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Carrying Words through Time
Kazim Ali
I translated Ananda Devi because
I wanted to write those poems. So
sometimes it is a jealous trick. I
chose her book quand la nuit consent
a me parler because it was small and
its cover was hot pink with yellow
lettering. But as I read the poems
I knew I could never have written
poems so raw, so honest, so angry.
But I couldn’t translate them in
Paris where I found the book. It took
my arrival in Pondicherry in francophone
India to start to see the poems
as mine. And it took three more weeks and my arrival in Varkala,
on the shore of the Arabian Sea, to feel the rhythm of Devi’s
ocean-borne Mauritienne poetics.
Poetry finds a place in the poem. Donald Revell argues that
you can’t find poetry in poems; it’s likely true, but you can find
poetry in translations, more than in writing poetry because in the
translation you, the poet, are watching it happen.
It brings me to my most recent translation project, Sohrab
Sepehri, an Iranian poet who wrote in Farsi, a language I neither
speak nor read. When my father went to Iran for work I asked him
to bring back to me volumes of contemporary Iranian poetry. I
had grown up listening to the Arabic recitations of scripture and
the Urdu poetry and mourning songs commonly recited during
the month of Moharram—though one of my grandmothers was
Iranian I was unfamiliar with the contemporary poetry of that
place.
Among the books my father brought back were volumes by
Sohrab Sepehri. They had been translated but the poetry of the
lines felt stilted, formal, prosaic. I was taken with one line though:
“I am a Muslim! The rose is my qibla!” The qibla is the direction of
worship toward Mecca. Observant Muslims will turn in this direction
wherever they are in the world. In hotels across the Muslim
world and in South Asia this direction is marked by a large arrow
painted on the ceiling. The fact that Sepehri was declaring not
Mecca but a simple rose to be his qibla struck me to the core.
Since I could not read the Farsi myself, I worked with Jafar
Mahallati, my colleague at Oberlin. He would read the lines and
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National Endowment for the Arts