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Tenement Press is an occasional publisher of esoteric,
accidental, angular, & interdisciplinary literatures.
‘My head is my only house unless it rains’
Don Glen Vliet
Tenement Press is an occasional publisher of esoteric,
accidental, angular, & interdisciplinary literatures.
‘My head is my only house unless it rains’
Don Glen Vliet
‘Were a wind to arise
I could put up a sail
Were there no sail
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I’d make one of canvas and sticks’
Bertolt Brecht, ‘Motto’
(Bucknow Elegies)
I could put up a sail
Were there no sail
Bertolt Brecht, ‘Motto’
(Bucknow Elegies)
長谷川 等伯 / Hasegawa Tōhaku,
松林図 屏風 / ‘Shōrin-zu byōbu’ / ‘Pine Trees’ (1595)
Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi
Yasmine Seale & Robin Moger
Tenement #3
978-1-8380200-4-0
149 pp
£16.50
ORDER DIRECT FROM TENEMENT HERE
Published 28th February 2022
Seale and Moger’s back-and-forth process reveals interpretation’s foundational place in translation: the poems can be read like palimpsests in which voices interweave and entangle.
Reem Abbas, PN Review
Yasmine Seale & Robin Moger
Tenement #3
978-1-8380200-4-0
149 pp
£16.50
ORDER DIRECT FROM TENEMENT HERE
Published 28th February 2022
Seale and Moger’s back-and-forth process reveals interpretation’s foundational place in translation: the poems can be read like palimpsests in which voices interweave and entangle.
Reem Abbas, PN Review
‘In Abraqan’ (Seale & Moger)
Born in Murcia in 1165, Ibn Arabi was a prolific Muslim philosopher and poet. He travelled extensively before settling in Damascus, where he died in 1240. Tarjuman al-Ashwaq, or The Interpreter of Desires, is a cycle of sixty-one Arabic poems. They speak of loss and bewilderment, a spiritual and sensual yearning for the divine, and a hunger for communion in which near and far collapse.
Agitated Air is a correspondence in poems between Istanbul and Cape Town, following the wake of The Interpreter of Desires. Collaborating at a distance, Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger work in close counterpoint, making separate translations of each poem, exchanging them, then writing new poems in response to what they receive. The process continues until they are exhausted, and then a new chain begins.
Translated and re-translated, these poems fray and eddy and, their themes of intimacy across distance made various, sing back and forth, circling and never landing. Absence and approach, knowing and unknowing, failure and repetition: Ibn Arabi’s cycle of ecstatic love shimmers with turbulence. Seale and Moger move into and against these contending drifts, finding in the play of dissatisfaction and endurance a prompt for new poetry.
Marina Warner, Yasmine Seale & Robin Moger
at the Warburg Institute, April 27th 2022
Yasmine Seale & Robin Moger recorded
for the New Lines Magazine podcast
Agitated Air is a correspondence in poems between Istanbul and Cape Town, following the wake of The Interpreter of Desires. Collaborating at a distance, Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger work in close counterpoint, making separate translations of each poem, exchanging them, then writing new poems in response to what they receive. The process continues until they are exhausted, and then a new chain begins.
Translated and re-translated, these poems fray and eddy and, their themes of intimacy across distance made various, sing back and forth, circling and never landing. Absence and approach, knowing and unknowing, failure and repetition: Ibn Arabi’s cycle of ecstatic love shimmers with turbulence. Seale and Moger move into and against these contending drifts, finding in the play of dissatisfaction and endurance a prompt for new poetry.
Marina Warner, Yasmine Seale & Robin Moger
at the Warburg Institute, April 27th 2022
Yasmine Seale & Robin Moger recorded
for the New Lines Magazine podcast
For the attention of ‘brick & mortar’ bookshops,
order copies of Seale & Moger’s Agitated Air via our distributor,
Asterism Books.
order copies of Seale & Moger’s Agitated Air via our distributor,
Asterism Books.
Yasmine Seale is a writer and translator. Her essays, poetry, visual art, and translations from Arabic and French have appeared widely—in Harper’s, Poetry Review, Wasafiri, Apollo and elsewhere. Current projects include a new translation of The Thousand and One Nights (W. W. Norton) and a translation of the poems of Al-Khansa (NYU Press). After five years in Istanbul, she lives in Paris.
Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic to English recently moved from Cape Town to Barcelona. His translations of prose and poetry have appeared in Blackbox Manifold, The White Review, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Seedings, and others. He has translated several novels and prose works, most recently Haytham El Wardany’s The Book of Sleep (Seagull) and Slipping by Mohamed Kheir (Two Lines Press).
A White Review ‘Book of the Year’ 2022
In this heavenly and heartbreaking collection, the nasibs, preludes or love-songs of Mohieddin Ibn Arabi are translated to vividly retell the human erotics of divine love. The dialogic method of the translator-poets means that each poem is a collaborative attempt to retrieve a passion that is elusive and ‘steady;’ set to ‘sliding scales,’ the lyric like a ‘waterski’ on the distance between them. The imagery is touching and evocative, sweet and spiritual. The reader is reminded of a love that is active and ongoing, told in a linguistic tense that subtly, tragically, holds the sought for moment away from us. We may never find anything that gets as close to the deferring grammar of love as the phrase, ‘when held.’
Through these translations of ancient poems, we remember that love produces a relationship with time. The lover of a love poem is looking forward to it, already in its wake, mourning and restarting to yearn. It’s like a spiritual lesson in how to love God, where the erotics of times’ surfaces react to each other, causing a space like grace, and a situated feeling ‘Regardless of where you are’. In nuanced and humble syntax, Seale and Moger recreate in English the event of fresh longing in every word, as accurate as it is provisional. They do this with tender and careful poetry, finding in the original a fleeting but piercing voice, as if from underneath another voice, fragmented and reaching for its reply. Small elliptic lines, ‘no fun being locked here,’ create all the more agitated air for intimacy.
Love told as poem is always an act of devotion that is always in the a priori of wanting. Here the poems offer details of a life already lived together and prepared for loss. The lovers are longed for in third-person, with ‘he’ and ‘she’ passed back and forth, so, rather than the lyric emphasis of you spoken to in the Song of Solomon, these poems create a distant field of someone off the page, the one who is loved but isn’t there.
Holly Pester
Antiphonal, intimate and virtuoso, these variations respond to the sense that the interpretation of desires can be endless—it can dance this way and that, and then turn and turn again. The exchange of voices, singing lines that meet and part, pick up on the presence of the lover and the beloved in the poems; as Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger pass each newly wrought phrase back and forth between them, the distance between Seale in Istanbul and Moger in Cape Town is bridged, and so are the centuries that separate us from Ibn Arabi, his motifs, his mystical ascents and descents, and his anguished yearning. This is translation as intrepid and inspired re-visioning, a form of poetry of its own, as forged by Edward FitzGerald, Ezra Pound and Anne Carson.
Marina Warner
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I love these poems by Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger, where translation is performed as a process of collaboration and rewriting, a conversation—until the reader gradually suspects that this might be a model to follow for any future writing. It’s as urgent as it’s beautiful, and therefore I’m grateful that there’s a publishing house like Tenement that can make this kind of project possible.
Adam Thirlwell
Agitated Air is a compelling and charming book; potentially infinite in the way its exchanges reach out and into each other’s, and the reader’s, heart. Seale and Moger offer more than elegant variation between ‘alphabets / of thorn’ and ‘bosky mazes’. Some texts beg to be recited; others are shapes to be dwelt upon. The mutual versions build and decline into sharp triangles and airy blocks, with the intimacy of pieces of a puzzle that do not fit together, yet are part of one scene. Seale’s lover can be candidly ‘scared’; Moger’s soliloquizes on ‘terror’. Here desire (whether for a mortal or immortal Beloved) and its translation are both naked and overwrought, clad in a wealth of traditions. Utterance, dry-mouthed, springs out in a fountain of words. In the title sequence, Moger’s answer catches the breeziness of Seale’s experimental layout, the air becoming ‘full with sweet release’; Seale replies by homing ‘sweetness in agitated air’ in the building-block of a prose poem; Moger then takes on the same body, but opens it out, punctuating for breath. Such relationships of form unfold aspects of significance: thunder as sound-event, thunder as ripple of soundwave.
Agitated Air creates wonderful and vulnerable ways into knowing as yearning: source texts and original responses, expansions and contractions, song and sigh.
Vahni Capildeo
The perils of translating ancient poetry from the East into English (say Arabic, Persian or Tamil) are many: the rich images and archaic language often trigger a fawning orientalism that dilutes the complexity of the material. The text risks slipping into the abyss of easily accessible platitudes. As the poems flip back and forth between Seale and Moger, they accrue a kind of poetic difficulty that is hard to reduce to cliches. The translations are approximations of a source poem—in some instances there is a flash of clarity, in others a profusion of ambiguity. They defy the expectation that a translation must decipher or explicate—the poems flicker in the margin between the known and unknowable. For all that the book conceals, the process reveals itself fully—the translator’s hand is plainly visible, their calibrations conspicuous.
Janani Ambikapathy, Modern Poetry in Translation
In Agitated Air, Seale & Moger muddy the waters between poetry and translation by responding to the ecstatic poetry of the 12th Century Muslim poet Ibn Arabi. Both translate Arabi's poems from Arabic into English, and go on to respond to each other's translations in a process that lets language mutate, flower and dissolve in playful and unexpected ways. This wonderful idea is executed with grace and care: while each “poem” (translation? version? response?) stands individually as a heartbreaking, gorgeous expression of spiritual or sensual yearning, the collection as a whole emphasises the rich mutability of language and meaning, making us reflect on just where the heart of a poem really is.
Will René, The National Poetry Library,
Staff Picks, Summer ‘22
In this heavenly and heartbreaking collection, the nasibs, preludes or love-songs of Mohieddin Ibn Arabi are translated to vividly retell the human erotics of divine love. The dialogic method of the translator-poets means that each poem is a collaborative attempt to retrieve a passion that is elusive and ‘steady;’ set to ‘sliding scales,’ the lyric like a ‘waterski’ on the distance between them. The imagery is touching and evocative, sweet and spiritual. The reader is reminded of a love that is active and ongoing, told in a linguistic tense that subtly, tragically, holds the sought for moment away from us. We may never find anything that gets as close to the deferring grammar of love as the phrase, ‘when held.’
Through these translations of ancient poems, we remember that love produces a relationship with time. The lover of a love poem is looking forward to it, already in its wake, mourning and restarting to yearn. It’s like a spiritual lesson in how to love God, where the erotics of times’ surfaces react to each other, causing a space like grace, and a situated feeling ‘Regardless of where you are’. In nuanced and humble syntax, Seale and Moger recreate in English the event of fresh longing in every word, as accurate as it is provisional. They do this with tender and careful poetry, finding in the original a fleeting but piercing voice, as if from underneath another voice, fragmented and reaching for its reply. Small elliptic lines, ‘no fun being locked here,’ create all the more agitated air for intimacy.
Love told as poem is always an act of devotion that is always in the a priori of wanting. Here the poems offer details of a life already lived together and prepared for loss. The lovers are longed for in third-person, with ‘he’ and ‘she’ passed back and forth, so, rather than the lyric emphasis of you spoken to in the Song of Solomon, these poems create a distant field of someone off the page, the one who is loved but isn’t there.
Holly Pester
Antiphonal, intimate and virtuoso, these variations respond to the sense that the interpretation of desires can be endless—it can dance this way and that, and then turn and turn again. The exchange of voices, singing lines that meet and part, pick up on the presence of the lover and the beloved in the poems; as Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger pass each newly wrought phrase back and forth between them, the distance between Seale in Istanbul and Moger in Cape Town is bridged, and so are the centuries that separate us from Ibn Arabi, his motifs, his mystical ascents and descents, and his anguished yearning. This is translation as intrepid and inspired re-visioning, a form of poetry of its own, as forged by Edward FitzGerald, Ezra Pound and Anne Carson.
Marina Warner
I love these poems by Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger, where translation is performed as a process of collaboration and rewriting, a conversation—until the reader gradually suspects that this might be a model to follow for any future writing. It’s as urgent as it’s beautiful, and therefore I’m grateful that there’s a publishing house like Tenement that can make this kind of project possible.
Adam Thirlwell
Agitated Air is a compelling and charming book; potentially infinite in the way its exchanges reach out and into each other’s, and the reader’s, heart. Seale and Moger offer more than elegant variation between ‘alphabets / of thorn’ and ‘bosky mazes’. Some texts beg to be recited; others are shapes to be dwelt upon. The mutual versions build and decline into sharp triangles and airy blocks, with the intimacy of pieces of a puzzle that do not fit together, yet are part of one scene. Seale’s lover can be candidly ‘scared’; Moger’s soliloquizes on ‘terror’. Here desire (whether for a mortal or immortal Beloved) and its translation are both naked and overwrought, clad in a wealth of traditions. Utterance, dry-mouthed, springs out in a fountain of words. In the title sequence, Moger’s answer catches the breeziness of Seale’s experimental layout, the air becoming ‘full with sweet release’; Seale replies by homing ‘sweetness in agitated air’ in the building-block of a prose poem; Moger then takes on the same body, but opens it out, punctuating for breath. Such relationships of form unfold aspects of significance: thunder as sound-event, thunder as ripple of soundwave.
Agitated Air creates wonderful and vulnerable ways into knowing as yearning: source texts and original responses, expansions and contractions, song and sigh.
Vahni Capildeo
The perils of translating ancient poetry from the East into English (say Arabic, Persian or Tamil) are many: the rich images and archaic language often trigger a fawning orientalism that dilutes the complexity of the material. The text risks slipping into the abyss of easily accessible platitudes. As the poems flip back and forth between Seale and Moger, they accrue a kind of poetic difficulty that is hard to reduce to cliches. The translations are approximations of a source poem—in some instances there is a flash of clarity, in others a profusion of ambiguity. They defy the expectation that a translation must decipher or explicate—the poems flicker in the margin between the known and unknowable. For all that the book conceals, the process reveals itself fully—the translator’s hand is plainly visible, their calibrations conspicuous.
Janani Ambikapathy, Modern Poetry in Translation
In Agitated Air, Seale & Moger muddy the waters between poetry and translation by responding to the ecstatic poetry of the 12th Century Muslim poet Ibn Arabi. Both translate Arabi's poems from Arabic into English, and go on to respond to each other's translations in a process that lets language mutate, flower and dissolve in playful and unexpected ways. This wonderful idea is executed with grace and care: while each “poem” (translation? version? response?) stands individually as a heartbreaking, gorgeous expression of spiritual or sensual yearning, the collection as a whole emphasises the rich mutability of language and meaning, making us reflect on just where the heart of a poem really is.
Will René, The National Poetry Library,
Staff Picks, Summer ‘22
