by Hilary Plum | Contributing Writer
The Silence That Remains
Selected Poems
Ghassan Zaqtan
Translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah
Copper Canyon Press, 2017
âAs if we had been thereâ: this line guides us into Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtanâs newest volume in English, our presence remaining in the subjunctive mood. That we are as if there attests both to our own statusâas readers of literature in translationâand to the displacements within history and memory given form in this poetâs magnificent work. In these poems, any event, any place, any memory bears the shadow of the subjunctive: of the history that didnât occur; of what is no longer ours; of how relentlessly memory transforms presence into absence. This shadowâas ifâdefines what, in the light of any moment, we may know. The line quoted comes from the poem âA Swallowâ: âAs if we were together / as if we had been there / with the dead who are there / as if over there.â This stanza considers the roleâthe place?âof the poem: as if a poem could offer a togetherness that wasnât, a presence that is no more, in a place lost then or now; even the absence of the dead isnât here. In these swift lines, we glimpse the knowledge of the fleeting, of the less-than-present, to which Zaqtanâs work is dedicated.
The Silence That Remains, Fady Joudahâs translation of Zaqtanâs earlier workâwith selections covering 1982 to 2003âwas published this summer by Copper Canyon Press. This is Zaqtanâs third appearance in English: Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, Joudahâs translation of Zaqtanâs more recent work, won the international Griffin Poetry Prize in 2013. The two volumes illuminate one another, each helping us to read the other: the unsimple spareness of the earlier poems; the suggestive, expansive precision of the later, such as the gorgeous âPretextsâ or the long poem âAlone and the River Before Me.â Describing the Past, a novella translated by Samuel Wilder, appeared from Seagull Books in 2016âan intricately elusive narrative set in the Karameh refugee camp, where Zaqtan himself was a child, before its destruction by Israeli forces in 1968 (Zaqtan was born in 1954, in Beit Jala, his family refugees).
Joudahâs foreword to The Silence That Remains notes that some of the early books from which he translates are barely, if at all, available in Arabic, and the originals he worked from were already subject to Zaqtanâs later revisions and republications. Thus many poems included in this bilingual edition do not readily find reflections in any mirror, as Joudah compellingly puts it, but â[inhabit] an in-between space where silences are performed. A genomeâs dance with its phenotypeâ; and so this work is âuncorrected, so to speak, by what would betray the silences it generates.â As readers of these poems in translation, their originals neither here nor there, we find ourselves then fully and only âas if we had been thereâ: a state that the poem both describes and embodiesâits text steadying momentarily, in your hands, here, while testifying to its own absences, there, then, now.
In other words, the line from the poem âThe Strangerâs Songâ that haunts meââAnd something of life on the back of the hand / was narrating / forgettingââat once describes life and text, each a form of forgetting, each eluding knowledgeâs grasp. Throughout these poems, the call and response between here and over there, between now and then, seems to be echoed by a movement between touch and sight, as means to know what is close, what is far, neither knowledge quite complete. âA Swallowâ concludes âas if over there // is as close as our habit / of not coaching our fingers to see / ⊠and the villages / ⊠wish they never were.â The final couplet doubles loss: the loss of the villages so great to bear in reality that it is wished preemptively into the subjunctive mood.
The poems in Silence comprehend a breadth of Palestinian history, the twenty-some years they cover and decades priorâwar, dispossession, occupation, exile, revolution, siege, resistance. One could call this a poetry of witness (as the jacket text suggests), though the term, with its simple sense of presence, seems too one-dimensional for this poet especially. Reading these pages, one often feels that war is everywhere, but when is it? It might be on a âCalm Day,â a day after yesterday:
No dead on the streets today
is a calm day,
traffic is normal,
thereâs ample room for the procession
of yesterdayâs dead
War might take form as an aftermath that is also a future wound, displacing our bodies from themselves, via metonymy, and into harmâs way: âThat was when we found our shirts taut / toward the enemiesâ arrowsâ (âOld Reasonsâ), or in âTheir Absence,â when âwhat remainsâ are âtheir shirts // banners that tug / only at trees // and are not retrieved / a triumph.â The only triumph is that the remnants of those who are gone may still be seen, these shirts the echoes of bodies that were here. âWhen the singers begin their slow departure / from refrains,â the poem âNight Watchâ begins, and when may this be? To begin to depart from repetition is an instant nearly impossible to name. Here ârefrainâ carries wonderfully its two senses in English: a verb meaning to restrain, from to bridle; and a noun for what is repeated in song, evolved from a verb meaning to break off. So that in ârefrainâ breaking off now means resuming, recurring; and repetition bears an intimation of force. And when, the poem goes on, âtheyâre done with all that,â that is when âweâll dig / a small time for us in rock / and hide our childrenâs toys in its palms, / hide all fragile things.â All this âbefore we go out to meet the raiding wave.â Here we hide our fragile things not from time, as one might expect, but in time, poignantly: it is only within time that one may know what is fragile, if only for the moment it lasts. And now we ride out, a we that will break against âthe raiding waveâ: from this battle some of us will not return; we find ourselves among âall fragile things.â The poem gives a sense that this night is itself a refrain; the raiding wave has come before and will come again.
The later poem âCollective Deathâ picks up in what might be a moment after âNight Watchâ ends:
Evening didnât come without its darkness
we slept roofless but with cover
and no survivor came in the night
to tell us of the death of others
The first line tells us, simply, that the impossible didnât occur: this evening was as dark as evening. The next lines arrange themselves to suggest that the others survived, and this was why no one bore news of their death; yet our reading corrects itself to realize that all the others may have died, no survivor left to speak of it. The poem ends in a state of timeâs end, not a single but a collective death, the end of a peopleâs continuation, the end of us: âthe women gave birth / only to those who passed / and the women will not give birth.â
The question of who we are and what will become of us resonates, as in âSign,â whose refrain serves to describe the exile that Zaqtan and generations of Palestinians have endured, as well as the exile from the past, singular and collective, that time ceaselessly enforces.
Cities changed us
elevators changed us
the slanted roads swung us about
And then:
journalism changed us
and the narrow small rooms
our conversations
We find ourselves changed, to ourselves and each other; the places weâve been have changed usââuntil,â the poem concludes, âwe ended up here / in this chrysalis.â This conclusion reverses what had seemed to be the poemâs direction, leaving us not after but before a moment of change. We are changed until we reach the moment before change: a chrysalis. The poetâs reversal here is both playful and prophetic: change will not cease; each sign signifies its imminence. Whatâs here and now is already only as if here and now; again the present awaits a future in which it must know itself, changed.
Zaqtanâs poetics of the fleeting illuminate not only how history and its forces are lived, as illustrated above, but the vivid traces that daily intimacies leave in us or make of us. âWe Are There,â a love poem (it suits Zaqtanâs conversation with himself and his readers that a later poem is titled âWe Werenât Thereâ), begins âThis is what I say now that sheâs taken everythingâ // The things that only I see will stay behind,â a solitude that reappears, changed, later: âOnly the things I see will stay behind.â The poemâs last lineâwhich characteristically both follows from and interrupts the syntax that precedes itâcelebrates and mourns the love once known: âand also that weâre together, alone, in the poem.â The poem is the place where she and I still are, together, where I may know the past again by describing it; and yet in the poem she has already âtaken everything,â and the poem is never a place where we may live. The poem is always there, but when may it be here? âWhen you grow up poetry will be your house,â a line in âAlso the Houseâ advises, a poem that begins with an evocation of the lost camp at Karamehâdisplacement imminentâand slyly notes that âI donât remember who was it that said / to me or anotherâ this line of advice, its tone at once encouraging and desperate. The poem is always only becoming a place to live, always announcing its loss of what it knows or means, its future incompletion, as in âAlways,â which describes how the poet reads âthe poem / the one that was supposed to have been finished / [ . . . ] and it wasnât finishedâ:
For seven years
I finish it every morning then doze off
and by evening
I always catch it
opening its doors on the sly
and calling talk in
The phrase âon the slyâ summons the question of how we, readers in English, enter these poems, through Joudahâs translation. Joudahâs agile chattiness and his ear for silence grant these poems both their spacious sense of absence and their quick presence; here the lyric subject moves through syntax like breath, vital motion more than stable center. One feels (I do not read Arabic) that phrases like âon the slyâ may belong to this translator particularly, as might lines like âYour morning, that bird of slow talkâ or âyour house visitors are a bunch of temptersâ (both from âThe Strangerâs Songâ), with the striking effect of these combined adjectives and nouns. Joudah often evocatively runs a word or phrase counter to idiomatic familiarity; or he asks that words bear the full burden of the multiplicity of their meanings. For example, the startling conclusion of âStrangerâs SongâââYour loverâs window / has not slept / or overlooked youââknows how âoverlookâ means both to ignore and to look down upon from above; both to see and to choose not to see. The tension between these meanings and the slippery negation (ânotâ) the syntax catches them inâinspiring and ending hope, turning the loverâs face awayâdeepens the absence of the loverâs gaze.
Critics versed in translation theory could usefully describe some of these characteristics as serving to âforeignize,â rather than âdomesticate,â the work in English: slight ruffles in language that return you to the thought of the poem you are not reading, the poem in its original language. Yet the complex displacements in presence that Zaqtanâs and Joudahâs work performs seem to anticipate such description, so that, as in the best cases, poetry becomes a means to comprehend theory, rather than vice versa. Credit for the readerâs attunement is due especially to the translatorâs foreword, an essay whose ambition exceeds the usual, more workmanlike role of such texts, carefully and insistently opening the poems to further interpretation, informing our readings but not determining them. Joudah considers Zaqtanâs use of silence, describing how âAcross Zaqtanâs poems silences inhabit syntax, translocate within and alter it,â and extends from this to say, âThe silences in this book are as universal and collective as they are individual and singular. Silence here is Palestinian silence.â âHow does one write Palestinian silence into English?â is Joudahâs next sentence, and of course the book that follows is then an answer, an âanswerâa translation at bestâ[that] demands a willingness to receive and accept.â
Thus asked to receive, to read the echoes of silence, the reader hears again the words of âNot for My Sakeâ: âspeech and its loads / are not mine / before me / all of it was.â In the face of the immensity of this taskâto hear the silences of history and memory; to receive the speech that is not yours; to have survived, for now, as if for this moment, before the textâthe poem refuses to leave us alone. The poem offers its voice. âYou have no clue,â the poem âThe Loverâs Songâ begins, âI visit you every night / to tell you my latest dream // Together we sit.â Together poet and reader watch someone else watch over the dead: âThe song isnât ours / the fire in the plains not ours, / someoneâs guarding the dead there.â Of course this moment is yet another as if, the poem presenting a dream it insists we visit each night, escaping and returning together, as if we could ask of one another, as if we could ask of the passing form of the text: âLife passed / donât / leave me hereâ (âA Voiceâ).
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Hilary Plum is the author of the novel Strawberry Fields (2018), winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose; the work of nonfiction Watchfires (2016); and the novel They Dragged Them Through the Streets (2013). She teaches creative writing at Cleveland State University and serves as associate director of the CSU Poetry Center. With Zach Savich she edits Rescue Pressâs Open Prose Series.
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