Poet, linguist, and educator Stanley Barkan and his wife, Bebe Barkan, launched Cross-Cultural Communications in 1971 as an educational program at Long Island University that offered instruction in twenty-seven languages. Since then, it has grown into one of the country’s most fascinating and visionary small presses, having published hundreds of titles in scores of languages, including many that Stanley Barkan has identified as being in danger of extinction.

          “Larger languages and cultures threaten to steamroll over smaller languages and cultures so much so that they’re threatened like the humpback whale,” he told The New York Times in 1984. “Our job is to preserve them in their essential form and bring them to the attention of Americans.”

          In the nearly four decades of its operation, Cross-Cultural Communications has brought the work of numerous poets to U.S. readers, including many who have written in Yugoslavian, Estonian, Dutch, and Native American languages, as well as those who write in dialects of these and other tongues. And while helping to raise awareness of and preserve these languages is one of Barkan’s goals, he has also long been interested in fostering cross-cultural dialogue—as his press’s name indicates.

          “When we introduce two different cultures, something rare happens,” he said.

          That rare thing, however, is not something that can be pinned down in a single sentence, or even in a single review. In this review of six of the press’s most recent titles, I will attempt to explore the results of the press’s work in fostering the voices of several cultures. To facilitate this, I have organized this review somewhat differently than similar group reviews I have done in the past. Instead of arranging books alphabetically by author, I have grouped them by language, from those titles written in English to those originally written in Spanish, Korean, and Persian. In doing so, I hope to help move the English-speaking reader from the familiar to the unfamiliar in the same way that the press has done.




Tea with Nana
Mia Barkan Clarke
ISBN Number: 9780893044787

          In addition to being a publisher of poetry from around the globe, Stanley Barkan is also a poet, and his press has released several of his collections and chapbooks. One of the most notable of these is Mishpocheh (reviewed in issue 31), which focuses on his family, several members of whom are also deeply involved in the operations of Cross-Cultural Communications. Barkan’s wife, Bebe Barkan, is a talented artist whose arresting portraits and surreal paintings have adorned the covers and interiors of many Cross-Cultural titles. Their daughter, Mia Barkan Clarke, is also a poet and an artist, and her work is given a fine showcase in Tea with Nana, a 2009 release designed, handsomely as always, by Tchouki.

          Clarke’s poetry is lush and evocative, flowing through time, nature, personal history, and the mythos of several different cultures like water, or perhaps like blood. Certainly, both similes seem appropriate, as femininity in all of its guises is the beating heart of these verses, which seek no less than to weave a web between women that transcends history and story. Her attempts to do so, however, are just that—attempts. As Clarke explains in “Sister of the World,” the process of learning about and reaching out to other women is never complete.

I’ve studied much
and yet
I feel as if
I know nothing.

I am every color
intertwined.
I am an intricately
woven tapestry,
a magic carpet
searching, soaring.

I have traveled
to many lands
and yet
there is much
I haven’t seen.

…

I am a half-painted canvas

I soothe and heal
soul’s windows.

          Similarly, much of Clarke’s poetry focuses on feminine archetypes—and significantly those which patriarchal culture has denigrated. Here, an Eve with a “doll-like structure/ created for man/ hesitantly reaches/ for her independence” (“Eve”); a fierce “earth mother” witch demands respect (“Dark Sorceress”); and an elemental force sensuously kisses her lover (“Fire”). Also notable are “Medusa,” which draws upon versions of the myth that portrays the gorgon as Poseidon’s rape victim (“no eyes/ to turn you to stone./ have pity’) and “Anahid” (here reproduced in full) about an Armenian mother goddess. This latter piece is one of the book’s most powerful in part because it is slightly different from the rest of the archetype poems. Rather than exploring Anahid’s story or her power as a mother figure, Clarke rails against her for failing to protect her children from the Armenian genocide. The resulting poem is a powerful jeremiad in which, if the reader listens carefully, an echo of King David’s psalms can be heard. It is an echo that occurs in many of Clarke’s poems which deal directly with her own relationship to persecution and genocide as a woman of Jewish heritage.

Anahid,
protector of Armenia,
were you there
when they needed you?
Delicate ghostly beauty
just a myth—
unable to stop
the evil
the persecution
the murders.

Your thick black curls
dance tightly between
alizarin crimson roses
given to you
as an offering
in your honor
every year.

          The alizarin red appears in the painting of Anahid facing her poem. It whorls like roses through the goddess’s black hair, framing a face that has almost vanished into her skin. The result is a bust like a lantern, adrift in a sea of flowers, looking out expressionlessly at the viewer and, one imagines, expressionlessly at genocide. The mixed media painting, which bears the same title as the poem, is a haunting and unforgettable illumination of the preceding text. “Anahid” the painting also encapsulates what is most brilliant about Clarke’s visual art—its striking use of color and space, its sensuousness, and its ability to add depth to the poetry that accompanies it. In this sense, Clarke is very much a part of the burgeoning interstitial arts movement, which explores the overlap and the complementariness between different art forms, and the ways in which they can support one another to tell a story. In keeping with Tea with Nana’s focus on the feminine, nearly all of these portraits are of women, some quite realistic, as with “Mama Siciliana,” and most abstract, as is the case with “Midnight,” a startling portrait of a faceless woman done in red, black, white, and blue. But like all of Clarke’s abstract work, she is a soothing, ethereal figure rather than a frightening one. Perhaps, in the end, she is also the emblem of Clarke’s poetry: contemplative, calming and, above all, colorful:

Silently
simmering,
I bask in the
moonless night.
In my solitude
I am calm, content,
merging with midnight.

          At $17.50, Tea with Nana is one of the most affordable art books one will ever find and a fabulous example of the power poetry and image can have when paired. It is also a tribute not only to Clarke’s heritage, but also to the world cultures that have nurtured all women. It should be read with an eye both to its startling images and its soothing words.




Vagabond Dawns
Carolyn Mary Kleefeld
ISBN Number: 9780893041861

          The work of Carolyn Mary Kleefeld and Mia Barkan Clarke bear striking similarities, at least at first glance. Both work in multiple media, and both favor highly abstract art that emphasizes bold colors and a focus on feminine identity and sexuality. Through their poetry, both also seek to explore connections to forces, currents, and dynamics greater than the individual. And here is where the two women diverge. In Barkan’s case, of course, this force is the universal experiences of women that transcend time and culture. Although Kleefeld’s poetry is replete with feminine imagery and symbols of female sexuality, her focus is on the individual’s connection to the natural world; her own connection to it, in particular.

          Of the six poets examined in this feature, Kleefeld is one of two U.S. Americans (though she was born in England). Given her national heritage and her interest in nature, it is tempting to compare her work to that of Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. But while Emerson was the “transparent eye-ball” being nothing and seeing everything, Kleefeld is eyeball, hands, fingers, feet, mouth, sex, and body. Not content to sit back and merely transcend through observation, she enters into nature and grapples with it; not by damaging the landscape, which often comes to mind when one speaks of engaging with nature as anything but a passive observer, but rather by swimming through oceans, feeling nightfall creep through her bones, and even channeling the natural world through lovemaking.

           “The Crucibles” (here reproduced in full) not only encapsulates the theme of Kleefeld’s collection, but it can also be read as an answer to Emerson’s “The Transparent Eye-Ball.” Note that the speaker in this poem is not a passive observer of nature, but rather an active participant:

The river’s vengeance
breeds metaphors,
like flying fish
escaping their natures.

We eat lustily
at the eroding shore,
chewing the moss of lies,
regurgitating poems,
relieved of their weeping flames.

Chords of black crows,
like winged crosses,
fly the wind’s fury,
thrilling our sight.

Like crucibles freed,
they soar the infinite will
of the tides.

A meek twilight
is slowly enshrouded
by night’s cloak.

And truth becomes
the white bones
of our ancestors’ sighs.

          Here, both nature and the speaker(s) are equally active forces. The river “breeds” language and the poet struggles to create (or “regurgitate”) poetry. But it is only when she turns herself away from turbulence to the still, sleek flight of the crows and the closing of the day that she is able to hear the poetry at last—and it is the poetry of nature’s cycles, of all things passing into bone, of the mortality that has always beset all living things. In just seven brief stanzas, Kleefeld takes a journey from ignorance to transcendence by being an active participant in the natural world.

           Although Kleefeld continues this theme of mortality and discovery in several of the collection’s poems—such as the elegant “The Hourglass of Time” and “San Francisco to Big Sur,” which rails against the ways in which large cities abuse their people—she is by no means a dour poet. Indeed, much of the poetry in Vagabond Dawns is awe-filled, sensuous, and contagiously playful. In “The Next Rhapsody” (again reproduced in full), for example, the poet finds wonder and joy in watching an autumn leaf buffeted by a gust of wind. Ultimately, the poem also speaks hopefully of resurrection and rebirth, which is just as much a part of the natural cycle as death.

Ah, the leaf is quiet
in the shade;
only the wind’s touch
moves it to tremor.

As it dries
to amber brown
and falls from stem,
the breeze dances it
to the sun’s light.

And in its death,
it comes to life.

Smiling, crackling,
it is sent ashore
on adventures unimagined.

And in the light
of breeze and day
it is tossed about,
then suddenly swept
to a cold, dark corner—
where it awaits
the next rhapsody…

          Although Clarke and Kleefeld are two very different authors who, as far as I know, may not have influenced one another directly, I nevertheless think that those who enjoy one will also find the other edifying. When taken together, their art is emblematic of work by female authors which Cross-Cultural Communications has championed for decades: complex, expansive, daring, and ultimately in line with the publisher’s vision of highlighting the connections between people. Additionally, I highly recommend Kleefeld’s work to aficionados of such challenging poets as Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, in whose steps she has trod while still managing to clear a trail of her own.




Burning Bridges
Aeronwy Thomas
ISBN Number: 9780893048983

           As many critics have pointed out, Aeronwy (pronounced air-RON-wee) Thomas is a poet living in an enormous shadow—that of her father, Dylan Thomas. While her father’s work has inevitably influenced her own—just as Stanley Barkan’s sense of line appears in his daughter Mia’s work—that is the last this review will say of him, exactly because of that reason. Thomas is a powerful and talented poet in her own right, and her work deserves to stand on its own merits. And the merits of Burning Bridges, which collects a hearty cross section of Thomas’s work, are many.

           With the exception of her father’s work, Welsh poetry is not well known in the United States; in fact, Burning Bridges is one of Cross-Cultural Communication’s first books by a poet from this country. While it is an unfair and impossible task for a poet to represent the totality of his or her nation or culture, Thomas nonetheless does a subtle and brilliant job of evoking the landscape and national character of Wales. Many of the poems in Burning Bridges are set, for example, in Laugharne, South Wales, the town in which Thomas grew up. In “It Was This Big!” Thomas recalls a story about her father’s fear of furry animals, which quickly takes on all the grandiose and humorous trappings of a so-called “fish story.” “Later than Laugharne” finds the poet recounting a childhood spent at the nearby estuary, making toy boats, spying on her father at his writing desk, and watching birds wheel overhead. Here, Thomas describes Laugharne’s landscape in details that are both gorgeously restrained and touched with the kind of soft melancholy that only memory can evoke:

We were poor those days—
Though I can’t remember being poor
in Laugharne, in those balmy,
never-to-be-forgotten days,
green and golden…

Herons, gulls and pipers still encircle
our house on stilts,
and the cormorants still scud and glide
in my memory…

          When it comes to talking about her country and her hometown, Thomas has the rare skill of being able to balance humor and melancholy, longing and whimsy in the same poem. Nowhere is her skill more apparent than in “Browns Hotel, Laugharne” (here reproduced in full), in which Thomas discusses the effects commercialization and the demands of wealthy outsiders have had on Welsh pubs, which, like anywhere else in the West, are often the heart and soul of a small town. Although Thomas punctuates this poem as one breathless run-on sentence (note the lack of capitalization and the placement of the period), “Browns Hotel, Laugharne” actually contains a multitude of sentences, a multitude of observations. Without punctuation, however, each sentence bleeds into the next in a way that perfectly replicates the noise of a crowded pub. Yet, the device of the poem allows the crowd to speak as one voice, in much the same way that a chorus does in a Sophoclean tragedy. Given that the poem is a lament for the loss of tradition (though one suffused with a good dose of humor), the comparison seems particularly apt and deliberate.

We like our pubs a little worn—see—
no posh cocktail bar or fancy beers
they come in here from London
flashing their money around
making changes cleaning everything up
this is Wales, mun, not Soho
we like the yellow ceilings
and our old fitted carpet as it was
it’s like our lives have been
steam-cleaned away
and all those strong beers
we like them weak
you can sink ten session beers
and still get home
and that jukebox they’ve put in
its no joke neither
we all have to go down to
the Rugby Club now
for a bit of peace and quiet
it’s cheaper beer too.

          While I promised at the outset not to dwell upon Dylan Thomas, I would be doing Aeronwy Thomas a terrible disservice not to point out that her family—both her parents and her children—are obviously important to her work. In 2008, for example, Thomas, her husband Trefor Ellis, and fellow Welsh poet Peter Thabit Jones toured the United States to promote her father’s work and to read their own. The Dylan Thomas Tribute Tour was sponsored by Cross-Cultural Communications and lasted for eight weeks. Also, some of Thomas’s poems echo some of her father’s works, such as “The Hunchback in the Park” (hers is titled “Spring in Cwmdonkin Park, Swansea”), or even gently tease people who share her father’s name, such as American folksinger Bob Dylan (“Sorry”).

          But it is on Thomas’s poems about the family she began that I wish to focus, because these are some of the most stunning and skillful in Burning Bridges. In “My Son, My Sage,” Thomas’s wry humor and meticulous attention to image (“He looks very solid, as if time alone will/ take him away…”) make an amusing and tender poem out of the act of toilet training a toddler, a subject that few poets could tackle without sounding silly. But “Daughter” (here reproduced in full), about the birth of Thomas’s daughter Hannah, is truly the best poem in the book, one that I reread several times in order to take in the stunning imagery and heartfelt emotion.

Curled like a starfish
my daughter bites her own tail.
Brought in by breakers
she rests on a sandbank.
I watch her breathe
awash in sleep.
The moon lights
her watery face.
Stranded in dreams
she smiles in sleep.
I paddle in the shallows
fall and swirl
in the eddies of her hair
moonlit and fantastic
gathering strength
for the turn of tide.

In the early morning
I’ll leave her
curled in froth.

          There are so many excellent poems in Burning Bridges that, sadly, no review of reasonable length can address them all. Even sadder, however, is that there will be no further collections to review: roughly a year after her tour, Thomas died from cancer. But happily, her poetry remains to enrich readers who want to learn more about Wales’s stunning poetic output beyond the work of her father.




Luis Alberto Ambroggio
Difficult Beauty
ISBN Number: 9780893041854

          The title of this volume, which compiles poems written by Argentine-American poet Luis Alberto Ambroggio over a period of eighteen years, is perhaps the best summation of the poet’s work. Ambroggio’s poems are, indeed, difficultly beautiful, focusing as they do upon some of life’s most fraught and difficult aspects, from the struggle to create a poem, to remembering fallen political comrades, to the act of loving another human being—which may very well be the most difficult and most beautiful part of life. He is also the first poet considered in this review who does not write in English, meaning that we must consider the complexities of translation before we can consider his work.

          As Ambroggio writes in “Comunión” (translated by Lori Marie Carlson as “Learning English” and here reproduced in full):

Life
to understand me
you have to know Spanish
feel it in the blood of your soul.

If I speak another language
and use different words
to express the same feelings
I don’t know
if I’ll continue being
the same person.

          To put this in plainer terms, the poet thinks that a translation of one of his poems is, in effect, a different poem. Given the nuances of language that simply cannot be translated (such as the cultural weight behind certain words, rhyme, and rhythm schemes, and, of course, idioms), this is a view with which I am highly sympathetic. Thus, the reader should consider the English versions of Difficult Beauty (and of this feature’s other non-English titles) to be an approximation of Ambroggio’s work—an excellent one, but an approximation nonetheless.

           That aside, the approximations within this book’s covers are not only stunning but also doggedly faithful to the essence of Ambroggio’s work. Examining them, then, will give the reader a fairly decent idea of the power and beauty of the originals. For Ambroggio’s poetry is beautiful, forceful, passionate, and urgent in either language.

           Ambroggio’s choice of topics run the gamut in Difficult Beauty’s 167 pages, ranging from the difficulty of loving another human being (“The Altar of Mirrors,” “This Silence”), the complexities of creating poetry (“Creation,” The Inhabitants of the Poet”), and the personal heartbreak wrought by political violence (“The Cell”). Sadly, a treatment of the full range of his poems would be beyond the scope of this review. Rather, then, I have chosen a poem which, for me, best encapsulates the unique skills that Ambroggio brings to his poetry regardless of subject: tightly controlled line, a flair for unusual and startling imagery, and a passion that is simultaneously subtle and unrestrained. The poem is titled “At Sea” (“Navegando”), and it is here reproduced in full.

What is the sea
but a long cry
from the distance?
How much of a mirror
does the sky need to see itself?

It could well be
the web of waves
that sensual
dialogue with the wind
that is irresistible.
I fear love,
that endless sea
above names,
because I do not know it
because it does not know me.

          In this poem, as in others, such as “Forbidden Fruit,” “The Fallen” (a prayer for air travelers), and “Future” (an exquisite poem about September 11), Ambroggio wrestles with that which lurks behind all of his poems: the unnamable and the unconquerable, whether that be God’s will, the vagaries of desire, the horror of human violence or, as in the case of “At Sea,” the breadth and height of love. And while Ambroggio admits throughout the collection, both explicitly and implicitly, that he is powerless to know the meaning of such things, his struggles to understand create a beautiful framework for him and his readers to use as ladders and maps in exploring the unknown forces that drive our lives.

           Indeed, for Ambroggio, this is the goal of poetry itself. As he explains in “Creation” (“Creación,” again reproduced in full):

God created the poet
to carefully feed
monsters
mythologies
and in the midst of ferocious insomnias,
to release a day, a god,
made of paper.

          Like many of Cross-Cultural Communications’ releases, Difficult Beauty is a bilingual book. The Spanish text of each poem is printed on the left-hand page and the English translation on the right. This arrangement is helpful and beneficial because it allows the author(s) of the book to speak in his, her, or their own voice while enabling those who cannot understand the original language to appreciate and enjoy the work contained between the covers. At the very least, one puts the book aside knowing that one can revisit it if one ever gains the skills to explore the original text.

           However, something amazing happens if the reader can understand both languages. I, for example, studied Spanish for several years in high school and university, but my speaking skills have atrophied since graduation. My reading skills, on the other hand, are much better. As I read Difficult Beauty, I found myself glancing to the left to read the Spanish and English versions in tandem. I quickly realized that not only did I understand more of the Spanish than I thought I would, but also that having an English translation at the ready helped me identify unfamiliar words and even verb conjugations. Thus, I was able to appreciate both versions of the poems simultaneously while developing language skills that I had thought corroded or lost completely. This is the extraordinary power of Cross-Cultural Communications’ work: the ability to use poetry as a vehicle for true conversations across cultures by placing the languages and viewpoints in that conversation upon equal footing—and, of course, to help readers become more conversant in multiple languages in which to hold that conversation.

           Difficult Beauty, as I’ve mentioned before, can be appreciated equally in both English and Spanish, and should definitely have a place on the shelves of all who are interested in the poetic output of the U.S.’s Hispanic community.




The Brush and the Sword: Kasa
Various authors
Sung-Il Lee, translator
ISBN Number: 9780893041229

           When most Westerners think of Asian poetry, the forms that come to mind are likely haiku, renga (from which haiku sprung), and tanka—all Japanese. I suspect that there are several reasons for this. First, haiku and tanka are governed by rules that are easily translatable from Japanese into English: a three line poem with a construction of five, then seven, then five beats per line, and a five line poem with a 5-7-5-7-7 beat structure, respectively. Second, the close political and cultural relationship between Japan and the English-speaking world throughout the late 19th and 20th Centuries. These two factors lead many Westerners to try their hands at both forms to the point that haiku and tanka written by English poets are often very different in tone and structure than those written by Japanese poets.

           While haiku, tanka, and renga (both original and Western attempts) are indeed beautiful and powerful forms, it is a travesty that the poetic output of such nations as China, Mongolia, Vietnam, and Korea do not enjoy the same interest and popularity. Thankfully, readers who want to educate themselves have an excellent primer in Sung-Il Lee’s The Brush and the Sword, which collects, expertly translates, and explains several powerful examples of kasa, a Korean form of poetry.

           Before we examine some of the poems in The Brush and the Sword, it is important to understand the structure of a kasa. For this, I will defer to Lee, whose expertise in Old English—the poetry of which bears a striking resemblance to kasa’s organization—makes him an ideal translator and editor for such a volume (bracketed text provided by this reviewer).

Kasa [when compared to shijo, a more structured poetic form] is unique in the sense that it really doesn’t have any form. This type of poetic composition is not under any restrictions of prosodic scheme or number of lines…. In some sense, kasa can be considered an equivalent in spirit to “blank verse” in English poetry….[S]o long as the metric requirement of thirteen-to-sixteen syllables per line and the symmetrical balance of the on-verse and the off-verse [full line and half or interrupted lines, respectively], each containing sustained two-beat rhythm, were met, a kasa could continue till its composer stopped writing.

          Additionally, these lines are divided up into four beats. But as this is a feature that is entirely lost in the translation from Korean to English (in which lines arranged thusly would be impossibly long and clunky), I note it here only for the sake of being complete.

           The kasa collected in The Brush and the Sword (so named because many included kasa were written by military men) run a gamut of topics, including contemplation of the natural world (Chŏng Ch’ŏl’s “Tour of the East of the Divide” and “Sojourn in Mount Sŏng”), verses about warfare (Pak In-ro’s “Lines Composed on a Battleship”), and poems written in women’s voices protesting their treatment by men (such as “A Woman’s Complaint” by female poet Hŏ Nan-sŏl-hŏn, though men also wrote these to describe being estranged from their feudal lords). Of the kasa collected in this volume, “Sojourn in Mount Sŏng” was one of my favorites because of its vivid language and gentle, dream-like pace. Here, the poet speaks fondly of the rural village in which he spent his teen years.

Awakened by the scent of the sunlit plum-blossoms by the window,
I come to know that a mountain-dweller has work to do.
Having sown the cucumber seeds at a sunny spot near the fence,
I pluck the weeds and tend the plant’s growth in the rain:
The story of a baron-turned-peasant is not an old one anymore.
Light-footed in straw-sandals, with a bamboo stick in my hand,
I walk along the peach-blossom lane that leads to a flowery bank.
A rocky cliff is mirrored on the glassy stream of the moonlit river.
Accompanied by its reflection cast on the water, I reach the West River;
Where else can I expect to encounter an earthly paradise?

           Although English-speakers used to the ten-beat lines of sonnets and the often short, tight lines of contemporary free verse may find their patience tested by these long, flowing lines, I urge them to be patient. Kasa on the subject of nature are subtle: they sweep the reader along like pebbles in a cold and clear stream as pastoral scenery flows past. If the reader surrenders to the poem, he or she will discover that the deceptively simple language (“a sunny spot near the fence,” “the peach-blossom lane”), when taken as a whole, creates a picture of the landscape that is as calming and meditative as it is indelible.

           Of course, not all kasa move exactly like this, or concern themselves with warfare, nature or lovers’ complaints. Lee has also included a brief kasa that focuses on the theme of human mortality: Chŏng Ch’ŏi’s “Drinking Song” (here reproduced in full). If the Western reader listens carefully, he or she will find echoes of several, more familiar poems which reference drinking and pleasure-seeking as defenses against death’s inevitability, including Iago’s boisterous drinking song from Othello. Additionally, the inclusion of such a poem, I think, illustrates one of the main points of Cross-Cultural Communications’ work: to demonstrate that, despite our profound cultural and linguistic differences, people of all nations have several things in common simply because we are all human. And one thing that all humans face, of course, is the inevitability of death.

Let us drink, bowl after bowl,
Let us drink, till we are wearied,
Counting the flower twigs piling up,
Each time we lift and empty our bowls.
Once I am dead, what difference—
Whether my body, bundled in a straw mat,
Be carried on a wooden frame,
Or be borne on a colorful palanquin,
While many a mourner follows after?
Once I am laid where thorny bushes and rushes tangle,
And gray oaks and white aspens keep guard,
While the sun looks dull, the moon pale,
While rain drizzles or snow falls thick,
While the bone-piercing wind blows hard,
Who will invite me to share a drink?
Too late, regret will come upon me,
When a monkey shrieks,
While perched on my mound.

           The Brush and the Sword is a strong collection of Korean poetry that will be of special interest to English-speaking readers who want to learn more about Asian poetry than the rudiments of tanka and haiku. However, I think that it is necessary reading for anyone who takes seriously both poetry and the process of fostering cross-cultural relations.




Hafez
Your Lover’s Beloved: 51 Ghazals by Hafez
Mahmood Karimi-Hakak and Bill Wolak, translators
Cross-Cultural Communications
ISBN Number: 9780893041137

           For several reasons, I approach this translation of Hafez’s work with a great deal of caution, and many caveats to the reader: I am not Persian; the ghazal form is unfamiliar to me; and while I have long admired the work of Jalal al-Din Rumi (whose influence can be found in Hafez), my study of his work has been that of a dabbler, not a serious student. Thus, even with Karimi-Hakak and Wolak’s excellent and exhaustive introduction to guide me, I am bound to make errors particular to beginners. I assure the reader that I and not the translator’s scholarship is entirely to blame.

           Although Rumi’s work has enjoyed some popular acclaim in the Western world since the 1990s (thanks, perhaps, in part to Coleman Barks popular but far too free interpretations of Rumi’s work), the same cannot be said of Hafez. Given that Iranians of all walks of life regard the 12th Century poet with the reverence that native English speakers give to Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer, this is a sorry state of affairs both culturally and politically. Hafez’s poetry has played a large part in Iranian politics, most notably in the 1978 uprising against the Shah: in this volume’s introduction, for example, the translators explain that a reading of Hafez’s poetry put together by the Iran Writers Association added fuel to the movement. Aside from being of incalculable importance to Iranian culture, Hafez’s verse is also arresting, surprising, and every bit as fresh and relevant today as is Shakespeare’s verse. Although much of the cultural significance of Hafez’s work will be lost on the uninitiated Western reader, the subjects on which he speaks—namely human and divine love—are universal, particularly when handled by such competent and knowledgeable translators as Karimi-Hakak and Wolak.

           Before we consider Hafez’s poetry, however, a quick explanation of a ghazal is necessary. This is a poem comprised of usually at least five couplets, each of which is complete in and of itself. These couplets then interweave and play off one another to form the poem’s full structure. In Hafez’s work—as in much of Rumi’s—that structure often elaborates upon two very prominent themes: that of love, both human and divine, and that of the dichotomies of human experience (in the poet’s case, for example, of being both an Islamic holy man who has memorized the Qur’an and writing frequently of drinking wine, which Islam prohibits).

           These two themes are very prominently on display in “Night-Transforming Wine” (here reproduced in full), or “Ghazal XI,” as Hafez did not title his poems. While this is among the most passionate and vivid (perhaps even explicit) selections in Your Lover’s Beloved, I have chosen it because I think it shares close ties to mystical writings with which Western readers may be more familiar.

Drunk, blouse half-torn off, her disheveled hair a chaos of curls
Singing poems through smiling lips, wineglass in hand,

In the middle of the night she stumbles into my bed
Eyes challenging, mouth muttering regrets.

Whispering softly she scolds me,
“Tired old lover, is sleep already conquering your sense?”

Any lover offered night-transforming wine
Betrays love by not worshiping drunkenness.

Ascetic, be gone. Don’t blame me for drinking.
We were given no other gift since creation.

Whether aged in paradise or today’s beaujolais
We drink what’s poured into our glasses.

From laughter of the wineglass and a lover’s binding curls,
So many promises are broken, like one Hafez made.

           As the translators explain, there exists a longstanding tradition in Sufi writings of treating wine, drunkenness, and all related imagery as symbols for union with Allah. And yet, the wine imagery daringly and provocatively persists, endowing Hafez’s poetry with what the two also call a libertine transgressiveness. Two good counterparts known to Western audiences are, I think, the Biblical “Song of Songs” and St. John of the Cross’s “The Dark Night of the Soul.” In the first, the speaker praises a prostitute’s beauty in explicitly erotic terms. In the second, the celibate saint speaks in the voice of a woman fleeing a dark house to join her lover in a courtyard. While the imagery in both of these works is just as shocking as the image of the half-naked, drunken, and amorous woman in Ghazal XI, no mainstream branch of Christianity has attempted to excise the “Song of Songs” from the Bible, even if its more explicit passages aren’t quoted in sermons. Likewise, while some translations of “The Dark Night of the Soul” attempt to downplay the eroticism more than others, nearly all note that the sensuality is code for an ecstatic and all-fulfilling union with God.

           It is in examining these parallels between Western and Middle Eastern literature that the point of this translation—and, indeed, the mission of Cross-Cultural Communications—becomes abundantly clear. Even though the reader who does not understand Persian will miss out on the musical grace of Hafez’s poetry, she or he will nonetheless have the tools to begin a cross-cultural dialogue. And given that cultural misunderstandings often create and then fuel international conflicts, such dialogue is sorely needed as we move into a new decade. It would thus seem wise particularly for U.S. Americans, whose government is so often at odds with that of Iran, to avail themselves of this excellent sampler of Hafez’s work in order to start having that dialogue within themselves and within their local communities.