Tarif Khalidi translates Sayyab

Comrade Tarif Khalidi is right that I have not been posting poetry. The 2400 words every week for AlAkhbar, I explained to him, is taking a lot of my time. Tarif kindly shared with me his translation of Badr Shakir As-Sayyab's poem: Christ After the Crucifixion:

After they brought me down, I heard the winds

In a lengthy wail, rustling the palm trees,

And steps fading away. So then, my wounds,

And the Cross upon which they nailed me all afternoon and evening

Did not kill me. I listened. The wail

Was crossing the plain between me and the city

Like a rope pulling at a ship

As it sinks to the sea-bed. The dirge

Was like a thread of light between dawn and midnight,

Upon a grieving winter sky.

And the city, nursing its feelings, fell asleep.

When the mulberry and the orange are in bloom,

When “Jaykur”* expands to furthest reaches of fancy,

When it turns green with plants,

Their fragrance singing,

And the suns which breastfed its splendor;

When even its night turns green:

Warmth touches my heart,

And my blood flows in its earth.

My heart is the sun, pulsating with light,

My heart is the earth, throbbing with wheat, flowers and flowing water;

My heart is the water, my heart is the blade of wheat;

Its death is its resurrection: it lives on what it eats.

In the dough when it is made round

And rolled like a tiny breast, the breast of shyness,

I died in the fire, I burnt the darkness of my clay,

But the god remained.

I was in the beginning, and in the beginning was Poverty.

I died that bread may be eaten in my name, that they plant me in season.

How many lives will I live! For in every furrow of earth,

I have become a future, I have become a seed,

I have become a race of men, in every human heart

A drop of my blood, or a little drop.

And so I came back. But when Judas saw me

He yellowed.

For I was keeper of his secrets.

He was a shadow of me that darkened,

He was a statue of an idea

In which the spirit was frozen and then extracted.

He was afraid the spirit would betray the death

In the water of his eyes.

(His eyes a rock

Into which he entered, trying to hide his tomb from people).

He was afraid of its warmth, afraid of its impossibility,

So he betrayed it.

“Is it you? Or is that my shadow grown white and scattering light?

Do you come back from the world of death? But death comes once.

This is what our fathers say, thus they taught us. Was it a lie?”

This is what he thought, when he saw me; his glance said it.

Feet running, footsteps, footsteps.

My tomb all but collapsing from the tread of footsteps.

Have they come ? Who else?!

Footstep, footstep. Footstep.

I placed the rock upon my chest

Or did they not crucify me yesterday? But here

I am

In my tomb.

Let them come:

I am in my tomb.

Who knows that I …? Who knows?!

And the friends of Judas? Who will believe what they claim?

Footstep, footstep.

Here am I, naked, in my darkened tomb.

Yesterday I was wrapped

Like a bundle of reeds, a blossom

Under the shrouds of snow.

The redness of blood is moist.

I was like the shadows between darkness and day.

Then I burst forth in treasures

And denuded them like fruit.

When I sewed from my pocket a swaddle

From my sleeve a dress,

When I one day warmed with my flesh

The bones of children,

When I tore open my wound and dressed another’s wound,

The wall between me and God collapsed.

The soldiers surprised even my wounds, my heart-beats.

They surprised all that was not dead, even in its tomb.

They took me by surprise

As a palm tree in fruit

Is surprised by a hungry troop of birds

In some abandoned village.

The eyes of guns

Eat my path,

Bayonets fixed, the fire in them

Dreaming of crucifying me.

If these are made of iron and fire,

The pupils of my people’s eyes

Are made from the lights of the heavens,

From memories and love.

They carry my burden, and my cross grows moist.

How small was that death, my death----and how vast!

After they nailed me and I cast my eyes towards the city

I hardly recognized the plain, the wall, the cemetery.

As far as the eye could see, it was something

Like a forest in bloom.

Wherever the vision could reach, there was a cross, a grieving mother.

The Lord be sanctified !

This is the city about to give birth. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++* Jaykur: Poet’s home village.