Off the Shelf Archive ~April

Sadly, the Archivist was much taken up during the month of April with writing a poem a day for National Poetry Month (in company with the talented poets Ami Mattison, Brian Miller, Patricia Caspers, and the inimitable Fireblossom, who all gave tons of support.) Therefore, the page known as Off the Shelf, where  the intriguing works of the mostly Dead Poets I fancy are showcased, was allowed to get quite dusty and neglected. 

But a new month is here, and a new selection makes it's appearance at last. This is a poem I first read in my late teens that made quite an impression on me, a classic of its kind from a writer who's celebrated perhaps more than he's read these days, the great American poet Robert Frost. It's a fey piece called The Hill Wife, and has always been my favorite work of Frost's.

You'll find it here, in the Off the Shelf Archives.

As always, feel free to comment on either the current or prior selection here, as comments are disabled off the main page.

Now, before it goes into the vault of time, here's a last look at the selection that's been sitting on the shelf all April, an excerpt from  The Genie of the Beach, by the Lebanese poet Khalil Hawi, and my review of the book in which it appears translated:

Review:  

Naked in Exile, Khalil Hawi’s The Threshing Floors of Hunger 

 Interpretation and Translation by Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard,  

© Adnan Haydar & Michael Beard, 1984, Three Continents Press. 

All rights reserved.

First, a portion of one of the poems included, Hawi's The Genie of the Beach:

The Genie of the Beach

I.                  Gypsy Tents

That’s All I’ve ever been—a dark-skinned girl

In gypsy tents that have no land, no pegs,

No chattels that impede, that carried by the wind

Sail on beyond the season’s feasting days,

And land on wayward roads from feast to feast.

The wind wipes out the traces that are left

From flames and revels round the gypsy tents.

II.              Mountain Stags and Horses of the Sea

And what has there been incarnate in my flesh

Except the nature of the mellow sand,

The thirsty sand yearning with lusty want

For the outrageous fury of the waves

Which furrow and assault the beaches and the straits?

Will echoes haunt me from their mountain range?

There on the coasts of the primeval snow

The shades of poplar burned my flesh;

Their verdant branches left unveiled

Fermented embers in my depths.

And feverish visions I beheld all day;

Things in the ponds of boiling blood,

Dim shapes in rising steam are veiled,

A raging stag looms into sight,

Rubbing its eyes blood red, routing the herd.

Will I be trampled by the raging stags?

My body moans, it cringes, pants, becomes

Mere fodder, meadows, verdant fields.

The wild mint wallows in the crannied mountain foot,

And in my valleys, groves of pansies throng,

Both frenzied stags in wild abandonment

And horses of the sea surge through the pansied fields,

And galloping they race into the bay

Urged by their frothing mates, thrusting their way along,

Yet there remains within the tender flesh

The mirror's clearness and the glowing tan

Of tranquil rip'ning clusters of the vine,

Trodden by gales, yet unaffected still.

III.           In the City

And in the city’s night, what have I been

Except the harvest feast on threshing floors,

Except the apple of the fertile wild?

I offered of my flesh: blood, wine and bread.

And I beheld with great perplexity

A body plied and squeezed by fetters ten.

What could it feed on but its fever's sweat

To make it shoot and bud and carry fruit?

~Khalil Hawi

Translation © Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard

~from Naked in Exile, Khalil Hawi’s The Threshing Floors of Hunger Interpretation and Translation by Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard,  
© Adnan Haydar & Michael Beard, 1984, Three Continents Press. All rights reserved.

You'll find this poem in its entirety along with several others and a great deal of insightful explanation and critique in Naked in Exile. The book contains three major poems by Hawi, The Cave, The Genie of the Beach, and Lazarus 1962. All are given in both the original Arabic and in English translation, section by section on facing pages.

As far as someone with no knowledge of Arabic can tell,the poems are meticulously and sonorously translated by the authors, rendered in a meter also reconfigured and 'translated' so as to be readily understood  by the Western ear, and then put in an intelligent and complex historical perspective, with additional in-depth but clear and readable analysis and discussion of each, as well as their place in the timeline of Hawi’s life and work unfolding in the period of the Lebanese Civil War. Hawi's own interpretations and introductions are included, and the authors also scrupulously go over and examine existing interpretations of the poems from an assortment of critics, as well as present their own.

Of his suicide, the authors of Naked in Exile  write: " His death was one of very many civilian casualties which accompanied that military occupation. If we single him out, it is because his life work supplies a voice for the many thousand silent victims... Hawi's death is...that of a thinker who wanted nothing better than an opportunity to escape his own pessimism (and who sometimes...succeeded)...[and] who was so totally unequipped with the defenses most of us put into play at the sight of suffering in others that he simply found himself unable to witness such suffering again."

I greatly enjoyed this scholarly and professional work which still manages to so skillfully convey the dark,layered, intensely mystical and lyrical quality of the poetry of Khalil Hawi. It 's available at both Barnes and Noble and Amazon.

Disclosure—I bought and read this book on my own dime and initiative, and received no compensation for this review. 

 

Bayadir al-ju is the original Arabic title of this collection as used by Hawi for the 1965 Beirut publication.

I wrote more about this selection back in March in this post.

Off the Shelf Archive~March

I’m doing a bit of a departure from my usual routine with the Off the Shelf page this time, and  reviewing a book I just purchased featuring the poems of Lebanese poet, Khalil Hawi, entitled: Naked in Exile, Khalil Hawi’s The Threshing Floors of Hunger; Interpretation and Translation by Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard. ( © Adnan Haydar & Michael Beard, 1984, Three Continents Press. All rights reserved.)

While randomly reading on the internet about the situation in the MidEast, I came upon an article discussing modern Arab poetry, in which was quoted a short unsourced quatrain from  Khalil Hawi (1925-1982)  which impressed me considerably. (I finally found it in this book, the first lines of Lazarus 1962.) 

In the West, we’re more familiar with one of his countrymen and predecessors, Khalil Gibran, but Hawi is a poet of a  different stripe; political, allegorical and dark. Hawi's date of birth is given variously as 1919 and 1925. He was born in a remote mountainous area of Lebanon in a small Greek Orthodox village community, and was educated first by French missionaries, then at the American University of  Beirut, followed by Cambridge University,in England, where he did his doctoral thesis on Gibran. Politically he  was an Arab nationalist by belief but unaffiliated with any party or movement, and he published a great deal of poetry, very little of which is available in translation. He taught at the A.U.B. til his suicide in 1982 on the eve of the Israeli invasion. 

You can find both my review of Naked in Exile and part of one of the poems therein called The Genie of the Beach, here, in the Off the Shelf Archive for April.

To make room for Hawi, you see below the prior Off the Shelf selection, the surreal poem by Federico Garcia Lorca, The City That Does Not Sleep. As always, feel free to comment on either the Lorca poem, or the Hawi piece here, as comments are disabled off the main page, and also feel free to make any suggestions for next time. More information on Off the Shelf and what it's about can be found on the Missionary Statement page.

 

The City That Does Not Sleep

   

In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.
The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,
and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the
street corner
the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the
stars.

Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
In a graveyard far off there is a corpse
who has moaned for three years
because of a dry countryside on his knee;
and that boy they buried this morning cried so much
it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.

Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!
We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth
or we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead
dahlias.
But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;
flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths
in a thicket of new veins,
and whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever
and whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.

One day
the horses will live in the saloons
and the enraged ants
will throw themselves on the yellow skies that take refuge in the
eyes of cows.

Another day
we will watch the preserved butterflies rise from the dead
and still walking through a country of gray sponges and silent boats
we will watch our ring flash and roses spring from our tongue.
Careful! Be careful! Be careful!
The men who still have marks of the claw and the thunderstorm,
and that boy who cries because he has never heard of the invention
of the bridge,
or that dead man who possesses now only his head and a shoe,
we must carry them to the wall where the iguanas and the snakes
are waiting,
where the bear's teeth are waiting,
where the mummified hand of the boy is waiting,
and the hair of the camel stands on end with a violent blue shudder.

Nobody is sleeping in the sky. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is sleeping.
If someone does close his eyes,
a whip, boys, a whip!
Let there be a landscape of open eyes
and bitter wounds on fire.
No one is sleeping in this world. No one, no one.
I have said it before.

No one is sleeping.
But if someone grows too much moss on his temples during the
night,
open the stage trapdoors so he can see in the moonlight
the lying goblets, and the poison, and the skull of the theaters.

Federico García Lorca

Image: Invention of the Monsters, by Salvador Dali, 1938

Art Institute of Chicago Collection  source link