Translation Tuesday: “Goodbye, Lebanon” by May Ziadeh

Egypt called in a serious voice, / and already my boat’s rocking

While better known for her correspondences with Khalil Gibran, the Lebanese-Palestinian writer May Ziadeh was a leading figure in the early-twentieth-century Arab literary world and feminist movement in her own right, whose work inspired generations of writers including the Egyptian writer and activist Nawal El Saadawi. Despite her lasting influence, no full-length work of Ziadeh’s—neither her French nor her Arabic writing—is available in English translation and she remains relatively unread in the Anglophone world. This week, we are pleased to feature one of Ziadeh’s earliest French poems, “Goodbye, Lebanon”—with its elegiac adieus for her landscape-lover homeland as she looks back from her new home in Cairo—rendered in Rose DeMaris’ creative translation that revives Ziadeh’s Romantic sensibility and revisits that exilic feeling which knows that, in separation, “grief goes on”; a poem which will resonate across time with the contemporary moment.

Goodbye, Lebanon

Goodbye, Lebanese mountains.

I’m going far
from your pink rose garlands,
your bright red satin strawberries.

Egypt called in a serious voice,
and already my boat’s rocking
bears new fruit—

But sea, whisper your lullabies
please, because I hurt so much.
Soft waves of home, sob for me.

Don’t go away so quickly, my love.
Leaving you, my chest is all wound,
wholly tender.

Lebanon,

you made me. Your moody nights
put the darkness in my eyes
and laid a vein of lightning in my soul.

Your white lace waterfalls wove
jasmine vine and lute serenades
all through me,

and my speech is the Spirit
murmuring in your woods.
My capricious seasons are yours:

my soul is sometimes wild,
an egret flying far
beyond the ocean’s edge,

and sometimes I curl up
like an anemone when touched,
damp with delicate seafoam tears.

Fading from sight, you’re a dream
that ends. But grief goes on.
Goodbye, my nest.

I love you, Lebanon. I adore you.
Lebanon, goodbye.
My heart—

pink roses,
red strawberries

—turns to vapor with the word:

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

translated from the French by Rose DeMaris

May Ziadeh (1886–1941) was a multilingual Lebanese-Palestinian poet, essayist, translator, and intellectual. Born in Nazareth, she was educated at a French convent in Lebanon, and spent much of her youth in that country. At twenty-two, she emigrated to Cairo, earned a university degree in Modern Languages, and established herself as a writer. For twenty years, she hosted a famous weekly literary salon, catalyzing conversations among the most influential artists and thinkers of her time. A passionate feminist who advocated for the emancipation and education of Arab women, May played a vital part in the Nadha (Arab renaissance) of the early twentieth century. In 1911, using the pen name Isis Copia, she published her first book, a poetry collection titled Fleurs de Rêve (Dream Flowers). “Goodbye, Lebanon” (originally titled “Adieu”) is the first poem from that collection to be published in English.

Rose DeMaris is an American poet, novelist, and essayist of partial Lebanese heritage. A California native, Rose earned a BA in Literatures of the World from UC San Diego. After moving to Montana, she earned MA degrees in English and Native American Studies, and worked as a teacher for many years. Rose’s fiction and nonfiction have been published by Random House, The Millions, and Big Sky Journal. Her original poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Roanoke Review, The Fourth River, Cold Mountain Review, Pine Row Press, and elsewhere, and she was a finalist for the 2020 Orison Anthology Award in Poetry. She hopes to finish a complete, creative translation of Dream Flowers and share more of May Ziadeh’s writing with a contemporary English-reading audience. She loves being in poetic dialogue with May. Currently working toward her MFA in Poetry at Columbia University, she lives in Brooklyn. 

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