Fadhil Al-Azzawi
Traductor: Khaled Mattawa and Fadhil Al-Azzaw
PROMETEO
Latinoamerican Poetry Magazine
84-85. July 2008.
BROTHERLINESS
In a tower
Climbing the sky
Inside a closed glass room
A skeleton sat very close to me
And put its hand on my shoulder, mumbling:
“You are my brother,”
then gave me a butterfly
heading for the flame.
Descending in the dark
Tripping on the steps
The world came to me and put its heart in my palm.
It burned my fingers
Like an amber
Wrapped in ash
And blotted with human blood.
A permanent truce
Between man and what came before him.
A permanent truce
Between the wind and the tree.
Put out the fire,
Let the butterfly return to its flower.
IN CAPTIVITY
From an old folk song
A couple of slaves fell on the roof
Of our house in Baghdad.
They were tied with a rope,
Back to back,
Wearing torn white clothes
And weeping.
I believe they were waiting for a ship, sailed by pirates
I believe they were staring at a horizon of trees.
I believe they were thinking of a distant island.
When I climbed to them and released them from the rope
They lit up in flames in my hands
And turned to ash.
IN THE COURT OF HONOR
In one of my incomplete poems
A sentence challenged another
And slapped it with its glove –
Inviting it to duel
In a the Court of the Honor.
At the end of the fight,
And as happens often,
One of my sentences was dead
And the other bleeding on the page.
I did not want
To get involved in the maze of criminal investigations
Between question and answer,
And so preferring to wash my hands of their blood
I threw away the whole poem.
THE PARTY
No one was missing.
Cain was in the kitchen sharpening his knife
And Noah in the living room watching
The weather report on television.
They all arrived in their cars
And disappeared in the long alley
Leading to the party.
Our fair lady danced in the ring
And showed her treasures
Through her transparent dress.
We sat with other guests
And sipped our drinks to the dregs.
At the end of the night,
Returning home,
We gave the blind man his lost cane
And the murderer his bloody hatchet.
It was a party,
Like any other party.
VISION ON A BUS
As I was traveling by bus
Between this life and the hereafter
The angel Gabriel hopped in –
A hat on his head,
Its rim sloping over his forehead –
Wearing a wide coat
And looking like one of the fugitives
On the sidewalks of Bahnhof Zoo.*
He got in without buying a ticket
And sat on the seat beside me
Pretending to look through the window
Like an American tourist.
On the road he poked me in the waist
And began reciting his new holy verses
Into a tape recorder he held in his hand.
His monotonous voice nauseated me
And I rose to escape.
But he caught up with me and threw me back into my seat.
He pressed his gun against my chest
And said threatening:
“Next time, O prophet, I will shoot.
Now recite. Recite in the name of thy God who created thee.”
* A train station in Berlin
SILENT PARADE
Placing my hands in my torn pockets,
Walking down the street,
I saw them watching me suspiciously
From behind the glass panes of stores and cafés.
They walked out quickly and followed me.
I deliberately stopped to light a cigarette
And turned around, like someone giving his back to the wind,
To catch a glimpse of this silent parade:
Thieves, kings, murderers, prophets, poets
Jumped out of everywhere
To walk behind me
And wait for my signal.
I shook my head in surprise
And walked on whistling
The tune of a popular song,
Pretending I was playing a part in a film
And that all I have to do is to walk on forever
To the bitter end.
HOW TO WRITE A MAGICAL POEM
There’s nothing easier than writing a magical poem
If you have strong nerves
And good intentions, at least.
It’s not that difficult, I assure you.
Take a rope and tie it to a cloud
And leave one end of it dangling.
Like a child, climb the rope to the end
Then throw it back to us
And let us try to find you –in vain-
In every poem.
FAREWELL
Alone he walks toward the scaffold.
His hands behind him, seven rifles pointed at his back.
He thought of who will weep silently over him.
He dreamt of the sun after he is gone, and the birds and the rivers
And the . . . and the . . .
And he looked at a date palm the wind penetrated and shook.
He saw a cloud: - “Maybe it will rain after my death.”
He noticed a narcissus hiding among the grass behind the fence: -
“A man will pick it and give it to a happy girl
who will leave it behind on a bench when she leaves the park.”
He stretched his eyes to dawn breaking . He was alone.
When he climbed the wooden stairs
A dove sleeping on the scaffold
Was startled
And flew away.
LIFE WITH RATS
Crouched in darkness,
We ate from a pot placed on newspapers spread on the floor.
Rats jumped to snatch food out of our fingers
Then stood in front of their burrows
Readying for another attack.
On cold nights
They hid between our thighs
Until we saw a giant rat in a forest
Dragging behind him a weeping girl,
Her neck tied with a rope.
In the morning, while we listened to the nightingale chirp in the tree,
We carried barrels of our urine
And dumped them in the ditch in front of the police station.
We came back with breakfast prepared for us by a policeman’s wife
Whom we’d made love to a thousand times in our dreams.
When evening came
They called us one after the other
And hung us from our shoulders to the ceiling fans
Until the rats began to fall
From the folds of our clothes
And howl from the whipping.
After a few years or maybe centuries
I saw the one I left in the darkness of the pit:
He was a young boy again wearing his pajamas as usual.
He lifted his head and stared at me for a long time
Then went quickly on his way.
I think he has forgotten me in the throng of life.
CROSSING THE DESOLATE VALLEY
This desolate valley is crowded with thieves
But I cross it alone.
I am afraid of no one
For I have no gold or silver in my saddle.
This desolate valley stretches before me
Dotted with stones that gleam like mirrors in the sun.
I drag my mules behind me
And sing happily to myself.
I n this valley rain pours down.
There is no cave to shelter me
And I don’t own a tent.
If the flood comes and the levy breaks
Who will save me in his swinging boat?
I go on nonetheless, holding in my fist my heart’s ember.
I set my fire to the world’s wood
And sit with ghosts that dine at my table.
I cross this valley alone
And let the wind blow behind me.
LISTEN NOAH!
Listen Noah!
With our feeble arms
We’ve built
Newer and higher embankments
Against the coming floods.
Whenever a ship sank
The carpenters built another.
Memories of the future alone
Kept our hope alive.
Through the centuries
We heard the wailing of the drowned
Everywhere.
Our miracle:
We always survived.
A STATUE IN A SQUARE
I dream I am a statue
In a square that carries my name,
So I try to look like a general at war
Collecting the burden of his victims
As flowers for his funeral,
And I speak at night about oblivion
To justify the confidence of mankind in me.
I think it would be better to raise my hat and praise
The sun shining down on earth
And let my statue step from its plinth
To join a battalion of angels
Returning from exile
With a cage of nightingales
That they once hunted in a deserted island.
“Release the birds,” says my life.
“Let them flow over the heads of passers-by,
Leaving for you the memories of whole eternity.”
THE CHIMNEY
A chimney blows smoke in the wind
Sometimes it blows dreams
Sometimes it blows sadness
Or blows the remains of some men in a room
Telling stories from the past.
The chimney blows a woman’s silence
As she rest in the arms of a man remembering a city in terror
Hunched in the desert
Blowing its memories away.
A chimney blows us day by day
In the night of another sky
Away into the wind.
MISUNDERSTANDING
The poet stood at the podium
And introduced himself:
“My poems are birds!”
The birds floated over our heads and sang:
“We are poems!”
So you could say
That, yesterday in a café, I wrote a bird
And before that I dined on a poem in a lyric pub.
ON A DYING PLANET
The air is foul in the room,
But no one opens the window.
We carry our books in our left hands,
But no one asks us for forgiveness.
The corpse is lying in the cellar,
But no one cries.
We had to discover fire again
Before crossing our valley at night.
We had to pay our outstanding bills
Before giving birth to our happy babies
In laboratory tubes.
We should have consoled our Neanderthal ancestors
Before driving them away
To the mountains.
No hope of returning again
To the forest.
Aliens in a UFO
Are waving to me from behind their glass.
Countless planets and galaxies
Have been always awaiting my arrival
Impatiently.
What am I doing here?
BEDOUINS
Three Bedouins in a desert,
Carrying sacks strapped to their shoulders,
Walking one after the other
Stooped for eternity
Like defeated soldiers.
Three Bedouins in the desert
Walk on silently,
As the wind blows now and then
And wipes out their traces.
TOO MUCH WATER FLOWED IN THE RIVERS
Watching the waves
I sat at the bank
While jungle fires broke out
Leaving me their ashes.
You know that every boat we boarded
Was sunk by storm
And the waves dragged us
To the end of the Earth.
What should it matter
If we built our new home
Under water?
Believe me, I will not sadden or regret
To see my hair fall out,
Or see time
Carrying his horrible scythe,
Like a cunning doctor
Who’s come to pull out the last of my molars,
As long as my friends like me as I am
And I can still love with all my heart.
I know I will stay young forever.
Only exile will grow old.
EVENTS
There is something that always happens:
A war can be declared suddenly
A baby born in a cave
A lonely heart broken.
Shall I forget all that?
There is something that always flows:
Water in a river
Wine in a tavern
Tears and blood too.
Can I stop all that?
There is something we always miss:
A sentence we learned by heart
An umbrella forgotten in a bar
A woman with whom we fell passionately in love.
Can I be happy about all of that?
And if nothing happens –
If I do not win a million dollars in the lottery
Or find a treasure in my garden
Or I do not make a trip to the moon,
For example,
Should I not be sad then because of that.
MASQUERADE
I found myself in a masquerade in a garden. The old guard should not have kicked me out as I had my mask on my head. That is the rule: No one is blamed for another’s sin. I sneaked in with the clowns who had painted red circles around their eyes, and wore beaked noses bought from a Japanese store next to ammunitions shop. I stood at the entrance welcoming the guests. Haroon al-Rashid entered on his horse which I took by the reins and led to a feeding stall. Witches came down from the sky on their brooms flogging the wind with their whips. And Cleopatra sang and played her accordion like she always did, while the snake around her neck swirled back and forth as if ready to give her a long kiss. Finally, the barbarians arrived drawing their swords, Hulako and Djengiz Khan too. Fearing for my life, I left the party through an opening in the fence. Tomorrow I will read in the newspaper the details of the whole battle.
THE VISITOR
At midnight, while it was snowing, I sat in my room, listening on the radio to a folksong about a nightingale that had died in a cage and a princess who had lost her way into the forest. Confused I heard a knock, gentle and low, like a rain drop on the window. Someone at white night was gliding high in front of the fifth floor of the house, whispering with a faint voice that I once heard, but forgot by the turns of life. He pressed his face against the windowpane und called me with my name, “Fadhil, let me come in, it’s freezing cold!” When I opened the window I saw two tiny black joyous eyes smilingly stare at me. Seeing me looking confounded at him, he entered and took me in his arms. He put his hand upon my shoulder and tenderly said: “Hi Fadhil, I am your brother, I came from a very distant planet to visit you.” Then he fluttered his coloured wings like a butterfly, lay himself in my bed and said: “Pardon me, I need to get some sleep, I have spent the whole eternity on the way to you.”
Fadhil Al-Azzawi (born in 1940 in Kirkuk of north of Iraq) is one of the leading poets and writers in the Arab world. He published thirteen volumes of poetry, seven novels, one volume of short stories, two books of criticism and memoir, and several translations of German and English literary works into Arabic. He edited several newspapers and magazines and founded the poetry magazine Shi’r 69. Al-Azzawi participated in Iraq's avant-garde Sixties Generation. His early work was critiqued and lauded with great enthusiasm. He is widely read in English and his writing blends the Arabic literary tradition with western modernism and postmodernism. Al-Azzawi studied English literature at Baghdad University. In 1977 he left Iraq to earn a PhD in the cultural journalism from Leipzig University in Germany. He founded in 1980 in Beirut (Lebanon) with some other Iraqi writers “The Union Of The Democratic Iraqi Writers In Exile” and took part in Editing of Al-Badeel (The Alternative) magazine.
His works had been translated into many European and eastern languages like English, German, French, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Turkish, Hebrew, Kurdish, Farsi, Chinese, Indonesian and published in literary magazines and anthologies. He is currently a full-time writer living in Berlin.
