Fatena al-Gharra: The Lost Button and Woman of Mint

Two final poems from Fatena al-Gharra, as translated by Sarah Maguire, Anna Murison and Sarah Vaghefian in their workshop at the Poetry Translation Centre: The Lost Button, a sensual moment snatched on a hurried pavement (I can't help but hear an allusion to Gertrude Stein's lovely and loving Tender Buttons in the title); and Woman of Mint. The poem is divided into two stanzas, a She stanza and a He stanza, with the person of the opposite gender only appearing in the final two lines of each stanza, creating an erotic tension from the (mandated) separation of the genders in observant Islamic societies. In her notes, Sarah comments that

It's fascinating to witness a woman poet writing in Arabic using a 'feminine' mint plant and a 'masculine' nettle to express her feelings about gender.

The play with the natural world and the switch of point-of-view in the poem is reminiscent of the Song of Songs, in which the female speaker may be the Queen of Sheba and aligned with the Arabic world, and the male speaker Solomon and aligned with the Israelites. So here the male figure is a nettle, a plant that spreads and takes over land. Within the erotic tension is (perhaps) a biting national allegory, controlled by the female voice.

Voices from Gaza: Khaled Abedallah

It's been a while since the last poems in our series, but new translations are arriving. Sarah Maguire and the Poetry Translation Centre have been translating work by Khaled Abedallah, and the first poem Seeds in Flight has gone up on the PTC website. More work to come from this wonderful writer, and two pieces by Khaled Jum'a are being co-translated by Isis Nusair and Michael Rosen. To hear and see more about Gaza, check out the program for the 10th Palestine Film Festival, which takes place in London from April 24th - May 8th 2009 at the Barbican Cinema and SOAS.

Faten al-Gharra: I Reveal Myself

Faten al-Gharra is an award-winning Palestinian poet with three collections to her name and an international following. The Poetry Translation Centre who produced this delicate and evocative translation of al-Gharra's beautiful poem. You can read more about their process, and see the Arabic original and English literal translation of the poem here.

I Reveal Myself

Descendant of raiders who landed on the beaches,
heir to the woman who unmanned Samson,
I am the daughter of waves and of memory,
a fresh shoot on old stock.

When I open my arms, the universe sets forth.
When I smile, honey wells from my virgin lips.
I take a step and the earth loses its balance.
In my laugh, earthquakes resound,
and volcanoes spurt from seven tectonic plates.

The child of frivolity and modesty,
I am the daughter of depravity and purity,
the progeny of black and white.

The tip of my finger taps the stars off track.
If I close my eyes,
darkness eclipses the world, until my eyelids lift
bathing it in gold.
And when I toss back my hair
the universe shivers in recognition.

I am today and I am tomorrow.
Crowned queen on the throne of space.
A blink, and fields foam green with wheat.
I am wheat itself. I am green.
The first harvest.
The last.


Translated by Sarah Maguire with Anna Murison and the Poetry Translation Centre Workshop

© The Poetry Translation Centre

New Writing from Gaza: A Portfolio

Over the last few weeks, protest songs for Gaza -- by Michael Heart and Invincible, among others -- have been flying around the blogosphere, giving a voice to the anguish and anger of Gazans, who were almost silenced by Israel's media blockade, and by damage to infrastructure. Journalists, bloggers and ordinary citizens, resilient and determined, posted when they could, via SMS to friends if they had to, and have made known the stories that didn't appear on the news.

These observations from the moment, on the ground, are thrilling, moving and necessary. They counter media bias, alert us to action, and give us a glimpse of what it feels like to be in Gaza. How much more so, then, might a poem or story, honed by a brilliant writer until it is dense with image and meaning? As the outpouring of grief at Mahmoud Darwish's death last year showed, literature, and poetry in particular, has a particular place in Palestinian culture -- and has had a particular place in reaching out from Palestine to the rest of the world, from Ghassan Kanafani's "Letter from Gaza" to Mourid Barghouti's Midnight.

But only a few Palestinian writers are being translated. In Palestine, the Khalil Sakakini Centre and the House of Poetry have both fostered new writers and new magazines. In the UK, Banipal and Modern Poetry in Translation have both had special Palestine issues in recent years, which have shown the depth and range of work being produced. Telegram's Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women, edited by Jo Glanville, introduced a number of new voices, such as Adania Shibli.

When I interviewed Adania in early December 2008, she spoke passionately about the writers she knew in Gaza, about the intensity of their work and the way that Palestinian poetry was changing in response to the conditions of siege. That was before the invasion. When the news and images of Gaza (not from Gaza) began to appear, I emailed Adania and offered to host a selection of writing on the blog: her choice of writers, immediate and new voices with essential things to say and powerful styles in which to say them.

Over the next month, we'll be publishing the work that she selected on the blog, as it arrives from Gaza. The first group of writers to arrive is diverse in age, background, experience, and style, but I find all of their voices compelling. On Monday, there will be a selection of short pieces by novelist, playwright and political scientist Atef Abu Saif, who lives and teaches in Gaza.

Following Abu Saif, whose stories will appear over three days, the blog will feature work from:

Soumaya Susi
Khaled Jum'a
Nasr Jamil Shaath
Fatena al-Gharra
Yousef Alqedra
Naser Rabah
Najah Awadallah

posted as it arrives from the Arabic translators have very graciously given time and support to this project, excited by its urgency and by discovering new work. Each writer presents translators with a different challenge and promise, and each will be translated differently. Excitingly, translator Isis Nusair is working on Khaled Jumaa's work with Michael Rosen and Shaun Levin, two anti-Zionist Jewish writers, whose acts of translation demonstrate how literature can build community and solidarity.

Abu Saif's pieces have been translated by Ibrahim Muhawi, who also translated Mahmoud Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness, a sequence of prose poems framed by the August 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Abu Saif's pieces - microstories, fragments - are dateless, although filled with precise detail of season and place. Minutely focused on a gesture, a piece of graffiti, on the author's own act of seeing, they are both like news stories - in their brevity, their concrete detail - and utterly unlike anything the media can offer.

In a 2008 Guardian article about the Poetry Translation Centre's ambitious tour and chapbook series, Sarah Maguire, who is translating Faten al-Gharra's work for us, wrote:

Poetry in this country is our favourite minority artform, largely greeted with bafflement, often with dismay. And yet we live alongside people for whom poetry is a central, essential passion. My hope is that by attempting to make their poems at home in our language, we can also translate a little of their enthusiasm. Poetry thrives through translation.

With this selection, we hope to show not only that poetry thrives through translation, but that people thrive through poetry, not only being written but being heard. The act of translation -- whether literally between languages, or metaphorically from the page onto a blog -- is a catalyst, a helping hand, to bring readers to the writing, and through that writing to resonant emotions and truths.

As Adania says: we are "trying to make the words of Gaza louder than those of the bullets and the bombings." Please come back to listen over the next month.