Revolt Against the Sun

by Nazik al-Mala?ika

Overview

The Iraqi poet Nazik al-Mala’ika was one of the most important Arab poets of the twentieth century. Over the course of a four-decade career, her contributions to both the theory and the practice of free verse (or tafʿilah) poetry confirmed her position as a pioneer of Arab modernism.

Revolt Against the Sun presents a selection of Nazik al-Malaʾika’s poetry in English translation for the first time. Bringing together poems from each of her published collections, it traces al-Malaʾika’s transformation from a lyrical Romantic poet in the 1940s to a fervently committed Arab nationalist in the 1970s and 1980s. The translations offer both an overview of her life and work and an insight into the political and social realities in the Arab world in the decades following the Second World War.

Featuring a comprehensive historical and critical introduction, this bilingual reader reveals this groundbreaking poet’s role in transforming the landscape of modern Arabic literature and culture in the twentieth century. It is a key resource for students and teachers of Arabic and world literature, as well as for readers interested in discovering an alternative narrative of modern Iraqi culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780863563171
Publisher:	Saqi Books
Publication date:	02/02/2021
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Nazik al-Malaʾika was born in Baghdad in 1923. After graduating from the Iraqi Teachers’ Training college in 1944, she received a Rockefeller Scholarship to study at Princeton Universityfrom 1950-51 and went on to earn a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1954. In addition to publishing seven poetry collections, four full-length works of literary criticism, and dozens of articles in the most widely read Arabic literary periodicals of the time, she also taught literature at the Teacher’s Training College in Baghdad, at Basra University, and at the University of Kuwait. She died in Cairo in 2007.


Emily Drumsta is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. She has published articles in Research in African Literatures, Social Text and Middle Eastern Literatures, and has a chapter in the forthcoming volume The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Translation. Her translations from Arabic have appeared in McSweeney’s, Asymptote, Jadaliyya, and ArabLit. She was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Grant for Revolt Against the Sun.

Read an Excerpt

To John Keats (after his poem “Ode to a Nightingale”) My life, the pains of my most solemn soul, my bitter dreams all wilting on the vine, and the procession of my fleeting days, and the grim specters of a future time all gathered into a bouquet of scents which kept my passing spirit in its hold. I gave the bouquet, like a dreamy song, to your unchained and everlasting soul. This is my life, poet of mine. I am a pensive girl dreaming her world away. My spirit is divine, but here on Earth, I’m but a handful of water and clay. Tortured by screams of sorrow ringing out, shivering with the shocks of many years, if not for you, I would not view the grave as solace; I would not be drawn to tears. Your sweet and everlasting melodies are my songs too; I sing them in my voice. I’ve called on them so many winter nights to drive away the storm’s loud, raucous noise. I’ve sung them to the fire in my hearth and to the shadows spreading through the dark stoking the burning flames of my emotions, waking the temptations that sear my heart. I’ve stood next to the river many nights in melancholy autumn, listening for the voice of a gentle nightingale who perches on the branches here, and sings. I search for your sad strains inside its voice, for your complaints between thinking and pain; I ask it about youth and how it fades, the shadow of a young man in his grave. I tell the nightingale, “Picture again the distant darkness of a gloomy night enfolding my poet, or what remained of him: destructive grief and moans of fright. Describe the sadness on the sick man’s face, his loneliness, his pleading, scattered cries Describe his body and the things he said when he lay down and bid the world goodbye. “Describe the way my poet spent the evening standing up tall upon that dead man’s feet, tilting his head to hear the tender songs, listening carefully to every beat. Describe the way his short life made him tremble with grief, beneath the unsheathed sword of death, his poet’s head enclosed in his two hands, alone beside the corpse, awake, bereft. “How did the forlorn evening take control over the fading candle’s dying flame? Did the wind shriek and bellow in the dark? What did his roaring, dying soul exclaim?” Where youth grows pale, and specter-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow… where this strange numbness finally says goodbye To the desires’ spirits as they go. The nights march on and on into their graves, and life follows behind in the procession. I too walk through the caverns of existence, searching for my exhausted aspirations. The nightingales all mock me as I pass, taunting and teasing, warbling in quartets, while your ghost hides away in secrecy, veiled in the violet shadow of sunset. Revolt Against the Sun (a gift to all rebels) She stood before the sun and said aloud: “Oh sun, my rebel heart is just like you: it ran off with the best days of my youth, its light quenched the stars’ thirst, ever renewed. Careful—don’t let the sadness in my eyes or these copious tears deceive your sight. This sadness is the form of my revolt, to which the gods bear witness every night. “Careful, don’t be deceived by my pale skin, my trembling features or my misery. If you see helplessness upon my brow or read it in my lines of poetry, know that it’s only feelings in my soul causing this suffering, these tears withheld; it’s only prophecy that failed to fly, so it took up this sadness and rebelled. “My lips are fastened shut over this pain, my eyes are thirsty for sweet drops of dew, the evening left its shadow on my brow and morning’s killed off all my pleas to you. I came to pour out my uncertainty in nature, ‘midst sweet fragrances and shadows, but you, Sun, mocked my sadness and my tears and laughed, from up above, at all my sorrows. “Even you, Sun? Source of my misery? You were the one I gazed at in my dreams, You were the one whose name I once revered, singing the praises of your smiling beams. You were the one I once held sacred and idolized as a refuge from all pain. But now, crusher of dreams, melancholy darkness and shadows are all that remain. “I will shatter the idols that I built to you out of my love for radiance and turn my eyes away from your bright light. You’re nothing but a ghost, splendor’s pretense. I’ll build a heaven out of hidden hopes and live without your luminosity. We dreamers know that deep within our souls there lie secrets, a lost eternity. “Do not spread out your beams over my grove, you rise for other than my poet’s heart. Your light no longer stirs feelings in me. The night stars now inspire all my art. They are the friends who guard me in the dark, They understand the passions that ignite my spirit. Gently, they extend to me thin, silver threads to guide me through the night. “The dark is filled with song and poetry The god of beauty roams to his content. Here light, unfettered souls flutter about and spirits hover in the firmament. How often I have wandered through the dark, forgetting all these sorrows, all these scars, upon my lips, a divine melody recited by a caravan of stars. “How often I have watched stars as they pass letting the twilight shape my incantations, and watched the moon bidding the night goodbye, and roamed the valleys of imagination. The silence sends a shiver through my spine beneath the evening’s dome, so still and dark, Light dances, painting on my eyelids with The dreamy palette of a hopeful heart. “And as for you, oh sun… what can I say? What can my passion hope to find in you? Don’t be surprised that I’m in love with dark, Mistress of cruel flames that melt us through. You rend our dreams before they can appear, You decimate what we build in the dark, You shatter visions of utopia, and break the silence in a poet’s heart. “Your dancing lights combined look pale, oh Sun, compared to my resistance and its fire. Your light cannot banish my melody so long as my hands grasp this singing lyre. If you should flood the earth, remember this: My temple has no room for your cruel light I aim to bury the past you revealed And live beneath the canopy of night.”

Table of Contents

Introduction

I. The Woman in Love with Night
Revolt Against the Sun
Elegy for a Drowned Man
The Woman in Love with Night
To John Keats
Words Written on a Grave

II. From Splinters and Ash
The Train Passed By
Elegy for an Unimportant Day
At the End of the Stairs
Chasm Song
To my Dearly Departed Aunt
Cholera
A Funeral for Happiness
Accusations

III. From At the Bottom of the Wave
To a Girl Sleeping in the Street
Elegy for a Woman of No Importance
Three Elegies for my Mother
The Sacrifice of a Dancer
When I Killed my Love
Words
Journey
An Invitation to Life

IV. From Moontree
The Moon Tree
A Greeting to the Iraqi Republic
Song for the Arab Ruins
A Song for the Moon
Three Communist Songs

V. From Of Prayer and Revolution
Sleeping Beauty
A Trilogy at a Time of Parting Ways
Headlines and Notices in the Arab Newspapers
Of Prayer and Revolution
On Peace and Justice