An Ocean of Tears, The Chest, Between the Loss & the Delay, and How Do I Tell You I Love You? by Mariam Michtawi

An Ocean of Tears, The Chest, Between the Loss & the Delay, and How Do I Tell You I Love You? by Mariam Michtawi Transference Jake Gordon 0 1 0 Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, International and Area Studies Commons , Linguistics 1 Commons, Modern Languages Commons , Modern Literature Commons , Near Eastern Languages Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/transference Societies Commons, Poetry Commons, and the Reading and Language Commons Recommended Citation Between my blame for you And my desire to see your eyes Lies an ocean of tears In vain, I try to forge a way But can only live, drowning every day Jake Gordon The Chest I kept the treasure of the past Inside a purple chest The days and years whiled I overcame every trial And I am convinced that my chest was the champion of my victories Then one stubborn, harsh, rebellious year A tsunami swept away all that was mine Everything But the chest was left behind The legacy of my love I hastened to it I began to contemplate it With the love I held for my homeland I wiped the dust from it Showered it with kisses Held it close This chest of joy Treasure of life Love of the years Friendship of childhood Sweetness and perfume of days… Gleefully, I danced upon it Barefoot for hours One of my daily rituals And for the first time I resolved to open it It was my one chance to live again I opened it carefully, with great longing As a lover longs for life But the chest resisted me a little, Concerned for my bliss upon feeling the shock Its screeching shook me to my core As though it wept for my inevitable misfortune I did not yield to it For my dreams slumbered inside I fought back, opened it, and with it a great grave My chest was empty... Empty... Empty... I regarded it a while A long while I left it open For the bats of time Then softly, I turned my back and departed, Stripped of everything, even my soul Jake Gordon Between the Loss & the Delay Between the loss and the delay This day Is the beginning of the end I feel compelled To retreat from love Retreat from writing For my words have been choked By your sandy, desert winds I have lost and given up And each day I delay the announcement of my loss to the next The days, the weeks, and the months go by And the delay transforms Into an imaginary friend I conceal his falseness To conceal my pain, My failure, And my crippling loneliness For a powerful bond of love has formed Between the loss and the delay My spirit is tired Above your Bermudian land Set it free Let it glide Through the sensual coral reefs Let it float Above the water on a leaf If only it would teach you The language of the sea How it has longed to sail Beyond the beauty Beyond your secrets How do I tell you I love you? While the fear and the shock Turn my long hair white While on the balcony The scent of jasmine and the smell of bullets tear each other to pieces While the dust Rips apart my new dress The shame chokes me And amidst the truce, our lovers’ meeting has been taken hostage How do I tell you I love you? How can I possibly say it? While the blood digs trenches In your innocent face Come to me, and I will clean your wounds with my forehead Come to me, and I will gather your sweat with my hands Come to me, and I will take you in my arms O love of my life... Come to me... I can scent the traces of a homeland in you still My interest in the effects that the agency of interpretation and translation can have on an interactive performance of poetry is what led me to translate these four Arabic prose poems. They are taken from a collection entitled Halloween AlFiraaq Al-Abadei by the Lebanese poet Mariam Michtawi. I was struck by Mariam’s very distinct performance style, a style typical of Arab poets and going back to the roots of Arabic poetry, which was performed in cultures of primary and secondary oral literature. Poems were read at tribal gatherings named majālis, which played an important role in village communities. These performances were tempered by mnemonic devices, including repetition, rhyme, epithet, and alliteration. Mariam’s poetry is many times removed from this kind of oral culture, and yet her style of performance resembles it. She speaks slowly and clearly in a voice laden with emotion and stress. It is almost sermon-like which serves to create a mystical feeling, impressing the poem upon the audience. Furthermore, she does not shackle herself to the written form of her poem but rather departs from it, repeating lines to add power and emphasis and occasionally adding or omitting lines. From a translation perspective, this is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, one is obliged to attempt a faithful rendering of the original, and yet how to accomplish that for a poem that is different each time it is performed? On the other, the fluidity and creativity of this kind of poetry is both attractive and liberating. My approach therefore has been two-fold. First, to reprodu (...truncated)