(From the Translator’s Preface.)
A book in five chapters, the first four of which contain the poems of two early Arabic language poets, al-Nabigha al-Dhubyani (‘The Prodigy of the Banu Dhubyan,’ a tribal group), said to have died in
18BH (
604CE) and Dhul Rumma (’He of the Frayed Cord’) who died in
114AH (
732CE). The poems are accompanied by texts taken from books of all periods, the majority of them ‘reports,’ which is to say accounts of events from the poets’ lives passed down in the same way as their poems (from contemporary witnesses through a chain of transmitters to a page): they are supposedly the roots bedded in history that gave rise to a poem’s growth, though they might also be thought of as the boughs sustained by and screening its trunk.
Almost all the material in the book is translated, with the exception of the odd line here or there. The third chapter contains two poems by Dhul Rumma and one by Golan Haji (dedicated to this translator). Golan Haji (b.1977) is a Kurdish writer from the northern Syrian town of Amouda living in Paris. The poems by al-Nabighah al-Dhubyani revolve around the story of al-Nabighah’s exile from the Lakhmid kingdom—then ruled by al-Nu‘man Ibn al-Mundhir—to the court of the Ghassanid kings, and his eventual return to al-Nu‘man. The fifth chapter contains texts taken from
The Marvellous in the Description of Spring, an anthology of Andalusian prose and poetry on the season of spring and flowers by the Sevillian poet and courtier Abu al-Walid al-Himyari, said to have died in about
440AH (
1048CE).
[...]
(Praise for Moger’s Tenement works prior.)
Reading Wadih Saadeh, in this inspiring translation by Robin Moger, one finds oneself entering the aftershocks of an imagination devastated by war and the deep internal and external exiles that follow such destruction. His poetry, loose and open—attentive and philosophical—lives in the remnants of what is left, of what survives to tell its tales, in both short-form, slightly surreal parables, and longer autobiographic tracings. It speaks of dust, of being dust, of stones talking to stones, of separated limbs and shadows walking their own way, clinging to shapes, of being water, of being rubble, new languages learnt, friendships, and tobacco at the source of a breath. Of travelling without arrival. Of moving without settling. As though one is forever seeking to settle but one doesn’t know how, or into what form. In the end, the poet settles on passing, and finds aliveness in its slightest movements. Like passing one’s hand through one’s hair, as he does it in the closing sequence of his ground-breaking poem from the Lebanese civil war. An extraordinary and painfully timely collection.
—Caroline Bergvall
on Wadih Saadeh’s
A Horse at the DoorMemories? Dreams? Thought experiments? A doubt hovers over what we are reading. That was in the distant past, that never was. Wadih Saadeh’s poems are haunted by absence and yet they brim with life, alert as they are to the most elusive disturbances of air. There was no division between us and the earth. Here a chair, a tree, a bird, a ghost has as much subjectivity as any living human. They have desires. They are the poet’s interlocutors. Their existential discussions with him are rehearsals for a world in which the wind may perchance return the leaf to the tree. The poet is not naïve. He knows the impossibility of wholeness, the irreversibility of exile’s traumas. Yet his voice remains playful. It has the supreme authority of tenderness. It embodies an ethics of the passers-by, who crush no one and are crushed by no one. Robin Moger’s supple translation deftly navigates the text’s associative meanderings. Breathless, the reader stands amazed.
—Omar Berrada
on Wadih Saadeh’s
A Horse at the Door
(See here.)
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
on Seale & Moger’s
Agitated Air
(See here.)