We do not need poetry in order to change the world or in order to fulfill a biological desire such as satiety or satisfaction, but because poetry is with us from the moment of our birth until the last blink when we bid farewell to this world and start another experiment in an unknown, hidden world.

This is how the US-based Tunisian poet and translator Milad Faiza is betting on poetry in an Arab reality full of misery, strife and regression.

Fayza says to Al-Jazeera Net that “there is no moment in human history without poetry,” pausing our question to him: Why do we need poetry in the present time?

Hair flower

Fayza’s birth is poetry “part of our existence,” we live it in different ways when we find, for example, an empty nest on a tree or a moment when we are unable to comprehend a tragic scene of a mother who collects in a bag of the remains of her son’s bones from a mass grave (in the words of the poet Dunia Michael), or a moment he says A father to his three-year-old daughter, she is the flower. When she asks him why the flowers wilt in the winter, she smiles a mysterious smile, asking, "Am I a flower?"

The ambiguity of that smile - according to Birth of Fayza - is the poetry we need "because we realize its meaning, but we remain unable to express it in a clear or definitive way."

"For me, poetry is the states of surprise and the questions that we live in, and it is music that the fingers of an object click on the piano and rise like smoke penetrating walls and curtains towards a cloudy sky," Milad added.

Sculptor Fingers

15 years is the period between the first poetic book of Fayza’s birth, entitled “Remnants of the House We Entered Once” 2004, and his second book, “Fingers of the Sculptor,” issued in the past year 2019, which is a long and remarkable period, but Faiza has its causes and circumstances.

Faiza justifies this by saying, "After I emigrated to the United States of America in 1999, I needed a few years to adjust to the new life, and I felt at the time that immersing in life and working sometimes long hours was the best alternative to my previous life in Tunisia, where I suffered unemployment after graduating from university."

The poet Milad Fayza wrote his recent poems that were influenced by American life in his collection of "The Sculptor's Fingers", dealing with the aesthetics of the places he visited (Al-Jazeera)

There is also a blockage in the horizon of the possibility of pursuing higher studies, or achieving financial independence and free life experience away from the pressures of censors and society as a result of severe bureaucracy, oppression and corruption.

"I felt that there was no choice but to leave, and when I left I decided to cut my relationship with the past in all its forms," ​​admits Fayza before noting that it took many years to recreate a new identity and a different language capable of absorbing the new experience, whether on a personal level. Or geographic.

In addition, there is an urgent need (was) "to break with the metaphor, metaphor and additional vehicles that I used to find in, before my emigration."

The second reason is the difficulty of dealing with an Arab publisher.

immunization

But this patience - Fayza continues as he continues his speech to Al-Jazeera Net - had a big positive side, which is "protecting me from eagerness to rush to publish works that I later regret."

When asked about the "case of translating Arabic poetry," translator Faiza says that it is no different from the case of translating other types of writing.

In the same context, he added, "It is true that some books of poetry and novels, especially those that receive prizes, are on their way to translation, but these works are rarely read outside the walls of schools or the departments of Middle Eastern studies and comparative literature in universities."

Fayza says, "Much of what is happening in the world of translation is part of political follow-up and is not always the result of aesthetic choices that stem from the value of the text itself," except for a few texts that imposed themselves on the other, such as the texts of Darwish and Adonis, "but they remain readable within the circle of poets and students of poetry mainly or those interested. Literary magazines and small publishing houses. "

Translation

The beginnings of Fayza's birth with translation were through the translation of American poets such as Mark Strand, Charles Simic, Caroline Forchi, Sharon Olds, Yosef Komenyaka, Anya Silver, Natalie Handal, Karl Sandberg and others, an experiment that was based on a desire to discover American poetry and read it reading Deep through translation.

“It is an enjoyable and incomparable experience,” Fayza says, noting in this regard that reading a text in English and then spending hours recreating it in another language “is like the experience of a young child playing with mud to make horses, wagons and luggage to furnish an imaginary world of water and dirt.”

He continues, "I have published many of these translations in Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper, Kika magazine and Al-Ghawon newspaper," and Fayza hopes to publish all or some of them in independent books in the near future.

The novel "Winter" by Scottish novelist Ali Smith presents a realistic picture of contemporary life and the experience of being influenced by art (the island)

new world

About his translation in the novel, Milad draws attention to the fact that when he started working on translating "Autumn" by Ali Smith, she "dazzled me with her unique style of writing and her ability to create parallel and overlapping fictional worlds from real and imagined events" combining the biographies of artists who passed like meteors in the sky, and popular politicians From the world of yesterday and today, the marginalized and unintentionally entered the circle of fire, burning and illuminating with their flames hidden and secret worlds from the contemporary history of Britain and Europe.

And he added, "For me, the novel Al-Khareef was a window to a new world in writing, and I was fascinated by it despite the difficulty of the translation process. Ellie Smith is a writer who does not stop playing with the events of the story, its language and style, and does not hesitate to carve new vocabulary and write long sentences that extend to entire paragraphs or sometimes pages." .

Smith’s machine translation, then, was a coincidence, but it turned into a complete project, as Faiza translated “The Winter” for Smith herself, and is now working on “Spring” expected to be completed soon, to continue working after that on “Summer,” which is a “quadruple that combines the threads of the seasons and metaphors Colors, warmth, cold and myths that make us more able to withstand the rigors of time and condemn hate and racism. "

Anya Silver

In the field of translation as well, Milad Fayza said that he is currently working on translating texts of the American poet Anya Silver, who left life in the summer of 2018 after a long struggle with cancer.

And he notes - in the context of his speech - that Silver has completed in the few years of her life incomparable texts on the experience of disease and resistance in its spiritual and political forms.

In this regard, Milad went on to say, "Anya Silver was not just a poet writing about the experience of coexisting with the daily hypothesis of death, but rather about discovering the forces inherent in us in our moments of our fragility and weakness. Silver has written in a dazzling Sufi style about the experience of life in all its details," explaining that he owes For her poetry, her friendship and hopes to translate her three books soon.

Arabic for non-native speakers

Milad Fayza lives in Rhode Island, USA, where he teaches Arabic at Brown University.

Here Fayza mentions that the Arabic language was not new to the prestigious American universities, "but the demand for it increased uncharacterically after the invasion of Iraq and the events of September 2001."

The novel "Autumn", translated by Milad Faiza and written by Ali Smith, deals with events taking place in 2016 in Britain outside the European Union (Al Jazeera)

According to Fayza, "Arabic is no longer just a language of religion, and traditional stories about the jinn, Sinbad and Shehrazad that tell about the taming of Shahriar, but rather it has become the language of peoples in direct and daily contact with American life, whether in Iraq or at home through Arab and Muslim communities in Michigan, California, New York, Texas and other states." American ".

Speaking about the reality of teaching Arabic to non-native speakers, Fayza pointed out that universities initially relied on non-specialized professors, "but after the departments of Middle Eastern studies and departments of Arabic language began to spread, these universities began to recruit professors with specialization, whether from Arab university graduates. Or American universities. "

Fayza summarizes the difficulties of teaching Arabic to non-native speakers in that before 2011, universities were sending students to spend a semester or a full academic year to study Arabic in the Arab world in countries such as Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen and Oman, but after the Arab Spring most of these have become Destinations are not available, and students do not now have the courage to go to them for security reasons, so most of them go to Jordan, Morocco, or Oman.

There is also a lack of interest in the rich Arab countries to invest in establishing centers for teaching Arabic language and literature in the West, compared to what countries such as China, France and Germany do, and the failure to provide grants with the exception of some countries such as the Sultanate of Oman and Qatar.

In addition to the above, the problem of the Standard Arabic language versus the large number of Arabic dialects and their great difference between them sometimes represents a thorny issue for many students. “They usually feel after studying Standard Arabic 3 or 4 years that they are unable to speak with the taxi driver in Rabat, or understand Events of a Lebanese series or movie without the help of subtitles. "

Corona Diary

In the circumstances of Corona, Milad Fayza speaks about his diaries over a period of nearly a year which he called "the year of depression", indicating that "with the passage of many weeks and months under this terrible experience," fatigue and weakness began to affect me, and the forest or the beaches of the ocean were no longer able to save me from State of depression and panic. "

Fayza revealed fears that he had always had while in exile under the impact of the (Covid-19) pandemic, "I have severe concerns about the future of my family and children. These concerns would not have reached this intensity and cruelty if I were in Tunisia in the arms of my large family."