Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (review)

If this collection has a serious fault, it is one beyond the power of its editors to address. They hope to introduce contemporary writing of the Orient to the Occident—a desire beautiful, true, good, and urgent. Reading Hafiz, Basho, or Gilgamesh hardly brings one face to face with the breathing Orient. These poems do. The problem is that U.S. readers, the book’s primary audience, do not read much poetry of any sort or origin. If they discover the uncanny humanity of other humanities here, that will be because the book was designed carefully for the purpose. Chang, Handal, and Shankar take turns introducing the themed sections, which draw readers into unfamiliar texts and situations by bringing in the editors’ own experiences and their own relation to the poems. To that extent, the book makes the world personable, though as the foreword (by Carolyn Forché) intuits, there is a worrying gap between the book’s intention and its readers’ reality. She observes in this collection a “spontaneous recitation of poems by people thrown together by circumstance. . . . Pablo Neruda in Arabic, whispered in the Shouf mountains on the eve of an impending attack; Mahmoud Darwish sung in a refugee camp by the light of a whirring Coleman lamp; Nâzim Hikmet spoken in the seven-gate lockup of a men’s maximum security prison.” What the American reader, however sympathetic, may find in the recitation, whispering, and singing that Forché describes is overwhelming variety and insurmountable difference. Those readers, unlike many poets whose work they read here, are not refugees—and the reader must be open to the experience not just of exile but of finding, through exile, a human quintessence that, in Gevorg Emin’s words, is “Small as the grain of marvelous Uranium which / cannot be broken down, put out or consumed.” The women and men encountered here—in this irreducible Elsewhere—are both very near and far beyond oneself.