For in Zaqtan’s verse, timelessness courses through the moment of speaking. It has been both a revelation and relief to spend the hours with Joudah’s renderings of Zaqtan’s poetry, even while keeping the translator’s perturbations in mind. Joudah happens to be especially solemn about his responsibilities and offended by lesser efforts. The Palestinian poet, like all the other poets, must satisfy a prerequisite: serve the truth to be discovered. Lest Joudah’s anxieties be regarded as surly Arabic pique at being misunderstood, remember Emily Dickinson’s warning that “too much proof affronts belief.” Too much artisanal imagery of suffering not only patronizes belief, but leaves the reader with nothing to do or work out. As a foremost translator of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry in English, Joudah has illuminated the latter’s obsession - “how to continually widen the lyric and in doing so reinvent or reinvigorate prosody.” At the same time, he has resisted subsuming Arabic poetry within an integrated grid of amiable global practice since “equating or comparing languages often leads to a soft jingoism … Language and poetries are, more often than not, as is science, linked to power structures and histories. He also bristles at what he perceives as the pressure to argue for the contemporaneity of Palestinian and Arabic poetic practice. The styling of pain into groovy aesthetics isn’t the only issue for Joudah. “The classification of suffering … has become an international décor … that conveniently tells us which people have suffered more than others and what should be done ‘about it’ … the engraving of moral righteousness in the kinds of those who are faraway and watching cable.” (His second book, Alight, will be published by Copper Canyon in 2013.) “I am hyper-vigilant of the darkness that moral certainty can bring into poetry,” Joudah says in an interview with David Baker. He continues, “One is tempted to register those personal details of loss, distance, and absence, and what they signify, especially in a preface to a literary work in translation.” The problem for Joudah is the reader who approaches Palestinian poetry with an expectation about him/herself - namely that the content found there will resonate with the acuteness of one’s pre-selected sensitivities to the Palestinian predicament.īut he also admonishes himself, an accomplished Palestinian-American poet (and physician) whose first book, The Earth in the Attic, was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize for 2007. “The need to explain a personal and collective biography of the Palestinian poet and his/her poetry, while a necessity not particular to a Palestinian, is itself a quandary,” writes Fady Joudah in the introduction to his translations of selected poems by Ghassan Zaqtan.
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