10TH ANNUAL (AND FINAL) NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 14 :: PHOEBE CARTER on MOHAMMED BENNIS

Week two of this year’s Poetry Month series is curated by Kate Hedeen and focuses on poetry in translation. Read her curatorial statement here.

On my second visit to Mohammedia, Morocco it was raining. The clouds were low and bilious over the sea while its waves crashed mercilessly on hot, black rocks. Wasn’t this how I’d always pictured the opening lines of Waraqat al-Bahā’/ The Leaf of Splendor?

The waves won’t revel in ravaging warm stones I will attend my gulf to the depths My fruit falls from primordial clay I surrender my defiance to the earth

I’d first read those lines, in Arabic, close to a year ago. And now here I was, watching the waves with their author, Mohammed Bennis.

How I came to translate Bennis at all, and this book in particular, was by a series of coincidences. Some days, these coincidences feel serendipitous. Other days, I think surely there’s something more straightforward, more immediately gratifying, I could be translating. Just because this particular book fell into my lap in a near-literal sense, doesn’t make me beholden to it. At times, as I rifle through dictionary after dictionary, I wonder if there’s something behind the words to translate at all.

Translation, for this reason, is always a leap of faith.

I first heard his name from my college Spanish professor, the Cuban poet and scholar Victor Rodriguez-Nuñez. I’d gone back to Ohio to visit my alma mater a couple years after graduating and we met for dinner. He told me about a Moroccan poet he’d met at an international poetry festival, and whom he’d been able to read in Spanish translation. He has no book-length translations in English, though, Victor told me. You should translate him.

But when I looked Bennis up later, I quickly saw that my Arabic was not up to reading him, let alone translating him. He became at that point both measuring stick and aspiration: when would my Arabic be good enough for Bennis?

I won’t say that Bennis was the only reason why I kept studying Arabic at such a fever pitch. But he was part of it. After a year of grad school in the US, I left to spend a year at the American University of Cairo.

I spent my last day in the US crouched on the floor of my emptied room with the Bennis anthology I’d borrowed from the Harvard library, taking pictures on my phone of every page. No way was I going off to study Arabic without these poems to measure myself against and to chase after.

In Cairo I met Shallal, a pharmacist whose first love was Arabic literature, but who’d stopped studying it after undergrad so that he could, as he said, keep loving it. As we got to chatting about our favorite authors, he mentioned Mohammed Bennis. Bennis! There he was again. We started meeting, along with our mutual friend and my classmate Aaron, for what we called — half seriously and half in jest — our literary salons. At our first meeting, Shallal plunked a copy of Waraqat al-Bahā’ in front of us. He’d rejected my phone photos of the anthology I’d painstakingly brought from home not so much on the grounds of their questionable material form as the fact that Waraqat al-Bahā’ was, as he explained, really all one long, fragmentary poem that must be read in its entirety, letting the images accumulate and transform across the pages.

I don’t know precisely on what grounds Shallal had picked this one for us to begin with, out of Bennis’s thirty-five or so books. But I now know that this selection set a particularly high bar for measuring my Arabic against — his vocabulary was recondite, the images bizarre, and the verses flowing into each other on the page. We spent most of our “salons” having Shallal explain, sometimes word by word, to Aaron and me what might possibly be going on in these poems.

I would note down our rough translations as we went along, then return to them later to try to make sense — and poetry — out of them.

I don’t remember exactly how Aaron and I became co-translators. But I do remember sitting on the grass after class arguing about whether or not mawaqīt — “appointed times” — had the potential connotation of “prayer times” in a verse I was puzzling over. We never agreed. But having someone to disagree with over such matters seemed crucial. Shallal, meanwhile, gave up on the translation. Couldn’t we work on something more…transparent? My professors said the same thing when I’d badger them after class with the more oblique passages. This just made us two co-translators, obsessive students of Arabic and of Bennis, all the more obsessed.

Now our literary salon has turned into a long-distance translationship. We work from a shared google doc, sometimes together while on the phone, and other times adding and editing on our own. Every so often we’ll both log in at the same time, unplanned, and it’s the closest thing I get to the pre-pandemic joy of bumping into someone unexpectedly on the street.

On my first visit with Bennis in Mohammedia, where he’s made his home for the past fifty years, it was sunny. We went to a café overlooking a green square. After he asked me if I preferred a table in the sun or the shade and I chose sun, he laughed and told me only a foreigner would willingly roast herself thus. After our tea had arrived I noticed him squinting in the brightness, so I asked if he was sure he didn’t prefer we move to the shade. Well, he admitted, my skin’s actually quite sensitive. I’m not supposed to spend too much time in direct sunlight. I was tempted to tell him that only a Moroccan would be hospitable to this degree of self-sacrifice. We moved our tea and conversation to the shelter of a wide awning.

That was in January of last year, on break in Morocco from classes in Cairo. Even Bennis echoed the doubts of Shallal and my professors. You know I have many other poems you could work on first, he told me. I wrote this one at a very particular time in my life. It was first published in 1988, when he was forty years old and trying to explode poetry, pushing language and form to their extreme.

As for what the poem(s) is (are) “about,” it’s really quite simple: his history as a poet (“I who traveled through the night / of the poem / and the joy of erasure”); the history of Fez, his childhood home (“Cisterns upon shrines / Locks upon / gaps / Bodies rotting / In Bab al-Mahrouq”); and a history of the universe (“that star journeying / between slumbers and / and life’s shoulder-borne horrors”).

See? Quite simple. He told me that (though I’m loosely translating here).

Sometimes two, three poems share the same page — I was confused the first time I flipped through his book and saw two neat columns lined up next to each other. It looked like a classical poem, each line divided into baytayn (two hemistiches, to translate into technical parlance. Two houses, to translate it both more literally and more poetically). But no. Read down each column, one at a time, not across all at once.

He uses no punctuation. But this isn’t one of his form-defying to-hell-with-convention moves. This is old school. Classical Arabic writing doesn’t use punctuation. It has instead short vowels that mark the grammatical function of each word (subject, direct object and so on).

Even in modern, punctuated prose, use the right transitional articles and you can keep a sentence going for as long as you want (for me, whose high school English essays always came back littered with accusations of run-on sentences, writing essays in Arabic is a dream).

Suddenly those tangled and maddening rules of classical grammar — the direct object is Mansub, accusative, so it takes a fatha, which looks like َ and sounds like “ah,” but if the word is undefined it takes fatha tanween which looks like ً and sounds like “ān,” unless of course it’s a diptote… — suddenly all of this was essential. Without them, “Your daystar is the desert / Here Fez rises Berbers / present the wayfarer with a silham cloak” could just as well be “Your daystar is the desert / Here Fez raises Berbers / The wayfarer gives a silham cloak.”

These poems will never be easy. I’ve learned enough Arabic by now to know that.

But they have become a whole world to me. And the more time I spend with them, this world grows. Now the opening lines are not only imaginary waves crashing on imaginary rocks. They are the rocks of Mohammedia on a stormy afternoon; they are the hours spent with Shallal and Aaron arguing about whether the waves “ravage” or “shatter” or “rend” the warm stones. And these lines now even lend a bit of splendor to the notifications that pop up on my screen, telling me Aaron’s added to our translation — what words will we argue about this time?

Phoebe Bay Carter is a translator from Arabic and Spanish and a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her translations have appeared in ArabLit Quarterly, InTranslation, Action Books blog, and elsewhere.