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TRANSVERSALITY AND TRANSLATION IN MOROCCAN CONTEMPORARY POETRY
Abstract
Moroccan poetry is remarkably absent in twentieth century print-media anthologies of Arabic poetry in English. In Selma Jayyusi’s Modern Arabic Poetry, there is only one Moroccan poet mentioned (Mohammed Bennis) while in Issa J. Boulatta’s book, Modern Arab Poets 1950-1975, there are virtually no Moroccan poets. This may be because North Africa has fallen outside the purview of Middle Eastern Studies. However, there are no Moroccan poets in anthologies of West African poetry either. Despite the publication in 1929 of a book entitled al-Adab al-Arabi fi al- Maghreb al-Aqsa, “Arabic Literature in Morocco” (edited by Mohamed ben al-Abbas Kabbaj), until recently Morocco has been neglected in studies of modern poetry in English translation. Certainly the politics of translation are implicated. Morocco, notes poet and novelist Abdellatif Laâbi, has long been on the periphery of both the Middle East and the West, adding that despite the post-colonialist moment, new forms of global domination maintain its marginality. Poet and scholar Mohamed Bennis echoes these sentiments when (speaking of Arab writers more generally) he notes, “It is significant that our great poets, thinkers and scientists remain ignored in the West. If I am the descendant of a symbolic family of modern Arab writers, whether Muslim or Christian, …I am also the descendant of these same Muslims and Arabs that …invented algebra, …the masters of logic and astronomy, doctors, scientists, but also great mystics, the inspiration for poetic, literary and artistic modernity in Europe.” Indeed Europe – and the entire Western world – owes the Arabs a literary debt whose acknowledgement is direly needed, especially today. What is the influence of Moroccan poetry across social, gendered and political ecologies? While romanticizing a national spirit may lead to the grossest of fascisms, it is nonetheless possible to speak of what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call a “milieu” – the vibrations of a territory, formed by the stories that have lived there, as well as the songs, languages, idioms, metaphors and other rhythms of history that are embedded in place. In this paper, I read Moroccan contemporary poetry for the “auditory traces” left by its authors and translators, as well as for the transversal relations of style imprinted there – from the political poetry of Abdellatif Laâbi to the poetry of feminine desire of Wafa al-‘Amrani or Malika al-‘Asimi. Moroccan poetry is reread as a poetry of the larger Maghreb, an essential aesthetic link between east and west, north and south.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Morocco
Sub Area
Ethnography