{"id":2298,"date":"2020-05-07T13:32:29","date_gmt":"2020-05-07T13:32:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2298"},"modified":"2020-05-07T13:49:53","modified_gmt":"2020-05-07T13:49:53","slug":"a-new-divan-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2298","title":{"rendered":"A New Divan – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

A New Divan<\/em> celebrates the two hundredth anniversary of Goethe\u2019s great West-Eastern Divan<\/em> in which the poet expresses both a personal sense of creative renewal and his love of Middle Eastern poetry, particularly that by the fourteenth century Persian poet Hafiz.<\/p>\n

In A New Divan<\/em>, twelve major poets from the \u2018East\u2019 and twelve from the \u2018West\u2019 were each commissioned to write on one of twelve themes in Goethe\u2019s collection. Only Khaled Mattawa and Don Paterson wrote in English. Other poems appear in both English and their language of composition. The English versions are by poets, usually working from someone else\u2019s literal translation. There are six essays relating to Goethe\u2019s approach to Middle Eastern poetry and addressing general questions about translation and relations between Middle Eastern and Western poetic traditions. The subtitle is perhaps misleading. What we have \u2013 much more interestingly than a dialogue \u2013 is a polyphony of voices from various traditions and situations within both \u2018East\u2019 and \u2018West\u2019, a polyphony reflecting both differences and the cross-fertilisations that have already taken place.<\/p>\n

We begin with Adonis\u2019s powerful \u2018Letter to Goethe\u2019 translated by Khaled Mattawa (who is also the author of the following poem). Adonis\u2019s \u2018Letter\u2019 is an agonized response to Goethe\u2019s hopes for a happy fusion of traditions, perhaps partly reflecting the dark history of so much of the Middle East in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In its elevated language, its use of metaphors and symbols that are both lurid and literary, and its abstract presentation of its subject, his poem is very far from the literal, concrete and explicit leanings of most modern British poetry. In this way, it powerfully widens the British reader\u2019s sense of what poetry can do. Admittedly, this isn\u2019t simply a matter of confronting Western habits of mind with Eastern ones. Adonis is an eighty-nine year old Syrian poet who has lived in Paris since the mid-eighties and the French poet Mallarm\u00e9 is apparently one of the major influences on his writing. Those who know Arabic poetry, or know Mallarm\u00e9 better than I do, may be able to sort out how much each has contributed to Adonis\u2019s style:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The West is behind you, but the East is not before me.
\n……….<\/span>They are two banks of one river.
\n……….<\/span>One has become more than an abyss,
\n……….<\/span>more than a rock;
\n……….<\/span>Sisyphus is its voice screaming:
\nSinbad wanders the sea of his Islam,
\nGilgamesh is dead, and Ulysses is lost among his waves.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In Adonis\u2019s hands and transmitted with the momentum and sensitive adjustments of Mattawa\u2019s rhythms, such a style has extraordinary power. I felt I was throwing myself into the sea of a kind of poetry that seems more like a passage from one of Blake\u2019s prophetic books than more recent English poetry, and as with those poems the elliptical and sometimes enigmatic nature of the images means that they remain haunting and fresh through repeated readings.<\/p>\n

In total contrast to the bardic style of \u2018Letter to Goethe\u2019, though also originally written in Arabic, there\u2019s Mourid Barghouti\u2019s \u2018The Obedience of Water\u2019, the first of two poems on \u2018The Tyrant\u2019. Here, in George Szirtes\u2019 elegant translation, simple language and almost childlike syntax are set against a polished, sophisticated musicality. Lethal satire is tuned to artistic delight and the misery of oppression is sublimated in wit and the hope that all tyranny must eventually collapse, though of course while the tyranny lasts such sublimation can only provide temporary relief. Something I found quite dazzling was the sudden imaginative expansion at the end of these lines:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When he takes his seat he doesn\u2019t descend from heaven
\non a cloud, no, he climbs up on our shoulders, yours and mine
\nand sits in the saddle of time dangling his legs<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u2018He climbs up on our shoulders\u2019 expresses a clear, single idea simply but the following line explodes into a series of brilliantly ambiguous, bitterly comic images and suggestions, ranging from complacently controlling horseman to child on a rocking horse, while the wonderful phrase \u201cthe saddle of time\u201d both suggests the tyrant\u2019s domination of his historical moment and hints at the transience and precariousness of his power. Regardless of whether it fits into a specifically East \/ West dialogue, there\u2019s a joy to the contrast between this poem and Jaan Kaplinski\u2019s \u2018The Great Axe\u2019, also describing a tyrant. Here, at the start of Sasha Dugdale\u2019s expressive translation from the Russian, hard, clear phonemes and heavily stressed rhythms act out the strokes of the axe that the tyrant is said to have dreamed of becoming, before suddenly giving way to faltering, hesitant cadences that allow the reader aloud to act out the tyrant\u2019s fears and inner weakness. Barghouti\u2019s poem works superbly by its ironic distance from what it describes, Kaplinski\u2019s by stylistic embodiment. Juxtaposition throws their contrasting artistic qualities and different ways of thinking about tyranny into vivid relief.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, I found the style of one or two of the \u2018Eastern\u2019 poems too alien to appeal. Nujoom Algahanem\u2019s \u2018The Crimson Shades\u2019 is a dialogue between Hafiz and his lover Suleika. What seems to be an Eastern love of ornament fills it with periphrases like \u201cYou voyaged following Helios\u2019s Psalms\u2019 for \u2018you travelled West\u2019, and I struggled with mixed metaphors like \u2018I wept until the gashes of absence charred my heart\u2019. Perhaps an Arab reader would go more directly to the idea behind the metaphors and not be thrown by the transition from gashes to charring. On the other hand, the meaning of \u2018Western\u2019 has expanded so much since Goethe\u2019s time that the style of the Mexican poet Homero Aridjis struck me as radically and inspiringly unlike what I\u2019m used to within my own corner of Western poetic practice. I can\u2019t read it in Spanish but as recreated in English by Kathleen Jamie it\u2019s a wonderful work, flying swiftly and lightly to its conclusion through a series of brief, arrestingly vivid visualisations of animals. Starting<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Across an empty darkness,
\nacross unmoving sky,
\nflashed scarlet macaw<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

it flashes past various beautiful, sometimes frightening creatures \u2013 caiman and jaguar as well as the comical \u2018skinny spider monkey \/ his privates dangling\u2019 \u2013 to reach a visionary conclusion that some people and moods may find sentimental, but that seems to be in tune with the idealism in Goethe\u2019s own Divan<\/em>. After describing the creation of man and woman, who can see themselves and name the animals, the poem ends<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Heart of the Sky, Heart of the Sea
\nHeart of the Earth beat as one,
\nand all the winged creatures, creatures
\nof the waters and the land
\ncould be, breathe, love and cast shade.
\nAnd life is re-created every day.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Equally absorbing in completely different styles are Clara Jan\u00e8s\u2019 \u2018The Song of the One Who Pours the Wine\u2019 (English version by Lavinia Greenlaw) or Gonca \u00d6zmen\u2019s \u2018Knowingly Willingly\u2019 translated by Jo Shapcott, or indeed various others, but what I really want to say is how exhilarating and enjoyable it is to read a book that combines such strikingly different kinds of artistic excellence and such diverse perspectives with the underlying coherence that comes from the shared reference to Goethe\u2019s original cycle.<\/p>\n

A New Divan: A lyrical dialogue between East and West<\/em>, edited by Barbara Schwepcke and Bill Swainson. Gingko, 4 Molasses Row, Plantation Wharf, London SW11 3UX. Royal Hardback, 208pp.; \u00a320.<\/p>\n

I would like to thank Patricia Oxley for permission to post this review, which appeared in Acumen 96.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A New Divan celebrates the two hundredth anniversary of Goethe\u2019s great West-Eastern Divan in which the poet expresses both a personal sense of creative renewal and his love of Middle Eastern poetry, particularly that by the fourteenth century Persian poet Hafiz. In A New Divan, twelve major poets from the \u2018East\u2019 and twelve from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2298"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2298"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2305,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2298\/revisions\/2305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}