Letters

for M.H.

From a parted city
I call You there

someone often
does not arrive

or loses a stranger
swearing his tongue

by the name of one
who called him

so reaches this message
through air

only to him
sworn to receive

so loses a name another letter
to hear from

another place to know
that it is there

not here the message
stretches in the name of

بدا لك سر طال عنك اكتشافه
و لاح صباح كنت انت ظلامة
و انت حجاب القلب عن سر غيبه
و لولاك لم يطبع عليه حتامه


Before you broke a secret, shedding light
upon itself & for your darkness, a new day;

you veiled the heart from the secret of its hiddenness,
& if not for you, the seal wouldn't have pressed.

- Al Hallaj

Correspondence with Al-Hallaj

I've decided to just call these translations "correspondences", since they're clearly not attempts to transfer the syntactical structural of the original into English -- an impossible task, as many have noted -- but efforts to recoup the sense of language meeting itself.

This is a feeling one gets from reading most Arabic poetry, since the language is so overwrought with semiotic correspondences that it seems capable of saying the whole world in a sentence. But this sense is especially important to the poetry of Al Hallaj, who uses language so stark with meanings that it appears, for a moment, appears translated. There prepositions become personal encounters with the Venerated. There one's own organs are thought to reside within the one provoking the sensation. There meaning addresses itself back to origin, but an origin that refers only to itself endlessly. There, at the "semiotic core" of the poem, is a lunatic encircling himself.

It would be a mistake then to approach these poems by translating the literal. If for Al Hallaj language is always already pointed towards its origin, then translations cannot consist of the correspondences between two languages, but one language, passed and back and forth between corresponding souls. How do they find each other? The one calls out to the world, shouting "You there," the other calls back "You there."


ﻓﻴﻚ ﻣﻌﻨﻰ ﻳﺪﻋﻮ اﻟﻨﻔﻮسَ إﻟﻴﻚ
ودﻟﻴﻞ ﻳﺪلّ ﻣﻨﻚ ﻋﻠﻴْﻚ
ﻟِﻲَ ﻗﻠﺐٌ ﻟﻪ إﻟﻴﻚ ﻋﻴﻮنٌ
ﻧﺎﻇﺮاتٌ و كله ﻓﻲ ﻳﺪَﻳْﻚ


In you is a meaning that keeps souls
and signs, from where they came, guided back

towards you; the heart I have has only
eyes for you -- beholding all, while all is in your hand.

Another new project --

A collaboration, with Jem Sweeney.

http://variablekey.blogspot.com/

Mutanabbi

I die before the eyes of any messenger
who’s never been subjected to the word

of his own name on page, and write
to him, the one who calls himself

the prophet, as though I’m calling
on a thing already dead.

Dear Prophet, it's only out
of direness, a duty to our tongue gaining

on oblivion, that I address you
by the name you still make

believe your own. Dear Prophet, we’ve lost
the message -- broken off the tongue

of the one who carried it & need
to teach this mute how to write

in our hand, beginning with the names
of buried men. Dear Prophet, we've given up

our own to reconstruct
a tongue in which one piece is always

rotting; now the rest
will go. We stand waiting

for another one, cut off
by the only tongue in which we hail.