Table Of ContentEnglish Poetry and Modern
Arabic Verse
English Poetry and Modern
Arabic Verse
Translation and Modernity
Ghareeb Iskander
I.B. TAURIS
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First published in Great Britain, 2021
Copyright © Ghareeb Iskander, 2021
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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
