Darwish and Translations of Belonging
An essay I wrote on two English translations of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish's poem انا من هناك “I Am From There”
Mahmoud Darwish (to be read from right to left)*
انا من هناك
محمود درويش
أنا من هناك. ولي ذكرياتٌ . ولدت كما تولد الناس. لي والدة
وبيتٌ كثير النوافذِ. لي إخوةٌ. أصدقاء. وسجنٌ بنافذة باردهْ.
ولي موجةٌ خطَِفتها النوارس. لي مشهدي الخاص. لي عُشْبةٌ زائدهْ
ولي قمرٌ في أقاصي الكلام، ورزقُ الطيور، وزيتونةٌ خالدهْ
مررتُ على الأرض قبل مرور السيوف على جسدٍ حوّلوه إلى مائدهْ.
أنا من هناك. أعيد السماء إلى أمها حين تبكي السماء على أمها،
وأبكي لتعرفني غيمةٌ عائدهْ.
تعلّمتُ كل كلام يليقُ بمحكمة الدم كي أكسر القاعدهْ
تعلّمتُ كل الكلام، وفككته كي أركب مفردةً واحدهْ
هي: الوطنُ...
A. Z. Foreman
I am from there and I have memories. Like any other
Man I was born. I have a mother,
A house with several windows, friends and brothers.
I have a prison cell's cold window, a wave
Snatched by seagulls, my own view, an extra blade
Of grass, a moon at word's end, a supply
Of birds, and an olive tree that cannot die.
I walked across the land before the crossing
Of swords made a banquet-table of a body.
I come from there, and I return the sky
To its mother when it cries for her, and cry
For a cloud on its return
To recognize me. I have learned
All words befitting of blood's court to break
The rule; I have learned all the words to take
The lexicon apart for one noun's sake,
The compound I must make:
Homeland.
Munir Akash, Carolyn Forché, Sinan Antoon, and Amira El-Zein
I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born.
I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cell
with a chilly window! I have a wave snatched by seagulls, a panorama of my own.
I have a saturated meadow. In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon,
a bird's sustenance, and an immortal olive tree.
I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey.
I belong there. When heaven mourns for her mother, I return heaven to her mother.
And I cry so that a returning cloud might carry my tears.
To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood.
I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a
single word: Home.
*Note on formatting: Substack’s not allowing me to use different indentations; the Arabic text should be aligned on the right margin since it’s read from right to left, but it’s been automatically shifted to the left because of the English. Non-Arabic speakers/readers be aware!
Comparing Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché’s critical translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, “I Belong There,” with a lyric one by A. Z. Foreman, “I Am From There,” elucidates the limitations of Lawrence Venuti’s dichotomising framework for translation, whereby translators can take either a “domesticating” or “foreignising” approach (548). The personal and political nature of poetry, especially in the case of Darwish, ensures that no objective or final measure of superior value can be decreed on its translations. Octavio Paz writes that translators of poetry work with “[a] language congealed, yet living” (159), and thus, as Allen and Bernofsky note, “negotiate a fraught matrix of interactions” (xvii). The two translations of this poem’s title alone signal such a negotiation and the divergent paths each poem will take, while coexisting as equally viable renditions of their source.
Akash et al.’s decision to translate the poem explicitly as one about belonging reveals a certain scholarly fidelity to the image of Darwish as “the voice of the Palestinian diaspora” (xvii), stationing the poem within this discourse of dispossession and collective identity. Foreman, on the other hand, translates more directly from the original Arabic, such that the poem retains an unostentatious air in the taken-for-granted-ness of “I Am From There.” This pattern continues in Foreman’s choice to reproduce the sonic and rhythmic features of the original, with the enjambed “Like any other / Man I was born” replicating the fluid and flexible metre of the Arabic. Akash et al. render the same lines, and almost the whole poem, in end-stopped sentences that are more halting. Foreman’s translation creates the “appearance that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the original” (Venuti 551) by following, rather than absenting, “syntactical or lexical peculiarities” (ibid.). Fluency in this case is achieved through a preservation of the original’s poetic strategies, which do not necessarily contradict the translator’s gloss. This contrasts with the almost prosaic nature of Akash et al.’s translation, a reflection of its catering to an audience likely trained in, or at least familiar with, the Anglophone poetic tradition.
Both translations exercise a similar degree of interpretive liberty when it comes to form, structure and diction. Foreman adheres to the end rhymes of the original with both perfect and imperfect rhymes in English – “other, / mother, / brothers”; “return, / learned” – while Akash et al. abandon this rhyme scheme altogether. The orality of Darwish’s Arabic verse allows his translators some range in rendering the poem on the page. Foreman translates, “I have a mother… friends and brothers. / I have a prison cell’s cold window, a wave / Snatched by seagulls…” Akash et al. translate, “I have a mother… brothers, friends, and a prison cell / with a chilly window!” While Foreman breaks up this enumerative portion to emphasise the isolation of “a prison cell’s cold window,” Akash et al. translate it as a single exclamatory sentence, reminiscent of Romantic attitudes towards one’s topographical surroundings. Here the latter commit the liberal humanist error that Venuti criticises as part of the “fluent strategy” of translation (552), which is to assimilate Darwish into the ostensibly “transparent representation of the eternal human verities” expressed in his poem (ibid.). Conversely, Foreman’s brevity stays true to the way “Darwish announces lyric… as threatened longing, perpetual search, and the possibility of poetic belonging,” a characteristic Najat Rahman identifies in her essay on the writing of home in Darwish’s poetry (42). The political context of the poem – Darwish’s imprisonment and exile – is thus honoured in Foreman’s translation, while Akash et al. choose in these lines to bring the poem closer to a Romantic Anglophone sensibility. Venuti is helpful here in understanding the not entirely wholesale reduction of Darwish’s poem to “target-language cultural values” (548).
Akash et al.’s scholastic elevation of the poem is evident in the use of phrases like “a panorama of my own,” “the deep horizon of my word,” “a bird’s sustenance,” “trial by blood,” “dismantled.” Such terms displace the more organic sounds and motifs of the Arabic, yet they still partake in what Paz describes as the “dismantling of the elements of the text, freeing the signs into circulation, then returning them to language” (159). Foreman practises this to a greater effect in remaining faithful to the emotional and aesthetic essence of the original. The whiff of academese in Akash et al.’s translation increases the psychic distance between poem and reader, as well as the distance between the translated and original poem. The imagery stays the same in both translations, but the simple yet memorable construction of “extra blade of grass,” “a moon at word’s end,” and the active principle in “an olive tree that cannot die,” lends Foreman’s translation an energy and immediacy that is suppressed in its peer. Though both translations maintain a “linguistic heterogeneity” (Venuti 555), Foreman’s lyricism shows his prioritisation of the musicality of the Arabic original, indeed “the voice of the fragmented soul,” as Akash and Forché claim in their introduction (xvii).
Where Akash et al. genericise “I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey,” Foreman plays with pace, assonance, imagery and alliteration. Further, the awkward length and clunkiness of “When heaven mourns for her mother, I return heaven to / her mother” is beautifully elegiac in Foreman’s execution: “… I return the sky / To its mother when it cries for her, and cry / For a cloud on its return / To recognize me.” Foreman pulls a syntactical sleight of hand, where subjectivity is destabilised in the shifting intermediary entities between “I” and “me.” No such exploration of the “mutability [and otherness] of identity” can be found in Akash et al.’s translation (xviii), at least on the level of scansion.
No objectively superior model emerges from such a comparison. Each translation has made different but homologous choices, and neither fits into the binary of domestication versus foreignisation. Such is the nature of competing translations that seek to honour the original text in their own unique and balanced ways.
Resources:
https://decolonizepalestine.com/
https://www.tumblr.com/sawasawako/732398187948769280?source=share
https://www.tumblr.com/sawasawako/731169722935214080/im-not-on-tiktok-but-franktimez2-made-a-video?source=share
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/blogs/495-free-ebooks-for-a-free-palestine?utm_source=Haymarket+Newsletter&utm_campaign=10963511ae-EMAIL_Newsletter_2017_11_20_HOLIDAY1_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a36ffbc74a-10963511ae-332807666&mc_cid=10963511ae
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/solidarity-with-palestine-free-resources-and-further-reading
https://www.palestinefilminstitute.org/en/unprovoked-narratives
From the river to the sea Palestine will be free.