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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
New and improved, July 19, 2007
This review is from: So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971-2005 (Arabic Edition) (Paperback)
This Copper Canyon Press edition of Taha Muhammad Ali's poems is a greatly enhanced update of his earlier, Ibis Press "Never Mind" through which much of the wider reading public most likely first encountered this remarkable voice. The enhancements are significant, not the least of which is the Arabic/English en face presentation of the poems. The temptation to learn at least enough Arabic to get closer to the actual sound of Taha's poems is powerful. Even the wonderful introduction, by Israeli poet and translator Gabriel Levin is updated, adding, along with the additional poems, more pearls to the necklace.
The other translators, Peter Cole and Yahya Hijazi, complete a team of translators whose product illustrates the thesis of "Found In Translation", (another recent publication, from Toby Press, of Hebrew poetry, also introduced by Levin (establishing Levin as linchpin in this esoteric literary congregation of the very few humans who live in a truly multi-linguistic artistic arena)): poetry translated by poets able to enable monoglot readers to access the poetry itself, that which lies above and behind the forms. The translations by Cole, Hijazi, and Levin are of a quality with which readers of John Elwolde's incredible translation of "A History of the Hebrew Language" by Sa'enz-Badillos will be familiar; that is, themselves works of art.
The importance of this phenomenon cannot be allowed to go unnoticed: the Middle East in the voices of poets translated into English, thank God, by people who know the poets, speak, read, and write in their languages, and for whom English is a parent Tongue (Levin's father was the American writer Meyer Levin) may create the forum in which the people, whose voices they are, can hear and be heard.
"Abd el-Hadi Fights a Superpower"
In his life
he neither wrote nor read.
In his life he
didn't cut down a single tree,
didn't slit the throat
of a single calf.
In his life he did not speak
of the New York Times
behind its back,
didn't raise
his voice to a soul
except in his saying:
"Come in, please,
by God, you can't refuse."
_
Nevertheless -
his case is hopeless,
his situation
desperate.
His God-given rights are a grain of salt
tossed into the sea.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury:
about his enemies
my client knows not a thing.
And I can assure you,
were he to encounter
the entire crew
of the aircraft carrier Enterprise,
he'd serve them eggs
sunny-side up,
and labneh
fresh from the bag.
VII. 1973
Don't you yearn to hear these words in Arabic? Perhaps there will be a DVD.
A Palestinian is finally being heard who does not just speak for the silent majority but is one of them, and Israelis and Americans helped make it happen. Peter Cole traveled with Taha on tour. Gabriel Levin, who, and this cannot be overnoticed, is literate to the artistic level in English, French (his mother is the celebrated French writer Tereska Szwarc), and Hebrew. These are artists performing Nabokovian linguistic feats.
Readers! We are so lucky to be audience to this. "Come in, please, by God you can't refuse."
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
person, June 26, 2007
This review is from: So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971-2005 (Arabic Edition) (Paperback)
This man knows and conveys humanity and decency, thus creating beautiful and powerful poems. He is well read, yet he keeps it real.
I first heard of him after watching the news hour (PBS) and a feature on poets of Israel/Palestine.
SO WHAT?!
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Sad and precious joy", May 30, 2010
This review is from: So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971-2005 (Arabic Edition) (Paperback)
"So What" gets its title from the single, concluding short story which begins, "I went barefoot the first ten years of my life...." and tells how a young boy runs breathlessly to an itinerant shoeseller with money (which his parents borrowed) to buy his very first pair of shoes. Eager to end the embarassment and discomfort of his shoeless life, the boy is shocked when the vendor tells him that the only remaining shoes are "both for the right foot. They're useless!" But the boy cries out, with determined hope, "So what?...So what!...So what!" Poet Taha Muhammad Ali's 34 free verse poems in this volume reflect his determined aspiration to enjoy life, to share it with others in conversation and in writing, and to improve it despite difficulties both great and small. A slowly and arduously achieved literacy and poetic craftsmanship is a major part of his "sad and precious joy."
Taha is the genial, large-framed, 79-year-old Palestinian proprieter of a tourist shop in Nazareth, Israel where he and his family relocated after wartime expulsion (1948) from his hometown of Saffuriyya about an hour's walk north of there. He is also a self-taught, late-blooming, later-recognized poet and conversationalist, introduced to English readers in 2000 with "Never Mind: Twenty Poems and a Story," translated from his three published Arabic works in a collaboration among Taha, translators Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi and Gabriel Levin, and editor Adina Hoffman. The new volume includes the first book's poems and 14-page discussion of them by Levin; but it adds translations of 14 additional poems with--importantly for Arab readers and students of Arabic--the original Arabic language (including voweling!) on facing pages. Lines from the second poem, "Warning," provide the title for Hoffman's excellent and complementary 2009 biography of Taha, "My Happiness Bears No Relationship to Happiness."
A close-up photograph of Taha's rugged, sober face and piercing eyes regards the reader from the front cover of the paperback; and the handy, handsome volume says to one who picks it up, "Come in, please,/ by God you can't refuse." Abd el-Hadi, the poet's alter ego, utters this ebullient invitation in the initial poem, as Taha himself surely did to customers at his tourist shop and to particpants in his ongoing literary salon there. Indeed, it is a ubiquitous phrase among Arab shopkeepers and homeowners ingrained with the cultural imperative of hospitality.
Despite Abd el-Hadi/Taha's simple, peaceful and generous nature as sketched in the poem, "Nevertheless--/ his case is hopeless,/ his situation/ desperate./ His God-given rights are a grain of salt/ tossed into the sea." Hence, when we meet him again late in the book ("Abd el-Hadi the Fool") he speaks of "hatred,/ blue as the edge of death itself!...bitterness... about to explode...my blood boiling...." But he quickly confesses, "my great apostasy/ is this:/ no sooner does the laughter/ of a child reach me,/ or I happen upon/ a sobbing stream,/ no sooner do I see/ a flower wilting,/ or notice a fine-looking woman,/ than I'm stunned/ and abandoned by everything,/ and nothing remains/ except/ Abd el-Hadi the fool!" This passionate man "embraces the righteous and the wicked alike,/ greets the victim and hangman as one....He takes the world to the hair of his chest/ like his daughter...." In "Twigs," the poet asserts that "After we die...hate will be/ the first thing/ to putrefy within us.
Abd el-Hadi/Taha's dual character and the ambivalence of his life is common among humans but magnified in Taha's case by the historical trauma of 1948, called "Al-Nakba" (The Catastrophe)by Palestinians," when he lost friends, fiancee, family members, home, hometown, homeland itself, and all but the clothes on his back during warfare after Britain abandoned its League of Nations Mandate. In "Balance" he ironically describes how "In 1948/ we owned/ a noble bull/ with horns...And they/ had an ordinary tractor/ with a chain...." In "There Was No Farewell" he recalls that "We did not know/ at the moment of parting/ that it was a parting...." In "Sabha's Cow," the story of a cow that ate a rope and then had to be killed, he declares "with all my heart I would have agreed,/ to swallow a rope longer than Sabha's,/ if only/ we could have stayed in our village." Taha is not a "resistance poet" like the late Mahmoud Darwish, but he expresses his share of "samoud" (steadfastness) in "Exodus" with a six-time refrain, "We will not leave!" and in "Thrombosis" where he asserts, "When I was a child/ I fell into a pit/ but didn't die...did not die...I do not die!...I won't die! I will not die!"
Perhaps the poet reasons, after Descartes, that sadness is evidence of life: "I feel sad, therefore I am." In "The Height of Love" he declares, "And even if/ the days were emptied/ of all that is finer/ than the reed-flute's rasp,/ of all that is more desirable/ than the warmth of the winter's fire.../ I would go on/ preferring life/ to a thousand deaths." "The Falcon" employs the word "sadness" 15 times in its extended study of "the obscure shades of sorrow in me,"; but its writer recognizes that "The songbird without my sadness/ is merely a mass of flesh....", and he even feels, "by God, my sadness.../I fear that I won't see you/ after I say farewell...." In the elegeic "Evening Wine of Aged Sorrow," Taha addresses his lost fiancee Amira and his deceased father, then concludes: "What feelings/ of sad and precious joy/ come across me,/ when I see the evenings/ weeping softly, and mercifully,/ as though with the tears of sisters...." In "Sabha's Cow," the poet avows, "It's true, there were hard times,/ but the bitterness was good,/ like chicory,/ or better!"
Finally, Taha considers his art of poetry in "Where?" "Poetry hides/ somewhere/ behind the night of words/ behind the clouds of hearing...And how could I/ possibly know/ when I am/ barely able,/ by the light of day,/ to find my pencil?" He doubts it in "Empty Words" "which frighten no enemy/ and offer no hope to a friend." He affirms it in "Fellah": "I'll plow on/ while the sack still holds/ seed my hand might sow." In this book he invites you to his harvest feast of poetry. "Come in, please,/ by God, you can't refuse."
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