At Kenyon Review: Khaled Mattawa's Thoughts on Translating and Writing Poetry

In this Kenyon Review article about identity, empowerment, translating and writing poetry, Khaled Mattawa, one of this year's MacArthur Fellows, explains why translating Arab poets into English empowered him to write about his own experiences coming-of-age as a multicultural young man in America.

I.
In December 1988, in my last year in college, I travelled for a week to New York and took Lorca’s Poet in New York with me. I realize the narcissism implied in the sentence, but I’d been carrying the book with me for months at the time. And while on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn a day or so later, in an Arab grocery story, I found some books of Mahmoud Darwish. Back in the room where I was staying, I’d read a poem by Lorca and put it aside, read some Darwish and translate it into English, and then went back to Lorca, and so on. In between, I wrote some of my own lines. I didn’t know Spanish, but I could read Lorca out loud for cadence. And there was Darwish’s Arabic, and my own versions of his poetry in English. I had four floods of poetry coming at me, and what I put down was perhaps an expression of the whirlpool they created in me.

Being inspired to write while reading happens to all poets, and happens to composers as well. They start playing something by another composer and then their own “original” work comes through. Other than directly quoting Arab poets in my work, I’ve yet to understand how translation contributes to my process of composition, except to say that, like rhyme or meter or any rule we set up for our poems, translation adds a focus on precision, the focus that forces one to be creative.

This episode in Brooklyn happened nine years into my life in the U.S., where I came at the age of fourteen—fully aware of who I am in a cultural sense. I was a foreigner and knew that alterity would stay with me for some time. I felt that foreignness when I first read Walt Whitman. His America just did not speak to me then. I needed something in English, but that was also in my “language.” Translating Arab poets offered me a chance to experiment with sensibilities similar to mine (using familiar images, symbols, and motifs) in English. Contemporary poets wrote poems based on exercises, others wrote imitations as beginners. Earlier poets, Milton included, cut their chops on translations from Latin and Hebrew. I chose this more old fashioned apprenticeship, except that I did not do this for the exercise, but for the kinship. [...]

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