Working within the vast world of Arabic poetry, writer, translator, and professor Huda J. Fakhreddine has done much to elucidate the movements of literary forms throughout history, the necessity of constantly interacting with tradition, and the inner universe of poems as they communicate and exchange with one another. Through her extensive knowledge and sensitivity to the capacities of poetic language, Fakhreddine has demonstrated powerfully that, as in a piece by her father that she translated: “Poetry is the deepest sea, distant yet more urgent than surf breaking on rocks.” Here, in this wide-ranging interview, Alton Melvar M Dapanas speaks to her on the importance of form and meter, the necessity of removing Arabic poetry from reductive study, the ongoing engagement of reading and translation, and the intimate way she came to love and feel safe in the world of a poem.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Certain paradoxes and ironies made an impression in me after reading your latest book, The Arabic Prose Poem (2021): that the Arabic free verse, or the qasīdat al-tafīla, is not “free” in the way of its Anglophone (free verse) and Francophone (vers libre) counterparts, and that Arabic free verse poets like Nāzik al-Malāʾika and later on, Ahmad ʿAbd al-Muʿtī Hijāzī, are, surprisingly, the fiercest opponents of the prose poem.
Huda J. Fakhreddine (HJF): Meter is the marker of poetry in the Arabic tradition, even if symbolically and not fundamentally. It is the fence that separates poetry from other forms—even those that have strong claims to the poetic. The modernist movement of the 20th century was the first organized and theorized effort to jump the fence of meter; this doesn’t mean that the fence was not jumped before, only that it was not done so in such a collective and deliberate manner. The Arabic free verse poem was the result of that formal experimentation or innovation.
But a more accurate label than “free verse” is qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla. The tafʿīla is the single foot or metrical unit, and a pattern of tafʿīlas makes up a meter in classical prosody. The modern poets no longer committed to the meters in their full patterns, but simplified them or reduced them to their building units (the individual tafʿīla), and often in qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla, the poem is built on a single metrical unit and its variations. The term free verse (al-shiʿr al- ḥurr) is thus confusing and not very accurate, since such poems still adhere to metrical considerations. The use of the term free verse is a testament to the influence of translation in the formative years of the Arabic modernist movement—though, as I argue in the book, translation was not that most decisive influence. I think the conversation with the Arabic poetic tradition, even when antagonistic and fraught, is really at the core of that movement, and is the real springboard to its most significant contributions. This is also why the term qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla is the most reflective of the movement’s intervention in form and its thinking about the role of meter.
Yes, free verse poets like al-Malāʾika and Hijāzī condemned the prose poem—perhaps because they thought that with qaṣīdat al- tafʿīla, their variation on the system of Arabic prosody had reached the limits of operating within poetry (or rather the poem/the qaṣīda) as understood and expected in the Arabic tradition. There is no doubt that their objections to the prose poem were also ideologically motivated, since the definition of poetry and its parameters are intimately tangled up with notions of Arabness. However, I also think poetry is like that: transgressive and impatient with itself. Poetic proposals which starts off as revolutionary and avant-garde will eventually come to be regarded as part of the establishment or institution, and will then have to face new proposals.
Poetry doesn’t settle into rules, and it also can’t bear to hang loose without tension. This pull between “freedom” and limits is what makes poetry, and it is what keeps poetic form (and structure) an arrangement in the making—never really fully realized or established. I argue that’s true even with forms we tend to think of as established, such as the archetypal Arabic qaṣīda. The most astounding qaṣīdas in the Arabic traditions are not applications of the theoretical rule, but rather constant challenges to the expectations set by such rules. Here, I’m thinking of the muʿallaqāt of Imruʾ al-Qays and al-ʿAshā, of poems by Bashshar b. Burd, Abū Nuwās, Abū Tammām, among others.
AMMD: With Jayson Iwen, you co-translated Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA Editions, 2017) and with Roger Allen, The Sky That Denied Me (University of Texas Press, 2020)—both poetry collections of your father, Jawdat Fakhreddine. In particular, Lighthouse for the Drowning (first published in its Arabic original Manaraton lil ghariq in 1996) has established your father as a household name among second-generation poets of the Arab Modernist movement. Can you tell us what the act of translating meant to you first as a translator, and second as his daughter?
HJF: I first thought about translating my father’s poetry a long time before Lighthouse for the Drowning was published, and I actually started translating him when I reread him again as a teenager—the second or third reading of poems I had grown up listening to and loving. As a teenager interested in poetry, particularly English poetry (which was my major in college), I felt a need to claim some of his poetry as mine. I had a sense of ownership or even authorship towards many of his poems, and translation is the most satisfying form of theft or appropriation. Taking my father’s poems into another language where I was able to create my own readings of them, my own rewritings of them, was really part of growing up, of coming into my own and finding my own grip on both Arabic and English.
In both projects, Lighthouse for the Drowning and The Sky that Denied Me, I translated my favorite poems from his works. The process offered me the unique experience of boldly translating poems I wished I had written in the first place, and the fact that I am his daughter gave me more license and freedom as I selected, translated, and rewrote. In both cases, I thought my co-translators would help balance my relationship with these poems—with which I was too emotionally and personally involved—and I’m grateful for them because our conversations in both cases pushed me to artistically and poetically justify my choices. Their experiences and input allowed me to take the necessary distance that gave the translations more integrity.
AMMD: Your first book, Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (2015), was dedicated to your grandfather, Fakhreddine Fakhreddine: “Your words raised a small darkening sky then the stars fell one by one.” The paternal figures within your family certainly influenced your career in literature.
HJF: This dedication with which I open my first book is in fact a variation on a line of poetry by the great poet Bashshār b. Burd:
كأنَّ مثارَ النقع فوق رؤوسنا وأسيافَنا ليلٌ تهاوى كَواكبه
The haze of battle-dust over our heads and our swords, together,
a night of falling stars.
My grandfather recited this line when I saw him for the last time. I had just arrived from the United States and went straight from the airport to the hospital room where he died three days later. When I entered the room that day, it happened that he was alert and feeling better. He was happy to see me and asked me about my work, and he knew I was writing about Abū Tammām and the Abbasid muḥdath poets. He made some jokes as he usually did and then recited Bashshār’s line.
I will forever be grateful for that final moment of lucidity where he was himself: warm, happy, and witty. I guess he was fighting his last battle, and he conjured up Bashshār’s battle scene with the night sky and its falling stars.
My grandfather was, and still is in many ways, my best friend. From him, I learned to listen to poetry and sing it. My earliest memories are of him singing poems to me; he had a repertoire of mainly pre-Islamic poems and a few other poems by Abū Firās al- Ḥamadānī, al-Buḥturī, al-Mutanabbį, and al-Sharīf al-Rad̩ī which he loved to recite and sing to us as children. These remain the poems I memorize and repeat in my head almost all the time.
I grew up in Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War. We moved a lot between Beirut and our village in the South, living in temporary homes—borrowed houses and relatives’ houses at times, depending on where and when the city was safe. My sanctuary as a child was the time my father would read to me and my brother Ali, and he had three favorite books he liked to read from and talk with us about: the muʿallaqāt, al-Mutanabbi’s dīwān, and the Quran. He challenge me and my brother once, when I was seven and Ali was almost six, to memorize the opening sections of the seven muʿallaqāt, and by that he gifted us a rhythm, a sound that resonated in our heads and could carry us home wherever we were.
My father enjoyed telling us stories about al-Mutanabbi’s life. As a child, I heard so much about al-Mutanabbi at home that for a while, I thought he was a troubled distant relative who had such a unusual life, and hasn’t managed to visit us yet. My father also often read to us from the Quran and enjoyed our many questions, but would more intensely engage the linguistic and rhetorical inquiries than any others.
My grandfather and my father are both reluctant paternal figures. They are more friends to me than paternal figures—both hesitant, sensitive, and shy men. I inherited from them not just a love for the Arabic language but the ability to only really be at ease within it, and to only truly feel safe in the world contained in a poem.
AMMD: In that same book, you made the case of the “metapoetic” as a “heightened awareness of a prior tradition.” And so, apart from opening each poem with an allusion to a poem from antiquity in Lighthouse for the Drowning, there is a personalisation and adaption of the formal and the classical into something confessional, contemporary, and sometimes even colloquial. Can you exemplify, in simple and brief terms, how the Arabic Modernists achieved what you called holding “a mirror up to the established canon”?
HJF: In its very make-up, qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla is a conversation with the tradition on the level of form as well as sound and rhythm. At the hands of poets who are tuned to that, the sonic unit itself (the tafʿīla) and the meter, in its variations, distortions, and unexpected turns, become both innovation and commentary on the “tradition” or the “canon.” An example of that from Lighthouse for the Drowning is the poem “Bilād” (Homeland), which opens with an epigraph from the muʿallaqa of al-Ḥarith b. Ḥilliza—an exploration of the meter al-Khafīf, as well as the theme of a lost or difficult homeland (bilād/diyār). The title poem from that collection “Manaraton lil-gharīq,” itself opens with a epigraph from Abū Tammām’s famous spring poem, and is an elaboration on the vicissitudes of time: the notion of change in nature and experience. Allusions to poems from the tradition are crucial in these modern poems, because they signal the conversations and connections at their core. The epigraphs are not only allusions to the past, but indicate towards future potentials and trajectories, where well-known motifs, sounds, and structures are signposts in new poetic territories.
Darwish’s poem “Qāfiya min ajl al- muʿallaqāt” is an overt example of such conversations that are crucial to the modernist project. Similarly, Adunis’s experimentation with meter and rhyme in Aghānī Mihyār al-Dimashqī (The Songs of Mihyar the Damascene), and in particular the piece titled “Aslamtu ayyāmī” (I Surrender my Days), presents the reader with the familiar meter al-Kāmil in an unfamiliar way.
A more subtle example is Salim Barakat’s engagement with Imruʿ al-Qays’s muʿallaqa in sections of the poem “Istit̩rād fī siyāq mukhtazal” (“Digression in an Abridged Context,” which can be found in Come, Take a Gentle Stab). Through the imagery of water and lightning and deliberate diction, he summons to his reader’s mind the muʿallaqa’s final flood scene. Attention to this allusion adds a significant dimension to Barakat’s poem. We can point to many other similar examples in the works of al-Bayati, al-Sayyab, Abd al-Sabur, Amal Dunqul, and others.
AMMD: The Arabic prose poem or the qaṣīdat al-nathr dawned as a literary form in the 1950s, and the Arabic free verse or the qaṣīdat al-tafīla three decades earlier. The former was launched by the founding of Shiʿr magazine by poets and intellectuals Yūsuf al-Khāl and Adunis (the penname of ʿAlī Aḥmad Saʿīd), but it had precursor forms in the early 20th century and before that: rhymed prose (sajʿ), poetic prose (al-nathr al-shiʿrī or al-fannī), poetry-in-prose (al-shiʿr al-manthūr), and prose that is poetic or merely laden with poetry (muḥammala). What do you foresee in the form’s future?
HJF: I don’t think it is poetically relevant to speak of form in a timeline of development or progression and say: first there was the qaṣīda, then came qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla, and now we are in the era of the qaṣīdat al-nathr. The fact that the qaṣīda as a form is earlier in time and qaṣīdat al-nathr is later does not mean that one replaces the other, or is better or more developed. It is important to remember that both the qaṣīda and qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla are still alive and well. As I argue in the book, the dialogue between these poetic forms in Arabic is what truly gives them their critical/metapoetic edge, what keeps their stakes in the tradition relevant and generative.
The prose poem today is no longer as big of a statement as when it first launched in the Arab world in 1960. Today, most young poets write prose poems almost by default. The rebellion and the deliberate shock or agitation some of the early prose poems caused have now given way for a less confrontational poetic practice.
I have two views on the future of the form: the first is that it disintegrates into an all too easy claim to poetry and the poem—by which anything passes as poetry or can claim to be a poem. This would be a failure. The second is that, polemics aside, prose poets will strive to maintain this poem’s tension, its integrity as poetry. This will lead to a more interesting and perhaps more demanding poetic practice. Since the game of poetry requires rules and limits, and the prose poem rejects the available rules, it is now each poet’s responsibility to find the rules and limits of her text, to discover the tension that makes a prose piece a poem. This can be extremely productive and is at the core of the quest of poetry in the broadest sense.
AMMD: The Arabic word baḥr has a dual meaning: it could mean “sea,” it could also mean “meter.” What does that tell us of the poetic meter in Arabic literature? Is it a mark of fluidity and expansiveness or does it signify being enclosed and contained?
HJF: The term baḥr captures the tension of contained expansiveness, of enclosed fluidity. And this is the tension that is poetry.
The meters (buḥūr) of Arabic poetry were identified after their manifestation by al-Khalil b. Ahmad al-Farahidi, who deduced them from the poetry available to him, and thus the manner in which the theory of prosody in Arabic came about—in the wake of poetry—leaves the door open for new meters to be revealed or identified. We know that the sixteen meters al-Khalil identified are not exhaustive. New meters (even if minor) were identified or innovated later. Moreover, al-Khalil’s theory allows for many exceptions and variations in every meter, to account for the expansiveness and fluidity of poetry. Still, poetry is form. Even as it rebels against ready-made ones, it continues to be an arrangement of some sort, and that’s why the Arabic term baḥr for meter is genius.
It also hints at the fact that endlessly different sounding poems can be composed in a single meter—even if in theory, it is the same set or pattern of sounds. For example, not all poems written in the meter al-t̩awīl sound the same. Yes, you can scan them and find more or less the same pattern of feet, but the baḥr as theory is different from the baḥr when it participates in the world of a specific poem, when it interacts with other elements such as structure, composition, and the very arrangement or stringing of words that make the magic. Each meter is a sea of sonic possibilities, even when it appears on the surface to be a limited or contained pattern of vowels and consonants.
AMMD: In the Journal of Arabic Literature, you wrote about the dynamics of literary circles, or the majlis, within the Abbāssid poets and their audiences like chancellery scribes (kuttāb): that back in those days, in their critiques, there was profound, enthusiastic valuing of the work. This seemed a far cry from the MFA and workshop culture that is prevalent within the Anglosphere—particularly since the dawn of American New Criticism.
HJF: The Abbasid majlis had its fair share of opposition, rivalry, and negative energy as well. Remember that poetry was closely tied to courts of power, and poets depended on those spaces for livelihood. In some cases, the success or failure of a poem was a matter of life and death. Nevertheless, what I point to in that article—which later became a chapter in my first book—is the in-depth knowledge and heightened sensitivity to poetic innovation the Abbassid poets expected of their readers.
This well-versed audience was fully aware of the poetic tradition, and was able to recognize its influences and echoes. A poet not only relied on the audience’s knowledge of images and motifs, but also expected them to appreciate his manipulation of these motifs. In this refined, educated audience consisting of poets, linguists, chancellery scribes, and other experts, they not only picked up on the subtle intricacies of a poem in conversation with its tradition, but also showed a readiness to criticize. This contributed to an innovative subversive poetic practice motivated by a heightened critical awareness of the tradition.
AMMD: You argued, in various academic articles, how the Western gaze in reading Arabic literature treats the texts as cultural and historical artefacts instead of attending to its literary and aesthetic qualities: “Seldom is [Arabic] poetry, the art form, a subject of study.” How can this be unlearned? And what has been done so far in challenging this practice?
HJF: The study of Arabic literature in the United States and Europe is usually housed in Middle Eastern or Near Eastern Studies departments—or what we refer to more broadly as “Area Studies.” Often the approach to Arabic literature in this niche of Western academy is motivated by a social, political, and anthropological imperative which supports interest in the region. Such study of Arabic literature in American academic institution unfortunately requires prefacing, introductions, and much framing to warrant its worthiness and to serve the extra-literary agendas which most often take precedence. This is where most of the stereotyping, the packaging, reduction, and manipulation take place.
The way to save the study of Arabic literature from such reductions is to study it on its own terms: as the emergent contemporary practice of a centuries-long tradition. This can only launch from a respect and loyalty to the Arabic language first and foremost—a belief in Arabic as a language of criticism and theory. The way we teach and use Arabic in and outside of the Arab World is crucial in this regard, and our approach to the standards of translations are also important here.
I am hopeful that more and more new studies of Arabic poetry will be driven by aesthetic imperatives as opposed to anthropological, historical, or sociological ones. More scholars are attempting to bridge the modern/premodern divide, to study Arabic poetic practice as live and urgent, shaped by the experiences and challenges of the twenty-first century and at the same time in constant conversation with its long tradition. New work is seeking to present Arabic poetry in a way that integrates its tradition and its practice into contemporary humanities, current critical issues, and World literature.
AMMD: The dominant Western discourse surrounding the prose poem seems to say that it is a rebellion, credited to the Symbolists who revolted against the alexandrine. But that is not the case with prose poem’s Eastern models—the first Japanese sanbunshi was a translation from Russian poems by Ivan Turgenev, which appeared in the Ueda Bin anthology Miotsukushi (1901), while the Chinese sanwenshi had been a vehicle of the state’s dominant political ideology. Is the Arabic prose poem a rebellion?
HJF: Every great poem is a rebellion. I don’t think any poet sets out to write a poem without the idea of changing something or breaking something or discovering something as motivation. The prose poem in Arabic was theorized as a rebellion or a break with the tradition; its early theorists claimed that such rebellion was unprecedented in the Arabic tradition. To counter this or balance it, it’s good to remember that qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla also made that that very claim. It was as revolutionary as poems can be in its theoretical and abstract proposal, both on the level of form and themes.
To add to that, Abbasid muḥdath poetry was also a rebellion—perhaps a more difficult, intricate, and demanding rebellion, I would argue. Individual poems often disregarded as “classical” offer us some of the most shining examples of poetry’s power to reimagine not only its tradition but the world. I think here of Abu Tammam’s spring poem, most of the muʿallaqāt but especially Imru’ al-Qays and ʿAntara, and al-Mutanabbi’s fever poem, to name only a few.
The theoretical claim of rebellion doesn’t always produce rebellious or revolutionary poetry; the real revolution happens in practice, in the individual unique world of a single poem, and it doesn’t always require big headlines or claims. Yes, the prose poem in Arabic is rebellious in theory, in its potential and its promise, but in practice it has produced many mediocre poems—as has qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla and the classical qaṣīda.
This is why close reading is the more responsible critical approach. Literary theory or criticism can only be founded on the close and dedicated readings of individual poems, otherwise it only produces futile blanket statements about abstracted literary movements, schools, and sometimes even historical periods into which literature is categorized.
AMMD: In your opinion, which literary works from the Arabophone, modern or from antiquity, have not been well-translated and therefore deserve to be reviewed and retranslated?
HJF: I think all translations eventually need to be retranslated. There is no translation that captures the entirety of the original text, especially in poetry. The more translations (good and bad) we have of a poem, the closer we are to approximating in the target language the effect and the event it creates in its original language.
A good example of retranslation as a necessary rereading is the case of the muʿallaqāt. We are not even close to exhausting these poems in translation. Every new English translation, for example, is an intimate engagement with the history of reading and commenting on these poems in the Arabic tradition, as well as a deliberate participation in the history of translation. Every new translation requires a new network of conversations with earlier commentators, editors, preface writers, translators and critics; the fruits of that engagement, if done right, are many. I refer you here to the Muʿallaqāt for Millennials, a project to which I had the pleasure of contributing two new translation: one of T̩arafa’s muʿallaqa and another of al-Aʿshā’s.
The Library of Arabic Literature (LAL) is a great example of how creative engagement in reading, writing, and translation reminds us that traditions are made by ongoing interchanges with the past, and that such engagements are what can keep a language’s literary memory from fossilizing into an institution. They safeguard a tradition from stiffening, instead keeping it as a project in the process of becoming.
I see LAL not as a project to translate individual works but as one to translate an entire world. It is a necessarily collaborative project in which, as translator or editor, you must undergo an entire apprenticeship of unlearning first, to then become generous and open to a multiplicity of voices and forms on input. This produces translations that are themselves generative and productive, both in the resulting English and in the new relationships they can form in both the Arabic and the English traditions. The team will work hard to make the translation into its own thing—an approximation of the original that is confident and well-adjusted in the English, unself-conscious and unafraid of venturing outside the narrow comfort zone of academic expertise, departments, and artificial fields of study.
So to return to retranslations, regardless of how good or bad earlier translations are, a new translation will definitely add to that work’s presence in English and will illuminate new dimensions. I’d love to see new translations of poetry collections. I’d be thrilled to work on translating poetry by Bashshār b. Burd, Abū Nuwās, Abū Tammām, ʿAlī b. al-Jahm, and al-Mutanabbī.
AMMD: As someone who taught a course titled “The Prose Poem in Arabic,” what poetry collections and poems in Arabic and in translation into English did you include? Who are the poets, classic and contemporary, that you felt should be in it? Were there books and works you think you should have incorporated?
HJF: I taught a seminar on the Arabic prose poem while I was writing the book. It seminar was in Arabic so we didn’t have to worry about what was available in translation and what wasn’t. In fact, most of the collections we read were not yet available in English, including Unsi al-Hajj’s Lan, Adunis’s Mufrad bi-s̩ighat al-jamʿ, al-Maghut’s Ḥuzn fī daw’ al-qamar, selections from Bassam Hajjar, Salim Barakat, Mohammad Bennis, and Qassim Haddad (who visited us at Penn that semester). We also read pieces from pre-Islamic prose, the Quran, al-Tawhidi, and al-Niffari to contextualize our discussion of verse, prose, and poetry in the Arabic tradition.
If I were to teach this class again, I’d chose an entirely different selection of poets. As I argue in the book, the prose poem in Arabic is not a homogenous trend or a movement or a school. And, thus, accounting for the varied and continually expansive prose poem project in Arabic, there are many possible configurations or constellations of poems and poets one can use. I’d include Lewis ʿAwad and Tawfiq al-Sayigh. I’d focus on prose poem anthologies and the role they play in delineating the genre and its parameters. I’d also focus on little magazines like Shiʿr and Ḥiwār as launching platforms and organized theorizing efforts. I’d also place more focus on contemporary poets writing today, building on the last chapter of my book.
Huda J. Fakhreddine is associate professor of Arabic literature in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. She is the author of The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition: From Modernists to Muhdathūn (Brill, 2015), Zaman Saghir taht shams thaniya (Dar al-Nahda, 2019) [A Small Time Under a Different Sun], a collection of personal essays in Arabic; and co-translator of Jawdat Fakhreddine’s Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA Editions, 2017) and The Sky That Denied Me (University of Texas Press, 2020), and Salim Barakat’s Come, Take a Gentle Stab (Seagull Books, 2021). She was the guest editor of Michigan Quarterly Review’s special issue on new writings from the Middle East and North Africa, co-editor-in-chief of Middle Eastern Literatures, and an editor of the Library of Arabic Literature.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), editor-at-large for the Philippines at Asymptote, is the author of Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021). Their lyric essay has been nominated to the Pushcart Prize and their prose-poem was selected for The Best Asian Poetry. Their latest poems, essays, and translation appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Oxford Anthology of Translation, Sant Jordi USA Festival of Books, and The University of Alabama Press anthology Infinite Constellations. Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, they’re an assistant nonfiction editor at Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature and Atlas & Alice Literary Magazine. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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