Five Poems

Riyad and his poems experienced a revival following the outbreak of the Syrian revolution; we felt it was the right time to translate the work of this deaf poet for Anglophone readers. He wrote love poems in Arabic of a kind previously unknown. Riyad’s poetry displays elements of the nascent surrealism that was in vogue on the Syrian art scene in the sixties and seventies. Through unlikely pairings of countryside motifs with technodystopic urban images, Riyad addresses the breakdown of social rituals and the seeming need of society or the state to rupture intimate relations through violence. Many of the poems are political, but in a way that tries to connect Syria’s political malaise with personal miseries of individuals. His poetry is also remarkable in its capacity to not conflate the beloved with the homeland (like modern Arabic poetry that is directly political tends to do). They grapple with love, without robbing the beloved of subjectivity or agency, within a dynamic and tragic context of disenfranchisement and alienation.

Riyad’s own physical ailments (which included deafness to kidney failure and diabetes), his love affairs, and political engagements are channeled into unrhymed free verse that is at once simple and disarming. The seemingly direct translatability of his style keeps an eye on global miseries and carries within it a sense of solidarity, showing us how the political can emerge from the innermost pockets of the personal, as a social relation of acknowledging the Other.

The challenge with translating Riyad does not lie in the difficulty of vocabulary or complex grammar, or ornate, involved phrases and metaphors, but rather in finding the right tone to convey the simple, poignant eloquence that characterizes all his poetry, where pain, loss, and a sense of helplessness in the face of a barbaric world are juxtaposed with simple beauty and a joy in the basic pleasures of daily life. All this is driven by a will to continue struggling and a belief in the power of love. Often, his poems lull the reader into a false sense of complacency or banality, before jarring or unsettling them at the very end with an image based on such a juxtaposition. So, all the pieces here presented us with the same challenge: we had to be careful not to fall into the trap of either sounding too blithe and superficial, or sounding too elevated and pompous; we also had to capture the quiet but jarring sense of shock at the poem’s conclusion. Capturing the right tone in our phrasing and word choices was always the key to faithfully translating Riyad’s verses.