Khaled
Mattawa was born in 1964 in Benghazi, Libya, where he received his primary education. In
1979 he immigrated to the TRAFFIC
Let me start off, using the title of Brian Friel’s famous play, by saying that I live “in translation.” When I began to be interested in writing, I had no doubt that I’d write in English. This is mostly because I received my high school and literary education in English and because I was living in an English-speaking setting. I think this was so because I, in an existential sense, needed acts of translation. I was attracted to Dostoevsky and Marquez, not Faulkner or Bellow, mainly because they addressed different worlds, and I was in a deep need of seeing unknown worlds written in English. V.S. Naipaul’s early novels translated a world that needed to be translated, a Hindu community living so far away from their land of origin and yet living in their shadowy memories of it. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, with its haunting portrait of an African American man who in the South and in the North lived only as the color of his skin. Ellison’s book pointed to an experience of inaudibility, rather than invisibility, that occurs when two world views, two languages, seem to cause gridlock in our ability to think and express. When I turned to Arab literature, I wanted to see how that world presented itself in English. As such I was influenced by the translator Denys Johnson-Davies more than by Neguib Mahfouz. When I picked up Tayib Saleh’s remarkable novel, Season of Migration to the North, I read it in one long immensely pleasurable night. Though I’ve read the novel several times since, I had only read the Arabic original once. The work of Nazim Hikmet, when I started writing poetry, was important to me, and so was Lorca’s Poet in New York, both read in translation.
Writers like me who write in adopted languages are nonetheless endowed with the spectre of their first languages. As I began writing, I was mesmerized by what translating phrases from Arabic could do to my English texts. Taking a familiar story or image in Arabic, one I had not seen rendered in English before, filled me with a sense of power over language when I wrote it in English. I think one would say that the psychic tension here has to do with the experience of migration, where migrants live a kind of despondent existence because they see their inheritance lying fallow before them. We have all noticed how excited immigrants become about sharing their native foods with the people of their host countries. Food, as a cultural artifact, can be made (and translated) and offered to others as a sign of cultural particularity. It is a way for the stranger to demonstrate his cultural riches. Music, literature, humor, and faith are much harder to translate. I think as a writer, translation allowed me an opportunity to explore the riches of my inheritance, in a language that I put into, what now became, my “own words.” Translation in the figurative and literal sense became my mission. On night in December 1988 I visited a Yemeni restaurant in
If I were to describe my sense of my own work, I would say it is a kind of surveying of a difficult landscape. Someone had said that I am as much a poet as I am cartographer. I think that means I am much more interested in maps than I am in directions, and the bigger the map the better. Let me clarify what I mean. Recently, I discovered two stories that I had not known, and that provide a tantalizingly suggestive subject for a poem. First, that the modern English poet Basil Bunting lived in Teheran during the 1950’s, and was in fact expelled from there by Muhammad Musadagh, the prime minister who was removed from power by a CIA coup. Who would have thought that the lyrical and musically engaged Bunting would have done anything to raise the ire of Muhammad Musadagh, a political figure I admire? I also learned that there was a controversy regarding Thomas Hardy’s death in 1928. Hardy was Bunting’s hero. Hardy’s family wanted to bury him at Stinsford but his executor, Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, insisted on burying him in the Poets' Corner. A compromise was reached: Hardy’s heart was buried at Stinsford and his ashes were interred in the Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner.
I have not read a poem about Hardy’s double burial, and I am certain nothing has been written about Bunting’s years in
I have one thing going for me in this case. As a child, I had heard of the The Thousand and One Nights, but never read them, (being more drawn to the story of Seif Ben Thi Yazin) but more importantly, never knew about the Nights’ structure of stories within stories. Yet that structure was available to me when I was young. This is how my mother told stories, and this is why now I can sit beside her for hours as she roams through the well-lit labyrinths of her memory. In her folksy way, she is a natural postmodernist narrator, which is my inclination in this case. If I were to approach this poem about Bunting and Hardy, I would still have to wonder about tone. Here, I find myself thinking about Cavafy who could tell an ironic story with wonderful self-restraint. I also think of another Greek, George Seferis, who combined narrative and meditation with great deftness. Stories, in contemporary poetry have to fight for their existence. I will want to review Homer’s description of Achilles shield for the sheer pleasure taken in description. I may review the work of the wonderful and little known American poet Herbert Morris for his steady confidence and contemporary language. For echoes of