Salah Boussrif: Poems

[Salah Boussrif. Image from al-quds.co.uk.] [Salah Boussrif. Image from al-quds.co.uk.]

Salah Boussrif: Poems

By : Brahim El Guabli ابراهيم الكبلي

The Third Book: An Inclination to Sunset

By Salah Boussrif

1. My march will be an inclination

to sunset

[Thus Spoke Zarathustra]

·       When fullness reaches perfection, it appears empty

[The Book of Tao]

The sea was nothing but

a lamp suspended in the air

and language

before the invention of        metaphor

was a bed

embroidered with imagination.

The body thrown in this bed, blazing

Oscillating

between a burning desire and a wave-dizziness

is about to wane.

Who inflamed the temptation of the tongue

and who stoked the ember of this body slumbering in honey

All colors fraternized

and light alone inhabited the distance

With his amorous hands

the poet used to bestow all its losses upon language

and open the windows of existence

on metaphors that resemble nonexistence

….an inclination to sundown

I marched patiently

and effortlessly I was writing things and deleting them

Is this why

“the clear path appears dim”

 

2.  A God addicted to deletion

Shrouded in gazelle skin

Humankind

in the past used to write its history

The desert

was a horizon in whose span the eyes freely roamed

Nothing veiled the view everything

was a horizon

Even death became a horizon or

a bamboo stalk rising toward a hollowness named the sky

The tribes were not spared the killing just as

language was not spared metaphors which enclosed it in blood.

·       The tribes did not use to like sheep-herding because grass was a trap and water was the shadow

of a man descending from the beginning of blood

And only the flags

indicated the path of departure

I remember that a historian wrote desecrating the past and opening its doors to all possibilities

he called the desert a cage

he also called the wind the voice of a God addicted to deletion

The earth as he named it

was a ghost’s leaven and deletion’s writing neither water nor fire

were the origin

Rather, winds blowing from an old wound whose existence is inflamed in seduction

and allowed the male to desire the pleasure of the ink to write

the history of the body

with naked desire

 

3.  The first of temptation

The willows were not readying themselves to replace the palms neither

were

roses

about

to become butterflies

The tribes used to leave their trees

and the flags used to hide behind this light which originates from the extreme of the wind

Who leads this madness and who

is this

who

put the night

in the crack of the day In groups they used to lead

their history and consequently they started erasing the old signs

Language

put on its words and meaning became the history of signs originating from

the end of meaning:

The book is a book and do not go too

far in interpretation

·       Think a little bit! How humankind acquires one meaning!

 [Shahnameh]

The poet put his tongue on the opening of the wound and folded language behind its metaphors, disallowing poetry to become speech

resembling all speech

 

Book Four…

 The Book of Ordeals

I.     The blood of the prophe

·       “My soul is sad to death” [Jesus..]

·       I am innocent of this man`s blood”[Pilate]

1

Quickly ah my friend

you reached my wound, but you showed no pain you did not deliver your fingers to a rising wind or come close to the flapping of wings

close to their wakefulness

Your prayer

was no luxury

or a passing fantasy I remember

that your cherry was a call

and the slumbering butterflies wove their whispers

in the lap of your solitude in your sensitivity

and handed your bread to hands

who hungered due to their excess of generosity1

Was it you who led the blind(man) to the balconies of light and continued spreading sparks in limbs of the sleepers

or

your hand

the one that greeted me is

the light that

reached my orphanhood

2

Is this a man or

a bamboo stalk shaken by the wind

3

You are an expert in the secrets of happiness

You didn’t spill any blood

And –whenever you were plunged in yours visions— you exchanged the blood of the killers

with your wine

An arm’s length away from you

Humans used to look lofty

restless.

4

There is not enough in my hands to illuminate your breaths

I suppose that you

reluctantly shed your tears and that the one who wept

was not you

and that the wind born from your fantasies is the water that sprang on your cheeks

Who then

wore your overcoat and went out

under rain quiver

astonished as

if

the sky

planted a moon in his heart

or allowed

his soul to cross its fantasies to leave a laugh

that resembles myth

on the forehead of the sun

5

He came to his home

but the people of his home did not accept him

6

 -I am

the bread of life

bread descended from heaven

take and eat (this is)

my body

--Ah friend why

did you collect all this

pain

in one hand

and why did

you allocate shade as a road to the blind

had you realized

that blindness is going to become the light of the keen

or

were you

obsessed with a sky

whose clouds will become a drink

for the sinners

7

On the chords of an old guitar you inscribed your sadness

since eternity

you vowed the wound to a body

that seduced its illusions

-       How many times did you escape death and how many

plants did you clear

so that the fields quench their solitude you

ah stray child

ah my wounded body

why did you deliver your hands to cold wood and put the soul

in

distant chambers

Are you

ah my friend

the one who let pigeons fearlessly fly and brought back life to the trees which had lost their breath…

-       How much time do I need to remain tied to a chord

that sings my grief

8

One drop is enough

to seed the earth

with pomegranate

A Nowhere Homeland

To which path does this bridge lead

did all the crossers escape as they were warily walking to their unknown end

none doubted the enormity of the trap

and none thought that the clock will be the bed of a river that only leads to a sinful estuary

How much time did you need to realize that the sun does not rise by chance

and that night

is a day that wept because of the enormity of what it saw

one version has it that

as you were passing the beginning of life

you practiced watching ceaselessly and you traveled the earth in two isthmuses one

you named noor

with it you lit the routes of the soul and the other

you sheltered

and with it you stitched the cracks of my wounds

at the height of happiness you used to thrive like a seductive ember you dribbled the wind and saved yourself from an inflammation that attacked visions

which wandered in the darkness of their illusions

Wasn’t it you who saw

that darkness is the sister of nonexistence and that this blue sphere

is a spark

that you ignited

with your blood

whenever its candescence

waned

Wherefrom were you bringing the light with which you opened all these windows2

The country did not hide its hatred when you were still plunging into its darkness

Happily you came close

to your death and with rare anxiety you liberated your illusions from horses which ran between the riverbeds of your slumbering river

Who then will defend you against all these stabs

and carry your tongue toward a never-dying light

·       The Pleasure of the Light

Is not all this rain enough to cleanse the air

Your breaths are sweeping

and the sparks springing from your trees

are not enough either to open the soul to the unknown lands of its wound

who expelled you from the ladies’ chambers and who

shared the bread with you when you were hungry and awakened your tongue from all this singing

Do you remember how mills turned in hand when you were on the verge of orphanhood and your eye sockets flooded with a light

which due to its delicacy

became

invisible

 al-Sahrourdi’s Beckonings

1

I neither drank from a water well nor did my grieves choke

when the universe appeared slumbering

in my laughs

I remember

how pleased were all those who ordered my exposure and all those who supported the desecration of my soul and how I walked joyfully toward my life

as I boast in happiness

I used to walk far away the steps obeying me and the distances

which seemed

more palatable than a collar

freed me

from my fantasies

Illumination was the last light

that allowed me to perceive my own darkness2

I did not explain my secret

and whenever I was plunged in my sorrows

I used to “undress”

some of my breaths

and spread my sparks in the wind 

3

Patiently

I used to sprinkle my light in

the darks

of my illuminations

and patiently

I seeded my land

with birds

whose flapping ignited

the light of my day

 

Ibn Muqla’s Hand

“The precious hand”

Your fingers are expert on the breaths of words

The pen between your hands was a chord or

a dose of perfume which you used to cultivate the grass at the beginning of tremors

The alphabet didn’t forget that

between your fingers it became

sparks

with which the words lighted some of my desires

While you heartened paper with your ink you used to cleanse

some of the agonies of the tongue which appeared in the earth’s clouds

is it a marriage

that you are venturing upon of

the embrace of two bodies: which displayed

desire for each other

Why

Was your hand torn from this cloth

and your fingers dilapidated as

if the sky

was not shepherding him

who was inscribing revelation in words have you become air

or did the tongue

behind its mellowness put an end to all possibilities of speech

Nothing required stripping the wind of its blowing

because nothing

was revealing the fierceness of the line or

the scattering of the stones between the cracks of the teeth

 

The First Vision…

 

The wind did not wipe my anguish

The chords of my hand still oscillate between two winds

all singing has self-postponed

and the voice has no place to sleep

without fatigue

The only standing wall at the end of history

was the wall of the cage of birds which sang

then

the beginning of their sorrow

the wind was not helping their flapping nor were they growing as they wished without

anguish

The hunters used to dream of thick groves

and of a sky that sprinkles its water

so that their hands do not weaken and the muteness of slumbering forests

 befalls not the grass

The perfume of the sky was insipid because the earth had not yet

spread its scarves

and the sea

was still a lad

nursing from mineral salt

which appeared in the form of a cloud

dispersed by the wind

Who stole the chords from a hand that offered its fingers

to a matchless melody

By the breadth of waves        by what does not cease to be

by the beginning of the soil

and by the last birds coming from nonexistence

I attained my orphanhood

and I was gladdened

by what cannot

occur

to a human

mind

God came and hugged me

and before He went to sleep

He informed me of the last dream that will happen to the Caliph He said

birds

will shake off their feathers where no horizon appears

in the horizon

the wind will appear naked and the treeswill appear as if they lost their breath nothing

will remain as

it used to be because the earth

cannot bear its moans anymore

Continue inhabiting your orphanhood and do not return

to a land

lost in the darkness of its illusions 

*** 

1. In the Arabic version "jaa`at min farti nadaawatiha." The literal translation would have been “hands which became hungry because of their excessive humidity.” First of all, we have a synecdoche by using hands to represent a human being. Humidity of one’s hands stands for generosity. Arab poets in the past would usually associate a generous person with the clouds, because as they used to say “water hates height.” The poet is also resorting to intertextuality by recycling a proverbial poetic image from the past.

2. This sentence is very difficult to translate: the literal meaning is "where did you get some of this light that is i your hands which you used to open all these windows. 

[Translated from the Arabic by Brahim El Guabli. You can read the translator’s introduction to his translation project here]

Mar 13, 2016 Lebanon

On a Day of a March…

“In his eyes was the sorrow of an Arab horse that has lost the race.”

Yaşar Kemal

On a day of a March…

The three of us are sitting in a hotel garden right above a park. A jovial giant, a cheerful exile, a lucky me... Beneath a sky full of birds… The wind is blowing like a forgotten whisper; the smell of moss is arriving from distant seas. The jovial giant’s phone rings. “Only three people know my phone number: Mehmed, Selim, and the other is…” says the giant as he answers his phone and lends his voice to his dear wife.

The month of March, the year is 2006…

I have a cold. Brother Mehmed is healthy. The giant is happy. The words he utters on the phone, which he has a hard time placing properly onto his ear, are lighter than roses and mingle with the air as if they were mist.

The giant does not get along with his cell phone. Once he called me while my son was riding his bike. We had a long conversation as I followed with my eyes my son’s wobbly moves on his bike. With such excitement, he talked about a novel that might take twenty to thirty years to finish. His voice was cut off suddenly. When it came back, he asked “Who was the girl who spoke a second ago?” Then his voice was cut off again. There was a thing called pay phones back in those days. “Please insert more coins,” or something in this nature, would say a female voice.

Our first meeting was as exhilarating as this one… I was waiting at the Esenboga Airport in Ankara with a staff member and a car Bilkent University provided for us. The year was 2002. The 15th of May. The giant and Zülfü Livaneli emerged from the VIP room. As I was walking toward them in a rather excited mood, I saw the giant embracing with his left arm the leader of Saadet Partisi, Recai Kutan. With a euphoric voice of a tree that hosts a flock of birds from the sky, he said: “Say hi to Necmettin!” Then as I expressed my willingness, under the weight of words becoming heavier in my mouth, to accompany him during the symposium dedicated to him, he quickly asked in Kurdish “Are you Kurdish?” When I said yes, he pressed me against his chest tightly. I sat next to the driver’s seat as Livaneli and he in the back… It was either at the traffic stop or perhaps during the traffic jam when people walking on the sidewalks began to interact with the giant by way of beautiful gazes, waving hands, sending kisses. I thought this must be what it means to be one of the greatest writers in the world.

One day, a very long day, he came to visit my little family all the way from the other end of the city. When I told him I work on Kurdish poetry, he mentioned that he, with Cahit Sıtkı, worked on the early translations of Kurdish poetry. In the darkness of the 1950s, they would hide in some corners and recite Kurdish poetry to each other as they translated them. The jovial giant was thrilled when he heard about Ehmedê Xanî Library, the project of mine that is etched into my dreams. Joining me in my crazy dream project, he said: “I will donate all my books to this library. And you know, among them are the Gallimard encyclopedias.”

The PhD program at Bilkent University offered a seminar on Yaşar Kemal in 2004. Süha Oğuzertem, who taught this seminar, changed our understanding of Yaşar Kemal entirely. We learned that his language in each novel is significantly different from one another. In each novel, there is, as if, a distinctly new novelist. We invited him to the seminar. He came. As he was entering the room, he turned to my dear professor, the late Talât Sait Halman, and said: “Talât, accept Selim into the PhD program, because his father is a dengbêj!” “He is already in,” said Talât.

The day I returned from England. Winter, 2011… This time I called him from a frosty garden. He never wished to exhaust people yet had a voracious appetite for story telling. Witnessing that was such a great pleasure and honor for me. During almost an hour-long conversation, he mentioned again the plans on a novel that would take twenty to thirty years to finish, and the third volume of Akçasazın Ağaları… In fact, he had already told me the ending of Bir Ada Hikâyesi (A Story of an Island) in 2004. He would burn the island in the end! It was such a heavy burden not being able to tell anyone about the ‘end.’ This meant: he, who always put on strong emphasis on “the human” in his nearly sixty years of stellar literary career, would burn everything he had uttered to humanity during his own century. Then the fourth volume of the book came out: My son’s grandpa Yaşar could not burn his island. Yet the speech he sent to be delivered at the ceremony of the honorary doctorate degree he received from Bilgi University was his farewell letter to the world. He talked about literature as an act of responsibility toward the world. With this, he was bringing joy to his island for the last time.

A refugee, a stutterer after seeing his father getting killed, an orphan whose right eye was carved out with a knife, a poverty stricken person, a person who shivered often, an ill-treated Kurd, a revolutionary, a dengbêj, a bard, a mourning flâneur, a story teller, a solemn spirit, a genius of diegesis, a body who fills the world, a chest who embraces the world, a sea of smiles, an island of there-is-always-hope, a human being… he was.

We, three of us, in a garden in the middle of a peninsula on a day of a March were talking as if we all had hard candy in our mouths. The exile paused our convivial conversation with a serious sentence. “I am going to the South,” he said. “The Kurdish government is going to give me the state’s honorary medal. Do you have any message you want me to deliver, Yaşar Baba?” They stared at each other for a while then forgot about me, and the glasses of tea. Tears began to swell in their eyes. The silence lasted like a long winter.

“Tell them that I love them dearly!” said Yaşar Kemal, after a long pause. “I have,” he said, “about thirty novels. Tell them to translate all into Kurdish.” He then turned to me: “Selim can do the translations.” Turning back to Mehmed Uzun, he continued:

Tell them, a people can become a nation only when they pay their writers. I receive a lot more for English or French translations of my work. What I ask from the Kurdish government is $100,000. Ask them to send me this money. I would then go to the bank. There I would ask a bank teller “My daughter, Kurds have sent me money; let me have it.” The bank teller would put the money on the table. Then I would weep profusely while pressing the stack of Kurdish money against my chest. Then I would find your number in my phone list of three numbers. “Mehmed,” I would ask, “find me the bank account number of one of the organizations for the martyred peshmerga so that I can send them the money.

The three of us, on a day of a March in one year, were sitting and conversing in a place somewhere in a world. Now, two of us are no longer on this earth. One of them found out he got cancer on his way from the emancipated part of his country after receiving the honorary medal, then said goodbye to a thousand year old exilic condition and toppled down like a tree on a hillside near Tigris. The other entered the warm chest of the world, leaving houses, shadowy courtyards, plains, wild pears, the mountains with purple violets, nomads with poetry, azat birds[1], the songs of the fishermen, the library shelves, ants, apprenticeship of birds[2], the deer pattern on a kilim spread inside the tent of a dreamy tribe burned to ashes, the blue butterfly, chukars, winds that yellow the weeds, borders, prison doors, the frosty waters of early springs as orphans.

For all, I am mourning over the loss of both.

*Editor’s note: This article was originally published in Radikal Gazetesi on February 28, 2015, and is translated by Öykü Tekten.

Öykü Tekten is a poet, translator, and editor living in New York. She is the co-creator of KAF Collective and pursues a PhD degree in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY. 

  


Footnotes

1. Yaşar Kemal tells the story of “azat kuşları” in his novel The Birds Have Also Gone. The fictional characters in this novel would buy the birds near the places of worship only to set them free.

2. The phrase “apprenticeship of birds” (kuşların tilmizi) refers to the pseudonym of Feqiyê Teyran (1590-1660), a legendary Kurdish poet and writer. Kurds believe that Teyran spoke the bird language. He was also mentioned in Yaşar Kemal’s novel A Story of an Island.