IV
Musicians, a few minutes more
crescent moon pales
sun rises on the horizon
dawn turns pink
This most favored hour
soon we will wake the children
There are quiet days such as these
where we dream of a life
similar to all the lives on earth
a life where we would live in places
we would not have left
And there are days one must sign
engagements weddings births
The guests will soon arrive
large tables are set
music is ready to take flight
night will be filled with dances and songs
Music
V
Musicians, I am speaking to you of a country
engulfed in a fault of history
of a people chosen to pay the price
of another sacrifice
of a story more than a hundred years old
full of sound and fury and blood
Behind doctored words
clean war
surgical strike
lies the same old dark reality
Lootings blackmail extortions
Beheaded sun and acid-attacked moon
Clouds flat from dropping bombs
Starving animals feeding on bullets
if they could they would run to the sea
and drown
*
Territory riddled with anger and rage
Days and concrete trembling
buildings collapsing
one by one
onto humans guilty
of wanting to live with one
choice left die here or there
*
Ruins upon ruins
and among the ruins
a vision a rag doll Batman
on the wall jumping
near a pink mouse
a kite going over the hill
a guitar torn apart on the table
near the sofa some pillows
a plastic chair
In the middle of the room
Yasmina’s long dark hair flying
while Brahim whispers in her ear
the vagaries of the weather
and the games resuming on the beach
This was my room . . .
*
Crickets scatter in the fields
and gnaw the plants to the root
History does more than stammer
Ares god of war has lifted his arm
The bloodshed may begin
Everything burns fields and cities
Immense mushrooms
bloom in the skies
No more hens in the henhouse
Corpses of horses and beasts
Doctors searching for souls
Are they still there?
Have they already left the bodies?
Everywhere the acrid smell of death
*
Time of infinite sadness
O rose and jasmine Palestine
dressed in dignity dreaming impossible dreams
Drunk with power they have hung your remains
to the rear of their tanks
and march making the V sign of victory
to perfect your being torn apart
Is this how men live
and their kisses follow them from afar
Music
VI
In the arena perfect corrida
enclosed space
this Mediterranean ghetto
reaches climax in a kill
clapped by aficionados
grouped up on the terraces
The matador aims out of duty
Nothing must move
Neither woman nor child
Neither young nor old
*
They stayed because
they are fighters
says the Commander
or mothers and fathers
of fighters
ancestors of fighters
children of fighters
children of children of fighters
All without exception
The matador aims out of weariness
or boredom at times “just for pleasure”
Killing-just-for-the-pleasure
KILL PLEASURE KILL PLEASURE
KILL PLEASURE KILL PLEASURE
*
War is a hard drug
that requires repetition
to be up to the infinity of death
Flames of life allied with stardust
fall and whirl endlessly into some
unfathomable chasm
Survivors look at the edge of the abyss wondering
What has become of you
who are watching them?
VII
Musicians, I am speaking to you of a life in the eye
of the hurricane smashed by assaults of rogue waves
of a life capsized in the Roaring Forties
of a life cracked at the mercy of the Powerful
America’s big brother who frantically waves
his rattle marked “Veto rights”
Mother Europe who wearing her pretty dress
watches from her tower the lesser people
struggling in hell
She can’t help but nod her head
to the same old tune
from Your Name, Palestine
Olivia Elias
translated from the French by Sarah Riggs and Jérémy Robert
Listen to the original read by the translator Jérémy Robert:
This excerpt from Your Name, Palestine, Olivia Elias’ collection of poetry, bears the hallmarks of the epic genre. The first challenge we encountered as translators was to make the plurality of its voices heard: the ancient choir and the musicians echoing the voice of the witness; the contemporary mythology and the preparations for the disaster foretold; and the refrain of the massacres and the concert of guardian voices that, from Aragon to Césaire, escorts the memory of a lost land. We then had to find the implacable scansion of tragedy underlying the melody of pain: finding the right rhythm and words to convey the changes of focus; the vision of a childhood in ruins emerging from the ruins of war; the double use of music; the dream of a wedding beating to the drum of death; the news of a country in tatters “engulfed in a fault of history;” and the unfathomable sadness of this “rose and jasmine Palestine,” whose heart is still filled with the laughter of children playing on the beach. Finally, we had to become the spokespersons for the dry and disillusioned lyricism to which the poet resorts in order to lend prestige—in anger, noise, and blood—to a country that has been put to death; to spell out the alphabet of chaos so as to decipher the language of sacrifice; and to stay as close as possible to the striking parsimony of the description which, in the same movement, curses the conquistadors that are “drunk with power” and the aficionados of carnage, in order to better praise the survivors of a people “struggling in hell.”
—Jérémy Robert
Olivia Elias was born in Haifa in 1944 and is a poet of the Palestinian diaspora. She has published three books, namely L’Espoir pour seule protection (alfAbarre, 2015), Ton nom de Palestine (Al Manar, 2017), and Chaos, Traversée (La Feuille de thé, March 2019). Her poems convey a powerful sense of brotherhood with all the outcasts of the world. They bear the stigmata of exile and roaming, and show how difficult it is for someone that has been uprooted and oppressed to grow and mature. Her poems have been translated into English, Arabic, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese, and have appeared in many journals, including ArabLit Quarterly, Poetry London, World Literature Today, いのちの籠 (Basket of Life), Alaraby UK, The Barcelona Review, The Adirondack Review, Poésie/première, and Terre à Ciel. In the United States, the manuscript of Chaos, Crossing, & Other Poems, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, will be published in 2022 by World Poetry Books.
Sarah Riggs is a poet and filmmaker. She was born in New York, where she is now based after having spent over a decade in Paris. She is the author of books of poetry in English, including The Nerve Epistle (forthcoming with Roof Books, fall 2021), Eavesdrop (Chax, 2020), Waterwork (Chax, 2007), Chain of Minuscule Decisions in the Form of a Feeling (Reality Street, 2007), Sixty Textos (Ugly Duckling, 2010), Autobiography of Envelopes (Burning Deck, 2012), and Pomme & Granite (1913 Press, 2015), which won a 1913 Poetry Prize. She has translated six books of contemporary French poetry into English, including, most recently, Etel Adnan’s TIME (Nightboat Books, 2019), which won the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award in 2020. She is the director of the international arts organization Tamaas, which focuses on earth arts justice and film, and runs an annual poetry translation seminar. Visit her website here.
Jérémy Robert is a translator between English and French and a poet who works and lives in his native Réunion Island. He has recently published French translations with the following English titles: Eugénie Paultre’s Matter of Life (Heni, 2021), Sarah Riggs’ Murmurations (APIC, 2021, with Marie Borel), Donna Stonecipher’s Model City (joca seria, 2020), and Etel Adnan’s Sea & Fog (Nightboat Books, 2012). Robert is currently working on translations of Michael Palmer’s Laughter of the Sphinx, and Rufo Quintavalle’s Weather Derivatives.
