One down, loads to go

I have finished my first book of the holidays: Journal of an Ordinary Grief (1973) - Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Ibrahim Muhawi.

The chapter on Gaza explains a lot. I hadn't perceived its importance at all, until now. How blind can one be?

You could open the book at random and pick any sentence to write from. I took 2 a while ago and gave them as a writing challenge on a forum I am on. I like starting from somewhere and going somewhere else entirely. The starting point acts as a door or a permission to make a start. It is not meant to hold you to remaining on a topic at all. The words are just that, and can be used freely.

There are 2 further books in the trilogy of memoirs, written later and much later: Memory for Forgetfulness (1985) and In the Presence of Absence (2006). For another time.

There is a concept I hadn't come across before - the Arabic Sentence. By that I think he means the impossibility of expressing the truth in language, yet it is the safest arena for trying to do so. So using Arabic gives him an unchallenged space, which is denied geographically and politically. The language is under his control and is his in an undeniable and permanent way, whatever might happen. The words are the most powerful and permanent weapon. Putting them in sentences wraps them up in an endless series of statements which can't be refused permission or denied existence or status. No one apart from an Arabic speaker can use the language, so it is a plastic, living, unlimitable force.

The preface by the translator doesn't look at it quite like that, but we can see what we like in a work..

Reading book titles = hoovering

It's a small step each time and includes just one verb or noun, sometimes one of each. Also an author's name. So that's why it is useful to read a review of a recently published book.

I found out the word for sweet coffee today and got it written down too. The man wrote it down really slowly and carefully. Total opposite to my hurried scrawl in English. urid qahwa halwa minfadlak. I guessed entirely wrongly in London last weekend, but now I know what I was misunderstanding.

I used up all the sugar and did a careful manoeuvre with my little cup so that all the grounds went back into my main pot and settled down before starting again and pouring more carefully. I had been too greedy and had tipped loads of grounds into my little cup. This all makes sense if you have made yourself cough with trying to drink the grounds out of ignorance.

Watch the long handle though, one day I will send it all flying. I nearly did several times during lunch with a friend at the cafe.

I knew I'd find it eventually - One of my heroes: Roger Allen

'She grabs her prey without pause, just as suckling mothers
hug their children.'

Comparing a female hunting dog and a doomed animal or bird to breastfeeding mothers and the wanting babies. No way will anyone get between one and the other. Or if they do, they are thwarting nature.

Ibn al-Mu'tazz,  on p197 of the very wonderful book by Roger Allen, The Arabic Literary Heritage, Cambridge University Press, 1988. I have borrowed it for 6 months already and am only half way through it. I may need to buy a 2nd hand copy from Amazon. It is one of those books where every paragraph is full of new information and the writing is clear and direct.

He mentions a flight he took in 1988 where his fellow passenger had a hooded falcon perched on his arm. I'd love to read more by Roger Allen, has he written a blog or memoirs? If not, why not? If you read this, please give it a go.

 Banipal Trust for Arab Literature - The Banipal Translation Prize - The 2010 Award

Prof. Roger Allen, Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature, gives interview and book recommendations

Al-Ahram Weekly | Culture | Between words: Living languages | Fascinated by the Arab World

Notes from a Translation Masterclass with Roger Allen « Arabic Literature (in English)

Maram Al-Massri مرام المصري

Today has turned into another of my days off from Arabic, ie a day for reading one collection of poetry from my shelf. I have already spent a few days on this collection, so I just made sure I had read it all.

Even though each half of the book had 100+ poems in it, they were selections from 2 previous books. So there is a lot more to read another time, when I get better at Arabic and can simply buy non-bi-lingual editions.

I need an all female reading group so we can discuss such books with each other openly.

Write up on Banipal.

French write up, plus much longer list of her books.

I would like to read her autobiography, if she has written one.

If you would like to practice French, German or other languages, look at her own blog which has various translations on it. Each poem is numbered and is pretty distinctive anyhow, so knowing a poem in one language will help you read and understand it in another language quickly.

3000 words - Kickstarter project

That is my challenge. I stacked up my vocab cards and I guess I am 1/10th of the way there. Then I made a pencil mark on the door frame for 300 cards. I used my tape measure to see where 3000 cards might stack up to. Now I have a little pencil line to aim for.

I'm finding words everywhere. My favourites are ones like tahrir because I know it anyway from the political changes on tv and on Twitter. Names of newspapers and writers are great too, I make a card for each if those and chuck them on my pile to check the exact spelling on Wikipedia or on Google Translate. The food ones are a mystery, so I have the instruction "look on Google images" on the back of those cards.

All texts I read in English have a few anglicised Arabic words so I take those. By their nature they are important enough to be used in a Preface or essay.

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The Kickstarter project I signed up for has been fully funded.

A Bird is not a Stone

It looks as if there will be an event linked to this in Oxford, so I look forward to that. I will encourage my previous class mates to come along with me to that.

A Bird Is Not A Stone

A Kickstarter project bringing to the UK a book of new Palestinian poetry called 'A Bird Is Not A Stone'.

http://sarahirving.wordpress.com/2013/08/17/poetry-from-iraq-and-scotland/ The video is of Sabreen Kadhim performing in Edinburgh. From 5 minutes English translations are given.

Reel Iraq Festival from 2013 More videos, I assume all in Arabic, so try to recognise a word here or there, start small.

My Arabic holiday

Well, it's in fact a break from lessons and that dreadful angst about remembering vocab. Thank God we never have tests. Children deserve medals for doing all that, particularly if they find it hard work.

I'm having a wonderful time reading and watching what I want to:

Poetry documentaries from the Al Jazeera English website. I can pause them and copy out what I read on the screen.

Latest issue of Banipal, includes pieces by Stephen Watts as it happens. I saw him and chatted briefly last week at a poetry event. He translates Arabic poetry.

Started an online course called The Emergence of the Modern Middle East,  it's from the University of Tel Aviv, but in English. I am doing the absolute minimum for it. They have a great discussion thread called 'What's on your Middle East book shelf?'

Skimming quickly through Adonis' Arabic Poetics book again, surprisingly relevant to the Emergence course.

Had some late night Amazon buys, so I am waiting impatiently for poems by Al-Massri, an autobiographical novel based in Israel/Palestine plus whatever else I felt I needed...

My one task is to count how many words I know! I am measuring this by doing index cards for everything. There are 2 stacks, the ones I know and the ones I am hazy about. The other element to this is sitting on the sofa checking that I do know the ones in the 'I know these' bundle. I have a feeling I need to spend an awful lot of time doing this.

Given how much time I spend avoiding doing vocab, it might be easier to just do it!

Don't be fooled by the light heartedness of this extract

Sarsara mourned for her son quietly, as if a sparrow had died at the sunset hour. We buried her only son in the village cemetery and went back to our daily concerns. Sarsara looked after her son's sheep and started to live in seclusion, protected by an aura of respect. One day Sarsara went out to graze her animals in the direction of the southern pastures on the way to the desert. She loaded her tent and some provisions on her donkey and set off with twenty sheep and three dogs. This trip to the pastures would normally last three days. But Sarsara didn't come back to the village for five years.

From the story 'Sarsara's Tree'
In the collection 'The Iraqi Christ'
By Hassan Blasim
Published in English translation from the Arabic by Comma Press 2013
Translator is Jonathan Wright

There are loads of other sections I could have picked, but as the blurb says on the back: 'At first, you receive Blasim's work with the kind of shocked applause you'd award a fairly transgressive stand-up. You're quite elated. Then you stop reading it at bedtime.' This turns out to be a quote from a blog by M John Harrison, which I have found here.

There are many glimpses of his life in reading and writing strewn about in the stories. I got the earlier collection of his work from the library, but need to buy it for myself now. It is called 'The Madman of Freedom Square', also from Comma Press.