Prayer

This piece, which is a re-posting from The Oxonion Review, continues our focus on literary translation and displacement. Refugee Hosts Writer in Residence Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, in collaboration with the Oxford Student PEN group, translates the poetry of Syrian writer Tammam Al-Tillawi. The poem is one of five works of translation from Arabic and French into English. It is the culmination of ‘poetic solidarity’ developed through a translation workshop held in 2014. Such works offer a guide for our research project, which will co-convene a series of translation workshops in the UK with our project partners English-PEN (including PEN Student Groups), PEN-International, and Stories in Transit. For more on the roles that creative writing, performance and poetry can play in refugee-related research, visit our blog.

Prayer

By Yousif M. Qasmiyeh and the Oxford Student PEN Group, University of Oxford

Let us thank our killer, O my friend,
For having missed us and hit that kid
Who always disrupted your afternoon nap.
He thought the bomb was a ball
So he blocked it with courage
The way he was always blocking balls
And shouting at the players.
Now he has won his game
Without screaming at the killers.
Now he has defeated you and me, and will sleep forever and ever.

Tammam Al-Tillawi

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Poetic Solidarity: Translations from Arabic and French

When Arabic was raised as a source-language for a potential Oxford PEN translation workshop in 2014, we faced a series of difficult decisions given the events and processes shaping the region: revolutions (and/or wars) which have brought hope, chaos, death as well as life to so many. Before selecting a number of potential poems (or poets), we decided to take some time to observe the scene and to choose accordingly. Ultimately, we have selected poems by Iskandar Habash (Lebanon), Tammam Al-Tillawi (Syria), Rasha Omran (Syria), and Firas Sulaiman (Syria), which have respectively been published in the following newspapers: As-Safir, An-Nahar, Al-Mustaqbal and Al-Quds Al-Arabi.

In spite of this trepidation, our selection is, of course, in no way intended to be representative of the poet or the poet’s poetry, but rather offers a small sample which sheds light on the complexity of choice and the ways in which different poets register and interact with the daily and the panoramic in the midst of such events.

With the aim of forging a degree of “poetic” solidarity between these and other poets, political activists and detainees outside of the Middle East, amongst other things, in order to draw attention to the human suffering as well as to the value of poetry therein, PEN organised an additional translation workshop which focused primarily on the poetry of Enoh Meyomesse, the imprisoned Francophone Cameroonian poet, activist, founding member of the Cameroonian Writers’ Association and winner of the 2013 Oxfam Novib / PEN Freedom of Expression Award. The international community of PEN centres has been campaigning on Meyomesse’s behalf since his imprisonment in 2011. To raise the profile of Meyomesse’s case, English PEN launched a crowd-sourced translation of Meyomesse’s Poème Carcéral: poème du pénitencier de Kondengui (2012), which was published as a print-on-demand e-book, Jail Verse: Poems from Kondengui Prison in 2014 and which Meyomesse himself received in prison in April 2014. Translations of his second collection, Prison Poetry, are currently underway.

We hope that these poems all reflect the powerful bonds of communication between poets, readers and translators, enacting what Seamus Heaney found most creditable in poetry which, he said, can “touch the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic reality of the world to which that nature is constantly exposed”.

The Arabic-English workshop was co-run by Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, Kate McLoughlin and Kevin Brazil, with the French-English workshop being co-run by Helena Taylor, Rosie Lavan and Yousif M. Qasmiyeh.

Participants of both workshops were: Stacie Allan, Jason Allen, Florence Beland; Spyridon Chairetis; Dominic Davies; Annie Demosthenous; Katie Ebner-Landy; Sarah Ekdawi, Benedict Gardner; Lewis Greaves; Sarah A. Halim; Nico Hobhouse; Emily Holman; Charles Jarvis; Ellen Jones; Dyedra Just; Meredith Morrison; Rebekah Murrell; Natasha Ryan; Edward Still; Anna Tankel; and Lucie Taylor. We are grateful for their very pertinent and insightful comments, additions and critiques vis-à-vis the translations, as processes and outputs alike.

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The other poems translated alongside ‘Prayer’ can be found here:

• Rasha Omran‘s Panoramas of Death and Desolation
• Enoh Meyomesse‘s Despair
• Firas Sulaiman’s The Dead
• Iskandar Habash’s Nothing Stays on the Table Except the Trace of your Hand… 

Featured Image: A wedding in the rubble of Nahr el-Bared Camp, Lebanon (c) M.M. Qasmiyeh