POEMS BY ADONIS
The New Noah
BY ADONIS TRANSLATED BY SHAWKAT M. TOORAWA
1
We travel upon the Ark, in mud and rain,
Our oars promises from God.
We live—and the rest of Humanity dies.
We travel upon the waves, fastening
Our lives to the ropes of corpses filling the skies.
But between Heaven and us is an opening,
A porthole for a supplication.
"Why, Lord, have you saved us alone
From among all the people and creatures?
And where are you casting us now?
To your other Land, to our First Home?
Into the leaves of Death, into the wind of Life?
In us, in our arteries, flows a fear of the Sun.
We despair of the Light,
We despair, Lord, of a tomorrow
In which to start Life anew.
If only we were not that seedling of Creation,
Of Earth and its generations,
If only we had remained simple Clay or Ember,
Or something in between,
Then we would not have to see
This World, its Lord, and its Hell, twice over."
2
If time started anew,
and waters submerged the face of life,
and the earth convulsed, and that god
rushed to me, beseeching, "Noah, save the living!"
I would not concern myself with his request.
I would travel upon my ark, removing
clay and pebbles from the eyes of the dead.
I would open the depths of their being to the flood,
and whisper in their veins
that we have returned from the wilderness,
that we have emerged from the cave,
that we have changed the sky of years,
that we sail without giving in to our fears--
that we do not heed the word of that god.
Our appointment is with death.
Our shores are a familiar and pleasing despair,
a gelid sea of iron water that we ford
to its very ends, undeterred,
heedless of that god and his word,
longing for a different, a new, lord.
Translator's Notes:
“The New Noah” is a poem I first encountered in my twenties, a poem Adonis wrotein his twenties. The poem’s content is simple enough. In the first part, Noah is saved from the flood and wonders why he and his people alone have been saved; despairing, he asks the Lord what He has in store for them. In the second part, Noah describes what he would do if he could turn back time, describes how he and his people would ignore God and sail to a different kind of salvation. Meditation on the relationship between the poetic persona and the prophet I leave to the reader.
In Adonis’s long poems, with which I have more experience, the language can at times be opaque, dense with allusion, and grammatically complex, what some admirers term al-sahl al-mumtani‘, the (apparently) easy (but effectively sublimely) elusive. “The New Noah” is in a straightforward Arabic, plaintive and mournful in the first part, aggrieved and assertive in the second, but translating proved difficult indeed. To begin with, there is the irregular but insistent rhyme at the ends of quite short lines (most are only five or six words long), something I have tried to convey. There is the playful and daunting use of classical Arabic meters, which I have brazenly ignored. And there is the careful deployment—I cannot think of another way of describing this—of the words allâh (“God,” line 2), rabb (“Lord,” lines 8, 15, 22, 42), and ilâh (“god,” lines 24, 35, 41). Unlike English, Arabic does not have uppercase and lowercase letters: the distinction between “God” and “god” is, consequently, made by using two different, though admittedly related, words: allâh and ilâh. I have paid special attention to this.
Overall, I am at peace with the translation, though rhyming the final four lines was difficult: “undeterred,” however implied, is my own intervention; and I still waver between “A New Noah” and “The New Noah.” There are certainly small successes: “fastening” and “opening” in lines four and six happily rhyme; the resonance of “porthole” in line seven; the possibility in English of using uppercase in the first part of the poem to underscore the difference in tenor between it and the second part; and that rarest of creatures, a cognate, in “gelid” in line 39. — s.m.t.
Source: Poetry (April 2007).
Flower of Alchemy
I must journey in a Garden of ashes,
Among its mysterious trees:
In the ashes are fables, diamonds and the Golden Fleece.
I must journey toward the Harvest, in hunger, in roses.
I must journey and I must take rest
Beneath the arc of orphaned lips,
Orphaned lips in whose wounded darkness
Is the ancient flower of alchemy.
Church of Daytime
For me, the Chalices and the flower whorls have become
A cushion
A dream upon a cushion
Ever since the Birth, ever since that time
In the forest of nursing, of weaning
I carry my tolling in the Church of Daytime
My Mass is sap in the midst of fruit and pollen
And the leaves are the Baptism
Source: Adonis, Kitab al-Tahawwulat, in al-A‘mal al-shi‘riyya al-kamila, Beirut, Dar al- ‘Awda, 1985, vol. 2, p. 433 (Zahrat al-kimiya’) and p. 438 (Kanisat al-naha).
The New Noah
BY ADONIS TRANSLATED BY SHAWKAT M. TOORAWA
1
We travel upon the Ark, in mud and rain,
Our oars promises from God.
We live—and the rest of Humanity dies.
We travel upon the waves, fastening
Our lives to the ropes of corpses filling the skies.
But between Heaven and us is an opening,
A porthole for a supplication.
"Why, Lord, have you saved us alone
From among all the people and creatures?
And where are you casting us now?
To your other Land, to our First Home?
Into the leaves of Death, into the wind of Life?
In us, in our arteries, flows a fear of the Sun.
We despair of the Light,
We despair, Lord, of a tomorrow
In which to start Life anew.
If only we were not that seedling of Creation,
Of Earth and its generations,
If only we had remained simple Clay or Ember,
Or something in between,
Then we would not have to see
This World, its Lord, and its Hell, twice over."
2
If time started anew,
and waters submerged the face of life,
and the earth convulsed, and that god
rushed to me, beseeching, "Noah, save the living!"
I would not concern myself with his request.
I would travel upon my ark, removing
clay and pebbles from the eyes of the dead.
I would open the depths of their being to the flood,
and whisper in their veins
that we have returned from the wilderness,
that we have emerged from the cave,
that we have changed the sky of years,
that we sail without giving in to our fears--
that we do not heed the word of that god.
Our appointment is with death.
Our shores are a familiar and pleasing despair,
a gelid sea of iron water that we ford
to its very ends, undeterred,
heedless of that god and his word,
longing for a different, a new, lord.
Translator's Notes:
“The New Noah” is a poem I first encountered in my twenties, a poem Adonis wrotein his twenties. The poem’s content is simple enough. In the first part, Noah is saved from the flood and wonders why he and his people alone have been saved; despairing, he asks the Lord what He has in store for them. In the second part, Noah describes what he would do if he could turn back time, describes how he and his people would ignore God and sail to a different kind of salvation. Meditation on the relationship between the poetic persona and the prophet I leave to the reader.
In Adonis’s long poems, with which I have more experience, the language can at times be opaque, dense with allusion, and grammatically complex, what some admirers term al-sahl al-mumtani‘, the (apparently) easy (but effectively sublimely) elusive. “The New Noah” is in a straightforward Arabic, plaintive and mournful in the first part, aggrieved and assertive in the second, but translating proved difficult indeed. To begin with, there is the irregular but insistent rhyme at the ends of quite short lines (most are only five or six words long), something I have tried to convey. There is the playful and daunting use of classical Arabic meters, which I have brazenly ignored. And there is the careful deployment—I cannot think of another way of describing this—of the words allâh (“God,” line 2), rabb (“Lord,” lines 8, 15, 22, 42), and ilâh (“god,” lines 24, 35, 41). Unlike English, Arabic does not have uppercase and lowercase letters: the distinction between “God” and “god” is, consequently, made by using two different, though admittedly related, words: allâh and ilâh. I have paid special attention to this.
Overall, I am at peace with the translation, though rhyming the final four lines was difficult: “undeterred,” however implied, is my own intervention; and I still waver between “A New Noah” and “The New Noah.” There are certainly small successes: “fastening” and “opening” in lines four and six happily rhyme; the resonance of “porthole” in line seven; the possibility in English of using uppercase in the first part of the poem to underscore the difference in tenor between it and the second part; and that rarest of creatures, a cognate, in “gelid” in line 39. — s.m.t.
Source: Poetry (April 2007).
Flower of Alchemy
I must journey in a Garden of ashes,
Among its mysterious trees:
In the ashes are fables, diamonds and the Golden Fleece.
I must journey toward the Harvest, in hunger, in roses.
I must journey and I must take rest
Beneath the arc of orphaned lips,
Orphaned lips in whose wounded darkness
Is the ancient flower of alchemy.
Church of Daytime
For me, the Chalices and the flower whorls have become
A cushion
A dream upon a cushion
Ever since the Birth, ever since that time
In the forest of nursing, of weaning
I carry my tolling in the Church of Daytime
My Mass is sap in the midst of fruit and pollen
And the leaves are the Baptism
Source: Adonis, Kitab al-Tahawwulat, in al-A‘mal al-shi‘riyya al-kamila, Beirut, Dar al- ‘Awda, 1985, vol. 2, p. 433 (Zahrat al-kimiya’) and p. 438 (Kanisat al-naha).