Human Surplus
I am the one who has not been killed yet
In war, earthquake, or traffic accident
What do I do with my life?
With those years that swell before me,
Like the sea before the pelican?
After the flower of my words has gone
Wasted on letters and requests for clemency
And my future drawn
The way a duck is sketched on a school blackboard:
Shall I express my dreams
In whisper and touch, like a blind man?
Or should I let them melt down the sides of my head,
Like the gum of tropical trees?
O windows:
A little forest air,
For I am suffocating
My lungs bulge from my chest
Like the eyes of an orphan
And my voice gone astray, like thunder
It knows no coming generation to seek
Nor old mouth to return to.
Builders: buttress me with stone
I am cracking
Like walls mixed with deceit
I collapse
Like snowy mountain peaks under a spring sun
Ah—If only countries could be traded
Like dancers in a night club.
Tattoo
Now
At three o’clock on the twentieth century
Where nothing
Comes between corpses and the shoes of passersby
But asphalt
I will recline in the middle of the road like old
Bedouin sheikhs
And not get up
Until all the prison bars and suspects’ dossiers
In the world are gathered together
And placed before me.
So that I can chew on them, like a camel in the
middle of the road
Until the cudgels slip
From the grip of policemen and demonstrators
And return as blooming branches (once again)
In their forests.
I laugh in the dark
I cry in the dark
I write in the dark
Until I can no longer tell my pen apart
from my fingers.
Whenever there’s a knock at the door or rustle in the
curtain
I cover my papers with my hand
Like a prostitute does when the police raid.
Who passed this anxiety down to me,
This blood, terrified as a mountain leopard?
As soon as I see an official paper on a doorstep
Or a cap from a peephole
My bones and tears begin to chatter against each other
While my blood, terrified, flees in every direction
As if chased from artery to artery
By an immortal battalion of species police.
Ah . . . my beloved.
In vain I muster my bravery and despair.
The tragedy is not here
In the whip or office or sirens.
It is there—
In the crib . . . in the womb.
For I
Was tied to my womb by no umbilical cord
But a hangman’s noose.
Man on the Sidewalk
Half of him, stars
Half remnants and bare trees
That poet, drawing back into himself like a thread
of mud.
Behind every window
Cries a poet, trembles a girl
My love: my heart is a golden butterfly
That hovers mournfully before your small breasts.
You were orphaned, with body effervescent
And clear eyelashes, fragrant of wild violets
When I gaze into your beautiful eyes
I dream of sunset in the mountains
And boats that sail at nightfall
I feel all the world’s words obey my touch.
Here, on old chairs
With their injured creaks
Where meet rain and love, and honey-colored eyes,
Your small mouth
Used to quiver on my lips like drops of attar
Tears traced on my eyes
I feel myself rising like the scent of virgin forests
Like the thunder of bare feet on a scorching day.
You were a homeland to me, a tavern
A small sadness keeping me company since
childhood
The day your gypsy hair
Floated in my room like a cloud . . .
Like a morning headed for the fields.
Away with you, rings of smoke!
And flutter on, my wounded heart!
For today, in my throat, a red nightingale longs to
sing.
O Street that I know, breast by breast, cloud by
cloud!
O white acacia trees!
I wish I were golden rain
Falling on every sidewalk, every lash handle
Or a breeze coming from a distant grove,
Then I would gather my lover’s perfume as she reclines on her bed
Like a tender tropical bird.
I wish I could wander
In filthier, noisier neighborhoods
And tremble alone above the clouds.
The sun was rounder and softer
In the old days
When the blue sky
Stole in through the windows and old peepholes
Like silk cocoons
On the day we ate and fucked and died free beneath
stars
The day our history
Was blood and some continents paved with corpses
and Holy Books.
Three Poems
Muḥammad al-Māghūṭ
translated from the Arabic by Nina Youkhanna and Elliott Colla
Click here for Elliott Colla’s translation of Adonis’s Ambiguity from the Summer 2011 issue.
Listen to:
The most distinct feature of the Arabic prose poem (qaṣīdat al-nathr) is that it breaks away from the formulaic meter and rhyme that has dominated the poetic tradition since pre-Islamic times. Indeed, it is this feature–doing away with sound pattern considerations–that allowed us to cleave closely to the original Arabic in a way that would not have been possible with more traditional genres that are invariably characterized by rhythmic and musical composition. The prose poem, in contrast, cuts the tie to sound.
Translating at such a close, near-literal distance gave us the opportunity to get profoundly intimate with al-Māghūṭ’s aesthetics and poetic sensibilities. We were also struck by the poet’s reliance on simile. We were first alerted to this feature by the scholar and critic Huda Fakhreddine in her excellent monograph, The Arabic Prose Poem (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). Some of these create arresting images, as when the poet describes his dreams as melting down the sides of his head “like the gum of tropical trees” or when portraying his desire to chew apart prison bars and political dossiers “like a camel in the middle of the road.” The Syrian critic Mohammad Alahmad has observed that al-Māghūṭ’s images are visceral and concrete, unlike the metaphorical poetry of his modernist contemporaries. This concreteness and particularity allowed us to hew more closely to the source language than we might have if the figures had been more abstract, granting a faithful rendition in English without compromising its poetic force. Finally, one of our favorite features of a al-Māghūṭ poem is its ability to turn suddenly, crashing into an unexpected ending, which often involves a jolting reversal that lingers in the reader’s mind like sillage after the poem has been forgotten.
Translating at such a close, near-literal distance gave us the opportunity to get profoundly intimate with al-Māghūṭ’s aesthetics and poetic sensibilities. We were also struck by the poet’s reliance on simile. We were first alerted to this feature by the scholar and critic Huda Fakhreddine in her excellent monograph, The Arabic Prose Poem (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). Some of these create arresting images, as when the poet describes his dreams as melting down the sides of his head “like the gum of tropical trees” or when portraying his desire to chew apart prison bars and political dossiers “like a camel in the middle of the road.” The Syrian critic Mohammad Alahmad has observed that al-Māghūṭ’s images are visceral and concrete, unlike the metaphorical poetry of his modernist contemporaries. This concreteness and particularity allowed us to hew more closely to the source language than we might have if the figures had been more abstract, granting a faithful rendition in English without compromising its poetic force. Finally, one of our favorite features of a al-Māghūṭ poem is its ability to turn suddenly, crashing into an unexpected ending, which often involves a jolting reversal that lingers in the reader’s mind like sillage after the poem has been forgotten.
Muḥammad al-Māghūṭ was born in 1934 in a village near Hama, Syria. In his youth, he joined the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) and was imprisoned in 1955 with other party members following the assassination of a top-ranking general. In the late 1950s, al-Māghūṭ fled to Lebanon, where he joined Syrian poet Adonis’s Shiʿr group. Already bearing a reputation as an unconventional poet, he pioneered the prose poem after publishing his first collection, حزن في ضوء القمر (Sorrow in the Moonlight; Shiʿr Journal Press), in 1959. His oeuvre includes six poetry collections, prose, plays, and film screenplays—all of which explore, with his signature sardonic tone, the vagaries of dreaming for dignity and freedom while living under brutal authoritarian rule. He died in 2006 after a long battle with cancer.
Nina Youkhanna is a PhD student at the Arabic and Islamic Studies department at Georgetown University. She holds a BA in comparative literature from Western University and an MA from the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Nina’s research interests focus on the period after the 1967 defeat in the Six-Day War and the ways in which Arab intellectuals contended with its aftermath. She is interested in the role of satire as a mode of subversive critique in the Arab world, particularly in response to traumatic historical events since the naksa and leading up to the so-called Arab Spring.
Elliott Colla teaches Arabic at Georgetown University. He translates and has published numerous academic studies on modern Arabic letters, including Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Duke University Press, 2007). His first novel, Baghdad Central (Bitter Lemon, 2014), was adapted into a television series starring Waleed Zuaiter. His second novel, L’Endroit le plus merveilleux au monde (The most wonderful place in the world; Éditions du Masque, 2023), has recently been published.
