disdain of place, then, the water mocking.” Note the conjunction “then” rather than “and,” as well as the word “the” and the change from “mockery” to “mocking,” all of which would perhaps make the poem’s “meaning” a bit more stable (as stable as a Barakat poem could be). But in making subtle changes, the translators remain faithful to the intended affect of the poem, even if what triggers the feeling of confusion or instability is different across languages.
Let us also consider the word “cockscomb.” While it isn’t the obscurest of words, it makes one stop (at least it made me stop), unlike its equivalent in Arabic, aʿrāf, which seems to have a less curious presence in the original poem; from a sonic perspective, it does not seem to have any siblings. Meanwhile, sonically as well as semantically, “cockscomb” also contains the word “cock,” and this in fact foreshadows the later sections’ sexual theme, something that Arabic does too, albeit with the word tahattuk. The tenth section begins:
10.
The cuppers [hajjamun] are back.
The geese angry, the wind staggering, stuffy and choked [masdudat al-ghalasim].
Dwell not in this elegant panic as you roll space, testicle by testicle,
over the bridge and toss timeless seals through fissures in the firmament.
Here, in Arabic and in English, I come to a halt: what is a “hajjam,” a “cupper”? A dictionary in hand, as one does when reading Barakat, I discover that a hajjam/cupper is one who performs cupping, something a bit more obvious in the English than the Arabic. But another phrase that I stumble over in Arabic, “masdudat al-ghalasim,” I read with total swiftness in English, “stuffy and choked.” A more literal, if less poetic, translation would be: “its [the wind’s] epiglottis blocked.” Ghalasim is the plural of the word ghalsama, which means palate, uvula, or epiglottis—the word has a clinical, cold, scientific tone to it, something totally missed in the English “stuffy and choked,” hence my attempt to evoke a similar scientificity with the word “epiglottis.” But would the poem even be readable—however modest the contemporary audiences of translated poetry into English is—with awkward words like “epiglottis” that would somehow detract from a poem’s “poeticity”?
In other words, was I asking the wrong questions at the beginning of the essay? That is, must the translation invoke the “linguistic conquest” that the Arabic poem invokes? Is it the yardstick against which the English translation must be evaluated? In some way, yes, it is—but “linguistic conquest” is more than just obscure vocabulary; it is also complex syntax and morphology; it is not only difficult content, but also challenging form. According to Walter Benjamin in “The Task of the Translator,” the goal of translation is not to communicate, that is, to convey “meaning” or “sense.” Rather, as he puts it, “a translation, instead of imitating the sense of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s way of meaning, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel.” The keyword here is “way,” not “meaning.” Benjamin is trying to point to a sort of intentionality (or, I hesitate to use this word, “essence”) in the original that must be mimicked in the translation. As he puts it, “The language of a translation can—in fact, must—let itself go, so that it gives voice to the intentio of the original not as reproduction but as harmony, as a supplement to the language in which it expresses itself, as its own kind of intentio.”
Benjamin adds that not all works of literature lend themselves, formally speaking, to this process of translation. “The higher the level of a work,” he writes, “the more it remains translatable even if its meaning is touched upon only fleetingly.” He also writes: “A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully.” For Benjamin, the original and the translation are in a supplementary relationship to each other, illuminating one another. Further, original and translation are “fragments” that, together, contribute—if partially—to our understanding of pure language, “which no longer means or expresses anything but is, as expressionless and creative Word, that which is meant in all languages.” Again, the emphasis here is on something that “is meant,” on intention (not to be confused with “meaning,” the synonym of “sense”). Following Benjamin’s purpose and role of a “real translation,” then, Barakat, in a formal sense, is an ideal poet to be translated. To translate him (in this case into English) is to shed light on Arabic and English and the relationship between the two—and, inevitably, on pure language.
*
Therefore, beyond the technicalities of the translator’s choices, Barakat’s poetry—in any language—(re)turns you to language itself, or “pure language.”I confide in you the sparrow dead on a wire in the street,
I confide in you the mountain that can be seen from my window,
holding its hammer of fog over the ruins of dusk.
“Hammer of fog,” “ruins of dusk”—what do those phrases even mean? The complexity and outright unattainability of the imagery leads me to the formal aspects of language, to grammar. I think of the conjunction “of.” How can a hammer be made of fog? The closest image I can conjure up is a cloud shaped like a hammer. (But fog can’t take shape—else why would it be fog?) Is it a hammer if it is not of steel, if it cannot do work? Needless to say, these are rhetorical questions; his poetry leaves many a gap for us readers to fill. And the translation also leaves us with these gaps.
Inasmuch as Barakat refuses to make sense in his earlier work, his later work seems to have a more stable “real-life” referent. In the latter half of the collection, we have an excerpt from his long poem “Syria” (2015), published four years after the beginning of the (still ongoing) Syrian Civil War in 2011. “Don’t ask me to master discipline,” he writes,
to master precision from now on. The stupefied heights have torn their vests, and the stupefied lowlands, like the stupid expanse, are useless, from now on. My knees gave out, the sky gave out. the sky will be fixed by the invaders, the defunct sky, the sky, that apron stained by the dribble of blood. This sky, the chant of madness, the nightingale, the dance of the nightingale on a dragon’s tail. The sky, the jerking from one belief to another. No proof of the sky, after this. No proof of a ladder to it, no ladder to descend from it to the human, O country.
Unlike in his earlier poetry, we feel the pain of the poet aching for his country. The imagery is less surreal, more grounded. It is as if the poetic word, or maybe the poet, cannot but give up on—or perhaps cannot afford to hold on to—the mastery of the Arabic language once exhibited in earlier works.
No vigour will return me to what I was.
Not the mountain’s loyalty,
Not the mountainous,
Not my grandfather, the mountain,
Not my grandmother, the forest,
Not my brothers, the narrow roads,
Not my sisters, the rocks burnished in the river stream.
No dawn can return me to what I was.
No defeat, no victory,
No path can return me to what I was.
The poet is forever undone, inarticulate; yet he writes, he mourns a country that was never fully his own. If in 2015 the poet is at a loss for words, he returns in 2019, in “Lineages of Animal,” with a sort of universal, prophetic vision, that brings together the difficult, rebellious poet with the poet for whom “No vigour will return me to what I was.” The poet, then, comes full circle.
In the last poem in the collection, “Homo Erectus,” he writes,
You have bequeathed to the descendants their desires in spoonfuls between their teeth. Hunters and peddlers of wounds, thieves who steal from death his door keys, his tobacco and the final pages of his account book.
In addition to being a poet, Barakat is also a profound thinker, a thinker who isn’t afraid to go against convention, to contradict himself, to think boldly. Thus, what Fakhreddine and Iwen have given us, in English, is not only a gift of language, but a philosophy of life.
