Gibran Khalil Gibran & Mikhail Naimy: Contemporary Arabic Poetry (an anthology)

Gibran Khalil Gibran & Mikhail Naimy: Contemporary Arabic Poetry (an anthology)

Today we introduce an anthology of great contemporary Arab poets, which in future will occupy our central pages with translations by Leonor Martínez Martín. We begin with Gibran Khalil Gibran and Mikhail Naimy, two of the most important figures of twentieth-century Arabic poetry.

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My Soul Offered Me Advice – Gibran Khalil Gibran

My soul offered me advice, instructing me to drink what cannot be wrung out or poured into glasses, what my hands cannot touch or my lips cannot feel. Before my soul offered me this advice, my thirst was a small spark in a mountain of ash and I quenched it by drinking from lakes, slurping from the water gathered in troughs. But now my desire exceeds what is in my glass, my burning thirst exceeds what I can drink, my loneliness exceeds my intoxication. I am never satisfied when I drink, but in this inextinguishable heat there is a constant happiness.

***

My soul offered me advice, instructing me to feel for what is immaterial, what is indestructible; it made me realise that we feel only half of what we are capable of imagining, that we can grasp only what we desire. Before my soul offered me this advice, I would content myself with warmth if I was cold; with cold if I was hot; and with either of the two if I felt weak. But now my suppressed feelings have grown and have become delicate clouds that cut through everything that exists before us, mixing with what is hidden from us. 

***

My soul offered me advice, instructing me to breathe in scents that have not been scattered by winds or dispersed by censers. Before my soul offered me this advice, I desired fragrances that I searched out in gardens, in bottles, in incense burners. But now I breathe in what cannot be burnt or poured out and I fill my chest with pure air, which does not come from any garden of this world, which is not carried on any breeze of this wind.

***

My soul offered me advice, instructing me to stay awake while my neighbours sleep and to sleep while they are awake. Before my soul offered me this advice, I did not, in my stupor, see their dreams, and neither did they, in their indifference, observe mine. But now I soar in my sleep only when they are watching over me and they fly in their dreams only when I can celebrate their liberation.

***

My soul offered me advice, instructing me that the lamp I carry is not my own; that the songs I sing were not born inside of me; that, though I am with the light, I am not the light; that though I was a lute, bound tightly by strings, I am not the one who plays it.

***

My soul offered me advice, my brother, and instructed me. And your soul offered you advice, instructing you – so you and I are very similar, we are alike. The difference between us is not only that I speak about what is inside of me and that there is, in what I say, a bit of impertinence. You silence what is inside of you and your silence comes off as a virtue.

Commentary

I have not been able to find the Arabic source for this poem, but we do have access to an English translation by Andrew Ghareeb from the 1930s (see here, p.21). Leonor Martínez Martín’s Spanish version is a redacted one: Gibran’s poem has fourteen stanzas (all of which are translated by Ghareeb), while Martínez Martín selects six of these for translation here. 

The two translations mirror each other reasonably closely in most aspects, although there are some noticeable differences. The first stanza that Martínez Martín translates (which is the fourth stanza in Ghareeb’s translation), for instance, contains an extra line at the end, which clarifies the meaning of the preceding (slightly more vague) line; this penultimate line, too, differs between the translations, with Ghareeb writing ‘my strong yearning has become my cup,’ which in Martínez Martín’s version is ‘my desire exceeds [supera] what is in my glass.’ How the two translators arrived at these two versions is hard to tell without access to the Arabic source. Differences of this sort are evident, too, in Martínez Martín’s third stanza (Ghareeb’s sixth stanza), with Ghareeb’s being much more detailed and specific than Martínez Martín’s (‘the fragrance from a plant,’ ‘jars of sweet-smelling herbs and vessels of incense,’ and so on). 

Perhaps most striking, though, is the difference in tone between the translations’ final stanzas. Ghareeb’s narrator is reasonably conciliatory with the imagined ‘brother’ to which these lines are addressed, equating the one’s speaking with the other’s silence (‘you guard what is within you, and your guardianship is as goodly as my much speaking’). Martínez Martín’s narrator is much more confrontational, as intimated by the ‘bit of impertinence’ (poco de impertinencia) they admit creeps into their speech; the narrator appears much more keen here to denigrate the silence of the ‘brother,’ which ‘comes off as’ – but is evidently not – ‘virtue.’ The possible didactic value of Gibran’s poem is therefore much more clearly articulated in Martínez Martín’s translation: the readers to whom Gibran addresses his work should, like him, not content themselves with the world they see around them and should push themselves to look beyond the visible and the tangible, to enquire about the ‘immaterial’ and the ‘indestructible.’

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Oh, Sea! – Mikhail Naimy

Do you not get tired, you murmur that comes, goes, comes?

What do you want? Where do you go, only not to stay there?

It is as if there are two hearts within you: one a slave, the other free.

The one wants to flee from the other, but it cannot flee.

Oh, sea, sea! Tell me: is there good and evil within you?

Is there faith in your calm and fear in your consternation?

Ease as you advance and hardship as you retreat?

Misery as you fall and pride as you rise?

Sadness in your silence and happiness in the noise you make?

Oh, sea, sea! Tell me: is there good and evil within you?

I stopped and the night is dark: the sea comes, goes,

And neither any sea nor any land answered me,

And when my night turned grey and dawn blackened the horizon

I heard a river singing: “In life there is falling and rising;

In people there is good and evil; in the sea, ebb and flow.”

Commentary

The Arabic source of Leonor Martínez Martín’s Spanish translation is available here; though there are a couple of interesting differences between them (and between these and my own English translation), which I detail below, the length of the poem and its lines mean that Martínez Martín’s translation is reasonably close to the source. Mikhail Naimy’s Arabic itself is quite evocative. The opening line – amā taʿabta? ʿajīj / karrun fa-farrun fa-karru (‘Are you not tired? You rumble that attacks, retreats, attacks’) – makes beautiful use of alliteration and repetition to highlight the sound of the sea and stress the threat it seems to pose; this is lost slightly in Martínez Martín’s Spanish (murmullo viene, va, viene), but this at least uses alliteration in a way not dissimilar to Naimy’s Arabic. Working from the Spanish, it is hard to recreate this – both tone and alliteration – in English.

Two lines of Martínez Martín’s translation have proven particularly challenging to translate, a result, I think, of her slightly misunderstanding – or misrepresenting? – Naimy’s Arabic. The first occurs in line eight. Martínez Martín’s choice of mezquindad (miserliness, tight-fistedness, stinginess; itself derived from Arabic miskīn), and its juxtaposition to orgullo (pride, or, more in more explicitly negative terms, arrogance), here seems slightly out of place with the other noun pairings in this section of the poem, which are clearly antonyms of one another (see, for example, facilidad and dificultad in line seven). The Real Academia’s Diccionario de la lengua española notes that the adjective mezquino – whence mezquindad – usually means ‘miserly’ or ‘tight-fisted’ in contemporary usage, but has older (‘rarely used’ or ‘not used’) meanings including ‘poor,’ ‘in need,’ ‘unfortunate’ and ‘unlucky’ (see here). It is these older meanings that I think Martínez Martín is evoking here – not least because these are more in line with Naimy’s Arabic, where the word dhull is used (‘lowness, lowliness; disgrace, shame, humiliation; humility, humbless, meekness, submissiveness’ – see Hans Wehr). My choice, ‘misery,’ tries to reflect both the ‘miserliness’ of Martínez Martín’s translation and the ‘lowliness’ of Naimy’s source. 

The second challenge is in line fourteen, the poem’s penultimate line. Again, the noun pairings in the second part of the line (pliegue and resurrección) seem quite out of place with the obvious antonyms that follow them (bien/mal; flujo/reflujo); what does a ‘fold’ or a ‘crease’ have to do with the ‘resurrection’ of a dead body? Looking to Naimy’s Arabic makes matters clearer. The terms Naimy uses have double meanings: ṭayy (which Martínez Martín renders as pliegue) can mean both the ‘fold’ or ‘pleat’ of a garment and, more generally, the ‘concealment’ or ‘hiding’ of an object or person; meanwhile, nashr (Martínez Martín’s resurrección) can indeed mean ‘resurrection,’ but can also, more generally, mean the ‘unfolding’ or the ‘spreading’ of something, both literally (a cloth, for instance) and figuratively (a disease or a phenomenon, a use that is more common in contemporary Arabic). Martínez Martín seems here to mix the metaphors that Naimy presents: while life is, for Naimy, a series of ‘foldings’ and ‘unfoldings’ (ups and downs, peaks and troughs, and so on), there is also the association here with the life and death of Christ (and other religious figures?), who was ‘concealed’ for three days after his death before his resurrection. Any possible religious connection in the poem is diminished in Martínez Martín’s translation. My translation – ‘falling and rising’ – aims to carry forward some of the meaning of Martínez Martín’s pliegue (‘fold,’ in the sense of ‘collapse’ or ‘fall’ or a business or entity), while not abstracting this too much from the ‘resurrection’ with which it is paired.