The Book of Disappearance: A Novel by Ibtisam Azem
Translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon
256 pgs. | pb | 9780815611110 | $19.95
Syracuse University Press
Review by Grant Barber

This wonderful, important second novel by Ibtisam Azem in English translation came out just in time for the observance of Women in Translation month—a month in which publishers, translators, authors, booksellers highlight English translations of works by women who write in other languages. Azem is a journalist of Palestinian heritage living in NYC. A credit to her imagination and writing is that one of the main characters in her novel, The Book of Disappearance, flips her own biographical matters: Ariel is male and Jewish, also a journalist filing reports in the opposite direction, to his editor in NYC from Jaffa, the town immediately south of Tel Aviv.

Although other characters appear written from a third person perspective—the chapter headings tell the reader whose perspective we are receiving—the other major voice is Alaa’s. He is a second-generation, internally displaced Palestinian who, along with the rest of the Palestinians living within their ancestral borders, vanishes one night. He was born into a family headed by a matriarch, his grandmother, who remained in Palestine after the creation of Israel in 1948—called by Palestinians the Naqba, the disaster, when 700,000 people left or were expelled from their homes.

The novel starts with the frantic search for Alaa’s grandmother, whom he finds upright, seemingly at peace, and dead. She is seated on a bench overlooking the sea in her beloved hometown of Jaffa. The city and the heritage it contains are strong forces of meaning, nostalgia, and character.

This report of the search turns out to be the start of a diary that Alaa kept, a running commentary addressed to his grandmother about memories, family members and events, his grief at her death as well as the losses she endured, reflections on place, history, and what it means to be a people. This diary has been left behind, discovered by Ariel after the vanishing of Palestinians living in the loosely defined (for the world of the novel) area of Palestine overlapping with Israel. Ariel, a liberal, more secular Jew, lives in the same building as Alaa. They were friends of a complicated sort, with keys to each other’s apartments.

Much of these basics are discursively laid out on the back of the book. What I’d claim is that the bare bones description—the characters, the disappearance without explanation or evidence of mass actions—does not capture the seeming light touch of storytelling by effective authorial voice and prose. Even when the thoughts of the characters turn toward some of the most horrific events of the region, the prose does not confront as much as describe and account. One of Azem’s strengths is that essential skill of showing, not telling. More than once after finishing the novel I would open it up to hunt down a character’s name or a sequence of events and be drawn right back into the story, well beyond finding the answer I sought.

An example of showing: after Alaa’s disappearance, Ariel focuses on his journalist duties, and is not getting much sleep. He climbs the stairs down to Alaa’s apartment; he lets himself in, which leads to him nosing around a bit—like checking out what there is to eat—and then falls asleep, exhausted, on Alaa’s bed for the night. He returns to sleep there again for the next several nights. The literary trope one might be looking for is the realization of “we’re all the same in the end,” or the mourning of the absence of a friend with new insight into unappreciated qualities. But, nope, not even a hint of any change in Ariel indicating empathy. The difference of just a flight or two of stairs is not sufficient a reason. Nothing about the apartment is touted as better—size of rooms, morning light, nothing.

In the Middle East Monitor, reviewer Romana Wadi points out the simplest, most logical explanation for Ariel’s behavior: the reflexive impulse to take over Palestinian dwellings and property. Ariel might represent a progressive viewpoint of Jewish Israelis, but he also seems comfortable repeating some of the rationalizations that try to cover the discomfort of knowing that hundreds of thousands of people had been displaced, sometimes with great violence, from homes in which they and generations before them had grown up. Alaa’s diary recounts a few conversations he had with Ariel when the topics turned toward those tensions, the anger just below the surface that can’t be willed away. By the end of the novel Jewish residents nearby have started casing the empty houses left behind, some with a view of the sea…wondering how and when they might lay claim. The Israeli government passes a law naming an arbitrary day and time by when the Palestinians must show up in person to reclaim their property, or it will be forfeit. The country as a whole seems to stay awake until that 3 a.m. deadline, waiting to see if this law was enough to bring the Palestinians back. It doesn’t, and the initial right of return that was established early in Israel’s modern existence but since blocked—echoes again.

For all the inescapable politics inherent here, Azem portrays people with complicated relationships—Alaa’s mother to his grandmother, fathers of both Alaa and Ariel, a former wife and present lovers of the men. The flow of the novel is smooth, an effective, almost-placid surface under which are deep waters, faster currents, dark places. This novel would make an excellent one for a book club interested in fiction as a door into current challenges.

Once again, a side-matter is that of genre. The besetting event seems like science fiction, a fairy tale or a one-trick magical realism move. The rest of the novel has a realist bent. Perhaps this novel is one more artistic work that makes the need for pigeon-holing novels into genres increasingly irrelevant. From Sterne to Stein to Calvino, and the translator’s own fiction—Antoon in his most recent novel veers outside the constraints of genre—the inclusion of the unexplainable seems actually truer to real life than a Sinclair Lewis or Stendhal novel.

Syracuse University Press merits mention and thanks for its dedication to literary works from the Middle East. It is in company with the U of Texas Press and its Latinx fiction series; the University of Nebraska’s series of fiction in translation; Wake Forest and Irish poetry; Yale Margellos; and �����Թ�’s Open Letter Books. Inherent though is the lower commercial profile all of these great sources of literature in translation into English. One can hope that novels and novelists such as Azem will continue to be supported and promoted on a wider English stage. Some really great work is out there every publishing season.

The Book of Collateral Damage

Author Sinan Antoon is an Assoc. Professor at the Gallatin School of Individual Study of NYU. His undergraduate degree was in 1990 from Baghdad University; his PhD is from Harvard, 2006, in Arab Studies. He came to the U.S. just after the 1991 war and has returned to Iraq several times for personal and professional reasons. He is a poet, translator, and novelist; The Book of Collateral Damage is his fourth book. The Corpse Washer, 2015, was also published by Yale Margellos.

An apt image for Antoon, or at least the narrators he brings to life would be a wax seal depicting a small globe with a person’s head peeking out above one pole, and feet out below the other, a literal depiction of a person passing through the world, with the one-word legend “Honesty.” A reader gets the sense that Antoon is a man travelling through this world based on life details he reveals in interviews, and his choices of stories, people—specifically narrators, language, and tone. That seal image may seem a bit light, but only on the surface: a person facing challenges, not quite belonging, at least at times. It’s a common theme from major world religions, Plato to Camus, contemporary science—being aliens and sojourners in this problematic, indifferent world. Antoon has written a twenty-first century update of the existential novel. Yet religions and philosophies also urge us to know the same world as a gift in terms of food, music, family, and friends. Antoon describes that goodness as well.

Belonging and struggle come with the impressions Antoon’s characters respectfully and non-judgmentally form of other people—taxi drivers, waiters, mentors, and professional peers, to women with whom the protagonist has romantic relationships. In this novel the narrator, Nameer Al-Baghdadi, keeps an interesting distance via observations of people, places, and events. He is present, he takes it all in, he processes, shows, cares: a slight, cool distance, of facticity, a flaneur not just of places, but an observer of life. However, instead of creating a sense of alienation, Antoon’s gift is to create a concreteness of the world portrayed. Toward the conclusion of the novel, Nameer recounts a scene after observing a man in NYC he has seen repeatedly going through bins for discarded cans and bottles to redeem for cash:

A month later, after wrestling with insomnia, I went out at half past four and walked south. After an hour, when I reached the riverbank, I saw from afar a truck parked under the Manhattan Bridge. There was a long line in front of it, with men and women pushing shopping carts piled up with bulging sacks. At the back of the truck a man was taking the sacks and then giving each person an amount of money. I watched for five minutes, then headed back.

While the account described here of the economically marginalized shows consequences of the contemporary urban world, the collateral damage of the title fully emerges in Baghdad, and in the writings of Wadood, which are at the heart of this novel.

Wadood Abdulkarim too is a man not wholly at home in any world. He is a bookseller whom Nameer encountered in Baghdad while serving as a translator for documentary filmmakers. Wadood gives Nameer an unfinished manuscript to perhaps translate; Wadood is ambivalent about this, the purpose of the writing not necessarily seeking publication. Wadood names his manuscript Firhis—catalogue. The writings of Wadood are in his voice, though not a book-within-a-book format, so no set-aside changes in font style or size beyond a chapter title and slightly indented margins. Wadood gives voice to his idiosyncratic vision, articulating the perspective of things of the world—a tree, a book, a wall, a rug, over 20 in all. Each of these sections is named “The Conversation of ______,” with the first one and a concluding version being a variation on the historical spiritual fable The Conversation of the Birds.

These testimonies recount the birth, formation, and growth of each thing of the world—sometimes we have to read a bit to figure out the small mystery of what is being brought forth, each with a history of decades. Each meets a final fate during the first minute of the fall of Baghdad in 2003. By the time we arrive at the concluding gut-punch of the fourth object, a carpet, the reader might feel put on notice that by understatement, showing not telling, this collateral damage will document the real costs to so much of what makes a culture, of the ordinary, which always bears the brunt of wars not of their choosing or control. Wadood explains this when handing Nameer the manuscript:

“This is a project of a lifetime, an archive of the losses from war and destruction. But not soldiers and equipment. The losses that are never mentioned or seen. Not just people. Animals and plants and inanimate things and anything that can be destroyed. Minute by minute. This is the file for the first minute.”

The voicing of inanimate objects as if they have human-like senses of sight and hearing, as well as the retention of memories, is a risky narrative device. A reader might initially experience that move as a bridge too far and absent in any previous familiar framework beyond fables, such as magical realism or a fictional argument for pansychism. A different purpose is served. The first aid in moving beyond this concern is the realization that Antoon has Nameer translating Wadood, and so creating a narrative container, context. Wadood’s Fihris comes with his explanatory writings, including a Preamble which includes:

The minute will be a three-dimensional space. It will be a place where I snipe at things and souls as they move. . . . But we rarely hear their voices, their whispers, because we don’t try. We rarely notice things smiling. Yes, things have faces too, but we don’t see them. Those who do see them, after making the effort and training to do so, and those who talk to them are labeled mad by your standards.

I am the one who saw everything, and I see what they don’t see.

Nameer then observes, “I liked the preamble, the idea of a history of the prey and a catalogue of the first minute. These were wild ideas that were not afraid to take risks.”

After a time the reader starts to wonder if and how Wadood and Nameer are also collateral damage. True to the smaller sections where the object or person emerges from unfolding detail, the novel itself concludes with the final puzzle piece of Wadood’s life, his mind shattering history and his fate. Nameer remarks that he is on his seventh move since coming to the U.S. Mariah, the woman with whom Nameer finds a mutual and significant relationship, traces the scars on his back. She does not ask too much about them, nor does she promise to erase them. As an African American woman she has her own deep understanding of history grounded specifically in the person, in belonging/not-belonging.

However, the collateral damages of history by the powerful do not dictate the entirety of existing as people out in the world. In one well-told scene, Nameer visits Mariah’s mother’s apartment for a meal. Antoon/Nameer appreciates food, home-cooking, or at least the unpretentious flavors of the everyday: figs, breakfast sammun with cream and date syrup, tea, simmet, okra recipes from two different cultures.

Antoon as a citizen of the world has definitive opinions regarding intellectual and political Orientalism. This critical engagement shows in his interviews, non-fiction writings, and a documentary he made about Iraq after the 2003 war. He critiques American invasions of Iraq and the politicians who ordered them, as well as the behind-the-scenes manipulation of foreign rulers, fickle and serving the perceived purposes of the U.S. We know that later, time and again, the support will boomerang back with unintended consequences for both governments and civilians.

Antoon’s fiction also comes as a rejoinder—my reading of him, not a stated concern of Antoon—to those who claim that something called “world-literature” gets initially written with an eye and ear for a theoretical (and mythical) mono-culture dominated by Western taste. The author in this novel cites poets and philosophers from pre-Islamic, pre-modern, and modern Arabic culture. A reader in English can take note in this novel of the authors named to seek out or not; the novel stands on its own regardless.

What is given no quarter, though, is the myopic Western assumption about the primacy of Western philosophy and arts cultures in the larger world. Whether from Asia, the Indian subcontinent, N Africa and other Arabic influenced regions: whole and different written worlds and perspectives, each with a rich, ongoing history are more ancient than, and stand beside, those of Western European traditions.

Sinan Antoon’s perspective and voice are one of the important, emergent witnesses. I’d claim that for the world stage. His books have been translated into French and German, and originally appeared in Arabic. He is building a truly important body of work.

Dark Constellations by Pola Oloixarac
Translated from the Spanish by Roy Kesey
216 pgs. | pb | 9781616959234 | $22.00

Reviewed by Grant Barber

Dark Constellations, the second novel in translation by the author of Savage Theories, continues the intriguing, complex narratives of science, technology, and searches for meaning and control in the personal and economic/political. Both novels jump around in time. Each epoch pushes boundaries of connectedness between the human and non-human, sometimes mystical, other times exploitive and weirdly, humorously absurd. Readers of Oloixarac’s novels seem to struggle with how to decide where to shelve these books: there are certainly elements of cyber-punk and science fiction. There is some Venn Diagram of relatedness in which a wider range of genres fits: Richard Power’s Plowing the Dark, �ٱ𳢾�������’s White Noise, ���ǰ��ǰ쾱��’s Ice; Bulgakov’s phantasmagoria and Nicola Barker’s disrupted narratives; Monty Python when the humor is biting, horrifying; and Andrea Barrett’s historical scientific concerns. And yet, we are not dealing with magical realism. Oloixarac is part of a grander movement of new Latinx writers, which includes the likes of El Salvadorian Castellano Moya of Dances with Snakes and Samanta Schweblin with Mouthful of Birds. Oloixarac’s writing is one of many styles of the new, but all these novels consist of ideas grounded in particulars, which is ultimately missing from so many dreary, derivative fictions of USA/British writers of manners and social convention.

Oloixarac’s writing is original, with unique preoccupations. Dark Constellations starts in the nineteenth century as European scientists seek an orchid’s pollen in the Canary Islands that is reported to break down barriers of human consciousness between people, but also human and non-human. Traveling into a cave system, scientists such as cartographer Torben Schats and insect merchant (?!) Diotimus Redbach find themselves overwhelmed by the hidden city of an indigenous tribe. They appear again later, but then we move on to Cassius, an student from Argentina studying computer coding and who later works at Stromatoliton, a company that seems to have a stake in the private, the public, the international, the dark web, and a future that breaks down divisions of species, people, corporations, and countries.

At the conclusion of his translation of Savage Theories, Roy Kesey writes a short afterword with observations on Oloixarac’s writing. He notes a sense of displacement, and already looks toward Dark Constellations, which joins the first “as every bit as rich and enfoldingly complex.” This is true on several levels of narrative structure and continuation of images and themes of which the keen reader might want to keep track. On a basic level of sentences (and the challenges the Spanish might have created for a translator), consider this concluding paragraph for one of the final chapters:

Ailín laid her head to rest next to the computer. Suddenly, Ailín and Noelia and Leni ceased to exist, and Cassio took up his lambskin jacket and patted Mossad, who meowed like a hoarse mockingbird. Cassio waved a liminal goodbye and was jettisoned out of the house. Violet glimmerings descended from the peak of the sky, covering everything, sliding down the side of the frozen mountain. Suddenly, his own trajectory painted itself sharply against the world.

A whole lot is going on just in those few sentences: acting and being acted on, unstable reality at least in perception, species confabulation, sky and earth features, allusion to the secretive political (Mossad) reduced to non-meaning, transcendence, specificity. If asked, could you demonstrate the act of “a liminal goodbye?”

We are in the near future. The women named in the above passage are the new “resistance,” literally painted as superficial as they try to disguise their faces from being scanned by public cameras, painting them with black and white triangle shapes. Cassio, who has been nurturing virus codes, has planted them throughout the world-wide web, one of the several trans-historical, trans-national, trans-personal constellations of the book’s title. The government and Cassio’s company have figured ways to capture the DNA of each person first via live samples, then exhumed corpses, and finally with monitors similar to public security cameras—Bionoses—which hoover up airborne DNA molecules from the general public. The revolutionary impulse of the population post-Argentinian dictatorship has devolved into the wearied but predictable co-opting of such projects—in which the government and corporations use scientific means for threatening but unclear gain.

I don’t think it is a spoiler to urge the reader to keep with the novel in order to reach a phantasmagoric, wonderfully absurd moment later on: a swarm of rats in a five-year cycle, triggered by the blooming of a specific plant that covers them in a neon-green dust. As the rats later die they first form copies of star constellations. According to one character, we can discern the really real by not looking at the stars/constellations, but at the black voids, the dark, titular constellations where there is no light. Head-scratching, profound sounding, a strung-together set of metaphors that might echo theoretical physics, nihilism, sure sounds like scientific deep thought or one of the earliest human attempts to figure out cause and effect: as above, so below, and vice versa. But these are the musings of a fellow looking at Day-Glo rats being exterminated while mysteriously forming constellation patterns, all brought about by an ability of humans to reach across the species barrier. A deep parallel exists between this descent down to the animalistic as Cassio reveals the technological nodes of the computer virus he has spent a lifetime surreptitiously disseminating, one that no one could debug or contain due to its complexity and reach.

In the end, Cassio comes to embody the worldwide reality, the how and the why waiting to be discovered by the reader who joins the journey of the novel. Another aspect that merits touching on is Oloixarac’s carna(l)tional, portrayal of the erotic. She writes about women’s reality, and differently from the more masculine (Updike? Roth?) build-up to a specific eruptive event, often described in cringe worthy language. In contrast, Oloixarac weaves frank, descriptive responses of female characters as incremental parts of life.

Oloixarac has an inventiveness, an imagination that stands apart from all those other (mostly male) writers I referenced at the start. She has control over images and ideas, which makes for little to no waste of words building up this world and its story. I don’t intend all of this to sound so dry, deadly serious. The writing has wit, playfulness, as Kesey also points out the “satiric key” that a reader needs keep in mind while tracking the jumps of time and place. We can look forward to more from this author, and one hopes the same translator, as Oloixarac’s third novel, Mona, has been recently published in Spanish.

Because I don’t know much about the tradition of Afghan landays, though I do find it both fascinating and in some ways haunting, I’ll let the jacket copy speak for itself before we get to Grant’s piece:

Afghans revere poetry, particularly the high literary forms that derive from Persian or Arabic. But the poem above is a folk couplet—a landay, an ancient oral and anonymous form created by and for mostly illiterate people: the more than 20 million Pashtun women who span the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. War, separation, homeland, love—these are the subjects of landays, which are brutal and spare, can be remixed like rap, and are powerful in that they make no attempts to be literary. From Facebook to drone strikes to the songs of the ancient caravans that first brought these poems to Afghanistan thousands of years ago, landays reflect contemporary Pashtun life and the impact of three decades of war. With the U.S. withdrawal in 2014 looming, these are the voices of protest most at risk of being lost when the Americans leave.

The Poetry Foundation also has a more on the topic, and the landays themselves, also written by Eliza Griswold (and also supplemented by photos from Seamus Murphy).

Here’s the beginning of Grant’s review:

On that September 11th I had a conversation with a professor friend who was teaching a creative writing class that evening. He questioned, “What can I possibly teach when all of this has happened?” While the dismay and grief were his reference, the question touches on a matter much deeper: what is art’s purpose? Either it is an indulgence, lacking gravitas—the wasted calories of dessert after a nutritious meal, good tasting but not essential—or art is a vital part of the human experience in good and hard times. This collection of landays—an oral tradition of women’s poetry in Afghanistan, with prescribed form but subtlety of subject matter—brings full-circle that conversation 13 years ago. This collection testifies in deep and important ways how art is inextricably part of life. These poems, historical and culturally central to Afghanis, can address timeless matters such as love, composed centuries ago or in the present as a woman grieves the death of loved ones killed in a drone strike.

Griswold is an editor and translator, a poet, and she is a non-fiction writer who has been addressing the contemporary intersection of Islamic and Christian worlds (The 10th Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault-line Between Christianity and Islam, 2011) through first-hand accounts. She negotiates the tense geographical intersections, giving her unique access. Here she draws from first hand interviews with women from the Pashto region, generally rural, isolated and conservative. She brings together the landays topically, followed by a brief narrative of the poets’ lives and circumstances for the poems. Interspersed throughout are candid black and white photographs taken by Seamus Murphy of the people and their surroundings.

For the rest of the review, go here.

Griswold is an editor and translator, a poet, and she is a non-fiction writer who has been addressing the contemporary intersection of Islamic and Christian worlds (The 10th Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault-line Between Christianity and Islam, 2011) through first-hand accounts. She negotiates the tense geographical intersections, giving her unique access. Here she draws from first hand interviews with women from the Pashto region, generally rural, isolated and conservative. She brings together the landays topically, followed by a brief narrative of the poets’ lives and circumstances for the poems. Interspersed throughout are candid black and white photographs taken by Seamus Murphy of the people and their surroundings.

A landay is a prescribed formal short poem. As Griswold explains, “[E]ach has twenty-two syllables: nine in the first line, thirteen in the second. The poem ends with the sound ma or na. Sometimes landays rhyme, but more often they do not.” Landays are primarily oral, and often sung, accompanied by a hand-held drum when religious authorities have not outlawed their use. Improvisations can happen in the moment as the poets keep the form, content remembered from previous versions, but with creative riffs to meet current circumstances. The landays, and the changes made can be biting, satirical, bawdy, or heartrending. The poems are recited/sung in groups of women, in privacy away from men. This collection is organized by the traditional subjects of landays.

The first section is “Love.” One can imagine these first landays being sung hundreds of years ago:

Your eyes aren’t eyes. They’re bees.
I can find no cure for their stinging.

Climb to the brow of the hill and sight
Where my darling’s caravan will tent this night.

In a note following the second landay, Griswold explains that landays are traced back to Bronze Age immigrants from Indo-Aryan people, from around 1700 B.C.E. The nomadic way of life is as alive now as then.

These women, however, live in modern times:

Daughter, in America the river isn’t wet.
Young girls learn to fill their jugs on the internet.

How much simpler can love be?
Let’s get engaged. Text me.

Griswold explains that when women went to the river in the past to gather water, the men might hide so that they and the women might have some sort of glimpse, a covert courtship at a distance. With wells now rather than rivers for water, women do not have water gathering as a reason for leaving their house. Although Griswold gathered most of the poems quoted, here she cites a civic leader from the district of Rodar, in the village of Chinar, “who transcribed these texts [poems] by local girls who were trading tongue-in-cheek landays that comment on how their lives are moving beyond the river bank traditions.” A photograph follows of a woman walking away from the camera with a water basket on her head, in desolate, rocky terrain.

Griswold concludes this section by recounting meeting Salma, a professional woman in her twenties, still single, with a radio show in Kandahar that features poetry, at least for now; women in her circumstance might not continue after American forces fully withdraw and Taliban rule returns. This anxiety repeats throughout the collection.

Salma has a younger sister, Sanga, who just got engaged to a cousin. Griswold recounts an exchange that the girl and her cousin had, one of the few citations of a male using the form:

One recent morning, the cousin approached her on the way to school and recited a landay to declare his love for the first time: “My mother loves me and God loves my mother, so God will reward you with being my mother’s daughter (his wife).” She responded with another landay: he’d better hurry up and send his family to ask for her hand in marriage, since others were already coming to her home.

While the exchange seems playful and perhaps surprising in the boldness which Sanga claims, the next section, “Grief and Separation,” strikes a counterbalancing tone in the first landay quoted:

When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers.
When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others.

The next landay gives the book its title:

In my dream I am the President.
When I awake, I am the beggar of the world.

In the follow-up explanation Griswold recounts a conversation with a refugee in a camp, an older woman whose husband is dying; the woman’s prospects when he dies are bleak.

“War and Homeland” is the final section of landays. The complexity of attitudes and conflicting deep feelings are striking:

May God destroy your tank and your drone
you who’ve destroyed my village, my home.

Contrasted with:

May God destroy the Taliban and end their wars.
They’ve made Afghan women into widows and whores.

The explanations for both landays given by Griswold, and the other poems within their contexts, make for important, powerful reading. America is not a liberating presence, but one more destructive force faced by Afghani women through history, albeit with some temporary benefit, a reprieve for now from women’s exclusion from receiving education, and some freedoms in the public sphere of cultural life.

These poems were not composed and recited for the Western readers’ benefit; instead they are part of the cultural reality and centuries old vitality of Afghani culture. This is not a literary act of appropriation, but of introduction. Griswold brings them to us so that we might listen in a bit to others’ realities, one to which we in the Western world, and especially the U.S., are now yoked.

Jawad is the youngest child from a Baghdad family. His father, like his father before him, is a traditional corpse washer—an honored and necessary role for their Shi’ite Moslem community that eschews embalming for immediate burial. The elder son was in training to be a doctor when drafted and killed during war.

The focus on Jawad tracks his relationships with his father, who starts the gradual training of his son at age eight (as he had with the older son) in the ritual of corpse washing; with his mother, widowed over the course of the novel; and with two different women with whom he is romantically involved. Both his father’s death and the crises of war limit Jawad’s practical future. He longs to be an artist, a sculptor, and completes a university degree to that end, with much tension between son and father. His father’s death, the economic realities of war, and finally his sense of duty, bring him back to the family business.

In Western literary terms the novel is a contemporary form of tragedy. At two different phases of his life Jawad becomes involved with a woman. Each relationship ends, not without love between Jawad and each woman, but without conditions that can lead to marriage. Jawad does not have hubris, but is instead contained by the situations so much out of his control. Like the statues of Giacometti that Jawad admires, he is stretched and distorted by the existential circumstances in which he finds himself, trapped in a way, but not without insight by the conclusion of the novel that gives him a some small sense of meaning and purpose in a profession centered around death.

Interestingly, Antoon brings in the reality of war, often in a matter-of-fact way, as background and context. He neither dwells on it, nor ignores it. This isn’t a novel centered on brutalities, battles, and direct conflicts between the occupied and their occupiers. The same approach applies to the corpses, with the exception of two toward the end of the book; one might expect graphic detail that would personalize all involved—the dead men, the relatives who brought them, the corpse washer, and by extension, the reader. Again, this is not a novel of outrage against the depredations and horrors of war in a visceral manner. Instead, the personal lives of Jawad, his family, his friends, and community members are warped by the unrelenting backdrop of conflict after conflict.

Antoon writes in two different, alternating styles. One is grounded in realistic portrayals in a time of distortion:

I was startled as I uncovered the face of one of the men I washed yesterday. He looked exactly like a dear friend of mine who’d died years ago. The same rectangular cheek bones, and long nose. The skin and eyes were coffee brown. His eyes were shut, of course. Their sockets were somewhat hollow. The thick eyebrows looked as if they were going to shake hands. But, I said to myself, I’ve already seen him dead in my arms once before. The name on the paper was Muhsin. The distinguishing mark that this person, who looked so much like my friend, had acquired was a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. It looked like a period which had put an end to the sentence of his life. One of the men who brought him to me said he was a shop owner and was killed in a robbery. Thank God, I thought. It’s not a sectarian killing. But does it matter to the dead how and why they die? Theft, greed, hatred or sectarianism? We, who are waiting in line for our turn, keep mulling over death, but the dead person just dies and is indifferent.

The short declarative sentences even when describing the horrific have a certain flatness of tone. Note how Antoon brings by economy of detail into one paragraph the role of corpse washer, the personal (a dead friend), violence, art-making that is life (the period at the end of a sentence), the everyday—a shop owner with friends, sectarian divisions, the finality of death.

The other mode is poetic leading to the surreal. Jawad’s first love, Reem, has just written from Amman revealing that she and her family had left Baghdad because she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she has had a mastectomy:

I see Reem standing in an orchard full of blossoming pomegranate trees the wind moves the branches and the red blossoms appear to be waving from afar. Reem waves as well and her hands say Come close! I walk toward her and call out her name, but I can hear neither my own voice nor the sound of my footsteps. All I hear is the wind rustling Reem smiles without saying anything. I am closer and I see two pomegranates on her chest instead of her breasts. She notices that I am looking at them and smiles as she cups them with her hands from below. Her fingernails and lips are painted pomegranate red. I rush toward her, and when I reach her and hug her, the left pomegranate falls to the ground. When I bend down to pick it up I see red stains bathing my arm. I turn back and see Reem crying as she tries to stop the fountain of blood gushing from the wound.

Antoon does quite an interesting thing as the novel progresses, as he removes the boundaries between the surreal and real-world encounters. An example: when male relatives bring just the decapitated head of a loved one for burial. The routine of washing comes up against the ghastly. Conversely, what seems real becomes revealed as dream: a description of Jawad waiting in line to get his visa to travel to Amman—a plausible step in the progression of the plot—when a suicide bomber ahead in line detonates, and Jawad is covered in blood, and then awakens. Dream and reality, the mundane and the surreal, blur.

This merger of reality and dream comes together in the second love affair Jawad has, with his cousin who has come with her family to live with Jawad and his mother. Over a succession of nights the two insomniacs grow closer and eventually become lovers. When it is time for her family to leave and for Jawad to step forward in one last opportunity to ask for her in marriage, he balks. This is a night-time relationship and cannot be sustained in something like ordinary life, the light of day. Death and Jawad’s duties toward the dead have overtaken him.

Significant roles and symbols interweave to tie the novel tighter together: an uncle in self imposed exile because of Communist sympathies and the impotence of political parties; statues in many roles and anecdotes; normal human institutions such as universities contending with the not-normal.

Pomegranates, like those referenced in the Reem dream sequence already cited, are part of Islamic religious symbolism. One must eat all the small pieces, the arils, of the pomegranate because one will always be from a tree in paradise. Beside the building where the corpses are washed is a small garden watered by the run-off from the washing ceremony. At the center of this garden is a pomegranate tree, beloved by Jawad’s father and eventually by Jawad, who sometimes rests beside it and talks to it. Two twigs from the tree go into each coffin as a symbolic way of easing the journey of the dead.

At the end of the novel Jawad has accepted his place as a corpse washer. The crucial moment comes when he is turned away at the border with Jordan; single men are not allowed to cross. While waiting for his turn at the border he sees a TV showing yet another bombing and the scene of dead bodies. He wonders, with all the conflicted realities with which he struggles, who might tend the bodies. While his sense of vocational call in the moment might be muted, and is a call always caught up in the troubling reality of death, here, however, is a moment where Jawad sees his place in his world.

The novel concludes with Jawad sitting beneath the tree, listening to a nightingale sing, until it is scared away by the arrival of another corpse; Mahdi, his assistant, breaks this silence:

It started singing with a gentle sweetness—as if it knew I had complained that paradise was far away, so it had brought its sound right here . . .

The living die or depart, and the dead always come. I had thought that life and death were two separate worlds with clearly marked boundaries. But now I know they are conjoined, sculpting each other. My father knew that, and the pomegranate tree knows it as well.

Mahdi opened the door and said, “Jawad, they brought one.”

The nightingale fled. I sighed and said, “Okay, I’m coming. Just give me another minute.”

I am like the pomegranate tree, but all my branches have been cut, broken, and buried with the dead. My heart has become a shrunken pomegranate beating with death and falling every second into a bottomless pit.

But no one knows. No one. The pomegranate alone knows.

Grant is not only a keen bibliophile, and an Episcopal priest living on the south shore of Boston, but has reviewed for Three Percent for forever, basically, and sometimes also performs as Chad’s stunt double at conferences.

Here’s the beginning of his review:

Antoon gives us a remarkable novel that in 184 pages captures the experience of an Iraqi everyman who has lived through the war with Iran in the first half of the 1980s, the 1991 Gulf War over the Kuwaiti invasion, and then the 2003 war.

Jawad is the youngest child from a Baghdad family. His father, like his father before him, is a traditional corpse washer—an honored and necessary role for their Shi’ite Moslem community that eschews embalming for immediate burial. The elder son was in training to be a doctor when drafted and killed during war.

The focus on Jawad tracks his relationships with his father, who starts the gradual training of his son at age eight (as he had with the older son) in the ritual of corpse washing; with his mother, widowed over the course of the novel; and with two different women with whom he is romantically involved. Both his father’s death and the crises of war limit Jawad’s practical future. He longs to be an artist, a sculptor, and completes a university degree to that end, with much tension between son and father. His father’s death, the economic realities of war, and finally his sense of duty, bring him back to the family business.

In Western literary terms the novel is a contemporary form of tragedy. At two different phases of his life Jawad becomes involved with a woman. Each relationship ends, not without love between Jawad and each woman, but without conditions that can lead to marriage. Jawad does not have hubris, but is instead contained by the situations so much out of his control. Like the statues of Giacometti that Jawad admires, he is stretched and distorted by the existential circumstances in which he finds himself, trapped in a way, but not without insight by the conclusion of the novel that gives him a some small sense of meaning and purpose in a profession centered around death.

For the rest of the review, go here.

Grant Barber is a regular reviewer for Three Percent, a keen bibliophile, and an Episcopal priest living on the south shore of Boston.

Collections like this are always fascinating to me—we get to see a wide range of the translator’s abilities and tastes, and are simultaneously introduced to more than one era, style, and form of poetry. So if you find it difficult to sit through an entire book of haikus, but would find more pleasure in reading a haiku here or there among a plethora of other poetic styles, this collection will be right up your alley.

Here’s a part of Grant’s review:

To enter Merwin’s larger poetic project, whether in his translations or his own poems, the reader weighs life’s experiences captured in language so that “these very things may be the poem.” This collection gathers poems spanning 2,500 years, from thirty-eight languages, seventy-eight different poets whose names are known, and twenty-six anonymous poets, the latter including songs from communal oral traditions. Two previously gathered selected translations (1948-1968 and 1968-1978), join those Merwin has selected from 1978 to 2011. Each of the three sections is preceded by Merwin’s explanation of his evolving project of translation.

“Since the eighteenth century, and especially since the beginning of modernism, more and more translations have been undertaken with the clear purpose of introducing readers (most of them, of course, unknown to the translators) to works they could not read in the original, by authors they might very well never have heard of, from cultures, traditions and forms with which they had no acquaintance . . . . (by) poet-translators who do not, themselves, know the languages from which they are making their versions, but must rely, for their grasp of the originals, on the knowledge and work of others.” (from “Forward, 1968-1978”)

Merwin honors his fellow poets who have helped him in his project of translations from not only languages more familiar to Western ears, and the haikus of classic Asian writers of the form, but also ancient Egyptian, Quechua, Kabylia, Dahomey, Caxinua, Vietnamese, Tartar, Urdu, and so forth. Beyond French and Spanish, Merwin explains that he is dependent on dictionaries and other translations; he might not work from the original but from, say, a French translation of the original.

Click here for the entire review, and some preview poems.

“South”

To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars
from the bank of shadow to have watched
the scattered lights
my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their places in constellations
to have heard the ring of water in the secret pool
known the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle
the silence of the sleeping bird
the arch of the entrance the damp
—these very things may be the poem.

-Jorge Luis Borges, Spanish, 1899-1986

To enter Merwin’s larger poetic project, whether in his translations or his own poems, the reader weighs life’s experiences captured in language so that “these very things may be the poem.” This collection gathers poems spanning 2,500 years, from thirty-eight languages, seventy-eight different poets whose names are known, and twenty-six anonymous poets, the latter including songs from communal oral traditions. Two previously gathered selected translations (1948-1968 and 1968-1978), join those Merwin has selected from 1978 to 2011. Each of the three sections is preceded by Merwin’s explanation of his evolving project of translation.

“Since the eighteenth century, and especially since the beginning of modernism, more and more translations have been undertaken with the clear purpose of introducing readers (most of them, of course, unknown to the translators) to works they could not read in the original, by authors they might very well never have heard of, from cultures, traditions and forms with which they had no acquaintance . . . . (by) poet-translators who do not, themselves, know the languages from which they are making their versions, but must rely, for their grasp of the originals, on the knowledge and work of others.” (from “Forward, 1968-1978”)

Merwin honors his fellow poets who have helped him in his project of translations from not only languages more familiar to Western ears, and the haikus of classic Asian writers of the form, but also ancient Egyptian, Quechua, Kabylia, Dahomey, Caxinua, Vietnamese, Tartar, Urdu, and so forth. Beyond French and Spanish, Merwin explains that he is dependent on dictionaries and other translations; he might not work from the original but from, say, a French translation of the original.

“Yscolan”

Your horse is black your cloak is black
your face is black you are black
you are all black—is it you Yscolan?

I am Yscolan the seer
my thoughts fly they are covered with clouds.
Is there no reparation then for offending the Master?

I burned a church I killed the cows that belonged to a school
I threw the Book into the waves
my penance is heavy.

Creator of living things you
greatest of all my protectors forgive me.
He that betrayed you deceived me.

I was fastened for a whole year
at Bangor under the piles of the dam.
Try to think what I suffered from the sea worms.

If I had known then what I know now
the liberty of the wind in the moving treetops
the crime could not be laid to me.

-Myrddyn, Welch, ca 6th century

Merwin at age 19 visited Ezra Pound when Pound was incarcerated in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital; Pound told Merwin that the best apprenticeship is to translate the masters, to draw from the well from which poetry arose. In following this advice, Merwin grounded himself in ancient poets and even more so in medieval poetry from Romance languages. The medieval poetry shares with Merwin’s larger poetic project the crystallizing use of images; these images carry deeper into the psyche than mere words on the surface might discursively capture. One doesn’t need to know the legend story cycle from which “Yscolan” is taken to hear the experience suffered from sea worms while being imprisoned under a dam, and then contrasted to the freedom of winds in a tree.

Merwin does this in good company, during an important moment in time of world letters for English speakers. In the late 1960s into the 1980s, one larger poetic project/school was referred to as “deep imagists.” Along with Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, Mark Strand, Charles Wright, and Robert Hass (among others), Merwin shared a use of seeming surrealist images which bypassed rational thought to reach emotional/spiritual reality. These writers also translated poems of varying eras and geographies in what seems in retrospect to be a new blossoming of translations into English.

In the first “Forward,” Merwin points to this impulse for both deep image and translation: “Translation may be no more dangerous than any other to a growing recognition of the true original that, in del Vasto’s words, ‘tastes of the source.’ It is love, I imagine, more than learning, that may eventually make it possible to be aware of the living resonance before it has words . . .” The Borges poem cited previously evokes this ‘source’ with ancient stars and the silence of a sleeping bird; the poet does not know the names of stars and constellations imposed by people, but does enjoy direct apprehension of them, and the smell of jasmine, the sound of the “ring of water in the secret pool.” Poetry bypasses intervening mythological/scientific constructs to grasp reality itself.

from “Looking Across the Field”

A peony appears
in my mind
after the petals have fallen

The evening I cut
a peony stem
and felt my spirit whither

The summer night is short
dew gathers
on the hairy caterpillars

-Yosa Buson, Japanese, 1716-1783

Merwin’s own poetry continued to grow and change in subject matter. He has deep ecological concerns, so nature figures significantly in both his own poems and those he translates. Love and its challenges figure importantly. Liminal moments—twilight, an approaching horizon, seasons as they are changing (especially into fall and winter), and most recurrent—the inevitable reality of death—thread through Merwin’s larger poetic project. The Buson poem Merwin chose presents all this by content and form: the natural world suffuses the images—a peony both mentally conjured and in a garden and a summer night’s dew fall—lovely, yes?—but the third line of each stanza, not only finishing the brief thought/image each in lines longer than the two preceding, but also turns the building image into something troubling—all the petals fallen, a spirit withered and, most graphic, a wet hairy caterpillar.

Formally, Merwin’s own poetry omits punctuation (since his first four books); he explains that punctuation seems to nail down the words and poem to a page in a limiting manner. Perhaps this is one of many reasons why Merwin is drawn to the Asian haiku-like verse of Asian poets such as Buson in addition to more recent, European authors:

“Words”

They were talking about
pretend love
at the old table
riddled with worms
the fire warmed up the stove
the lentil darkened as it cooked
and in the open doorway
facing human words
composed in well-tried syntax
the beauty of the bitter foliage
and birds with red breasts
were shining.

-Jean Follain, French, 1903-1971

This photographic tableau captures conversation around this decaying table in a kitchen/dining room that is not comfy, but in a place of falseness and paucity. Over against the interior space is the exterior, which has beauty—albeit somewhat bitter—and is alive with the shining red quickness of the birds.

This former Poet Laureate of the US, Pulitzer Prize winner, author/translator of over 50 volumes of poetry and prose, is now in his mid-80s. Of interest is how the poet returns to the same sources of ancient languages and medieval poets in the third, most recent period of translating; this after a middle period more characterized by modern poets. His forward to this last section is also ruminative, recalling his life as a poet through personal detail; he is no longer as caught up in the issues of translation.

Next month his Collected Poems will come out from the Library of America to make him the second only living poet to be so honored (John Ashbery is the other). Other poets may join him in importance for American poetry of the 20th/21st centuries. None surpass him. This Selected Translations is amazing in scope, mastery, themes, artistry, imagination: a testimony to a life time of consequential work.

Grant Barber is a regular reviewer for Three Percent, a keen bibliophile, and an Episcopal priest living on the south shore of Boston.

I’ve been interested in this book literally for years, having first heard of it on a trip to France in 2009, and am very excited that this is finally available. (And hopefully I’ll have some time this summer to read it . . .)

Here’s a bit of Grant’s review:

French author—philosopher, poet, novelist—de Roblès writes something approaching the Great (Latin) American Novel, about Brazilian characters, one of whom is steeped in the life of the seventeenth century polymath (but almost always erroneous) Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. Eleazard von Wogau, a French journalist lives in a dilapidated mansion in a town being overtaken by the Amazon vegetation, with his housekeeper Soledad: all of this at first seeming like Garcia Marquez-like clichéd Latin American tropes, but subverted in short order. He is a character at the center of a fragmented family and the various narratives that radiate out into seven different directions, each a quest of varying and dubious goals, but all of it conveyed with seriousness, more often with dark humor.

Eleazard is translating the hagiography of Kircher written by his amanuensis and acolyte Fr. Caspar Scott; each chapter of this novel opens with an account from Schott’s biography, and most chapters end with Eleazard’s journal reflections which reflect his own feelings but also reach into Wittgenstein and other modern philosophers (in a style reminiscent of Markson actually).

His ex-wife Elaine is a university paleontologist who travels in the company of other scientists upriver through a jungle inhabited by smugglers and indigenous tribes. They want to find the origin site for fossils of which a few samples have been tantalizingly brought back by a previous scientist; he had been given them by a tribal shaman.

In a passage that describes all the quests of the novel, Elaine recalls one of Eleazard’s rants:

bq.” Sending a missionary to convert the Chinese or a cosmonaut to the moon is exactly the same thing: it derives from the desire to govern the world, to confine it within the limits of doctrinaire knowledge that each time presents itself as definitive. However improbable it might have appeared, Francis Xavier went to Asia and really did convert thousands of Chinese; the American, Armstrong—a soldier by the way, if you see what I’m getting at—trampled the old lunar myth underfoot, but what do these two actions give us, apart from themselves? They don’t teach us anything, since all the do is confirm something we already knew, namely that the Chinese are convertible and the moon tramplable.”

Click here to read the entire review.