Golan Haji The Narcissists
As sent to / & translated
by Robin Moger
Recently, a translator, a close neighbour to the lands of al-Andalus, sent me the introduction to THE MARVELLOUS IN THE DESCRIPTION OF SPRING, by Abu al-Walid al-Himyari. I was first brought up short by the second line: 'The most deserving of being written down, worthiest of being anthologised, is that to which the writers have turned their backs and the compilers paid no mind…' Reading on, I find a poet from Cordoba ventriloquising night stock as it addresses its cousin broom stock, and then, in a section in which the various flowers make declarations of their faith:
The chrysanthemum bore witness that its flowers
did worship none who cropped them but their Lord.
Abu al-Walid compiled his slim volume in the twelfth century. Despite his youth, he arranged into chapters excerpts prose and poetry, culled from the compositions of a select group of judges, police chiefs, ministers and other frequenters of meadows and gardens. He died in Seville ‘in the flower of his youth, a young man of two and twenty years.’
Encountering here the phrase ‘a rose as red as venous blood’ sent me back to Abu Bakr Ahmad Ibn Mohammed al-Dabbi, better known as al-Sanawbari, a poet of Aleppo; it was as though I’d caught the echo of a familiar refrain and needed to remind myself of the words:
Earth’s a ruby, air be pearl,
green growth is turquoise,
and waters are crystal.
Historians tell us al-Sanawbari was a court poet of the mid tenth century. The classical critics dubbed him The Lesser Beloved—The Greater Beloved being Abu Tammam—and it could be said that they neglected him. Maybe they saw his aestheticised refinement as a weakness; certainly his preoccupation was with nature, not with man. His elegies to the city of Aleppo and its river, the Queiq, have proved far more enduring than the few he composed for Aleppo’s ruler, Sayf al-Dawla, or the Prophet’s family.
His dearest friend, the poet Kushajim, described their friendship thus:
It is two bodies with their two souls one,
like two points held within a single line;
its modesty does heighten the sublime,
and in its warmth uplifts what might sink down.
Not without cause is al-Sanawbari known as a preeminent poet of ‘garden verse,’ to which wemight add of water verse and snow poetry, too. Commenting on his name—an epithet meaning ‘like the pine tree,’ first given to his grandfather—he wrote:
When we were called the pine tree, it was not
a weakly wood to which we were ascribed;
thank God that when we take an epithet
we add to roots an aspect beautified.
Ibn Jinni says that he recited these lines to Abu Tayyib al-Mutanabbi in Baghdad, and that every time al-Mutanabbi remembered it he would laugh.
Al-Sanawbari said: I departed Aleppo in search of Sayf al-Dawla, and just as I had passed through the city walls, I saw a veiled horseman charging towards me, a long lance levelled at my breast. I was on the point of throwing myself from my mount to avoid the blow, but as he drew close he lowered the lance and pulled back his mask, and lo and behold, there was al-Mutanabbi, who proceeded to recite to me the following: We scattered their heads at Uhaydib / like coins are strewn over a bride. Then he said, What do you think of that? Any good? at which I said, By God, you’ve nearly killed me …
Which was more lethal: the Great Narcissist’s poetry or his lance?
The Genius of the Flowers
In the tyranny of the image, the entrenched narcissism and bleak existence before the mirror that constitutes our modern age, what is absent is the image seen by the mind’s eye. Think of theancients using words to perceive things in their absence: first read, then see, then the heart’s eye helps you ponder what you’ve seen. But words, too, change their masks. Qalb is heart, but as qulb it turns to serpent; wujdan—the anima—has entered school dictionaries chained to the narrowest medical sense of ‘mood,’ a way to name various affective disorders.
The poet still inhabits the heart of the Arabic miracle that is the Quran; what need have they for myths? What is the myth meant to show? And to whom? Al-Sanawbari wrote the following on the poppy anemone:
A red above the green and black,
between them marked with white
His poppy anemones are not the same as those that grew from the blood of the gored Adonis, depicted by Badr Shakir al-Sayyab in his poem, THE JAYKUR ADONIS:
The boar’s tusk pierced my hand,
and its fire sank into my side,
and my blood jetted and flowed,
and watered not anemones
nor wheat.
Al-Sanawbari’s anemones preserve the freshness of their depiction, are vivid in their immediacy. We might return to what we once criticised so fiercely, what we excoriated as lowbrow—as superficial, stiff and glib—on this, our happy journey from the dank rot of the depths to the sunlit surface. Do I come back to al-Sanawbari because it’s so hard to find descriptions of nature in contemporary Arabic literature? He was serious about play, and he painted so many flowers: the pistachio flower, the pale blue flax, basil’s watery lilac, almond and apple blossom, water lily and night stock, eglantine and the anemone, pomegranate blossom and irises, lilies and chrysanthemum, the yellow chamomile (known also as bahaar, which in Farsi and Kurdish is the word for spring), and above all the narcissus:
As if night’s pale moons ring
suns low on the horizon
and set upon smooth stems;
drowsy from wine you see to your surprise
them fixing you with their unsleeping eyes.
He is, in the most literal sense, the Narcissist. His narcissi, naturally, have little to do with the mirror theories of Freud and Lacan or the subject of Renaissance paintings; his poetry is free of the myths that might make us think of Mahmoud Darwish’s Narjis or Paul Chaoul’s Narcisse. Al-Sanawbari’s preoccupation is with the pleasure of the eye—through the concision imposed by poetry, we see the precision with which he describes the flowers, their colours and movements—but he never attempts to capture their scent. He was acutely aware that the sensualists, poets such as Abu Nawwas, had already hymned to excess the delights of touch and smell and taste in their wine poetry. Abu Nawwas had parodied the ancient trope of standing over the ruins,
To he who standing weeps over a campsite’s trace
inform him that it would not hurt to sit.
... and al-Sanawbari addresses the same idea, too:
To speak on gardens is sufficient that I need not keep
describing ruins; what shame is there in that?
Mary’s Incense
Throughout the course of his career as a poet, William Carlos Williams was obsessed with preserving the immediacy of description, a constant alertness to the present moment of his surroundings in Paterson. In one of his shorter poems, he describes a brief instant in the life of a cat, capturing her deft progress over ‘the top of the jam closet’ then setting her hind paw in an empty flowerpot.
Now read Al-Sanawbari’s weightless verse, blessed with gift of forgetting:
They have never known a year like this year;
there’s never been a time that with this can compare.
His playful description of the cat, that we still call the narcissist in imitation of him:
He sets up his watch at the corners,
on the ceilings and the doors;
he takes prey quicker than you’d blink an eye
even if that prey be taken from the sky.
In the late 1990s I translated a poem by Williams called THE CRIMSON CYCLAMEN for a reading by the poet and painter Nazih Abu Afach who grows these same flowers himself. In the mountains of Syria and Lebanon, they are known as Mary’s Incense. I don’t know if Nazih ever got round to painting the giant cyclamen he saw in his dreams, the way he failed to get around to many things in his paintings and poems and life in general, but he certainly never tired of repeating what the little prince says to Saint-Exupéry’s pilot whose plane has crashed in the desert: ‘The stars are beautiful because of a flower that cannot be seen.’ In Ibn Manzour’s great dictionary, THE TONGUE OF THE ARABS, anwar means lights but also flowers. Flowers are more commonly azhaar, and zawaahir are the stars.
Haji / Moger / 2025
Golan Haji is a Syrian-Kurdish poet, essayist and translator with a postgraduate degree in pathology. He lives in Saint Denis, France. He has published five books of poems in Arabic: He Called Out Within The Darknesses (2004), Someone Sees You as a Monster (2008), Autumn, Here, is Magical and Vast (2013), Scale of Injury (2016), The Word Rejected (2023). His translations include (among others) books by Robert Louis Stevenson and Alberto Manguel. He also published Until The War (2016), a book of prose based on interviews with Syrian women. Last spring, his French-Arabic volume Avant Ce Silence, with French translations by Marilyn Hacker and Nathalie Bontemps, was published by APIC editions in Algeria.
Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic to English who lives in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat. His translations of prose and poetry have appeared widely. Among his recent publications are Sleep Phase by Mohamed Kheir (Two Lines Press, 2025), Wadih Saadeh’s A Horse at the Door (Tenement Press, 2024), Strangers in Light Coats (Seagull Press, 2023)—a collection of the poems of Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan—and Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal (And Other Stories Press, 2023), which was a joint winner of the 2024 James Tait Black Prize for Biography.
