Komunyakaa and the Launching of Meena

I write this just a few hours before I travel to Egypt for the first time in order to bring Meena into being. Meena is a new bilingual Arabic/English literary journal to be based between the port cities of New Orleans and Alexandria, Egypt. The title is the Arabic for "port," and its aim is to open a dialogue or port-of-entry between our two cities, languages and cultures. We do this in the spirit of Dr. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, founder and director of PROTA (Project of Translation from the Arabic), who says if we read one another, we will be less likely to kill one another.º

Khaled Hegazzi, my Egyptian co-editor and the translator of the following poem, will not be joining me as planned because of an issue with his passport, but we hope he will be able to make it over soon. I am nervous about the long flight, about doing this alone, about the language. With my work on the magazine, I have become intimately involved with the Arabic language, a strange notion considering the fact that I cannot read or speak it. In addition to gathering the work in English, I have also been helping with coordinating and even "doing" some of the translations from Arabic into English with Khaled. This involves a process of reading aloud, trying words out, browsing several dictionaries and, occasionally, pantomiming. It is an exhausting and exhilarating process and one that has challenged my most basic notions of language such as capital letters, punctuation, the notion of left-to-right.

My role in these translations has varied in its involvement. With the translations into English, I actually write them and see them come to life underneath my fingers. It is a way of getting inside a work that I have only experienced as a writer of an original piece—yet the goal and process are very different, as it is not the blank page we work with, but something like a piece of clay already shaped.

Translating Yusef Komunyakaa's "How I See Things" into Arabic, on the other hand, meant moving from beautiful and complex transparencies of my mother tongue into a language I am just coming to meet; it meant assuming the role of a clarifier, a consultant. Words like "hoedown" and "nightriders" do not exist in Arabic, so in the back-and-forth with Khaled, I try to explain their cultural nuances and, more nebulously, the feeling surrounding them.

Our involvement with Komunyakaa began when Khaled heard Yusef read here in New Orleans on Easter Sunday this year and immediately became interested in translating his work for Meena¹ and beyond. He was drawn to the music of his lines, his craftsmanship and the depth and range of his subjects. He said that his lines "got inside of him" in a way that poetry in English had never done. And getting inside of his poems through translation gave both of us a new relationship to his work. For example, the poem for Meena involves a platypus, a word that does not exist in Arabic. Does one include a footnote on the platypus? A small picture? We began to feel the poem was playing some kind of cosmic joke on us. It pointed out, like so many experiences in working on the magazine, that translation is so much more than finding an equivalent word in the other language.

"How I See Things" is steeped in the history and culture of the Deep South where we live. How does one convey the poem's subtle evocation of the place and its lyrical vernacular in a language which encompasses such a different history and landscape? How does one get the sense of a plastic Jesus on a dashboard in an idiom that would have no reason to accommodate it? These were some of the points we struggled with, I trying to further explain the taste of the references, he rendering them into his foreign and beautiful tongue.

I write this now in darkness. Soon I will be surrounded by the Arabic I have been struggling...