More Poetic Puzzling

08 Jun, 2025

I periodically return to (usually contemporary) Arabic poetry to determine whether my ability to be emotionally drawn in by, as opposed to comprehending intellectually, what’s going on has grown at all. So far, the answer’s no. Whether in broad historical anthologies filled with commentaries; smaller, more concentrated collections; or individual works, I understand what’s happening on a literal level, or why the poet would approach a situation or development with the emotions they did; I can recognize that a poet’s chosen, say, to present what he wants to offer in the form of a ghazal. In fact, in terms of getting “objectively” what’s going on, I often feel more confident with Arabic poetry than I do with “Western” forms. In spite of it all, though, I’m rarely captivated, and sometimes have to force myself to finish what I’m reading.¹

I’m wondering if part of the problem is simply language, and a very particular one at that. Earlier this year, Robyn Creswell discussed what a long-fraught exercise trying to convey the beauty of the Qur’an in English has been, especially when the original Arabic was meant to be recited aloud—the centerpiece of a ritualized performance—and not necessarily read quietly on the page.² Whether the translator’s intention was, as early on, to make the text seem less than credible to non-Muslim readers, or to provide a translation that honored the original the best it could, nothing’s really seemed to turn out right, and some translators have even acknowledged that their efforts just plain fall short. If the way Arabic functions in general is difficult to align with the way English functions in general, there’s a problem here from the beginning.³

But then there’s the more disturbing possibility, the guilt-inducing one that seems to say if this isn’t doing anything for you, you’re just an unfeeling chauvinist, willingly hostile toward what’s unlike you and yours. I hope it’s not naive to counter, though, that if you’re reading with as open and curious a heart as possible, that condemnation is too harsh. What it might be fairer to say is that for many readers, there’s been little opportunity to develop a particular view or feeling, and that deficiency isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault; for good or ill, the experience isn’t there to allow a reader to feel what the writer feels, or could even know what the practicalities, much less the emotional strategies, of living in the writer’s position would entail. Indeed, in many an instance, even if reading can and should make you aware of others’ realities, it would be insulting to assert from your point of comfortable distance that you sympathized or understood what the writer had endured.

Tom Gaulke is probably better at describing what I’m trying to get at, that difference the absence of some necessary thing makes in being able to experience a living connection with any sort of artistic creation. In talking about the writing of Ernst Bloch, for whom the presence of Heimweh (a particular variety of homesickness) was essential, Gaulke says that if you remove this concept from Bloch’s work, it “will seem out of tune and perhaps even weird. It will not make sense or resonate for anyone who feels perpetually rooted or fully at home.”⁴ To take it a step further, if your life (like Bloch’s) and so much else weren’t being threatened by the Nazis, to say you “understood” where Bloch was coming from would be ludicrous.

This absence of necessary experience—and especially of an overwhelming longing for places or conditions or customs from which you’ve been exiled or are being destroyed—may be another part of what’s keeping me from being emotionally seized by more or less contemporary Arabic poetry. That sort of longing is palpable in Mahmoud Darwish and Adonis and others; in addition to those first two poets I’d read before, the anthology I just finished included Sami al-Qasim. But even with a good knowledge of the histories and current events in the parts of the world these men came from—and even though I’ve visited Palestine and been left wordless at what it could possibly mean to survive, much less thrive, in such conditions—I can’t feel other than separate from what’s offered on the page. There’s the sort of general estrangement any teen might feel, or the sense I still have that I don’t really fit in with my native surroundings. There’s that level of alienation, yes, but then there’s what Adonis means, in talking about Beirut in 1982, that “My era tells me bluntly: / You do not belong.”⁵ To say my own feelings about being an internal outsider could relate in any real fashion to the type of life-and-death rejection Adonis is talking about would be offensive.

So what is it about the way these collective and individual histories and accounts are being presented—this information taking the form of poetry—that isn’t getting to me, when responsible reporting on the same sorts of situations often brings me to nauseated anger and sadness? Lack of experience only covers so much ground here. I wonder, then, if there’s something particular about poetry, here and elsewhere, that doubles the estrangement; poetry, after all, is trying to convey not only ideas or information and states of mind and heart, but taking the extra step of presenting those ideas in an especially artfully constructed, and usually culturally specific, way. (In terms of that cultural specificity, think how hard it is for your average American not to dismiss haiku as just a neat trick anyone able to count syllables can pop out.) Even within your own milieu and language, native poetry may not come across as very accessible, because of its refusal to present what it has to say in plain prose (so-called straightforward) fashion.

For example, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and Elie Wiesel’s Night can still (I assume) emotionally devastate high school English classes with their prose accounts of life in a concentration camp. On the other hand, much of Paul Celan’s poetry, which was attempting to grapple with many of the same questions and experiences those other two Holocaust survivors were, didn’t and doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense even to his peers, because of its refusal to be clear-cut about an experience it was impossible to approach in clear-cut fashion. You might even say that in verging on the incomprehensible, Celan’s poetry was truer to the situation it was meant to confront—but that faithfulness to reflecting something incomprehensible might have come at the cost of readers being unable to find a place to get their emotional (or even intellectual) foot in the door.

I could keep on going, asking very generally, for example, who poetry and other arts are (intended) for, whether one sort of art form is better at connecting unlike audiences with each other, and so on and so forth. But we all know that’s a question that can’t, and probably shouldn’t, be answered.⁶ Here, though, courtesy of Karen Barad’s elaboration of diffraction, is what I hope my semi-regular study of Arabic and other varieties of poetry can do: delve into accounts of experiences far different from my own “without defining [either] one against the other or holding either … as the fixed referent for understanding the other,” finding “a way of attending to entanglements in reading … through one another.”⁷ That’s an ambitious, maybe not even possible goal, but it’s eminently worthwhile. And given the challenge of the task, maybe I can even stop beating myself up for not feeling quite at home with one creation or another, and just letting that feeling be whatever it winds up being.

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