This week’s New Yorker has a brief but keenly
interesting article on modern Arabic politics and poetry, by Robyn Cresswell of
Yale, taking off from the Syrian (lapsed-Alawite) poet Adonis.
The author remarks on the difficulty of finding satisfactory
translations for this verse, owing in particular to the “rhetorical grandeur”
characteristic of classical Arabic.
Actually we see part of the problem, more cultural than linguistic,
right in the poet’s nom de plume,
Adonis. Cresswell diplomatically
explains the eponym as a “vegetal deity of death and resurrection”. The thumbnail from the Britannica lays the emphasis
elsewhere: “in
Greek mythology, a youth of remarkable beauty, the favourite of the goddess
Aphrodite … Traditionally, he was the product of the incestuous love Smyrna entertained
for her own father”. To an
American, the name conjures up something like Jean Marais (Cocteau’s
greek-godling toyboy) rather than anything religious.
An additional problem for the translator of this poetry is,
paradoxically, the relative lack of
technical prosodic problems, since it is mostly free verse -- “tennis with the net
down” to begin with -- so that the translator has not the challenge of
recreating some sense of the original prosody, as FitzGerald so brilliantly
did with his version of Omar’s Rubaiyat, or Charles Lyall’s metrical
experiments in rendering pre-Islamic Arabian verse. That is to say, a translation cannot be really successful
unless confronted in the
original with something that is in
some respects untranslatable.
~
For our own attempts to grapple with the treasures of the
Arabian verse-hoard, try this:
.
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