Schubert the Greek
Is it a new birth,
insomnia’s sediments
from feathers, memories,
and bullets?
A new departure, a counter-departure.
There is no equality yet between
snow’s shadow and shadow’s ash.
Should one take refuge in Narcissus (or Bacchus)
for the sake of decoding the talismanic rose
or the butterflies that flit
in the corridors opened by our sleep
that fossilize us?
How distant are the paved roads of childhood.
How close are the roads of death.
Greek sculptures are capable of
the liquidation of minds that alienation’s echo
filled with dirt.
Schubert once more, and the tears are not enough.
It is our duty to toss the keys into the President’s hands.
The Shade
Bore deeper into your aversion, O reality,
as that might be more becoming for the ripping up of the stars.
Stars! A foot in search of something that resembles it. A foot that sprouts leaves with dreams. A foot that severs.
The axe that was crafted to cut trees trunks will remain an axe always.
The final arrival to the realm of my arms was on Tuesday.
Between rain and reality, god’s shadow
descends.
Here I am, en route to practice my humanity.
The room is box-shaped, just like the heart,
With the last of my cigarettes, anxiety reaches its most ferocious state.
I descend.
The Wilds of the Metropolis
1
You gnaw at sleep’s pear
and lie on a pile of ruses, dangers, and debacles
then rest on yesterday’s train
while your phantoms keep on pulsating, powerful, alive
Indeed they are your eternal comrades
Bare are the tables
like the night’s core, like Einstein’s equations: and here you are
running towards the mirage of moments.
You are intoxicated and thirsty
intoxicated and thirsty more than is proper: this is life
This is infinity
2
The walls of houses are closed to you
The wind strews you in the streets
You merge with torrential waters
Waters the size of adolescence and youth
You left many secrets in the sand’s shadows
befriended the mouth of power
You opened the doors of chance
anchored fire
in the soul’s caravans
You bowed down before kings
often . . . for a long time
You extravagantly embellished sheets of paper
and made the heavens a site for explosion
for obliteration
yet no thorns
You were not loyal to yourself
You were estranged
You even reckoned
names, wells, and the winds
a kind of absurdity
Such loss!
You need to know the origins
to feel the sources:
light, breezes, reality
contradiction and lakes of blood, why not?
You seesawed extensively
but there were always herbs, glasses, and weddings
around you
Beautiful babble
Silly babble
Nothing is intertwined with the boundless
in the primordial
And these are the wilds of the metropolis
Two Poems
1
There is no need yet for hieroglyphics
as they concern emperors
who have proliferated around us like the plague.
As for the outermost corners, magnetized by moronic gladiators,
it is better they should be ignored, or gifted to an ordinary poet.
The ruins are for us, this is their beauty.
As for the artificial paradises, let the thieves and the vile wallow in them.
Crossing nothingness or being is just a mere occurrence.
What is serious is the arrival to the self,
to the fountainheads that Satan abandoned.
Instead of old age, then descending, towards the start
we were afflicted by endless beginnings.
Endless are the bacteria of pain.
Endless are the rituals of blankness.
Endless are the horrors created by your blind fanaticism.
There is no end, then, to what we now create.
And what we design amounts to nothing.
Like this we receive the code through the roar of the ages.
Here I am with
an apple
and that suffices.
2
Will we ever know
the covert player
in this foul game
Death-Life?
Four Poems
Jan Dammu
translated from the Arabic by Suneela Mubayi
Listen to “The Shade” read in the original Arabic by Suneela Mubayi:
Jan Dammu’s poetry represents the absurdist and surreal philosophy he espoused. His metaphors, insights, and aphorisms allow a glimpse into a mind that was both disconnected from and aware of reality, especially some of its darker aspects. His poems eschew any kind of traditional Arabic poetic lyricism; instead they reflect the use of poetic techniques such as defamiliarization, collage, and fragmentation, derived from the influence of surrealism and Dadaism in modernist European poetry, especially their emphasis on strange juxtapositions of words to evoke sensations outside of their conventional representations.
Among the poems selected here, “Schubert the Greek” incorporates a degree of intertextuality that requires a certain knowledge of western classical music and Greek mythology on the part of the reader. Like almost all his poetry, fragmentation is a prominent feature of this poem; this places him alongside modernists who tend to prefer fragmentation and collage to a cohesive “narrative.” His was a metaphysical stance against the ugliness and fakery of the world, and this sense of futility led him to experience a string of disappointments. This manifests itself in the two images of the axe and the world in “The Shade.” According to the Iraqi critic Muḥammad Maẓlūm, the poem “Wilds of the Metropolis” is closest to depicting Dammu’s own life and has a confessional tone of self-chastisement. The contemporary city as a “wild land” is likened to the never-ending desert that stretches to infinity.
Throughout his alienated life and the crises he experienced, he was aware of the difference between the world around him and his own private world. For someone who dreamed, wrote, and analyzed poetry for more than forty years, his output is acknowledged to be quite meager, and many of his poems have been lost in the general chaos of his life.
Among the poems selected here, “Schubert the Greek” incorporates a degree of intertextuality that requires a certain knowledge of western classical music and Greek mythology on the part of the reader. Like almost all his poetry, fragmentation is a prominent feature of this poem; this places him alongside modernists who tend to prefer fragmentation and collage to a cohesive “narrative.” His was a metaphysical stance against the ugliness and fakery of the world, and this sense of futility led him to experience a string of disappointments. This manifests itself in the two images of the axe and the world in “The Shade.” According to the Iraqi critic Muḥammad Maẓlūm, the poem “Wilds of the Metropolis” is closest to depicting Dammu’s own life and has a confessional tone of self-chastisement. The contemporary city as a “wild land” is likened to the never-ending desert that stretches to infinity.
Throughout his alienated life and the crises he experienced, he was aware of the difference between the world around him and his own private world. For someone who dreamed, wrote, and analyzed poetry for more than forty years, his output is acknowledged to be quite meager, and many of his poems have been lost in the general chaos of his life.
Jan Dammu (c. 1943–2003) was born Dinkha Mimmu Yusuf into a lower middle-class Assyrian family in Kirkuk. Jan Dammu is a pen name he adopted later, sometime in the 1960s, allegedly from a visiting Canadian scholar named Jean Demo. Dammu migrated to Baghdad in the early 1960s and became known as part of the Kirkuk group of poets and writers. Dammu spent most of his life in Baghdad’s bars and cafes, living a counterculture lifestyle. His only published collection, Asmal (Rags), appeared in 1993. While most dissident Iraqi poets left the country in the late 1960s and 1970s, Dammu’s only trip abroad was to Beirut in the late 1960s, from which he was expelled after three years, allegedly for being a penniless vagabond. He left Iraq for Amman in the mid-1990s and eventually became a refugee in Australia in 1998, where he died in 2003.
Suneela Mubayi is a freshly minted Ph.D. in Arabic literature at NYU where she is completing a thesis on the intersection of classical and modern Arabic poetry. She has translated poems and short stories between Arabic, English, and Urdu, which have been published in Banipal, Beirut39, Jadaliyya, and elsewhere. She wishes to re-establish the position of Arabic as a vehicular language of the global South, the role it played for many centuries. She also hopes to one day be able to call herself a poet.
