Robyn Creswell is the translator of Iman Mersal’s poetry collection THE THRESHOLD, published by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux in 2022. In his Introduction to the book, he writes:
All of Mersal’s poems were originally written in prose—sometimes with line breaks, sometimes without. In Arabic, this verse form is called the qasidat al-nathr (prose poem); it is a relatively recent development, dating from the late 1950s. The form represented an important, even revolutionary change: until the mid-twentieth century, Arabic poetry was composed in fixed meters and line lengths, more or less unchanged for fourteen hundred years. But while the pioneers of the qasidat al-nathr—particularly the Syrian poet Adonis—still wrote in a high poetic register, Mersal’s prose poems are emphatically prosaic, not only in their subject matter but also in their diction, rhythm, and tone.
Translations, like hot air, tend to expand, but Mersal’s distinctive tone of voice is economical and even, at times, austere. Although she writes in prose, her poems have a formalist stringency, an animus against flabby language and sloppy sentiment alike. Her alertness to these flaws, even in English, has strengthened my renderings and also, I hope, made their music more like the originals’.
LOVE
After years of observing it from the window
or stashing it in a backpack with Xanax,
love explodes in the least likely place.
This scenario isn’t innocent of literary designs.
It’s like rubbing rust off the word love
or wiping away all the song-spittle
from ardor and longing and lovesickness.
If you happen to be an Arab poet
you must have written something about it by now.
You must have been lost for many years
in the desert of infatuation
hunting a mythical beast that guards the only well
so you can kill it, then weep
over the crime you were fated to commit
for a sip of water.
And even after you’ve returned to your people—
you’re still a poet!
Love has a bad reputation.
Love is absolutely the worst thing there is to write about.
I look for the Muse in every poem I read.
The poet hangs her on a wall, nailed and spread-eagled,
the object of fantasy. We begin with the victim’s eyes and end—
depending on how avant-garde our poet is—between her legs,
or, in the best case, with sympathy for her victimhood.
I played that role from time to time
but fortunately never met a truly great poet
and so emerged from these experiences with a hatred of Muses.
A chiffon bridge
you have to cross to reach the other shore—
though of course it isn’t really any safer there
and you won’t arrive on the other shore as yourself,
because you’ll fall right away into some nasty pool
and many hands will offer to pull you out:
the hands of friends who think they’ve been there before,
poets whose vocation it is to witness your fall,
a bored insomniac psychoanalyst.
God’s hand is not among them, but fear not—
fingers will presently reach out from an advertisement
for beauty products, promising you such smooth skin
that you’ll never fear to fall again.
Love makes us authentic and narcissistic,
narcissistic in our authenticity and authentic in our narcissism,and so on. There’s no such thing as enough
until the arrival of he who said
contentment is an inexhaustible treasure
as if to set the senses’ temperature at zero degrees
while he walks off into the desert
whistling something mystical like I am you and you are me.
Listen to Iman Mersal recite the original Arabic text of her poem “Al-Gharaam” (“Love”) here:
