A Moment Of Awareness

Is it ethically obtainable for us or for others to continue to believe those who have practiced on us or on them the business of lying, swindling, deception, manipulation and procrastination even for one single time? As far as I can see it, this is extremely difficult and goes beyond the fickle and poorly-acquired human opinion twisted by the conditions and state of affairs which are already affected by the cycles of time and the winds of change. 

The way out of that requires a great deal of effort and should go toward wiping each one them out from our memory. Such a decisive move should be directed towards that end alone and we must never honor anyone of them, and hence ward off insulting ourselves, by the erroneous willingness to invest time and effort in waiting for them to change. We must never accord a bit of thinking to such a dramatic scenario.

For gone, indeed, is that time in which we used to believe or hope for them to understand one day the meaning of how to counter agony and deception with patience and discretion and how to offer more goodness to goodness instead of bastardization, denial and ill faith. Gone completely is that time in which we used to ponder that we would eventually arrive at something different lurking behind harshness and deception. 

What we have come to find, instead, is a new update to much of ignorance, procrastination, insincerity, manipulation and trickery coupled with a demand for us to condone and succumb to them and a surprise from them over our resistance and knowledge of what their hearts plot in secret, what their silence stupidly reveals and what their words pathetically conceal. 

There seems to be no use here in elaborating more and I should perhaps finish with this call without adding anything to it further: 

"Bring my arms to me

To hone them with the salt of tears.

Bring tears to my eyes 

So that the dead among us 

Cries over the living." 

- Chokri Omri

«Ask him who lives what is life»

Where most people terribly tend to enjoy their emptiness and then horrendously forget the death station, I thus continue to remember. We are mortals and we are all coming to stop by it for a moment. This must be understood. But if you ask me about how I see it, I can submit that I have hardly any fear of crossing such station. I have, instead, fear of my journey in life. I have fear of its painful lessons and tribulations. I do not need to ask anyone about how he/she sees it himself/herself but I need to continue to ask myself, instead, and search for good answers. 

My vision, concerning life, has it that life is not what is happening in reality. No, sir! Life is a choice, a stance and an attitude towards life. Life is that of the heart resisting and bleeding because the mind is scoffing at the human breakdown and busy listing the differences between persons and their ideas, if they have any, and then seeking to normalize and turn a blind eye to the lack of innocence, energy and nobility in everything said and done.

I thus continue to remember and ask myself: Are we living life rightly and decently or are we just waiting for it? How is it that we are going to bring back what has been taken away? How are we going to come back home safely and victoriously after a long journey? Finally, while seeking to earn a good life in which good answers to those questions are to obtain, make sure to carefully build, step by step, and with patience and love, a self-guided search for self-improvement and get rid, at the same time, of those who have only big words in their stinky mouths. 

- Chokri Omri

In Poetry, Love Remembers and Reminds

Love requires something beyond knowledge. It has always already been a mystery hardly unpacked. As a matter of fact, there is more to it, for the good hearts that continue to beat to it, than just agony, open wounds and tears experienced by many but felt by few and hence expressed, articulated and depicted and sometimes prevaricated, exagerated and twisted by poets, writers and whoever feels himself at it. It all depends on the nature and nurture of the few blessed and cured hearts and minds welcoming and fostering it or the many sullied, corrupt and dirty minds and hearts mistrusting, using and then dismissing it. 

 

In love lies perfect wisdom, healing and eternal happiness for the good hearts that either welcome or shy away but still repsect and in love lies limitations, suffering and homesickness too. In short, to be able to love means to be able to remember clearly and decently. Now, by invoking memory, thus coupled with shared, because it is negotiated, knowledge of the past that must be delivered to the present, we keep at once reading and re-reading, writing and re-writing and building and re-building upon it for posterity. Nobody can start from void because love has always preceded. 

 

Of course, for curious minds, this is easily proven by the existence of numerous collections of poems and huge volumes of prose furthered by critical work to help them endure through time. But it is worth reminding that love cannot be found in books of literature. Literature itself, as Nicholas Watson* rightly said, refers not to books but to the knowledge gained from them. 

 

We can see that in the same way as we see how actions and reactions are being taken and made through time on the ground by those who seek to read, learn and reach out with help (this is love!) and by those who ambition to move many a step further and begin to fly with words and deeds everywhere and offer help on the ground (this is love and knowledge!). 

 

Success will then come to both categories as learning becomes incremental and life-long and this shows us the multitude of possibilties in life and shows us the multiplicity and complexity of ways that either point to the Paradiso where love is nourished and elemented by divine beauty and truth or, alas, to the Inferno where hatred hates everything including itself and thus is ready to suffer, pay the bills of lies and crimes inflicted by its agents and therefore continue to feel the bitterness it has already caused everywhere. 

 

Love, in a nutshell, however mysterious and dangerous, remembers and reminds but hatred, however comfortable, complex and horrendous, forgets, hinders and manipulates.

 

 

----------------

*Nicholas Watson's statement is gleaned from his introduction to a chapter entitled "Theories of Translation" p.73 in a volume entitled "The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English" edited by Roger Ellis and first published by Oxford university press (New York, 2008). 

Source: 

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/in_poetry_love_remembers_and_reminds-4609

A Reading and translation of a poem

“The Birth of Song”

I am as certain of my song, 

When first it warms my brain, 

As woman of her unborn child,

Or wind that carries rain.

The child and rain are born at last,

Though now concealed from sight—

So let my song, unshaped and crude,

Come perfect to the light.

W. H. Davies

- Reading:

The poem is based on an extended metaphor (some form of conceit) involving the notion of (pro)creation: conceiving (brain / womb / wind) and begetting (delivering the poem / delivering the baby / bringing rain). Accordingly, the translation should bring out the elements of this conceit. "Song" simply means "poem". Some poems are set to music; they, then, become songs. The "child" and "rain" are "unshaped and crude" until they are born; likewise, the poem, "unshaped and crude," will "come perfect to the light". 

W. H. Davies is known for his being more inclined to simplicity than sophistication, and the gist of this poem attests to it. Child, Rain and Poem all partake of a natural process of growth, according to the poet.    

Any translation work must begin by unpacking the meaning before recasting it in a new idiom. In the case of poetry, the expressive function must be approximated as much as possible.

Mohamed Mansouri 

- Proposed Translations: 

1) "ميلاد أغنية"

عن أغنيتي آتيكم بالخبر  

حين بالدّفء لعقلي تنتصر

كأمّ تنتظر مولودها الآتي

كالرّيح تحمل المطر

ها قد أتى الوليد أخيرا والمطر

وإن كانا الآن بعيدين عن النّظر

ألا فلتتركوا أغنيتي، لا تقتلوها 

عساها تأتي جميلة كالقمر

وليام هنري ديفيز

(تعريب شكري عمري)

2) "ميلاد القصيدة"

بقصيدتي يضاهي استيقاني 

وهي نطفة في جَناني

استيقان الأمّ بوليدها المنتظر

أو الريح الحُبلى بالمطر

وأخيرا يهلّ الوليد ويأتي المطر

وإن كانا الآن خفيّين عن البصر

فدعوا قصيدتي تأتي على السّجيّة

فتتبدّى للعيان في طلعة بَهيّة. 

وليام هنري ديفيز

(تعريب محمّد منصوري)