My favorite Spanish word is sigiloso. It comes to me unbidden of a sudden from that place frondoso in my noggin, the quarter that is menos lugareño, con tan poco apego to the local that I can be exotically vocal.
Resulta que me_evoca English “sigil,” a seal que no_es lo mismo que foca; of logic en mi_idioma hay muy poca. It leads me to your sister’s chest-of-drawers: No_es lo mismo “la cómoda de tu hermana” que “acomódame a tu hermana” — ¡Dios, qué_escándalo! The play on words es un retruécano.
Arturo Rodríguez told me this tale: A man’s car failed him in a lonely dale. Nearby pastured a horse, and distant lay a farmer’s house where urchins were at play (Arturo’s word for “urchins” was escuincles). “Es el carburador,” murmured a voice. As to who had spoken there was no choice. The man hightailed it to the house in panic. “YOUR HORSE JUST TALKED!” he stammered halfway manic. “It said my problem is the carburetor!” “Not possible,” the farmer said. “That horse no sabe nada de mecánica.”
Artesano del arco, ¡te saludo! Arturo, amigo de grato recuerdo, viviste_antaño en mi cobertizo. En paz descanses, maestro de canto, y obra de ladrillo y cemento.
Never a bird had fairer scientific name than Upupa epops, the jaunty hoopoe, for which the Arabic is hudhud. “Heron” is balaSHUN.
I experience this delicate lyric written in Arabic as all signal with no noise. If it alludes to other than what it says, I’m clueless. The poem exalts confusion, and being humbly confused is divine in my book. Wallowing in certainty is where mischief lies. Only today I read this: … Stay with the questions and entertain doubt as the unlikely bedrock of understanding.
The translation to English and transliteration of the Arabic text are mine.
2013-8-16 I sing of you, O bird, migrating heron. I sing of your whiteness, and your unhurried gait in fallow land. I sing of you also, O hoopoe, who are resident. I sing of your little crown as you gather seeds in the plowed field. I am like this, my song is confused; it puts one foot in the fallow land and another in the plowed land. One time I say the prayer of the resident, another the prayer of the traveler. (Zakaria Mohammed, Poetry, September 2023)
“With students, sometimes she suggested that they try silence, not working at all. That, she believed, might be best for someone who was writing the wrong poems or producing too much.”
(Colm Tóibín)
She insisted on calling herself a writer. It was for posterity to judge if she was a “poet,” she averred in an essay. News of her passing hit me with a jolt on the very day of it. Louise Glück died on October 13, 2023, aged 80.
Her astutely acid critiques of my submissions in a writing seminar she conducted at Greensboro administered a salutary coup de grâce to my juvenile ambitions to write poetry. At seminar’s end I set sail to fail in other directions, and have since paid her the readerly devotion the genre exacts from me. An unsentimental, Olympian reserve I treasure in Glück’s work has provided a benchmark for how I prospect for poems in verse I consume.
Here’s another comment from Colm Tóibín’s tribute in The Guardian:
Glück was not afraid of using words like “soul” or “god”, or making use of primal images of forest and light and dark and sun and moon. But the poems were not abstract. They were poems of hard experience. She didn’t do innocence. The poems were filled with emotions that she knew only too well.
(Colm Tóibín, “Louise Glück: a poet who never shied away from silence, pain or fear,” theguardian.com, 10-17-12)
This is the second of 3 poems by Zakaria Mohammed published in the September 2023 edition of Poetry magazine. They date from 2013. (I noted the first one here). English translations by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha are in the Poetry issue as well.
The translation from the Arabic and transliteration of the Arabic text that follow here are mine.
2013-8-15 I await the expiry of August, September’s coup de grâce. Hey, dawdling Fall, I am here, expectant. Cooked you some porridge, kindled a fire. Come, wind-sweep the brazen sun away. Lift its hand from my shoulder. Summer crouches heavily on my chest. But my pale hand swears by season’s turning, readies a saddle for it. Oh! — you piebald horse of Autumn, that carries me where my thoughts go: chainlink stone climbing the foot of the hill, unruly clouds climbing the foot of the sky. There’s nothing more than this, not a thing.
Of course, it’s possible to add a crash of thunder so my bones are shaken, and the bones of the world. As for all of you, believing fondly horses live in the hills of Spring, know: Autumn’s promontories are their dwelling. They tense and gather muscle at the scent of rain, their nostrils flare, they bolt, clearing rocky hurdles toward the summit, where they will graze on the fringes of clouds.
THE UNITED KINGDOM “Stand up and fight… etc. Stand up and fight – because when you stand up and fight,… etc… stands up and fights. And when… etc… stands up and fights,… etc… stands up and fights. And when… etc… stands up and fights,… etc… stand up and fight. And they stand up and fight for… etc. That is what… etc. Stand up and fight. Stand up and fight! Thank you, conference!” [See note] (Penny Mordaunt, Conservative Party MP)
THE UNITED STATES “This all goes back to our reward structure, and how that’s gotten turned on its head… As long as you’re talking about fighting — regardless of whether you have a strategy to land a punch or win a round — you never actually have to win, because that’s what gets the most attention… And that means Republicans are now sort of always talking between ourselves, and the rest of the country we either don’t engage or hold in contempt.” (Doug Heye, Republican aide)
“[Winning election to Congress] has come… to mean winning a prominent platform for performative outrage…” (Yuval Levin, Opinion writer)
Sources Kate Nicholson, HuffPost, “Penny Mordaunt Couldn’t Stop Herself Using This 1 Phrase During Her Tory Conference Speech,” 10-5-23. Michael C. Bender, “For Republicans in the Trump Era, Chaos Often Seems to Be the Point,” New York Times, 10-6-23. Yuval Levin, “What We Can Do to Make American Politics Less Dysfunctional,” New York Times, 10-9-23)
Note Full text of the Mordaunt fight chant: “Stand up and fight for the freedoms we have won. Against socialism, whether it is made of velvet or iron, have courage, and conviction – because when you do, you move our countrymen, our communities and capital of all kinds to our cause. Stand up and fight – because when you stand up and fight, the person beside you stands up and fights. And when our party stands up and fights, the nation stands up and fights. And when our nation stands up and fights, other nations stand up and fight. And they stand up and fight for the things for which the entire progress of humanity depends! Freedom. That is what Conservatives do. That is what this nation does. Have courage. Bring hope. Stand up and fight. Stand up and fight! Thank you, conference!” (Penny Mordaunt, Conservative Party MP)
“Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with theater, ballet, opera and the dance.”
(Trinidadian Marxist thinker C.L.R. James)
Cricket may be “somewhat impenetrable” to outsiders, per The Times, but only to those who resist penetration. The quadriennial Cricket World Cup, which started recently, “enraptures lovers of the game” from Durham to Durban, says the journal. I, for one, a perennial outsider, am spoiling for rapture.
The game’s lingo can be exotic: top-rated batter Babar Azam is said to average a “gaudy” 58 runs per game. More RPGs than 58 would qualify as “flamboyant.”
The lingo can wallop equally with understatement: veteran bowlers Trent Boult and Mitchell Starc “are expected to get more than their share of batters out.”
And a certain archly prim manière d’en parler can taste like apple pie: Ben Stokes, an ace at both batting and bowling, is an “all-rounder,” by gosh! The term could have issued from my grandmother’s lips.
EthicalDative isn’t a long-form blog, so I can’t précis the article’s whisper and promise on how cricket is played. A key to understanding the game is to forget baseball. The bowler gets a running start and usually bounces the ball to the batsman. The batsman is allowed to hit the ball in any direction, including backwards. There are two batsmen, not one, who take turns trying to hit balls. They may run between two low posts called wickets, or may decide not to.
That much I know.
(Victor Mather, “How to Become a Crickert Expert Just in Time for the Cricket World Cup,” New York Times, 10-4-23)
At the MEGA confab in Manchester the conurbation’s thrumming with humbug. Bannon cannons bombast from his basement. Farage megaphones it, cuts a rug with Priti.
Hardening arteries of reaction course with candlefire. Queues for Dutch rubs bend round every corner. Conning spoilers croon sweet nothings to clapping mini-throngs in semi-empty halls. Tufton Street hosts covert huddles in hotels.
Peers and peerettes trip the light fantastic. Posh buffets of pasta Putinesca fortify financial service barons. Trays of flutes brimming remainer tears lubricate their anthem of In Grip We Truss.
“Rhyme is a bit like metaphor, a way of asserting a resemblance between otherwise distant terms.”
(Kamran Javadizadeh)
There’s the rhyming of abducted words pressed into sonic servitude on a lick and a whim, screaming at the end of their lines. And there’s rhyme so poetically truthful you hardly notice it, yet would rue its absence.
You’ll know the one when you see it; here’s an instance of the other from a poem which is technically unrhymed:
“Lo, the summer is dead, the sun is faded, Even like as a leaf the year is withered, All the fruits of the day from all her branches Gathered, neither is any left to gather […”]
Here’s another truthful instance:
Márgarét, áre you gríeving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leáves like the things of man, you With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? Ah! ás the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; […]
I think of Swinburne’s by-the-wayside rhyminess, alongside Hopkins’s brass-bottomed match-ups, as organic rhyme, versus what might be called synthetic, or chain-ganged, rhyme. On first reading of the Hopkins verses I took little note of the rhymes themselves (a dead giveaway of skill), caught up as I was in the jolt of unleaving, plus rhythm, alliteration and neologism. The rhymes fall weightlessly amid the musick and gamboling word-horde.
These two are dead poets, of course. There’s little organic rhyme going on among live ones. That’s not a lament. Time flows. You can’t miss a negative. Where rhyme hangs out these days is in jaunty verse where words pair off in the semblance of a saucy hokey-pokey. It’s wicked good fun with a message inside.
Sources Kamran Javadizadeh, “The Eroticism of an IKEA Bed,” The New Yorker, 2-3-23. “Hendacasyllabics” by Algernon Charles Swinburne. Referenced by Matthew Walther, “This Is Why I Hate Banned Books Week,” New York Times, 10-1-23. “Spring and Fall” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Quoted by Bret Stephens in The Conversation, “Kevin McCarthy Surprised Us All,” New York Times, 10-2-23. Resurrecting the Trashcan Bard, WordPress blog.
The September edition of Poetry magazine publishes 3 poems by Palestinian poet Zakaria Mohammed. English translations by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha accompany the Arabic texts. She publishes a translator’s note as well. The poet’s death on August 2, 2023, is noted by Leonie Rau in ArabLit & ArabLit Quarterly.
I’ve read the poem “2013-1-2” in my dictionary-bound way, and have transliterated the Arabic text to show the vowelings and case inflections as I perceive them. Tuffaha’s recording of the poem in the online edition helps train my ear to the living language, and her translation helps check my understanding of the Arabic text.
As a student I’m best served by literalness in my own English version. A fringe benefit is that translating close to the metal feels like polishing a wry lens for viewing the world. The result can read oddly, as can poetry itself.
2013-1-2 Once I shot a gazelle. And the gazelle is a poetic necessity, nothing else. The sheep, white or black, are the truth. What’s important, I set for the gazelle a trap and it fell into it. And in me (was) an appetite, you can’t describe it, for savoring the salty meat of gazelles. I don’t like the meat of sheep of the malls. But I like your wheat-colored hand hanging medals on my shoulder. I like your lips saying to me: You are the pollen of the date palm. I am the pollen of the date palm? I am the iron that wounds it, and the frightening full moon that cuts its throat. I no longer have power over the gathering of my dispersion [See note] . I no longer distinguish between gazelles of the mall and the sheep of the poem. Futility to drive away the gazelle, and futility the pollen of the date palm.
If I die, open my email. The password is on a sheet of paper on the table. There you will find my will, and you will seize the gazelle by its two horns.
If you spot a parsing error in my transliteration, please tell me. I know a pausal reading omits many of the case endings, but documenting them helps me test my grasp of syntax.
Note “I no longer have power over the gathering of my dispersion” [lam ‘a^ud qādir(an) ^alā lamm(i) šatāt(ī)]. The active participle [qādir(an)] inflected adverbially expresses a state of ableness The verbal noun [lamm(un)] ranges across the acts of “gathering,” “reuniting,” “putting in order” and “repairing.” The verbal noun [šatāt(un)] conveys the sense of being “scattered” or “dispersed,” and can include the term “diaspora,” though it’s not mentioned in Hans Wehr. The speaker may feel either powerless or fed up with a condition of exile. Tuffaha translates it as: I can’t bear my exile any longer.
EthicalDative 
Mrs. Muzzle