Adnan al-Sayegh, Iraq

Por: Adnan al-Sayegh
Traductor: Dr. Jenny Lewis with others

Let me tell you what I saw…
- Extracts from Uruk’s Anthem -

       Enough of the flute will make you drunk on my tears.
            Enough wine and bread, and I will sing for you…
at the gates of Nanmakh’s temple
Marduk the sorcerer blows on his quill
and parts the sky
      in my name and yours;
                  attached
                   to the skyline
                                is the arch of lazord
where Juno rages, ordering her scattered guards
                        to grab the wind by the scruff of its neck.
Tiresias laughs: love cannot be buried,
yet Juno buries it out in the wasteland,
                  leaving it half-covered,
                       its penis exposed
to the starving dogs.
   
Some thieves swiped letters
from the wall
       to lead them to
              treasure
but they found only an old rat
             that flicked its tail in the direction of the hoard
as it gnawed the flood epic.

We ran to help stem the flood
but the guard at the Museum of Babylon stopped us with
– Visits are prohibited.
…………………………
…………………………
*

And I opened my eyes to the sea.
The ECG machine was faulty, the curtains drawn,
the surgeons gathered round my body
           with scalpels.
I shouted: Let me tell you what I saw…!
but they wouldn’t listen
and the professor began cutting me – over a morgue of text –
busy with his students,
so I closed my eyes and slept deeply.

I saw the planets kneeling to me
and the resurrection, ablaze with lightning, crammed with naked crowds
overflowing with their mistakes…
and Israfil blew his horn:
Wake up you sleeping people from your crippled centuries!
I shouted: Where is God?

Dust settled on their faces when they woke, terrified, in their pyjamas…
and God stretched himself and flicked through my thick book.
So this is my life?
Running in hell screaming:
Where are the sins of the tyrants?
The bartender grabbed me:
   Quiet!
…………………………
…………………………
*

             I want
                   an autumn
                         to ripen
                                   this
                                          whimper
           into an anthem to Uruk
                       that is the sum
                                 of the earth.
               Beyond, poets spread horses
                     over the fields
                          and school books.

It’s for me to turn the millstone of words
to grind my soul for a girl drinking coffee in the morning,
to see other than the blue of this sky, a sky for your shining eyes
            behind the iron of prisons and melancholy songs.
We suffer because poems last forever.
…………………………
…………………………
*

We carry our mats like a country
and fold them quickly
whenever the security forces raid us…
We leave with wasted muscles and a horse grazing on hemlock that died.
So the moon breathed heavily into my lungs,
lifting the shadow of his thumb under the ribs of evening…
              About those who sleep standing up in Kirkuk police station
while he grinds his teeth: every time they pick up his books
                                        and throw them
                                        at the toilet
                                        door
he dips his feet into ink
                    and blood
and hurries over the lines
to write
the history of Uruk.
…………………………
…………………………
*

We would have gone on building these lands
     as God wanted in his Babylonian dream –
                 water and prayers rippling over the steps of its hanging gardens

but they destroyed us,
built a prison from our dried blood
and called it a homeland
then said: Be grateful for your country.
……………..
No sea for us to slice with boats
O you that sleep on the stones of the impossible revolution,
                                                                        no sand or foam:
I saw my blood in the stamps stuck on by deportees…
             Where are you wandering to by yourself?
               Life is – the land that you seek…
…………………………
…………………………
*

I climb the walls of the city
                   trashed by enemy aircraft
and see Ninkal82 with her hair spread
           over its ruins, lamenting as she beats herself.
Bulldozers scrape it off
so contractors can cover its tombs with banking districts.
           Above,
               above (and my heart is afraid of heights) above the chimneys
                     above the minarets
                            above the cannons –
                                the rancid breath of those trapped below dirties our vision and launches it into space to be raked by bloody claws –
                          and the tower of Babel becomes clear...
          smuts
          from the soot of factories
                  soil the museum exhibits
pilfered by Bedouins under their djellabas
brick by brick
and governments don’t notice
and the tower guard didn’t notice
              his majesty passing.
                 When he asks for Gilgamesh’s plant –
– Sir, it was eaten by a sheep, but wasn’t it your nose, pardon me,
                           that was sniffing that pile of shit…    
– …

But before he could see into the depths
they buried him in shit
                                 up to his eyeballs
…and then
he saw
everything…
…

and nothing.
     They were scraping the walls of Babylon
               to put pictures of the General
                             on every brick.
The mouse laughed until his back teeth
                        turned into endless cities
and he pointed his ears towards the tyrants who had vanished
on their high walls; I tugged the beard of the Babylonian fortune-teller.
Didn’t you say to me that all invaders
                      will be blocked by its door?
If only we could believe that our tears
                         pouring
                       over the slopes of mountains
                                    will quench the thirst of centuries.
Didn’t you say to me
            that this Euphrates
                   will flood
                     at the sight of its sons’ blood
                  on its bank
          and will seethe
          and destroy
            all its dams – all its bridges?
But why has it stopped, ashamed?
…………………………
…………………………

Adnan al-Sayegh was born in al-Kufa, a city on the banks of the Euphrates in Iraq in 1955 and is one of the most original voices of his generation of poets. His poetry denounces the devastation of wars and the horrors of dictatorship. Adnan has published thirteen collections of poetry, including the 550-page Uruk's Anthem (Beirut 1996), the 1380-page The Dice Of The Text (Beirut, Baghdad 2022) and very short poems Glimmerings… Of You (London, Baghdad 2024)

He left his homeland in 1993, lived in Amman, and Beirut then took refuge in Sweden in 1996. Since 2004 he has been living in exile in London. He has received several international awards; among them, the Hellman-Hammet International Poetry Award (New York 1996), the Rotterdam International Poetry Award (1997) and the Swedish Writers Association Award (2005), and has been invited to read his poems in many festivals across the world. His poetry had been translated into into many languages.