Shadowboxing: Gentlemen’s Disagreements

Part I: Brodsky, Darwish, Heaney, Translation, and the Purposes of Poetry

x
And I ask: Which is more cruel? That a human being should wake up to find he’s a giant insect, or that an insect should wake up to find it is a human being who plays with an atomic bomb thinking it nothing more than a football?
xxxxx—Mahmoud Darwish

Asked by a teacher to declaim a poem in class, a boy complies by reciting one of his own. The following day, he is summoned by the region’s military governor, who proceeds to insult and threaten him—all because of a poem which asks, albeit naively, why the boy isn’t allowed to play with his neighbors. Thus begins the career of one of the most important voices of our day. The dissident writer’s job description naturally includes frequent bouts of imprisonment and, eventually, exile. The pattern goes back to Ovid and Dante. Gradually the poet becomes a wanderer, moving from city to city, always dreaming—and, of course, writing—of home.

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While it reads like a parable about the dissident’s path in the former Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc countries, some South American dictatorship in the even-worse old days—a paradigm or distillation of experiences enforced on Mandelstam or Milosz or Neruda or Stus—in fact, this true story is about a Palestinian. At the time the regional governor ridiculed his poems, Mahmoud Darwish was eight years old.

Palestinian. The very word carries a charge immediate and deep, an electrical force field attracting words to itself like shavings to a magnet. Moreover, the syllables flying in its direction are themselves as charged as what attracts them. Palestinian: terrorist, victim, Nazi, (semitic) anti-Semite(!), problem. To an outsider, not directly affected by the stigma, the phenomenon is fascinating, in a dreadful sort of way—what gravity a simple arrangement of letters contains. Jew. Black. Christian. How hard it must be to carry such a weight of associations and projections. Palestinian.

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In Plato Elaborated, one of the great poems of the second half of the twentieth century, Joseph Brodsky skewers the philosopher who was the first to advocate professional cleansing. Plato notoriously wanted poets arrested and exiled because of the subversive things they said about the gods, or, in Brodsky’s updated version, about a tyrannical state. That is the poem’s subject. The poet speaks mockingly about all the official monuments and edifices of the state—the opera performed for the delectation of a tyrant seemingly oblivious to the poet in the back row hissing through clenched teeth; the neutralized, empty library; the heroic statuary of riders on their horses reminding the poet of the trampled. Why, the poet asks a friend, do we need the twentieth century when we already had the nineteenth? Needless to say, such a negative attitude can’t bring a positive result: “And when they would finally arrest me for espionage, / for subversive activity, vagrancy, for ménage / à trois,” the poet is grateful for this chance to step behind the scenes, to see “in Act Three / how it looks from the inside”: how this elegant façade, the seemingly well-ordered state of the philosopher’s fantasy, is in fact fueled not by the burning of fossils but by the immolation of humans. The speaker’s attitude proves Plato’s point: poets are pains in the ass. They tend to pinpoint the gaps between theory and practice, where most things human reside.

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It would be hard to overestimate Heaney’s role in forging a literary lineage across languages and cultures—not for himself alone but for the next generation of writers as well. He engaged with full respect the work of Milosz, Mandelstam, Holub, Herbert, and of course his friend Joseph Brodsky, to name just a few. In his essay The Impact of Translation he writes: “What translation has done over the last couple of decades is not only to introduce us to new literary traditions but also to link the new literary experience to a modern martyrology, a record of courage and sacrifice which elicits our unstinted admiration.” He adds that the martyred Russians “are the ones who toed the line, not just the verse line but the line where courage is tested, where to stand by what you write is to have to stand your ground and take the consequences.”

Certainly Heaney is right to observe that “a poem in translation is radically and logically different from what the native speaker experiences, phonetics and feelings being so intimately related in the human makeup.” The communication of kindred spirits across language has, however, something of the fierce poignance and pathos of two animals of different species trying to connect, to reach each other, because they know they have something too important and meaningful to say—or because they simply want to connect, which is itself already meaningful. The sounds of a poem in translation may lack the mellifluous harmonies of Tennyson or the accomplished regularity (and tedium) of late Wordsworth. It can, however, more than make up for this with something else. That something else may well be its content of true poetry, which is perhaps the only thing surviving translation. Beyond the aural echoes of intimate vowels and consonants, past the secretive warp and woof of sounds experienced only by those inside a language, as only the finest poets can communicate it, there is still more. You hear it in lines like one by Brodsky that Coetzee singles out in his memoir Youth: “As dark as the inside of a needle.” Yes, one nods, there it is. Or this, from Darwish: “Toward nightfall, the body / Like Shiva, grows extra arms.” It is not just the trope, the metaphor, the simile. It is the idea within the image, lodged inside the thing, for once broken open to release the poetry.

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Brodsky shakes his fist at the state that has displaced him. So does Darwish. But whereas the state that ultimately exiled Brodsky was our enemy, the one that has done that much and worse to Darwish is formally our friend, one of our chief allies. How, then, do we respond?

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Here’s a recent poem of Darwish’s, from an unpublished collection titled State of Siege:

If you had looked into the face of your victim
and contemplated carefully
you might have remembered
your mother in the Gas Chamber,
and freed yourself from the rifle’s intent
and changed your mind—
really, this is no way to restore an identity.

The poem’s force is in the final shot of that last line: the tone is arch, clucking, undermining the polemic while underscoring the intensity of the speaker’s emotion.

~

For the last year or so I have been asking people—friends, acquaintances, semi-strangers at parties—how many Palestinians they know. While no statistician, I can report that, among the hundreds of people I’ve queried, only a handful (maybe five?) have said they either know or knew or had met a Palestinian (how objectifying, how potentially ugly this sounds—but one must begin). Given how much Palestinians are in the news, this is in itself a fact worth noting. Sometimes, when speaking to writers or journalists, I’ve asked if they know of any Palestinian Muslims who write columns in local papers. “Edward Said,” some used to say, until his recent death stole the name from their lips. Muslims, I’d reply. Said was a Palestinian Christian. The answer to my initial question has rarely been a simple No. Several times I’ve been asked, even by dear friends, whether I thought “it was a conspiracy.” A conspiracy? By? For what reason? To what end? Such insinuations can only give rise to questions.

Yet my own question continues to strike me as fair: Given how much we read about “Palestinians” and given that Palestinians have a long literary tradition, producing journals and newspapers wherever they land, surely there must be qualified candidates. And surely one has the right to ask to hear at least one, but preferably several, voices from a community that has been for decades characterized and described as though it were a nation of mutes. And so to repeat: Where have all the Palestinian columnists gone, long time passing?

~

Writing is a little puppy that bites at nothingness
Writing wounds without blood.
xxxxx—Darwish

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And yet, it is funny how certain subjects make one feel afraid—it is in the literary world a rare enough emotion (aside of course from the banal fears relating to career issues, to jobs, academic advancement, and so on) and may be one of the few ways of staying awake in an intellectually lethargic and morally soporific culture. Even in this liberal age certain subjects feel taboo. Taboos, of course, signal the discovery of a transgression that has not yet been commodified, and that is rare. But a taboo surrounding the discussion of the politics of a country in the news almost daily? How deeply, deeply odd. What exactly does one fear? Is it that, putting ourselves inside the poet’s imagination, we inadvertently come to share his wide-ranging insecurities and doubts?

Heaney elaborates tellingly on what makes certain poets disturbing to people you imagine could care less about the art: “It is the refusal by this rearguard minority which exposes to the majority the abjectness of their collapse, as they flee for security into whatever self-deceptions the party line requires of them. And it is because they effect this exposure that the poets become endangered: people are never grateful to be reminded of their moral cowardice.”

And so it is our own abjectness before the specters of our own minds (what exactly do we think these mouthfuls of air might do to anyone?)—our own consciences—that indict us.

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“There descends upon us the American who appears when he should disappear,” wrote Darwish in his elliptical, startling Memory for Forgetfulness, an impressionistic “account” of a day (August 6th, Hiroshima Day) in the life of the Palestinian community during Israel’s assault on Beirut. The American in question is an amateur photographer with a video camera recording, for his own purposes, the shelling of the city. Darwish is something less than happy to see him: “I call him Cause-Man because he’s a lover of hot issues. . . . More of us must die that he may have more to do and the excitement of sharing the life of the victim.” The type Tom Wolfe satirized in Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. Certainly such passages are meant to confront the Cause-Man in one’s self. (To Darwish I would say, parenthetically, that there aren’t quite as many Cause-Men out there as he might think.) After interviewing the besieged Palestinian, Cause-Man asks: “Will you recognize Israel?” The answer is unhesitating: “No.” While the response is spontaneous, it is followed by a passage of tortuous self-appraisal that gives one a glimpse of the psychological—not to mention historical—complexities of the case: “The victim must concede the right of his killer to kill him, and those buried under the rubble have to declare the legitimacy of their slaughter. . . . For the first time in our history, our absence is conditional upon our total presence. . . . The Other, present with all his murderous gadgets, is demanding our presence for a while, to announce his right to push us into the final absence.”

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The following lines by Czeslaw Milosz were for my generation a touchstone on par with the opening of “Howl” or Auden’s “September 1, 1939”:

What is poetry that does not save
nations or people?
A connivance with official lies.
A song for drunkards
Whose throats will be slit
In a moment.
Readings for sophomore girls.

“Readings for sophomore girls” may be a fitting title for an anthology of the work our generation has done over the last thirty years. Certainly very little of it would be able to bear the heavy title “poetry.” What poems have you read that satisfied Dickinson’s simple criteria?

“To put it more directly,” wrote Heaney in the eighties, “contemporary English poetry has become aware of the insular and eccentric nature of English experience in all the literal and extended meanings of those adjectives.” He speculated that because England was an island that had not been invaded in nearly a thousand years, “these enviable and (as far as the English are concerned) normative conditions have ensured a protracted life within the English psyche for the assumption that a possible and desirable congruence exists between domestic and imagined reality.” He could as easily have been writing about the United States in the nineties; and even since 9/11 our efforts to connect outside our own literary culture have been meager, small, and cowardly.

Who does not feel anxiety about the reports of increases in European anti-Semitism? On the other hand, who bothers, or cares even, to wonder what has turned the admittedly modest American Palestinian population into invisible men over the last years? These days I consider it a mark of privilege to know a Palestinian, as I think it was an honor for my grandfather to have had the blessing of risking his children’s lives to hide Jewish friends and former students of his in his apartment during the Nazi occupation of Peremyshl.

Arabs have been the beneficiaries of European curiosity about their cultures, religions, geographies, and mineral wealth for many centuries now. It would be fascinating to read a history of the last two millennia from their point of view.

Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness is thrilling precisely because it reflects a brilliant mind’s wrestling match with all the great questions about literature and meaning. He and his generation have struggled, in a search for an Arabic modernism, to find a language that will allow them to speak complex truths in a natural voice: “And if we complain of the general inability to perfect a language of the people in creative expression, that should not prevent us from insisting on speaking for them until the moment arrives when literature can celebrate its great wedding, when the private voice and the public voice become one. Yes. There is a role of literature, and severing the relationship between the text and those for whom it is transformed into power is the very alienation of letters which the prophets of the final defeat are now extolling.”

You hear a scrupulous intelligence struggling with the burdens of a program: “We want to liberate ourselves, our countries, and our minds and live in the modern age with competence and pride. In writing, we give expression to our faith in the potency of writing. . . . [W]e are children of this age, and not of the past or the future.” Reading, you sense yourself strangely moved, drawn in slowly, and then swept up into a world where literature still matters—just as it once did in Eastern Europe, and never has in the United States except to a stubborn yet not insignificant handful of people. In Darwish we overhear a mind and a spirit wrestling with the angel of art as if the outcome of the contest were a matter of life and death.

As quite possibly it is. One significant member of that handful who recognize the abiding importance of engaging one’s age in a no-holds-barred contest for its soul is Susan Sontag, who recently (and I believe accurately) observed how much is at stake for us right now. In an address delivered in Germany last spring, she noted that the United States “is at a radical, a very radical turning point—possibly the moment when the republic may have ended, and the Empire begun. . . .”

In such a moment one can be tempted to dismiss literature as less relevant than ever—and yet when one considers the historical examples, and reflects on the fact that such disparate witnesses to devastation as Thomas Mann or Paul Celan or Nguyen Thieu or Aharon Appelfeld or Samuel Beckett, to name only a few, not merely never abandoned literature but indeed were driven by what they saw to a deeper recommitment, as well as to a recognition that the power of literature was a necessary and viable force with which to oppose the power-mad—when one studies their responses one does somehow take heart. And readers in the United States these days would do well to read and wrestle with the hard truths Darwish brings to light.

The ironies embedded in some of the histories juxtaposed above—that Mahmoud Darwish studied in Moscow in 1970 around the time that Joseph Brodsky was serving his term in Siberia, condemned by the same regime that eventually killed the Ukrainian poet Vasyl Stus—are piercing and provocative and to be saved for a future exploration.