Previously discussing Adonis: Selected Poems from the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist, we’ve noted with admiration how translator Khaled Mattawa has forged powerful poems that stand as unique entities distilled from the source of Adonis’ works in Arabic. As we look again at an excerpt from another selection from this collection, we continue to marvel … as we catch our breath.
What an imagining of what a poet can be and what a poet can achieve! In the first of the two stanzas drawn from the longer poem, the tambourine is a jaunty symbol of music and rhythm and percussion, rousing the listener to motion. Then, from one line to the next, that symbol is shattered … and yet …
“his throat is a fire named God”
… the poet carries on defiantly. That momentum carries on into the second stanza of this selection, which vividly depicts how a poet can uphold passionately historical truths. When the poet “rains blood”, which can be understood as the emblematic words of his (or her) poetry, others can take that blood, those words as their banner, their inspiration.
The poem salutes Jacques Berque, who clearly had a profound effect on Adonis. Berque, who died in 1995, was a French Islamic scholar and sociologist whose expertise focused on the decolonisation of Algeria and Morocco. Not long before his death, his translation from Arabic to French of Adonis’ poems in the collection Soleils seconds was published.
Mattawa has conveyed strikingly the importance of Berque to Adonis to English-speaking poetry lovers, at the same time painting a shining and universal portrait of what a poet can stand for.
