Shales of Tahmad 2
I think of... whoever has lost what can never be found again.
Charles Baudelaire
window feast
inclines the gaze
she says: tear me away
liberates a night
goes out
enamored
Porte d'Aix
family smell
the bus passes
love stuck to the window
season of exile
regulated entry
austere sense
a craziness
state police troopers...
there are dark passions
a chant that transpires
the people come and go
as the storm nears
are we
of an arrogance
to walk a scarlet semblance
legacy
with sequences of sands
to support a capital punishment
in the profusion
slowly
day goes astray
an Arab veiled in locusts
urges on his mare struts
about and hums
begs for applause
he his kin know the toll
two dinars a head the Occident
I recognize him
she says strip him
of all his goods keep only a ram
offer it to the one who no longer waits
Djaziya commanded the men
knew how to handle the epigram
she from a high linage and expert
was going to submit
...
and Dhiyâb the hilalian marries Djaziya
It is only a story
to lull a fever
words like a vault
consigned with sadness
to nothing our traces
the salt in the cinders
in ecstasy
Place, a blade's indecision
against the grain awakening
our giddiness a screen
was it a need to parade
iridescent, with abrasive points
gashes sulfur the trace
in its crack blue from freezing
at the hour when winter cards the park
the bird asks to drink at night
your blood cracks like bark
Lotus as tattoo
opulence of haymaking times
there crushed by insolence
this memory shakes you up
you say inadvertently
let them guess
invariably you slide into invective
friable shell — rendez-vous of insects
you heart goes away
late lightnesses
murderous clay
night kneads then rejects
contour in suspension
Showers
the dream pulls back
the charms no longer work metal
alone
slices
corruption
knacker's work... CENSORSHIP
night takes a hold of the course
a hand forgets the loved one's dictation
panic
dawn mechanically scalds the gaze
opens the scared crystal
heady facets
shines a solid pain
so much
at the point of dawn
the promises went by
passion interior of a wall
consumed in the instant
gaping
dare break
throw yourself at my sweat
let your fears regale themselves on my flesh
I reserve you an exile in my equipage
departure
to wish to die
dew
a bracelet gone astray
enthralls you
in the hip swaying day
idol
with surprise worn off
the obol dazzles the corpse
cheap junk aggresses the sidewalks
fired clay shatters
laud this ordeal
far from the sunset's wrinkles
the coffee smoking gold
zinc mornings
train of saucers
shroud
red than ochre than smokey
in the silence of a set up
happy
the town is drying up
summer encloses
lesion here
fusion of alum — sortilege
to see again the refused threshold
to understand
in the turmoil
one despairs
the bodies sway
din
a memory still
the heatwave's rust overwhelms
stealthily
this celebrated speech
performer of cements dead
(a dog licked the moon
in the middle of mute ruins)
where are you night revelers
there
you dive into
sleep
a rupture to be transmitted
Thatch, Water-Meadow and Sheet Metal
Autumn
I'll go over there where the tree and man...
Ch. Baudelaire
Grooves calcinated remains
Dwelling emptied of dreams
You exhausted the gaze of all the designated spaces
To die the path
Like the rope gone to earth
Like the gallop that has lost its cadence
Like the boldness of dawn
Where the feared halt — oblivion of first steps
How many lulls in our lives
Over there a vine dries in the white sun
Over there my body had shattered on the ground
So much desire in the well-loved lull
...
The days imagine the sand deserted
Parade
Love me, oh...
Pain, bodies toiling at the incidence of remorse
(How not to die for having bathed my heart in
your body)
Dream torn from the well-established fear
Oh love me
The signs fade away one after the other and lose themselves in silence
And you, unsettled, what do you expect from silence...
Offered myrrh
Scepter laid down to the day that rises naked
Trembling encounter
Our lives crossed to lose themselves forever
To weep over the place today, mutilated memory
The pain masters the words
You present yourself with a patched up story
A soul yellowed by time
What hope do you hold in the words gone awry
As evening closed in I heard the tears
And our lives looked at each other
For a long time the wound suspended like a reprimand
...
Building site
Long ago a man lost his hands
Freed from the embrace's whiteness
From early morning on the noise confounds all the signs
Wake-up is tough
An image persists that wants to dominate your life
Subdue the shadow of the song
You turn moved because the sun is already high
Marbled heights
You contemplate sunset at the close of a crisis
Mirror with no resonance
Destitution of effects
Your life collides with the other shore — your mortgaged soul
You say I didn't want that/my face
And you say Fate under the mask
A snatched promise
She
Worried
Looks at you and looks and looks
(Look at yourself!)
...
at the close of a crisis mirror with no resonance
...
to Kh.
Somber signs knotted into the deep solid ochre
Pain, light quartered — rejection of brightness
Headway in the insomnia shell
The azure/marine dream drowns the expected color
That's my way of traveling he said
Exile is my Trade: A Habib Tengour Reader
Habib Tengour
translated from the French by Pierre Joris
These poems are extracted from 'Exile is my Trade: A Habib Tengour Reader,' edited and translated by Pierre Joris, forthcoming from Black Widow Press, Boston."
Habib Tengour is a writer and an ethnologist. Born in Mostaganem (Algeria) in 1947, he lives and works between Constantine and Paris (where he teaches sociology and ethnology at the Université d'Evry val d'Essonne). Considered as one of the Maghreb's most forceful and visionary poetic voices of the post-colonial era, Tengour, who authored a "Manifesto of Maghrebian Surrealism" in 1981, explores the Algerian cultural space in all its ramifications : the oral and hagiographic traditions, the popular imagination and the founding myths, collective memory, raï music and the lived experiences of exile – all this in writing formally so profoundly hybridized that the critics have forged a term to define this phenomenon, namely "soufialism" (Hédi Abdel-Jaouad). The subjects that are closest to his heart are the Algerian cultural identity and memory as they are being mestizoed and woven between Orient and Occident, especially under the impact of the experiences of exile and migration. See for example L'Epreuve de l'Arc (1990), his "maqamât-novel," Gens de Mosta (1997), his novel composed of short stories, Ce Tatar-là (1999), his poem set in the working class suburbs, or Retraite (2004), a collection inspired by the rundown hotels of Belsunce quarter in Marseille, where the photographic image (Olivier de Sépibus) and the poetic word converge to say the difficulty of aging in exile. Here, as elsewhere, the double vision of poet and ethnologist achieves surprising symbioses, for Tengour, the cynical observer of his society, proposes through his narratives a fragmented chronical of post-colonial Algeria under the dismal light of History or of myth: emigration in Tapapakitaques (1976), the decline of socialism in Sultan Galièv ou La rupture des stocks (1981/85), the rise of fundamentalism in Le Vieux de la Montagne (1983). Le Poisson de Moïse (2001), his latest novel, tries to understand what makes young Algerians eager to join the Taliban.
Pierre Joris has moved between the US, Great Britain, North Africa, France & Luxembourg for close to half a century. He has published over 40 books of poetry, essays and translations, most recently Canto Diurno #4: The Tang Extending from the Blade, an Ahadada ebook. 2010. In 2007 & 2008 he published Aljibar and Aljibar II (poems, a bilingual edition with French translation by Eric Sarner, Editions PHI, Luxembourg). Justifying the Margins: Essays 1990-2006 came out in 2009 from SALT in the UK. His 2007 publications are the CD Routes, not Roots (with Munir Beken, oud; Mike Bisio, bass; Ben Chadabe, percussion; & Mitch Elrod, guitar) issued by Ta'wil Productions and Meditations on the Stations of Mansour Al-Hallaj 1-21(Anchorite Press, Albany). Other translations include Paul Celan: Selections (University of California Press) and 4x1: Work by Tristan Tzara, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean-Pierre Duprey & Habib Tengour translated by Pierre Joris from Inconundrum Press. With Jerome Rothenberg he edited Poems for the Millennium, vol. 1 & 2: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry. Green Integer published 3 volumes of his Paul Celan translations: Breathturn, Threadsuns and Light-duress (which received the 2005 PEN Poetry Translation Award). He lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn with his wife, the performance artist Nicole Peyrafitte & teaches poetry & poetics at the State University of New York, Albany.
