#lena jayyusi

[lunamonchtuna]

— May Sayegh, from The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, tr: Lena Jayyusi & Naomi Shihab Nye, (2001) (via lunamonchtuna)

[majestativa]

She contains you like eternity.

— May Sayegh, The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, transl by Lena Jayyusi & Naomi Shihab Nye, (2001)

[soracities]

Salem Jubran, "Refugee" (trans. Lena Jayyusi and Naomi Shihab Nye), from A Map of Absence: An Anthology of Palestinian Writing on the Nakba [ID'd]

[feral-ballad]

Saleem Barakat, tr. by Lena Jayyusi and Naomi Shihab Nye, from Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology; “Dilana and Diram”

[jardindefruits]

Incense drifted from flowers on the moon's quiet wings...

Abu Al-Qasim Al-Shabbi translated by Lena Jayyusi and Naomi Shihab Nye, from ‘The Will of Life’, Arabic Poems

[finita--la--commedia]

… and I set her between yearning and madness, between my veins and my blood's desire.

Hamda Khamees, “About Love and Impossible”, translated from the Arabic by Lena Jayyusi and Naomi Shihab Nye in: “The Literature of modern Arabia: an anthology”, edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi 

[nudeartpluspoetry]

"On Entering the Sea," by Nizar Qabbani

Poem, translated by Lena Jayyusi, Sharif Elmusa, Jack Collum, from On Entering the Sea: The Erotic and Other Poetry of Nizar Qabbani, Interlink Books 1996 (buy this book!). Images from public domain sources. Video clips from Pixabay, Moshe Harosh, Andre Mouton, Matvey Doomchev, and Free Footage, by permission, and thank you. Recording is mine. Qabbani: 1923-1998, a renowned Syrian poet, writer, and publisher. He was born and grew up in Damascus. Later he lived in Geneva, Paris, and London, where he died. His numerous books include The Lover's Dictionary; To Beirut the Feminine, With My Love; Poems Inciting Anger; and Alphabet of Jasmin

[crashinglybeautiful]

Language

When a man is in love how can he use old words? Should a woman desiring her lover lie down with grammarians and linguists? I said nothing to the woman I loved but gathered love's adjectives into a suitcase and fled from all languages. —Nizar Qabbani trans. Lena Jayyusi and Jack Collom

Courtesy of Matthew Ogle’s Pome

[stayinblue]

Language

by Nizar Qabbani trans. Lena Jayyusi and Jack Collom

When a man is in love how can he use old words? Should a woman desiring her lover lie down with grammarians and linguists? I said nothing to the woman I loved but gathered love's adjectives into a suitcase and fled from all languages.

[thevividgreenmoss]

Badr Shakir al-Sayyab (trans. Lena Jayyusi and Christopher Middleton), Rain Song / Unshūdat almaṭar

Your eyes are two palm tree forests in early light,

Or two balconies from which the moonlight recedes

When they smile, your eyes, the vines put forth their leaves,

And lights dance . . . like moons in a river

Rippled by the blade of an oar at break of day;

As if stars were throbbing in the depths of them . . .

And they drown in a mist of sorrow translucent

Like the sea stroked by the hand of nightfall;

The warmth of winter is in it, the shudder of autumn,

And death and birth, darkness and light;

A sobbing flares up to tremble in my soul

And a savage elation embracing the sky,

Frenzy of a child frightened by the moon.

It is as if archways of mist drank the clouds

And drop by drop dissolved in the rain . . .

As if children snickered in the vineyard bowers,

The song of the rain

Rippled the silence of birds in the trees . . .

Drop, drop, the rain

Drip,

Drop, the rain

Evening yawned, from low clouds

Heavy tears are streaming still.

It is as if a child before sleep were rambling on

About his mother a year ago he went to wake her, did not find her,

Then was told, for he kept on asking,

'After tomorrow, she'll come back again . . .

That she must come back again,

Yet his playmates whisper that she is there

In the hillside, sleeping her death for ever,

Eating the earth around her, drinking the rain;

As if a forlorn fisherman gathering nets

Cursed the waters and fate

And scattered a song at moonset,

Drip, drop, the rain

Drip, drop, the rain

Do you know what sorrow the rain can inspire?

Do you know how gutters weep when it pours down?

Do you know how lost a solitary person feels in the rain?

Endless, like spilt blood, like hungry people, like love,

Like children, like the dead, endless the rain.

Your two eyes take me wandering with the rain,

Lightning's from across the Gulf sweep the shores of Iraq

With stars and shells,

As if a dawn were about to break from them, But night pulls over them a coverlet of blood. I cry out to the Gulf: 'O Gulf,

Giver of pearls, shells and death!'

And the echo replies,

As if lamenting:

'O Gulf,

Giver of shells and death .

I can almost hear Iraq husbanding the thunder,

Storing lightning in the mountains and plains,

So that if the seal were broken by men

The winds would leave in the valley not a trace of Thamud.

I can almost hear the palmtrees drinking the rain,

Hear the villages moaning and emigrants

With oar and sail fighting the Gulf

Winds of storm and thunder, singing

'Rain . . . rain . . .

Drip, drop, the rain . . .

And there is hunger in Iraq,

The harvest time scatters the grain in-it,

That crows and locusts may gobble their fill,

Granaries and stones grind on and on,

Mills turn in the fields, with them men turning . . .

Drip, drop, the rain . . .

Drip

Drop

When came the night for leaving, how many tears we shed,

We made the rain a pretext, not wishing to be blamed

Drip, drop, the rain

Drip, drop, the rain

Since we had been children, the sky

Would be clouded in wintertime,

And down would pour the rain,

And every year when earth turned green the hunger struck us.

Not a year has passed without hunger in Iraq.

Rain . . .

Drip, drop, the rain . . .

Drip, drop . . .

In every drop of rain

A red or yellow color buds from the seeds of flowers.

Every tear wept by the hungry and naked people

And every spilt drop of slaves' blood

Is a smile aimed at a new dawn,

A nipple turning rosy in an infant's lips

In the young world of tomorrow, bringer of life.

Drip.....

Drop..... the rain . . .In the rain.

Iraq will blossom one day '

I cry out to the Gulf: 'O Gulf,

Giver of pearls, shells and death!'

The echo replies

As if lamenting:

'O Gulf,

Giver of shells and death.'

And across the sands from among its lavish gifts

The Gulf scatters fuming froth and shells

And the skeletons of miserable drowned emigrants

Who drank death forever

From the depths of the Gulf, from the ground of its silence,

And in Iraq a thousand serpents drink the nectar

From a flower the Euphrates has nourished with dew.

I hear the echo

Ringing in the Gulf:

'Rain . . .

Drip, drop, the rain . . .

Drip, drop.'

In every drop of rain

A red or yellow color buds from the seeds of flowers.

Every tear wept by the hungry and naked people

And every spilt drop of slaves' blood

Is a smile aimed at a new dawn,

A nipple turning rosy in an infant's lips

In the young world of tomorrow, bringer of life.

And still the rain pours down.

[majestativa]

Now you collect all the wounds, taking refuge with death, wearing dreams as wings.

— May Sayegh, The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, transl by Lena Jayyusi & Naomi Shihab Nye, (2001)

[feral-ballad]

Sleep then, sleep, delirious one, for your heart is simply a heart, and you were only the guide for two lovers who did not complete the plundering of their souls.

Saleem Barakat, tr. by Lena Jayyusi and Naomi Shihab Nye, from Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology; “Dilana and Diram”

[movesinvokesinspires]

RAIN SONG

Your eyes are two palm tree forests in early light, Or two balconies from which the moonlight recedes When they smile, your eyes, the vines put forth their leaves, And lights dance … like moons in a river Rippled by the blade of an oar at break of day; As if stars were throbbing in the depths of them …

And they drown in a mist of sorrow translucent Like the sea stroked by the hand of nightfall;

The warmth of winter is in it, the shudder of autumn, And death and birth, darkness and light; A sobbing flares up to tremble in my soul And a savage elation embracing the sky, Frenzy of a child frightened by the moon.

It is as if archways of mist drank the clouds And drop by drop dissolved in the rain … As if children snickered in the vineyard bowers,

The song of the rain Rippled the silence of birds in the trees … Drop, drop, the rain Drip

Dropthe rain

Evening yawned, from low clouds

Heavy tears are streaming still. It is as if a child before sleep were rambling on About his mother (a year ago he went to wake her, did not find her, Then was told, for he kept on asking, “After tomorrow, she’ll come back again … That she must come back again,

Yet his playmates whisper that she is there In the hillside, sleeping her death for ever, Eating the earth around her, drinking the rain; As if a forlorn fisherman gathering nets Cursed the waters and fate And scattered a song at moonset, Drip, drop, the rain Drip, drop, the rain Do you know what sorrow the rain can inspire?

Do you know how gutters weep when it pours down? Do you know how lost a solitary person feels in the rain? Endless, like spilt blood, like hungry people, like love, Like children, like the dead, endless the rain. Your two eyes take me wandering with the rain, Lightning’s from across the Gulf sweep the shores of Iraq With stars and shells, As if a dawn were about to break from them, But night pulls over them a coverlet of blood. I cry out to the Gulf: "O Gulf, Giver of pearls, shells and death!” And the echo replies, As if lamenting: “O Gulf, Giver of shells and death .

I can almost hear Iraq husbanding the thunder, Storing lightning in the mountains and plains, So that if the seal were broken by men The winds would leave in the valley not a trace of Thamud. I can almost hear the palmtrees drinking the rain, Hear the villages moaning and emigrants With oar and sail fighting the Gulf Winds of storm and thunder, singing "Rain … rain …

Drip, drop, the rain … And there is hunger in Iraq,

The harvest time scatters the grain in-it,

That crows and locusts may gobble their fill, Granaries and stones grind on and on,

Mills turn in the fields, with them men turning … Drip, drop, the rain …

Drip Drop When came the night for leaving, how many tears we shed,

We made the rain a pretext, not wishing to be blamed Drip, drop, the rain

Drip, drop, the rain

Since we had been children, the sky

Would be clouded in wintertime,

And down would pour the rain, And every year when earth turned green the hunger struck us. Not a year has passed without hunger in Iraq. Rain … Drip, drop, the rain … Drip, drop … In every drop of rain A red or yellow color buds from the seeds of flowers. Every tear wept by the hungry and naked people And every spilt drop of slaves’ blood Is a smile aimed at a new dawn, A nipple turning rosy in an infant’s lips In the young world of tomorrow, bringer of life.

Drip….. Drop….. the rain …In the rain. Iraq will blossom one day ’

I cry out to the Gulf: "O Gulf, Giver of pearls, shells and death!”

The echo replies As if lamenting: ‘O Gulf, Giver of shells and death.“ And across the sands from among its lavish gifts The Gulf scatters fuming froth and shells And the skeletons of miserable drowned emigrants

Who drank death forever From the depths of the Gulf, from the ground of its silence, And in Iraq a thousand serpents drink the nectar From a flower the Euphrates has nourished with dew.

I hear the echo Ringing in the Gulf: "Rain … Drip, drop, the rain … Drip, drop.”

In every drop of rain A red or yellow color buds from the seeds of flowers. Every tear wept by the hungry and naked people And every spilt drop of slaves’ blood Is a smile aimed at a new dawn, A nipple turning rosy in an infant’s lips In the young world of tomorrow, bringer of life.

And still the rain pours down.

BADR SHAKIR AL-SAYYAB

Copyright ©: Translated by Lena jayyusi and Christopher Middleton

[finita--la--commedia]

We were lost in each other. Though we embraced tightly, our skins mingling, we remained very much alone very much alone.

Hamda Khamees, “Very Much Alone”, translated from the Arabic by Lena Jayyusi and Naomi Shihab Nye in: “The Literature of modern Arabia: an anthology”, edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi 

[mouridbarghouti]

Stephen Watts reviews A Small Sun by Mourid Barghouti Aldeburgh Poetry Trust, UK, 2003 32 pp, £4, ISBN 095354222X My Step towards my Country . . . Mourid Barghouti is best known in English for his memoir I Saw Ramallah which was published earlier this year in the UK by Bloomsbury. But he is more well known in Arabic as a poet, having published thirteen books of poetry including a Collected Works in 1997. He was in fact born in a village near Ramallah, studied English Literature at the University of Cairo, and has lived mostly in that city, having spent many years in exile from his homeland. A Small Sun is a chapbook of English translations published by the Aldeburgh Festival Trust to coincide with Mourid Barghouti’s participation in the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in November 2003. Its 30 or so pages are of mostly short poems in translations by the poet and his wife Radwa Ashour (some reprinted from Banipal’s Palestinian issue No 15/16) and with a handful of earlier translations by Lena Jayyusi & W S Merwin taken from the 1992 Anthology Of Modern Palestinian Literature and one short poem in Ahdaf Soueif’s translation. Early poems (Barghouti was born in 1944) are not included and the range is from five collections published in Arabic between 1980 and 2002. Perhaps it is difficult to evaluate a small selection of poems in translation – does the poet, for instance, also write long poems and poem-sequences? But one complex of feelings and clear truth is set out from the very first, the poem ‘Exception’ that is short enough to quote in full: All of them arrive: river and train sound and ship light and letters the telegrams of consolation the invitation to dinner the diplomatic bag the space ship they all arrive all but my step towards my country . . . There in thirty-seven English words is a communal, and not merely a personal, biography that shows the poet’s quality of objective intimacy. The poem ‘Desire’ also has a typically real and bitter twist of beauty that has had to bear witness to personal exile and that is, beyond that, an acute statement of sadness resigned to necessity and calm. In a poem that turns on its exact and accurate detail to evoke absence, and that states the desired present to evoke the absence, the gender shifts halfway, so that ‘his leather belt’, ‘the pair of shoes he left behind’, ‘his scattered papers’ modulate to the subject, the very real ‘she who is still there waiting’ and to the strength of the poem’s ending: “each time the day ends/she reaches out to touch a naked waist/and leans back against the wall”. The subtlety of erotic loss in this poem – as of other forms of loss throughout the collection – is both beautiful and sharply painful, or in other words real. In another poem ‘embrace’ becomes death as ordinarily as does happen, and a child recalls of his grandmother that “on her last day/death sat in her arms,/ and she was tender to him and pampered him/and told him a story,/and they fell asleep together”. These poems come not written at random, though they have that quality of truths openly come across. The statements are simple and complexly real, lucid with detail: “wooden seats/that have lost their cumin-coloured paint” or “there are inventions/ that do not exist/old age is one of them”. Or at the end of a ‘normal journey’ where everything is as expected “don’t worry,/your son is still in his grave, murdered,/and he’s fine”. Or in the contrasted sameness of ‘A Night Unlike Others’ where the son, a schoolboy murdered in politicised struggle, returns in the poem dead to the family home and “he passes through them/they pass through him/they remain shadows/and never meet” and again the intimacy is painfully objective, the language exact. In all these poems opened truths in calm language tighten the slack between beauty and reality and their strength is both unobtrusively simple and harsh “leaving this world as it is” with the need for it to be imminently changed. This is fine poetry and maps our inner feelings to daily realities. Both the publication of the chapbook and Aldeburgh Festival’s invitation to the poet in 2003 reflect the albeit slow increase of awareness in this country of the value of translation, and of the vital presence everywhere of many-tongued poetries of exile that reach right into our language.

[wordsthatmoveme]

RAIN SONG

Your eyes are two palm tree forests in early light, Or two balconies from which the moonlight recedes When they smile, your eyes, the vines put forth their leaves, And lights dance . . . like moons in a river Rippled by the blade of an oar at break of day; As if stars were throbbing in the depths of them . . .

And they drown in a mist of sorrow translucent Like the sea stroked by the hand of nightfall;

The warmth of winter is in it, the shudder of autumn, And death and birth, darkness and light; A sobbing flares up to tremble in my soul And a savage elation embracing the sky, Frenzy of a child frightened by the moon.

It is as if archways of mist drank the clouds And drop by drop dissolved in the rain . . . As if children snickered in the vineyard bowers,

The song of the rain Rippled the silence of birds in the trees . . . Drop, drop, the rain Drip

Dropthe rain

Evening yawned, from low clouds

Heavy tears are streaming still. It is as if a child before sleep were rambling on About his mother (a year ago he went to wake her, did not find her, Then was told, for he kept on asking, "After tomorrow, she'll come back again . . . That she must come back again,

Yet his playmates whisper that she is there In the hillside, sleeping her death for ever, Eating the earth around her, drinking the rain; As if a forlorn fisherman gathering nets Cursed the waters and fate And scattered a song at moonset, Drip, drop, the rain Drip, drop, the rain Do you know what sorrow the rain can inspire?

Do you know how gutters weep when it pours down? Do you know how lost a solitary person feels in the rain? Endless, like spilt blood, like hungry people, like love, Like children, like the dead, endless the rain. Your two eyes take me wandering with the rain, Lightning's from across the Gulf sweep the shores of Iraq With stars and shells, As if a dawn were about to break from them, But night pulls over them a coverlet of blood. I cry out to the Gulf: "O Gulf, Giver of pearls, shells and death!" And the echo replies, As if lamenting: "O Gulf, Giver of shells and death .

I can almost hear Iraq husbanding the thunder, Storing lightning in the mountains and plains, So that if the seal were broken by men The winds would leave in the valley not a trace of Thamud. I can almost hear the palmtrees drinking the rain, Hear the villages moaning and emigrants With oar and sail fighting the Gulf Winds of storm and thunder, singing "Rain . . . rain . . .

Drip, drop, the rain . . . And there is hunger in Iraq,

The harvest time scatters the grain in-it,

That crows and locusts may gobble their fill, Granaries and stones grind on and on,

Mills turn in the fields, with them men turning . . . Drip, drop, the rain . . .

Drip Drop When came the night for leaving, how many tears we shed,

We made the rain a pretext, not wishing to be blamed Drip, drop, the rain

Drip, drop, the rain

Since we had been children, the sky

Would be clouded in wintertime,

And down would pour the rain, And every year when earth turned green the hunger struck us. Not a year has passed without hunger in Iraq. Rain . . . Drip, drop, the rain . . . Drip, drop . . . In every drop of rain A red or yellow color buds from the seeds of flowers. Every tear wept by the hungry and naked people And every spilt drop of slaves' blood Is a smile aimed at a new dawn, A nipple turning rosy in an infant's lips In the young world of tomorrow, bringer of life.

Drip..... Drop..... the rain . . .In the rain. Iraq will blossom one day '

I cry out to the Gulf: "O Gulf, Giver of pearls, shells and death!"

The echo replies As if lamenting: 'O Gulf, Giver of shells and death." And across the sands from among its lavish gifts The Gulf scatters fuming froth and shells And the skeletons of miserable drowned emigrants

Who drank death forever From the depths of the Gulf, from the ground of its silence, And in Iraq a thousand serpents drink the nectar From a flower the Euphrates has nourished with dew.

I hear the echo Ringing in the Gulf: "Rain . . . Drip, drop, the rain . . . Drip, drop."

In every drop of rain A red or yellow color buds from the seeds of flowers. Every tear wept by the hungry and naked people And every spilt drop of slaves' blood Is a smile aimed at a new dawn, A nipple turning rosy in an infant's lips In the young world of tomorrow, bringer of life.

And still the rain pours down.

BADR SHAKIR AL-SAYYAB

Copyright ©: Translated by Lena jayyusi and Christopher Middleton