Translator's Note

The following are seven poems from Saleh Diab’s collection J’ai visité ma vie (2013), a French-Arabic bilingual edition with selections from three books of poems composed over roughly twenty years. Born in 1967 on the outskirts of Aleppo, Diab encountered modern poetry as a participant in the Literary Forum at the University of Aleppo (1980-1986), a pocket of creative freedom and critical debate in an otherwise stifling cultural environment. In the 1990s, Diab re-located to Beirut, where he wrote for the literary supplement of the al-Nahar daily and published his debut collection. This was his first minor exile from Syria. In the year 2000, just as Syria was undergoing a momentous change of rule, Diab was invited to attend a poetry festival in France and decided to stay, fight for permanent status and eke out a living. This spontaneous decision to migrate brought him to extremes of precariousness and, based on the poems, nearly reduced him at times to the low existence of a clochard. The fictive speaker in these poems largely overlaps with Diab’s authorial self for whom the way of attaining upward mobility passes through romantic relationships with local women. The turbulent ups and downs involved in these relationships are depicted, dramatized and narrated with unusual vivacity and verve.    

Though the frankness and dynamism of Diab’s lyrical realism speaks for itself, it is interesting to note that he came to this idiom at the end of a lengthy process of self-training in austere modes of imagism that blotted out the biographical. His debut volume is tellingly titled A Dry Moon Watches Over My Life, the implication being that poetry’s objective dryness and moon-like distance proposes new ways of perceiving the smallness of his human self. At this juncture in his early writing, Diab fell under the influence of Poetry and Experience, a work by the American poet and critic Archibald MacLeish that was translated to Arabic in the early 1960s.[1] The book lays out an ethos of impersonal minimalism drawing on Ezra Pound’s modernism and classical Chinese poetics. In many respects, translation plays a part in the pivotal shift to autobiography that follows his move to France. For one, Diab became, in Salman Rushdie’s words, a “translated man.”[2] To write like he does in literary Arabic about domestic feuds and outdoor sex was inconceivable in Syria. The stern pruning of simple images made sense in Syria where poetic discourse was encumbered by official culture, enamored with romantic hyperbole or enclosed in hermetic symbolism. In France, delicate miniaturist abstractness was a dime a dozen and Diab instinctively sought a way to stand out rather than be assimilated.

Remarkably, Diab is anything but a Francophile even though he speaks French with ease in everyday comings and goings. With the current situation in Syria, his future in publishing depends to a large degree on the French book world. And yet he has little of the inferiority complexes with respect to the Parisian metropole that plagued the first wave of Arab modernism and its towering theoretician, the Syrian poet Adonis.[3] Diab shows sovereign disinterest for French poetry and Paris figures in his poems realistically as a hostile place of harsh weather, high rents, and gruff strangers. Given the relative receptivity to translations of the French book industry, the French language serves as a semi-neutral gateway into other more peripheral poets and poetries. Thus, some of the poems we read here are inspired by the domestic realism of the American poet and short story writer Raymond Carver, who was revealed to Diab in French translation. This influence is noticeable, on the macro scale, in the carefully crafted effects of self-revealing nakedness and artless immediacy, and on the micro scale, in specific details like the opening of champagne that recurs in several poems.[4] Over time, translation itself would occupy a growingly prominent place in Diab’s project: first, in overseeing bilingual editions of his work, and second, in undertaking translations from the Arabic and anthologizing modern Syrian poetry for French readership.

In an interview apropos the publication of a bilingual anthology of Syrian poetry, Diab remarks that he thinks of translation as a form of willful transmigration, causing poems to live in other bodies. An echo of this feeling is couched in the meditation on his physical migration in the poem “Southwest France.” The reference made in that poem to his agility in moving large saucepans in the kitchen is rife with suggestion to the restlessness of the migrant finding momentary calm in a French village. In Arabic, a common word for translation is naql, to move something from place to place (the intransitive form intiqāl means to move oneself, transition, relocate). In the same interview, Diab speaks of translation in the familiar register of intimacy and love:

 Translation is a form of writing.  It allowed me to enter the most intimate mihrab [prayer niche] of poets and see what concerns them and matters to them in the finest detail of their creative work. It made me read their texts deeply and understand them. I would not have been able to translate them with ordinary reading. Perhaps I had a certain desire to possess the poems I love through translation. Maybe I was dreaming I could become all the poets I translate. In translation, reading and writing cross paths and come together, a meeting enshrined in love.[5]

Reading this statement alongside relationship poems such as “The Knife Sharpeners” brings out the extent to which the exchanges between source and target language engage in a de-idealized love discourse: utopian and mutually destructive, impossible and unavoidable, exasperating and ebullient.

As to my own translation process, these English versions passed through a knotted triangulation process involving the original Arabic, my native Hebrew, and my limited French. I first encountered Diab’s poetry in Hebrew translation in the Haaretz literary supplement and was captivated by the sheer transparency of his voice. The deeper I went into the poems, however, the more I realized that his translatability is artfully constructed and, as such, suggests a seasoned poetic intelligence. The Czech poet Miroslav Holub has made some discerning remarks about the special force of writing, in particular historical conjunctures, original poems born in and for translation.[6] In possessing both local detail and cosmopolitan daintiness, such poems would travel light so as to have an afterlife in places and times more hospitable to truth than one’s own (Holub was referring to Soviet Czechoslovakia). Translating Diab first into Hebrew and then into English, I find each time anew the deceptive forms of creativity involved in writing poetry with no seeming national markers, poetry that would could cross over easily so as to live through unpropitious circumstances. In a national poetic culture such as Arabic, with a strong sense of ethno-linguistic exceptionalism, this is no small achievement.

The challenges posed by this register apply to both target languages but in some cases one language offered readier solutions than the other. Translating the adverbial phrase ʿalā ghayr hudā (used to describe the mist trailing behind the pheasant in the poem “Southwest France”) presented a difficulty for both. This is an idiomatic collocation meaning ‘with no aim or orientation,’ and yet the word hudā comes with religious baggage as in God’s righteous path. Its presence in a perfectly profane textual environment is quite shocking and calls attention to Diab’s deliberate self-distancing from the Arabic’s levels of sanctity. Neither in English nor in Hebrew was there an effective way to replace this bump, and I ultimately chose to employ a flat adverb so as not to disrupt the fluency. Some of Diab’s puns are easier to convey in the Hebrew due to the proximity of the peoples and their intertwined predicaments. In “I Call Up the Novelist” the author writes that his eyes “are conquered” by his lover’s old haunts. The verb, iḥtalla, denotes in common usage the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Diab repurposes the figure with the ideas it holds to ironize the language abuses committed by bad rhetoric in the Arab world, an irony that Hebrew readers are better situated to appreciate given their insider status. On the other hand, Hebrew lacks a sufficiently common term for “novelist.” Writers of novels are unfortunately subsumed into the general category of “writers.” English has the edge here in suggesting that the poem is enamored with prose and emulates the so-called “novelistic” eye for detail.      

[1] Archibald MacLeish, Poetry and Experience (Cambridge, Mass: Riverside Press, 1961).

[2] Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta Books, 1991), 17.

[3] On Adonis and his adaptations from Saint-John Perse see Robyn Creswell, City of Beginnings (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2018), 106–112.

[4] The image appears in Carver’s poem describing the decision to marry Tess Gallagher in Reno shortly before his death.  See “Proposal” in Raymond Carver, All of Us (London: Harvill, 1996), 290–291.

[5] For the interview see Hussein Bin Hamza, “Belonging to Human Time: A Syrian Contribution to Arab Poetics,” ArabLit, May 16, 2018. https://arablit.org/2018/05/16/saleh-diab-on-crafting-a-bilingual-anthology-of-syrian-poetry/

[6] On Holub’s situating of his idiom “halfway to translation” see Justin Quinn, Between Two Fires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 111–122.

Daniel Behar

In the Classroom