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The Library of Arabic Literature
FOREWORD
PETER COLE
ON ʿANTARAH’S WAR SONGS
Translation begins in a listening. Its art starts in the ear that takes us in, with all the craftiness that entails. When it’s working, translation transports and entrances. It tricks us into suspending disbelief and moves our imagination from where it had been to another place (often distant) and another time (which is somehow now). That mysterious shift through hearing leads to cadence and timbre and balance, to a surface tension that images ride, to currents of feeling swirling beneath them.
Improbably, much of translation takes place in the reception of the original creation, before a single syllable is mouthed or jotted down in the translator’s language. The quality of this initial absorption is, in fact, so vital to the transfer of energy translation involves that it’s tempting to say it matters even more than what happens next, on the expressive side of the ledger—since without it, nothing of worth will happen there. So that when James Montgomery declares, in the name of ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād—
Fools may mock my blackness
but without night there’s no day!
Black as night, so be it!
But what a night
generous and bright!
All the paltry ʿAmrs and Zayds
my name has eclipsed.
I am the Lord of War!
he isn’t rehearsing hand-me-down gestures, or giving us static English equivalents for words attributed to a valiant poet of pre-Islamic lore; he is writing out of an embodied reading of the Arabic text and tradition, through his deepest instinctive and critical response to it. He is doing all he prosodically can to bear and lay bare a charged aesthetic matrix that mattered centrally to medieval listeners, and might mean something potent for readers in English today. In short, he is, with Richard Sieburth’s assistance, performing an early Arabian drama and presenting it to us as a present—a gift of time. Historical time and the time that is rhythm. Existential time and the pulse of a person. Of two people. An entire people. Of peoples.
“All language is vehicular,” says Emerson, and none more so than strong translation, which can move across centuries and seas, and then through the difficult inner terrain of every reader, including the translator. What James Montgomery understands, what he conveys within that understanding and hears in his hosting of ʿAntarah’s verse, is the resonant, layered nature of the “war” that the poet proclaims himself “Lord of,” which is to say, the poetry within the violence. And he sees, as plainly, that ʿAntarah’s fight isn’t simply for the honor of the tribe, or for specific values his community prizes: fortitude and bravery; or belonging and fighting to belong, and guarding the weak as part of belonging. Montgomery knows, and his Glaswegian English helps him know, that these lines refer as well to the struggle of a social and literary outsider who both does and doesn’t want in—a black man who’s proud of his difference, and angry at the difference it makes. He realizes, too, that the fight lives on only in the agon of a poet battling for his poem. And that all these wars are to the death.
Our squadrons stand
arrayed for battle
banners flapping
like vultures’ shadows.
Motion in stillness, quiet through noise, the chiaroscuro of premonition. Each is deftly deployed, syllable by syllable, in this quatrain and its haunting chiasms. And that—the spirit, and the darkening sap of ʿAntarah’s combat—is what courses through the turns of these renderings, which channel the translator’s own “mental fight” for the poem.
• • •
“Did poetry die in its war with the poets?”
Montgomery’s opening of ʿAntarah’s “Golden Ode,” one of the best-known poems in the history of Arabic, jolts this volume into high gear. It’s a radical reading, pulled off with panache. Instead of the (also powerful if more wistful) musing that inflects the usual construal of the verse—“Have the poets left any place unpatched?”—Montgomery’s ʿAntarah bolts out of the gate with a signature defiance, stakes raised high, for himself and for poets to come. For translation too. And that because this isn’t “only art” for ʿAntarah, it’s life. It’s love and loyalty, an idea of the good and magnanimity, a sense of self-worth and others’ honor, compounded by a vivid if obsessive inwardness,
evenings when water flows unchecked
and the lone hopper, look,
screeches its drunken song
scraping out a tune
leg on leg like a one-arm man
bent over a fire stick.
Will the translator, as poet and scholar, survive the journey into the desert and emerge with the prize of a poetry that gives us “ʿAntarah,” an ʿAntarah that’s his, and ours, and ancient at once?
The years passed
and the East Wind blew.
Even the ruins
fell into ruin—
tired playthings
of Time
and the thunder
and rain.
Clan Hind lived here once.
You can’t visit them now—
Fate has spun
their thread.
When Montgomery sings with such elegiac litheness, translating with fine-tuned attention to pitch and footfall, to the distribution of weight along a line, to the deployment of texture and effects of sound, we have our answer, as his poem, ʿAntarah’s poem, reaches us on a visceral level with unmistakable force through its suppleness. Or maybe we’re lifted and taken back to it. Or both: ancient poet and modern reader meet through the magical agency of the translation, in a space between that exists as fiction, or myth.
More miraculous still in this mix is that the translation can follow the currents of the sixth-century verse through further modulations, in the same poem, from tenderness into ferocity, from a gentle resignation to fierce plasticity:
I am Death.
I’ve felled many
a foe, their chests
dyed in rivers of red jiryāl,
their bodies unburied
on the open plain,
their limbs torn
to shreds
by dusky wolves,
aortas pierced
by the pliant spear
gripped tight
as I closed in.
Then back again:
I’ve