While reading Against Forgetting, Carolyn Forché’s anthology of twentieth-century poetry written in the shadow of war, repression, and exile, I paused over two poems by Gottfried Benn—“Monologue” and “Fragments.”
“Fragments” surprised me not only as a record of European despair but also as a linguistic architecture of ruin. Its abrupt images, broken syntax, and philosophical disorientation do not merely describe fragmentation; they create a poetics where shattered elements become the only form available. This poetics, forged in twentieth-century Europe, continues to speak urgently to writers working under contemporary regimes of political rupture, exile, and linguistic erosion.
My reading of Benn is shaped not only by literary analysis but by the embodied practice of translation, where theory, history, and lived fracture converge. Translating the poem into Arabic allowed me to trace that breakage line by line. Working word by word—often deleting what I had just written, dismantling and rebuilding entire syntactic units—I began to hear what Benn withholds: the inarticulate impulses rising between his blunt statements, like hesitant visitors from the wreckage of language. I tried to keep the door open for these visitors, crafting metaphors that could carry their connotations into Arabic without smoothing over Benn’s austerity. When semantic gaps or cultural distances appeared, I returned to the historical moment that provoked the poem. Its terse, ambiguous lines drew me into a postwar landscape where rhythm emerges not from harmony but from collapse itself.
Through this process, I realized that Benn’s interruptions are not failures of expression; they are his method. He offers a poetics of assembly—fragments arranged with precision because the whole is irretrievably broken. Here, “scars interrupt early creation,” yet creation persists, piece by piece. The spiritual wounds of a century do not close; they are made visible as form.
Benn’s vision has illuminated my own poetics, prompting me to consider how a fragmented narrative might be reassembled between memory and the present. That movement, I found, was reciprocal: having lived an abruptly altered life, my own “scatteredness” has become a source of poetic sensitivity, a way of gathering disparate pieces into a renewed perception. This lived dislocation has shaped not only my writing but also the ethics of my translation practice.
For an Arab poet, the aesthetics of ruin carry a long lineage. Classical Arabic poetry perfected the image of standing amid remnants—the aṭlāl of Imru’ al-Qais, ʿAntarah, and Zuhayr—immortalizing loss through language. But Benn’s fragmentation is not elegiac; it is diagnostic. While the pre-Islamic poet mourns what has vanished, Benn interrogates what is collapsing. This shift—from lament to inquiry—opens a different analytical path, one that leads not backward but toward the unsettled energies of modernism. These closer resonances emerged not from the ancient tradition but from modern Arab poetry: the cold lucidity of Adonis, the physical mysticism of Unsi al-Hajj, the wandering dissonance of Sargon Boulus. Their compressed syntax and metaphysical disquiet share Benn’s conviction, expressed in Problème der Lyrik, that “God is no longer a hypothesis in our consciousness; only form remains.”
Across languages, these poets confront the exhaustion of transcendence and treat poetry as the last surviving architecture of meaning.
This encounter with Benn was not purely theoretical. I belong to a generation that watched the Egyptian revolution fracture into silence and disappointment. During five years of wrongful imprisonment after the military coup, I wrote my first poetry collection, No One Is on the Line. Composing amid uncertainty became an act of survival. The style I discovered—clipped, dreamlike, suspended between ruin and reconstruction—moves, like Benn’s, between the memory of order and the presence of collapse. Translating “Fragments” clarified something fundamental to me: that the disintegration of this century and the disintegration of my own life are not mirror images, but they actually rhyme, in ways that feel uncannily parallel.
I confronted the same poetics of fracture once again while writing a poem in exile, a poem in which the mother—often imagined as a fixed origin—had to be conceived anew, “a hesitant constellation at the edge of forgetfulness.” Like Benn, I found no intact source to return to. Even the mother tongue arrived fossilized, cracking open its “marble vowels” like debris from a vanished linguistic order:
I conceived my mother
in lonely nights
of cold diaspora.
She taught me all the words,
and I named her.
I sang for her
in sounds that neither of us did belong
and together
we wept along
and trembled.
Very slowly,
she knitted me a garment
that did not fit
my old song.
And it dwindled—
like moss eating a statue,
a slow decomposition
of organic matter,
and mother tongue.
The poem’s final image—language decaying “slow as moss eating a statue”—echoes Benn’s sense that what once felt metaphysically secure now exists only as residue. However, where Benn’s detachment has the clarity of a clinical report, my own tendency is toward intimate reconstruction: origins imagined rather than inherited, the self assembled from shards rather than recovered from memory. Yet both modes acknowledge the same truth: language is both the site of loss and the material for building the self—that identity must be assembled from remnants, and that form becomes a shelter raised from the ruins of language.
In this sense, fragmentation is not the failure of meaning but its last viable form under historical pressure.
Notes on the Translation
Translation here is not a neutral transfer of meaning but an ethical negotiation with history, power, and linguistic aftermath. In translating Fragments, I repeatedly revisited the word “fragments,” which appears twice in the English version with subtly different connotations. For the title, I selected فتافيت instead of شظايا. Fatafīt conveys crumbled residue, the gentle disintegration of material—a texture closer to Benn’s gradual diagnosis of civilizational decay. Later in the poem, when the speaker lists “the rest: fragments,” I translated this second instance as شظايا, meaning “shards broken by force.” This distinction creates two levels of ruin: فتافيت, representing the diffuse erosion of a civilization from within, and شظايا, the sharper, violent remnants of modern life scattered into disconnected pieces under pressure rather than time. This choice also accommodates Benn’s clever logic, which begins by describing the collapse of systems of religion, science, and the old world and concludes the poem with a portrait of a modern man.
Likewise, in translating Watkins’s historically accurate “Negro spirituals,” I chose الأغاني الروحية للأمريكيين من أصول أفريقية—“the spiritual songs of African Americans.” This phrasing preserves the historical meaning while reflecting contemporary linguistic responsibility and clarity.
One term in Fragments troubled me more than any other: “dissolute,” which in English teeters between moral laxity, spiritual exhaustion, and metaphysical unravelling. While these are the poem’s core themes, translating it into Arabic as “الفاسق” or “المنحل” suggests moral judgment along the lines of social decay that Benn implied. I therefore omitted the word completely to preserve the indeterminacy through which Benn allows dissolution to appear indirectly. This approach enables certain meanings to emerge from the syntax rather than forcing them into a lexical choice that Arabic could not sustain without distortion.
To translate Benn is to translate rupture. It is also to believe—stubbornly—that even the smallest surviving fragment, whether emotional, musical, or semantic, can be reassembled into a form of endurance. A narrative. A life. That belief, across German and Arabic, as well as through wars and exiles, remains the fragile structure to which poets and people continue to cling.
The English version of the poem:
Fragments,
Refuse of the soul
Coagulation of the blood of the twentieth century
Scars interrupt the cycle of early creation
The historic religions of five centuries pulverised
Science: cracks in the Parthenon,
Planck with his quantum theory merging
In the new confusion with Kepler and Kierkegaard
Yet there were evenings that went in the colors
Of the father of all, dissolute, far-gathering
Inviolate in their silence
Of coursing blue,
Colors of the introvert:
Then one relaxed,
With the hands caught up round the knee
Peasant, wise, simple and resigned to the quiet drink
And the sound of the servant’s concertina—
And others provoked by inner scrolls of paper,
Vaulted pressures
Constrictions in the building of style
Or pursuits of love
Crises of expression and bouts of eroticism.
That is the man of today.
His inwardness a vacuum
The survival of personality
Is preserved by clothing
Which, where material is good, may last ten years.
The rest fragments,
Halftones
Snatches of melody from neighbor’s houses,
Negro spirituals
Or Ave Marias
My own translation
فتافيت–
نفايات الروح,
تخثر دم القرن العشرين
ندوب قطعت دورة الخلق الأولى
الديانات التاريخية عبر خمسة قرون تهاوت
والعلم: صدع في البارثينون
بلانك بنظريته الكمية,
يمتزج
في الالتباس الجديد مع كبلر وكيركيجارد
ومع ذلك كانت هناك مساءات, لم تخل تماماً من ألوان
زرقاوات التدفق…
مساءات الأب العظيم المصون في صمت لا يمس
ألوان المنطوين على ذواتهم
يسترخي عندها الإنسان
ويشبك يديه حول ركبتيه
ريفي حكيم وبسيط
استسلم للشراب الهادئ
ولصوت أكورديون الخادم
وغيرهم,
استفزتهم لفائف الورق المخبأة في عقولهم
وضغوط مقببة
تضيقات في بناء الأسلوب
أو مطاردات الحب
أزمات التعبير,
ونوبات تهيج جسدي
ذلك هو المرء اليوم
دخيلته فراغ
وبقاء شخصيته
يحفظه الملبس, إن كانت خامته جيدة
قد تدوم عشر سنين
والباقي شظايا
أنصاف ألحان
ومقتطفات مختلسة من بيوت الجيران
أغاني روحانية لأمريكيين من أصول أفريقية
أو آفي ماريا العذراء
Artwork courtesy of our featured artist Ernest Williamson III, PhD
