“The poem is a bridge extending across time and encompassing all horizons,” writes the renowned Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani. It is through this bridge of poetry that he continues to traverse and speak to his Arab audience. In 1995, Qabbani published an article entitled, “Arabs bite the moon of poetry” in the Arabic daily journal Al-Hayat. The English version of this article later appeared at the end of Republic of Love: Selected Poems in English and Arabic under the title “How does Nizar feel about poetry translation?” Qabbani's article contains twenty rules ranging from his views about the translatability of poetry and particularly his poetry, his resistance to having his poetry translated into any language, and a discussion about what he expects from his translators. These rules, as well as his works of prose, such as My Story with Poetry, give us an insight into Qabbani’s theory of translation from his own perspective as the original author. Accusing his translators of murdering him, Qabbani approved of only two English translations of his poetry: Arabic Love Poems, translated by Bassam K Frangieh, and the aforementioned Republic of Love. As an homage to Qabbani - a master of metaphor in all his writings - this paper will compare Qabbani's poetry in its original Arabic to that of his English translators, who have and continue to strive to bring his foreign readers from one world and language into his own poetic garden. By using examples of his approved English translations, I will argue in this paper that the bridge of translation cannot function in the same way as Qabbani's bridge and that what prevents this bridge from succeeding is the deficiency of linguistic and cultural substances embedded in the text. This paper is divided into three parts: the first part will discuss why Qabbani, as a poet, resists the construction of a translation bridge; the second part will compare the original text and the translated text to demonstrate the incompleteness of the linguistic and cultural elements of the translation; the last part will use the Skopos theory to analyze the translators' intentions that on another level determined the translation’s outcome.

The Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet opens 'Angina Pectoris' (1948) with the lines: “If half my heart is here, doctor / the other half is in China / with the army flowing / toward the Yellow River”. From his earlier works in the 1920s, to his later writings and activism in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Turkey’s preeminent modern poet sustained a striking preoccupation with China throughout his life and oeuvre. By tracing the arc of his engagement, including poems such as 'Istanbul Detention House' (1939) and 'A White Dove in Beijing' (1952), I explore Hikmet’s poetry as a medium for generating varied configurations of identification and anti-imperialist solidarity between Turkey, China, and beyond. In turn, I examine the Chinese translation and critical reception of Hikmet’s poetry. How was this mutual engagement both bolstered and delimited by revolutionary and Communist ideologies? How was transnational solidarity performed and translated across these contexts?   Hikmet’s engagement with China, intersected with the Chinese translation and reception of Hikmet, presents a provocative starting point for an intervention into twentieth-century literary and diplomatic history. Formed against the backdrops of the monumental Kemalist and Maoist state-building projects, via the cosmopolitan and diasporic communist networks of Moscow, the Hikmet-China connection is one that cannot be subsumed into traditional models of literary relation such as that of the centre-periphery; and one that traverses and unsettles categories of analysis such as nation, language, region, continent, and empire. Meanwhile, many of Hikmet’s relevant poems were written, or translated for Chinese audiences, in periods during which no official Turkish-Chinese diplomatic relations existed, lending his work a particularly dense and fraught relational significance. By engaging with recent efforts to re-conceive the terms and mappings of world literature and transnational solidarity —such as in the work of Pheng Cheah and Anna Bernard— in conjunction with the narrative and emotional turn in international relations —such as in the work of Hussein Banai and Rachel Leow— I will use the Hikmet-China case study as a lens through which to reconsider some of the stakes and dynamics in the ‘worlding’ of world literature and the shaping of diplomatic history, from their material and social networks, to their conceptual and affective grounds.

Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa has had a significant—but largely unacknowledged—impact on modern Arab literatures. ʿAlī Badr’s 2009 novel Ḥāris al-tibgh is imbued with Pessoa’s presence both formally and thematically: the very title is a reference to the poem “Tabacaria” written by Pessoa under his heteronym Álvaro de Campos. The novel is framed as a journalist’s account of his research for a book about the life of Iraqi violinist Kamāl Medḥat, who also assumed the identities of Yūsuf Sāmī Ṣāliḥ, an Iraqi Jew living in Baghdad, and Ḥaydar Salmān, an Iraqi Shiʿi living in Iran and Iraq. These three personae directly parallel three of Pessoa’s most well-known heteronyms: Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis. This paper argues that Badr employs Pessoa’s particular model of heteronymy to provide a nuanced portrayal of shifting identity politics in Iraq from the 1920s to 2006. It further considers Pessoa’s broader influence on Arab writers, and his own relationship to the literary “East” and to orientalism.

With the advent of the new millennium, as Syria was grappling with manifold social and political changes, its cultural scene went through significant transformations. Over the following decade, new literary discourses emerged that both reflected and contributed to the general atmosphere that engendered the 2011 uprising (Abbas, 2009; Weiss, 2013; McManus, 2013). My paper argues that these discourses embody an epistemological break with the dominant intellectual frameworks that had hitherto informed the literary field in Syria. They represent a new critical sensibility that interrogates the totalizing models of sovereign paternalism that a previous generation of intellectuals had produced and the genealogy they had constructed for Arab modernity. I trace the literary history of this disjunction through the representation of the figure and literary persona of Mihyār in three works by Syrian authors. The paper begins with Mihyār’s first appearance in Adonis’s 1961 poetry collection Aghānī mihyār al-dimashqī (The Songs of Mihyar of Damascus), which established this literary persona as a representative of the ḥadāthī (modernist) intellectual’s vision of future progress. It then turns to Mihyār’s reappearance as the protagonist in Ḥaydar Ḥaydar’s Walīmah li-ʾaʿshāb al-baḥr (Banquet for Seaweed), a 1983 novel that traces the journey of the intellectual under expanding authoritarian regimes. I argue that although Walīmah depicts the crumbling of Mihyār’s dreams under a series of defeats, it continues to subscribe to Adonis’s vision of the hero intellectual as a force of change, and of progress as a rupture with the past. I conclude with the feminist rewriting of Mihyār, and the intellectual he represents, in Brovā (First Draft), a 2011 novel by Rozā Yāsīn Ḥasan, one of the prominent women novelists of the 2000s. No longer a protagonist, but rather one thread in a cluster of stories, Mihyār and his legacy come under a sharp and critical spotlight in Ḥasan’s novel. Through innovative literary techniques, including metafiction and multiperspectivity, Brovā interrogates the notion of authorship as well as the legitimacy of the authority it metonymically represents. The novel, I argue, announces the metaphorical death of the savior, prophet-like intellectual and a concurrent rejection of the worldviews he held, enabling the emergence of multiple, humanized and individualized intellectuals whose realities are, like the writing of fiction, continuously in the making.