Taha Muhammad Ali

A charismatic personality and a writer of remarkable gifts, Taha Muhammad Ali has lived through the many stages of the Israeli–Arab conflict, and his poetry emerges directly from the crucible of that tragedy. One of the leading poets on the contemporary Palestinian literary scene, he was born in 1931 in the Galilee village of Saffuriyya. During the Arab–Israeli war of 1948, he was forced to flee to Lebanon, together with most of the inhabitants of his village. A year later he slipped across the border with his family and, finding his village destroyed, settled in Nazareth, where he has lived ever since. An autodidact, he has supported himself for many years by selling souvenirs in his shop near the Church of the Annunciation.

Taha Muhammad Ali writes in a clear, forceful style. His poetry forgoes the incantatory cadences of much modern Arabic verse in favor of a more speechlike but nonetheless carefully constructed and musical currency. Al-sahil al-mumtani'a (a difficult, elusive, or even inscrutable simplicity) is the Arabic term for what is in effect his working method, and it requires of translators every bit as much attention, and as intense an effort, as does more conspicuously formal verse. The subtle linking of consonant and vowel, the creation of pulse and its alteration, the modulation of dynamics, register, and tone, are just a few of the technical elements that go into the work. Arriving at that linkage comprises, at once, the most pleasurable and, in many ways, the most exhausting and difficult phase of translation, as it involves the development of a physical, kinaesthetic relation to the work, one which mediates the shift from language to language. It exhausts, literally, and discomfits, because it calls for a repeated process of self-effacement, in order to let the original poem take hold, before the construction (and reconstruction) of the English equivalent can begin.

In the case of "Revenge"—a poem too new to have made it into So What: New & Selected Poems 1971-2005, which Copper Canyon Press recently published—the translation sought to recreate the corkscrew-like tension and suspense of the poem, often along complex sentences, and this despite the fairly unadorned and even plain dictional register. To that end, particular care was taken with the poem's patterning, at both the micro-level of syllable and syntax, and the macro-level of architecture, pace, and dramatic structure.
- Peter Cole

Click here to read his poem REVENGE.

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