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English Poetry and Modern Arabic Verse: Translation and Modernity PDF

193 Pages·2021·2.873 MB·English
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English Poetry and Modern Arabic Verse English Poetry and Modern Arabic Verse Translation and Modernity Ghareeb Iskander I.B. TAURIS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, I.B. TAURIS and the I.B. Tauris logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain, 2021 Copyright © Ghareeb Iskander, 2021 Ghareeb Iskander has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Adriana Brioso Cover image Statue of Badr Shaker Sayyab, 1971 by Miran al-Saadi. (© Ahmed Mahmoud, CC BY-SA 3.0) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third- party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-0-7556-0724-2 ePDF: 978-0-7556-0725-9 eBook: 978-0-7556-0726-6 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. To my parents vi Contents Preface viii Acknowledgements xi Introduction 1 1 The Arabic waste lands 19 2 Translating Whitman’s Song of Myself into Arabic 59 3 Al-Sayyāb’s translational contribution 101 4 Conclusion 145 Notes 153 Bibliography 156 Index 169 Preface My journey as a poet-translator started during my master’s degree when I studied nine English translations of al-Sayyāb’s Unshūdat al-Maṭar in 2009.1 This experience opened my eyes to the interaction between the original poem and its translations, creatively and culturally. I was keen to know how English translations of al-Sayyāb’s poem could manipulate their readers on these two levels in a specifically Iraqi system. My second attempt was in 2013. I was in- vited by Reel Festivals to a workshop called Found in Translation between four Scottish (or based in Scotland) and four Iraqi poets to translate each other. The discussion was through interpreters because most of the British poets did not know Arabic, and vice versa. In this way, the poems were produced by a creative rather than a translational process. The discussion about the poems deepened our knowledge not only of the language of the ‘other’ but also of our own language; it also raised our awareness of the poetic potential each language contributes. The dialogic ‘approach’ which dominated the workshop resulted in a new third language. The source poem is not simply transferred from one language to another; rather, it is allocated in a new process. This ap- proach helped to involve all poets in the process, especially those who had no translational experience. The outcome of this project was first presented at the British Council’s Niniti Literature Festival (Niniti means Lady of Life in Sumerian) and later published as a bilingual book called This Room Is Waiting (2014). I translated poems by Krystelle Bamford, William Letford and Jen Hadfield into Arabic. Hadfield translated my poem ‘On Whitman’ in which I personalized his ‘Song of Myself’: يسفن ينغأ ةريخلأا كَ تينغأ يف كَ سفن ينغأ ةريخلأا يتينغأ يف ؟نذإ امهبتكنس فيك Preface ix نلآا ركذتي ًانايسن هتحرتقا يذلا بشعلا ةملكلا قبسي يذلا حرفلا I sing myself In your final song I sing you In my final song How can both Be written then? The grass you suppose to be oblivion Remembers now The delight the forerunner of the word. (Iskander, tr. Hadfield, 2014: 102–3) This translation was a collaborative job between writer and translator. In addition, the process of the translation and the discussion, in particular about Walt Whitman as a central theme of the poem, led to a discussion of his influential role, especially in Arabic modernity. It was this experience which first gave me the idea of studying the impact of world modern poets on Arabic modernity as an academic subject. But the most exciting element in this project was when the Scottish poet John Glenday translated part of my poem ‘Gilgamesh’s Snake’, which is a personal response to the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. Subsequently, we developed and enhanced our collaboration to translate the whole book. It won the 2015 University of Arkansas Arabic Translation Award and was published as a bilingual collection by Syracuse University Press in 2016. As Buil stated, ‘a bilingual lay-out is always a challenge for the translator, and more so when both versions are presented en face’ (Buil, 2016: 402). However, as the writer and co-translator, I was fortunate to engage in this collaboration with Glenday, and this joint approach served to ensure that the English translation met the Arabic original. Glenday was rigorous in following poetic aspects of the original, including the form of my poem in the Arabic prosodic system, certain linguistic usages and their cultural significances. Nevertheless, as a poet-translator, Glenday was ‘free’ to choose what he thought could be poetically presented in the target language. For example, he chose to translate ‘بيرغلا رجفلا’ as ‘the unfamiliar dawn’: :ءيش لَّ ك ىّنغ ةمئانلا َةفصرلأا ىّنغ

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