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3
Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Jhio Jan Navarro - Asymptote Blog (www.asymptotejournal.com)
 

we chew off fresh sugarcane and tell overblown stories

3
100 Refutations: Day 63 | InTranslation (intranslation.brooklynrail.org)
 

The poem featured here was written by an unknown Guaraní poet from the Maká people, an indigenous group native to Paraguay. This type of verse is considered part of the Guaraní tradition of religious songs.

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Whispers of the unseen - Jumana Taiseer Mughari (wearenotnumbers.org)
 

I’m a whisper caught in the city’s breath / An echo trapped in the screams of death.

3
100 Refutations: Day 62 | InTranslation (intranslation.brooklynrail.org)
 

Manuel Gonzáles Prada (1844-1918) was an influential figure in Peruvian culture and politics during his lifetime. His essays were known for being full of irony and humor, and his innovative poetry has been described as a precursor to Modernism. In addition to his writing and political careers, Prada spent several years working as the Director of the National Library of Peru.

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BORDER WISDOM – Ahmad Almallah (fedia.io)
 

the world is not as bad as our neighbors made it to be that day— we’ve seen worse days— and how beautiful they were, these days living strife: how we loved everything about not having to go to school:

I won’t describe the past for you, I tell you I got held at borders, I tell you I am used to it, and what? What is this record you play over and over: don’t get used to it, you shouldn’t it’s sad—I bow in recognition:

and after the long journey from border to border, wanting only piece after piece of these walls around me to start breaking, what does not getting used to it do for me?

source: https://themarkaz.org/poet-ahmad-almallah/

Ahmad Almallah is a poet from Palestine. His first book of poems Bitter English is now available in the Phoenix Poets Series from the University of Chicago Press. His new book Border Wisdom is now available from Winter Editions. He received the Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize for Creative Writing, and his set of poems “Recourse,” won the Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship. Some of his poems and other writing appeared in Jacket2, Track//Four, All Roads will lead You Home, Apiary, Supplement, SAND, Michigan Quarterly Review, Making Mirrors: Righting/Writing by Refugees, Cordite Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Great River Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry and American Poetry Review. Some of his work in Arabic has appeared in Al-Arabi Al-Jadid and Al-Quds Al-Arabi. His English works have been translated into Arabic, Russian and Telugu. He is currently Artist in Residence in Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania.

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100 Refutations: Day 61 | InTranslation (intranslation.brooklynrail.org)
 

Francisco Gavidia (1863-1955) was a well-respected public figure in El Salvador known for his work as a writer, politician, lawyer, historian, educator, and journalist. His wide-ranging body of work includes everything from poetry and plays to music, pedagogy, and literary translation. In 1964, the Salvadoran government created a medal for intellectual merit named after Gavidia, to be awarded each year to a Central American writer or journalist who has made significant cultural contributions.

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I didn’t believe I would ever learn to die* Eminescu – Asma'a Azaizeh (fedia.io)
 

I didn’t believe I would ever learn to die

I wasn’t around when death was for free

But I was there when my maternal grandfather paid the price of cotton labourers’ sweat that made his Ottoman suit

The price of bare miles to the women of Bosnia

The price of their tears on the chests of their men before the war

The price of God’s banners

The price of the emperor’s frivolousness and long-term sickness

Balkan blood dripped on my school shirt

The teachers found vows of vengeance in my backpack, and so fabricated chapters of history

I wasn’t around when death happened by chance, on the road

But I was there when my paternal grandfather paid the price of a signature at the bottom of a page, the price of surrendering his village at the bottom of the mountain, of taking the occupier’s hands off of it, the rebel’s taking his hands off of his waist. With the move of a pen, my grandfather’s ink numbed the slope. With the folding of a paper, the mountain folded history, with a handshake, he took the valley’s hand from the tank’s muzzle.

The almond trees died in the cardiac operation rooms, the wedding horses shrouded their eyes with henna and killed themselves.

No one cleansed my ethnicity. But the mountain’s spinal cord broke. And so broke my chance to ever ascend it together, to look at Christ’s footsteps on the lake and copy them.

I’m not the miracle

I didn’t walk on water and I didn’t heal myself of your love’s ailments

But it was my heart’s water which I learned to turn into asphalt whenever I remembered you

I learned to flee the lava that dripped from the mountains of your fear

And I didn’t learn death

I wasn’t there when death was a once and for all lesson

Where the memory of the rocket betrayed it and so forgot the way

The bullet that never meant to cease being a pen

The massacre that passed by the main road and fired peace

When I was walking in the back road

Picking yellow daisies and watching wars drawn in cartoons

I didn’t believe I would ever learn to die

Until Beirut’s war drowned my mother’s lullaby in the well

The scent of invasions emanates from the cooking oven

The commando’s voice enters Um Kulthoum’s cassette

The skulls that paved the city road, they leave the poster hanging beside the bed and lull me, tapping my soft head like a long latmiya. So I stop crying, or they stop crying in it.

My heart grows in the well like a pomegranate tree, each time a branch is broken I climb another on my way to you. All of me breaks, so I become a nest. The birds look in the water and see the laughing face of a Bosnian, I look in it and see your face.

I am the child of tubes crossbred in a medical lab

I smelled the scent of dead horses in my father’s sperm

And I retreated

I was born in the seventh month

After I was beaten by Bosnians in my mother’s womb

And I retreated

I didn’t believe I would ever learn to die

Until the Hebron massacre was committed on the cake of my ninth birthday. I lit the candles on the carpets of Abraham’s house. They melted there alone and no one sang upon them. The birthday gifts fall into the well, the gifts fall, vows of vengeance, in my backpack

The vows would’ve dug my grave had they any hands

The almond trees would’ve stepped on it had they a spinal cord

The mountains would’ve praised it had they any poems

The Bosnian’s tears would’ve creviced its stones had they any beaks or claws

And I would’ve come out

To learn the first lesson

That the smashed skull in the poster is my skull

And that the blood on my shirt

Is my blood

source: https://www.lyrikline.org/de/uebersetzungen/details/4355/12874 biobibliographical note: https://www.lyrikline.org/en/authors/asmaa-azaizeh

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100 Refutations: Day 60 | InTranslation (intranslation.brooklynrail.org)
 

Chimalpahin, or Domingo Francisco de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin (1579-1660), was born in Chalco, in what is now central Mexico. He is best known for writing the history of Mexico in both Nahuatl and Spanish. The better known of his surviving works is Relaciones, or Anales, which includes testimonies from indigenous people and descriptions of the events before and after the colony was established. He died in Mexico City.

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In the Time of the Apricots – Carol Sansour (fedia.io)
 

I shall plough

everywhere

and move on

Out of your soul’s press

and your body’s distillery

I shall be drunk on your last breath

In the palms of your hands

I shall place all of me

All time will pass

Me and you

everywhere

we shall be

  • -

And while we are aware of our profound sadness

we force our bodies to pass through infinite tunnels

where the world is preoccupied with perfecting its plans

to eliminate our children

Q: You are an Arab artist?

A: Me? God forbid! I am a criminal, thank God. God was merciful and kind to me.

The mornings green, yellow

and honey hued

In the time of the apricots

The smell of burning sugar

Children playing in the dust

while my mother makes coffee

and milk and tea

My mother

In the time of the apricots

Always my mother

source: https://www.shaeirat-project.com/by-the-time-of-the-apricots Kotob Khan ed., Cairo, 2019 – translation Youssef Rakha

In the Time of the Apricots is a tour de force. A cycle of poems, it embraces the entire life experience of a woman poet who happens to be Palestinian. We can find, without being able to disentangle them, daily life and politics, desires, childhood memories, motherhood. The insistent memory of the mother is like the refrain of this long and finely chiselled song.

The variety of poetic forms is brought into play and their meticulous arrangement into an ode to life recited in an almost natural voice by this duet of splendid readers, each in her language, is a drama in stereo where anger, sensuality, reportage, elegy, fantasies, the infinite tenderness of mothers, heady melancholy of this season of apricots and the smell of Turkish coffee all mix.

biobibliographical note:

Carol Sansour is a poet from Palestine whose first book, في المشمش, In the Time of the Apricots, appeared in a trilingual edition in 2019 in Cairo by Kottob Khan ed. The French translation has been published in Geneva by Héros Limite ed. in May 2022, coupled with her second collection, Jamila.

She co-manages the Shaeirat Project and is the director of the Athens Palestine Film Festival. Her work is translated into French, English, Italian, Spanish and German.

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100 Refutations: Day 59 | InTranslation (intranslation.brooklynrail.org)
 

Carmen Peña Visbal, born in Barranquilla, Colombia, is a poet, journalist, lawyer, and expert in strategic communications. Visbal has studied human resources at the Industrial University of Santander; law at the Free University of Colombia; human rights at the ESAP (Escuela Superior de Administracion Publica); security and national defense at the War College of Colombia (Escuela Superior de Guerra); criminal law and forensic sciences at the Catholic University of Colombia; senior management at Nueva Granada Military University; and political management and governance at the University of the Rosary. She has held numerous leadership positions in journalism, government, and consulting. Visbal’s collections of poetry include Dite (1994), Las vestiduras de mi alma (1998), Mi voz no te alcanza (2008), and Todo silencio es esencial (unpublished). She has also been included in several anthologies such as Poseia Colombiana del siglo XX escrita por mujeres, Vol. 2 and Siete Poetas: Dreams of a country at peace without mines.

1
When it rains blood – Reem Sleem (fedia.io)
 

When you walk under the rain, take off your shoes and walk barefoot. Let your feet feel the water on the ground, let them soak a little. Let your feet sink into the mud, feel its softness and play with it using your toes.

But whatever you do, do not look up at the sky. That gray sky with its black clouds. You will see death hovering above you, smiling a terrifying smile. You will see deadly smoke in the air. You will see the souls of children gazing at you with pity. You will see the rain turning red, mixed with blood.

You will not like the sight of the sky, so don’t look at it. Look at the ground, at the puddle of water. You will see your reflection in it. Look closely and remember who you are. This is you, and this is the land where you grew up.

This puddle, debris will fall on it at any moment and might hit or kill you. Run away from it and stop at another puddle. Look at your reflection again. Remember who you are, then run again.

And when the rain stops and the puddles dry up, look up at the sky. Have you understood what has happened to you? Have you finally realized what is going on around you? Have you grasped that you are forgotten, perhaps even dead to those people? Those who stripped you of your identity and took away your safe refuge. Those who killed your family and broke your spirit. The time has come.

You will go and fight so that the sky returns to its blue, the clouds to white, and the rain to clear!

You will fight so that the sun rises, plants grow, and you breathe oxygen instead of gunpowder.

And either you return victorious, or you do not return at all.

source: https://wearenotnumbers.org/when-it-rains-blood/

Reem Sleem is a student in the Department of English Language, Literature, and Translation at Al-Azhar University. She is ambitious, loves learning languages, ​​and has a passion for reading personal development books and novels of all types.

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100 Refutations: Day 58 | InTranslation (intranslation.brooklynrail.org)
 

Virgilio Dávila (1869-1943) was born in Toa Baja, Puerto Rico. Though he experimented with a Romantic style of verse, he is often mentioned as the primary representative of the Modernist movement in Puerto Rico. The influence of Rubén Darío, for example, can be clearly noted throughout his work. He devoted many of his poems to the indigenous beauty of his native island and unique syncretic culture therein. He was widely published by the time he died in Bayamón in 1943.

100 Refutations: Day 48 | InTranslation in c/poetry@fedia.io
[–] testing@fedia.io 1 points 9 months ago

from the article:

A Blessing [From a 1902 text]

Before you, I offer my copal —it is for you. Offer it to the father —it is for you, raise it up to the father.

I shall fulfill, once more, my offering of pozol for you —it is for you, offer it to the father. Before you I lay my gift, once more, for your joy. I offer it so that my gift does not become spoiled, so it remains whole, remains worthy —that is at the head—of my gift, for you.

May my gift not break! May my gift not crack!

Watch me laying down my gift, Father! So that I do not sink into fever fires! I have placed you in the new fire pit, watch me, once more, lay down a gift for your joy, watch me lay down a gift for my children’s souls. That they may never be penned in, that they may never be held captive by illness, by cold, by fever. Come in then, walk toward my children, and heal them.

100 Refutations: Day 47 | InTranslation in c/poetry@fedia.io
[–] testing@fedia.io 1 points 9 months ago

from the article:

Behind My Voice

Behind my voice —listen, listen— another voice sings.

It comes from behind, from far. It comes from the buried mouths and it sings.

They say they are not dead —listen to them, listen to them— while the voice rises remembers them and sings.

Listen, listen: another voice sings.

They say they live now in your eyes, sustain them with your eyes, with your words.

So that they are not lost. So that they do not fall.

They are not only memory, they are open to life open wide.

Listen, listen: another voice sings.

100 Refutations: Day 46 | InTranslation in c/poetry@fedia.io
[–] testing@fedia.io 1 points 9 months ago

from the article:

The Madman’s Skull

They cut off the head of some unlucky madman who, in a somnambulist’s tone, used to recite his monologues, and they threw it in the garden where, in the sweltering hour,

he would speak to roses and red carnations, before, in the asylum, from some unknown disease, he’d died,

then that mass of cells and phosphorus, transformed itself. Shed the hair, and the muscle of his face,

birds pecked out his eyes, and the sun made the skull into an oven, cooking

the head, from whence gruesome, fateful worms emerged and from whence a thousand gold-leafed butterflies also. Later, when the asylum’s gardener,

holding it between his calloused fingers, shook the skull, strange sparks shone in hollow sockets

and the jaw bones rattled as if laughing.

100 Refutations: Day 45 | InTranslation in c/poetry@fedia.io
[–] testing@fedia.io 1 points 9 months ago

from the article:

The Beautiful Text

Turned kamikaze, the poem was a bloody gob of spit, riddled with the tuberculosis of history that burst in the empty whiteness of my heart

Omen

There, where your night occurs where the voracious blackness of your night finds you time, with inordinate strength, will throw a stone

Mothers Arrange Their Aches at Night by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat in c/poetry@fedia.io
[–] testing@fedia.io 1 points 9 months ago

from the article:

Mothers Arrange Their Aches at Night

Joint pain, high sugar, rheumatic ailments, a boy who missed school because of a cold: mothers feel sadness for mysterious reasons, like sadness over other mothers who stand in public streets holding photos of their sons’ well-groomed faces with sideburns and mustaches, waiting for the cameras to capture them and their chapped hands. Mothers who hold up the house beams, open windows, air out carpets on roofs, expel moths from the hearts of abandoned mattresses in case a visitor arrives. Mothers, who stipulate no conditions for return, arrange their aches at night and wash their daughters’ hair with oil, in bed they toss and turn. And when they fall asleep they snore and give the house a name and a voice.

Translated by Fady Joudah. From You Can Be the Last Leaf (Milkweed Editions, 2022) by Maya Abu Al- Hayyat and Fady Joudah. Copyright © 2022 by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat and Fady Joudah. Reprinted with the permission of Fady Joudah.

100 Refutations: Day 44 | InTranslation in c/poetry@fedia.io
[–] testing@fedia.io 1 points 9 months ago

from the article:

Veritas

Within a mad forest, Cold and humid like a cistern, Goes an old man holding a lantern, leaning on his walking stick and looking for truth. His hand quivers, and the light with it.

Tired, on he goes, faithless. Then, stops, looks… always, nothing. The forest is empty!… “Let me find a true lie, that would be truth enough, my God!”

There are also, in the forest, many children. Carrying happily, every one, his own truth. And on that truth in turn, when over-turned, a new truth turned over, that truthfully says that it lies. The old man trembles. The sun is sick. It snows.

Then he sits down and says, “The forest is empty: Truth is, truth doesn’t exist.” Then he contemplates the nonsense notion, And sadly exclaims: “And if that’s a lie as well, my God?…”

Doha Kahlout: "Images from the War" in c/poetry@fedia.io
[–] testing@fedia.io 1 points 9 months ago

from the article:

Images from the War

1

With half a memory and ruined images, I turn over the past, repeating names that have no sound. Anxiety echoes back. The streets revolve, and the houses in my mind revolve, empty except for fear. I leave behind the years of experience, the tears and laughter, the farewells and encounters, and I run. Survival is a lost horizon, hope a device for the needy.

I fall into regret. For the meaning of life I go back to the drawing board, one foot tracing the steps, the other resisting missteps. In faces, a dictionary of fortitude, a thesaurus of longing. In conversation, stories amputated by a stray explosive. And in me a strange heart, an eye unable to contain its tears, a footstep hobbled by not knowing what now.

I carried all that came before and all that I’ve become. About my history I schooled others and was schooled. I was changed by this endurance, by hard necessity. Words grew in helpless silence. The ordeal shaped me. The body was besieged by a house unknown to it, by roads that do not lead to it. But hope leaks between our conversations. We chew it, chew its promises. For a long time we believe it and we don’t let go.

2

I call out the powerless names, the narrow definitions. A pain resulting from restriction and from thought. A river releasing the current of its language into me, plunging me into the mind of the ancients. With a pair of clipped wings they say: My throat. I crouch, overcome by the weight. I refuse answers. The group photograph rejects me.

I drag my stubborn footsteps, pave my path. The river is angry, slapping my heart. I no longer care about footsteps, about meaning, about the knocks on the door, about my experiences and mistakes and missteps, my satisfactions and my grievances. I cross with neither my heart nor the river. On my back I carry frightened voices, asleep on my shoulder. To the tree from which I dropped at the beginning of time, with a color and a name and a voice that tries, I ask: Who am I? The tree hears nothing, says nothing. I say: What is war? A stab at immortality. A lust for it. I carry the answer and the explanation. I turn the facts over and accept them. I set off like a bird that knows its expanse and its nest, heart full and eyes hungry for salvation. Astonishment fences me round. The body is dug with the voice of our masters. They have eaten what remained of longing. Reassurance dazzles me: I see it waving at me behind the fence of amazement. There it is; I recognize it, but it cannot reach me.

3

After a brief death, television was revived for the purpose of broadcasting names, each one snatched away by a weapon between inexperienced hands, and to convey to us—lest we forget—the moment memory was demolished and the capitals wept.

Red is a color that belongs to us. The martyred, the injured. Massacre. Blitz. And the color of the line that mourns us hastily, in shame.

Papers are our mission. We gather what may establish our names, so prone to being forgotten, and our birth certificates so that no confusion may exist as to our age. Then we remember that we have lived through four wars, and our miracle is survival.

The voices are heavy with reproach. We put questions to the gods and whatever lies beyond. The voices are questions going to and ceaselessly fro. There is a babble under your breath. All eyes huddle round. There is only one answer you are seeking: when will the house stop spinning?

Calm is a cruel warning sign, a lurking we know well. We repeat as many verses as we can, then we test our hearing. If you can hear, you are saved, and if you cannot hear, you become news.

Numbers are a waking nightmare, a hammer on our fingers. We count everything into which life has entered and which death crept in behind through the back door.

Ceasefire, an exit from one war into another. For war traverses us and finds a sister here. A single blaze that does not shed its burden and does not let us go.

Doha Kahlout is a poet and teacher from Gaza. Her first collection of poems, Ashbah (“Similarities”), was published in 2018. She was selected for a residency at Reid Hall in Paris as part of the Displaced Artists Initiative, co-sponsored by the Columbia Global Center and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, but has not been able to take up her place since the Israeli invasion of Rafah and the closure of its border crossing in May 2024.

Yasmine Seale is a British-Syrian writer and translator. Among her translations from Arabic are The Annotated Arabian Nights and Something Evergreen Called Life, a poetry collection by the Sudanese writer and activist Rania Mamoun. She is currently living in New York, where she is a Visiting Professor at Columbia University

100 Refutations: Day 43 | InTranslation in c/poetry@fedia.io
[–] testing@fedia.io 1 points 9 months ago

from the article:

Poison

For my clumsy back, Expanding into the dirt, To my footsteps beneath my footsteps To the breath of touch.

Limits in high relief, outside limits.

The shadow for my shadow, my back.

Stunned by beauty, breathless in the silk In death’s bay.

My eyelashes fall heavy, re-touching The water, the repose Diamond-shaped, like a fractured Christ.

100 Refutations: Day 42 | InTranslation in c/poetry@fedia.io
[–] testing@fedia.io 1 points 9 months ago

from the article:

Dignificada

At night, in the distance, a scream In the south, they say, “It is the voice of silence” In this wardrobe, a cat, trapped Because a woman Because a woman Defended her right

From the mountains, the voice of lightning It’s the clear thunder of truth In this holy life wherein no-one forgives no-thing But if a woman But if a woman Fights for her dignity

[…]

I followed your steps girl-child Until I reached the mountain Then I followed God’s path In the company of animas

Oh, dark-skinned girl, Oh, my dark-skinned girl I won’t forget you

Beautiful Mother, pray for her Loving Mother, pray for her Merciful Mother, pray for her

“Dignificada” performed by Lila Downs. BBC Newsnight interview with Lila Downs.

100 Refutations: Day 41 | InTranslation in c/poetry@fedia.io
[–] testing@fedia.io 1 points 9 months ago

from the article:

Song without title

There, sings the torcacita on the branches of the ceiba tree. There, also, the knife, the charretero, the small kukum and the sensontle! All a-joy The birds of the Lord God Likewise, also, the Lady has her birds: the small turtledove, the small cardinal, the chinchin– bacal and the hummingbird too.

These are the birds of the Beautiful, Lady—she who is the owner.

For if there be joy amidst animals, why then, are our hearts not full too? If the same are they at dawn: Bellisimos! All a-song, all a-playing running through their heads.

“Luna de Xelajú”, performed by Gaby Moreno.

Do you know what getting bombed by an F16 feels like? in c/poetry@fedia.io
[–] testing@fedia.io 1 points 9 months ago

from the article:

Tala Abu Rahmeh: Do you know what getting bombed by an F16 feels like?

It sounds like the air is getting sucked from the world and you are about to stop breathing. The plane threads itself into the sky, sound dipping in and out. A small hope in a second of silence snatched away by its roar like a lion inching closer to its prey. You line your shoes by the door. You close your eyes when the bomb drops to conjure up your grandmother’s peach tree, and how she yelled at you for eating them while they were still green, the tangy flavor of unripe grapes, your mother’s hand as it holds yours, her finger rubbing your palm, the smell of fresh bread on Friday morning, your brother’s stubbornness, how beautiful it was to fight about small things, like how messy his room was. Now it might be turned into rubble. You hear the thud and know it’s not your turn yet, because when the bomb drops on you you hear nothing.

Tala Abu Rahmeh is a therapist, writer and translator based in New York City. Born to a refugee father and an internally displaced mother, Tala grew up between Jordan and Palestine. You can find her writing in LA Review of Books, Enizagam, 34th Parallel, Blast Furnace, Timberline Review, Kweli, Penn Center USA, and most recently in We Call to the Eye & to the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Descent (Persea Books, 2023). Tala holds an MFA in Poetry from American University and a master’s in social work from Columbia University.

100 Refutations: Day 40 | InTranslation in c/poetry@fedia.io
[–] testing@fedia.io 1 points 9 months ago

from the article:

The Anguished Tam-Tam

It is ridiculous to play the flute In a country where the national Instrument is the powerful assôtor*

*“The assôtor […] is the largest drum in Haiti. Its low, heavy sound can travel for several kilometers in the mountains. It is a traditional instrument in Vodou ceremonies. During the Haitian Revolution, when French troops sought to regain control of newly liberated regions, Toussaint Louverture reportedly made use of the assôtor to send coded messages between the mountains and valleys.” (Poetry of Haitian Independence, edited by Doris Y. Kadish and Deborah Jenson, p. 278.)

A performance by a Haitian drum ensemble.

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