Translators’ note:All the translations of the poems cited in the following essay are by us. This is partly for consistency’s sake, and partly in tribute to the spirit of (re-)translation that permeates Fakhreddine’s essay. The Hiba Abu Nada poem, for instance, had already been translated into English by Fakhreddine for Words Without Borders, but we decided to write another rendering of our own, a small ripple in the boundless ocean of language.
With the classical Arabic poetry, we allowed ourselves to be a little more fluid and experimental in form, spacing and punctuation, prioritizing its sonic and aesthetic qualities over strict word-for-word fidelity. Most challenging was the quoted fragment from al-Mutanabbi, with its quasi-personifications of the poetic speaker’s Fortitude and Survival—the doubling of his Self. We attempted to convey some of his thematic and syntactical convolutions by taking inspiration from English metaphysical poetry and slipping in a covert allusion to John Donne’s “Death, be not proud.”
With the poems by Celan, we endeavored to represent not Celan’s original German but Huda Fakhreddine’s Arabic renderings of that German—which is why our translations adhere much more closely to the structure and rhythm of the Arabic. Like Fakhreddine, we referred to several English translations, including those by Pierre Joris and Michael Hamburger, to triangulate our renderings with hers.
–Kendall Dorland and Alex Tan
*
If time must continue on its course after this, then it cannot but course toward a free Palestine. Toward a world in which it’s unthinkable for a boy to wonder whether his legs will grow back; for a girl to pass twelve full days in slumber and awakening, beside the corpses of her family, only to die alone.
For what can it mean for our hallowed Arabic poetic tradition to live on, if it were to fail—in this monstrous moment—to marshal all its voices to speak in Gaza’s tongue? The eighth-century poet Bashshar ibn Burd once said that true poetry is measured by its imperishability over the epochs. That it remain present in spite of time’s passage, always equal to the task of expressing the actualities of the language and its inhabitants in the here and now, beyond history’s unjust trajectories. If he is right, then it falls to us to hear Gaza in every Arabic poem. Gaza—the wound of time that will never mend—must become a language, a way of reading, a reckoning, an undoing of all that we have been until now. A compass for that which we might yet become.
Witness Gaza here, reading and translating us, breathing new life into our poetry and urgently summoning it to herself. It is Gaza who speaks through Al-Samaw’al’s words:
she upbraids us for being
______scant in number
so I say to her, scant are
______those with honor
hardly are we in want of
______those among whom survive
the youthful and the aged
______who for glory strive
It is Gaza who is stricken, as Al-Shanfara was, by the shock and ignominy of being forsaken by one’s kin:
raise, brothers, the breasts
______of your mounts
for to another race, not
______yours, is my wont
primed with provisions
______moon-bright the night
and the mounts girded
______poised to surmount
beyond you I find kin
______in the sleekest of brutes
smooth-backed and flecked, hyenas
______with manes hirsute
kin in whom secrets safekept
______are undisclosed
nor are they who sin
______forsaken, exposed
It is Gaza who stands with those who once stopped in their tracks, thunderstruck by the treachery of time. All those lonesome, forsaken, snuffed-out lives. With the language of Amr ibn Ma’adi Yakrib, Gaza speaks:
with these hands
______I’ve laid to rest
______many a brother upright
of mourning and fright
______am I devoid, no fire
______could tears keep alight
gone are my loves
______but swordlike
______alone I abide
And Gaza it is who alone suffuses time and survives—if survive she does—speaking, with might in her soul, through the verse of Al-Mutanabbi:
I parry with the cavalry______of Fate
_____-solo, I claim___whilst Fortitude
_____my action dictates
my daily Survival____braver than I
_____-fragile we remain____-whole
_____-on account of might in her soul
chafing against Harm_I compelled her
_____-ask________-Death, shalt thou
_____-die________-is Alarm herself alarmed
I stepped forth_____–with footsteps of one arriving
_____-whose Self___-as if doubled—I
_____-& she—flooded with bloodlust for me
Of what use can our Arabic language be if, again in this moment, it fails to give itself wholly to the task—however impossible—of encompassing the horror that is Gaza’s catastrophe? And even across other languages: what speech is possible without Gaza?
For days, I’ve been returning to Paul Celan, that poet who survived humanity’s savagery—but only partially. That savagery left its mark in him, eroding his faith in poetry and speech writ large. Yet he returned and—out of the silence that succeeds carnage—hewed a language for those who could barely be said to have survived. Those for whom there is no greater eloquence than silence.
So I read each poem of Celan’s in what weak German I could muster, and then in numerous English translations, and I hear nothing but Gaza. Then I translate the poems into Arabic and still I hear nothing but echoes of Gaza. I translate not because I need an Arabic version of Celan now, but because what I need is for Gaza to translate Celan to me. I need Gaza to translate all the world to me.
“Tenebrae”
near we are, O lord
near and between your palms
worn we are, O lord
cleaved and cleaving to
as if each body of ours
were your body, O lord
pray, O lord
pray to us
for we are near
we passed like a wind-trace
moved and bent
over each crag and gorge
we moved toward the water
to be given drink, O lord
it was blood,
it was your spilled blood, O lord
and it gleamed
your image glinted in our eyes, O lord
void and open were our eyes and hearts, O lord
we drank, O lord
drank the blood and the image in the blood
kneel and pray to us, O lord
for we are near
“Psalm”
No One will knead us anew out of dust and clay
No One will mourn our ashes
No One
blessed art thou, No One
may we flower one day in your gaze
may we flower in your snare
No Thing
we were, we still are,
we remain ever flowering
this No Thing, we
flower of No One
our belongings radiant like the soul
our burdens desolate like the sky
the petal aflame, red
here we sing
the word’s scarlet
on thorn’s edge
The third poem I include here is titled “Number the Almonds.” Those eponymous seeds are themselves Palestinian compatriots, calling to mind Mahmoud Darwish and Hussein Barghouti. There is bitterness in this poem: the bitterness of almonds and of abandonment, in conjunction. So I granted myself some liberties.
In my mind resounds Darwish’s famous line: O how alone we are. And in accompaniment, from “In Praise of the High Shadow”: How alone you were. These two phrases resound in Darwish’s voice. But closer to me, and with greater incident, these phrases are inflected by the voice of Hiba Abu Nada, the Gazan poet who was martyred in an Israeli airstrike on October 20, 2023. She deliberately conjures up Darwish in one of her poems, challenging and questioning him:
O how alone we were—
when they won their wars
and left you bare, forked
before your own slough
dear Darwish—no poem
will return what
the lonesome has lost
I approach this third poem of Celan’s with Gaza by my side. I allow myself to work into my translation this most Palestinian of phrases—the phrase Mahmoud Darwish inscribed in the aftermath of Sabra and Shatila’s horrors; the phrase that Hiba Abu Nada then echoed from the very heart of besieged Gaza, who stood steadfastly alone. How alone you were.
I let myself lean on it, this phrase through which Darwish and Abu Nada cleave to the thread that connects them to the stop-stance of Al-Samaw’al, Al-Shanfara, Amr ibn Ma’adi Yakrib, Al-Mutanabbi. To the legacies of a deep-rooted Arabic tradition, one of immense loneliness when met with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
number the almonds
and number each bitterness
keeping you awake through the night
number me among you
I searched for your eye when you opened it
no one looked at you
______(& alone you were)
I spun the secret thread
along which dewdrops glided in your mind
then slipped into the jars
those guarded by words
that find no way into any heart
______(& alone you were)
only then could you fully cloak yourself in your name
step firmly, entering yourself
the hammers swing freely
like bells embracing your silence
______(how alone you were)
the listened-to reached you
a dead thing placed its arm around you
and you three walked into the evening
count me spiteful, bitter
number me among the almonds
May Gaza be the ever-present moment of history—its beginning and its end, at once. May Gaza read the world on our behalf and translate it to us. May Gaza translate us, translate the tumult of history and all that humanity inherits. And if, after all of it, we are still to speak and to stammer out this language in ruins, may Gaza be our only word.
___________________________
Alex Tan is a writer, translator, and editor at Asymptote Journal currently based in New York. Their essays and correspondence have been published or are forthcoming in Words Without Borders, The Markaz Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, ArabLit, minor literature[s], and Full Stop Quarterly. A conversation with Nasser Rabah, translated from the Arabic, was recently published in Protean. Some of these writings can be found here.
Kendall Dorland is a writer, translator, and graduate student based in New York. Her work has been supported by the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) and the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships. She has previously written about issues of spatial inequality and the right to the city in Cairo, and is currently interested in ruination, grief, and the elegy in classical and modern Arabic poetry.
