mother tongues

These creative translations by Saadi of Syro-German poet, Adel Karasholi's poems were written in February 2002 as part of a Scottish Poetry Library/Goethe Institute creative translation project, 'M/other Tongues', along with the Karasholi himself and Ken Cockburn of the Scottish Poetry Library who acted as interpreter and who provided the literal translations of the original (German) poems.

Embrace of the Meridians
Thousand-and-one Nights
Earth Blood
Ugarit
As Long As I Live
Announcement
Olive and Oak
The Path Into Exile
Taking Root
Madness

Embrace of the Meridians
(Umarmung der Meridiane)

Back and forth
Back and forth

Where am I at home?

In two languages, the sentence forms
From two worlds, the hands gather
In dream, my mother speaks with me in Deutsch
My Saxon wife, in Arabic
From meridian to meridian
With winged feet, my visions leap
And spring from the branches of my sapling
Each blossom bears the tattoo
Of sand-traced sun caravans
Which flow up through my tree's limbs

O
Meridians you
Branches
Oak and olive
Embrace each other tightly
And more tightly yet
In me

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Thousand-and-one Nights
(Tausendundeine Nacht)

O Sheherzaad, My Lady
In times past
The taut bowstring of your words
Vanquished death
Yet spinning night into tale
You silence the day

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Earth-blood
(Erdol)

Grace you are
In the veins
Of our earth yet
The cacti mock my longing
For woodland

Curse you are
Enslaved lord of the desert
Armoured marble of palaces
Lead piped into flaccid organ
Mediaeval brain
Turned to stone

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Ugarit

It is written
A stone outlasts
Us
Who are not even certain of a
Natural death

Yet solely
In us
Survives the history
Of this stone the hand
That clove it
Into temples

And to dust

Its death ascends
Straight through us
Into life
Outwitted by our
Imagination's wit

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As Long As I Live
(Solang ich lebe)

Death
Broods in its metal egg
Ceaselessly
In the lap of the earth

I let fly
Word-doves
Over the roofs of sleeping cities
Cast into the seas of indifference
Messages in bottles

Ceaselessly

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Announcement
(Ankundiging)

Arriving
At your house
Before the year has turned
I fall away
From myself
Leaf
By leaf

Yet this sap
Still cracks the pots
With the sheer joy
Of ripening

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Olive and Oak
(Olbaum und Eiche)

Olive and oak in me
Unequal pair
Reaching out, one
To the other

O longing!
Choke not the buds
On the branching ribs

Bony olive
Giver of fruit
Scarab of sun
Green cradle for Noah's dove
Claws in cactus-spiked earth
Unwatered, stubborn

O longing!
Do not choke the buds
In the branching ribs

On to the oak,
Foliate
Dripping in the endless rain
Notes without stems
Roof of our love
Tangled beyond separation
Stealing through the keyhole, now and then,
The sun

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The Path Into Exile
(Der Gang ins Exil)

They spoke of tyrants
I repeated it after them
They said hunger is cruel
I repeated it after them
Like the others, I clenched my fist
The eyes of the sentries cast me
From alley to alley
No
My mother did not stand on a verandah
She did not wave as in films the mothers wave
She covered her hair
With the transparent white voile
Turned herself slowly towards Makkah
And prayed
My father did not embrace me like men
Embrace men
Silent, dumb he lit his cigarette
Silent, dumb he propped himself up on the cushion
Silent, dumb he blew out his anger in smoke
And when I went I did not know
That the kiss with which I tattooed both hands
Was that of a foreign death

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Taking Root
(Taking Root)

In the place between
The feet are rooted
The arms stretched taut like strings
Crucified and Cross one and the same

Thus I maintain my equilibrium
Thus I ram down roots into the centre of the world
Thus I dream of the marriage of sun and snow

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Madness
(Der Wahnsinn)

Thus spake Abdullah to me:
If you leave to madness your eyes
Then they see only what they want to see
If you leave to madness your hands
Then they grasp after fire
And box the ears of tyrants
If you leave to madness your lips
Then they shatter the castle
Which encloses them
If you leave to madness your feet
Then they trip lightly off the tightrope on which you dance
If you leave to madness your memory…

Question answers question
And bethrothed, vision and gaze

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