Yasmine SEALE
& Robin MOGER
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GARDEN OF
THE VALLEY ...
& Robin MOGER
GARDEN OF
THE VALLEY ...
A CHAIN OF POEMS
FROM A BOOK CALLED
AGITATED AIR: POEMS AFTER IBN ARABI
Born in Murcia in 1165, Ibn ARABI was a prolific Muslim philosopher and poet. He travelled extensively before settling in Damascus, where he died in 1240. TARJUMAN al-ASHWAQ, or THE INTERPRETER OF DESIRES, is a cycle of sixty-one Arabic poems. They speak of loss and bewilderment, a spiritual and sensual yearning for the divine, and a hunger for communion in which near and far collapse.
AGITATED AIR—the third title from TENEMENT PRESS—is a correspondence in poems between Istanbul and Cape Town, following the wake of THE INTERPRETER OF DESIRES. Collaborating at a distance, Yasmine SEALE and Robin MOGER work in close counterpoint, making separate translations of each poem, exchanging them, then writing new poems in response to what they receive. The process continues until they are exhausted, and then a new chain begins.
Translated and retranslated, these poems fray and eddy and, their themes of intimacy across distance made various, sing back and forth, circling and never landing. Absence and approach, knowing and unknowing, failure and repetition: Ibn Arabi’s cycle of ecstatic love shimmers with turbulence. SEALE and MOGER move into and against these contending drifts, finding in the play of dissatisfaction and endurance a prompt for new poetry. See below for a chain of poems excerpted from SEALE and MOGER’s collaboration.
AGITATED AIR—the third title from TENEMENT PRESS—is a correspondence in poems between Istanbul and Cape Town, following the wake of THE INTERPRETER OF DESIRES. Collaborating at a distance, Yasmine SEALE and Robin MOGER work in close counterpoint, making separate translations of each poem, exchanging them, then writing new poems in response to what they receive. The process continues until they are exhausted, and then a new chain begins.
Translated and retranslated, these poems fray and eddy and, their themes of intimacy across distance made various, sing back and forth, circling and never landing. Absence and approach, knowing and unknowing, failure and repetition: Ibn Arabi’s cycle of ecstatic love shimmers with turbulence. SEALE and MOGER move into and against these contending drifts, finding in the play of dissatisfaction and endurance a prompt for new poetry. See below for a chain of poems excerpted from SEALE and MOGER’s collaboration.
Garden of the valley
Give something back
To the one with boundaries
To her name
The one who has
White teeth
Garden of the valley!
Give her something
Of your shade
No
Longer than her circle
Needs to settle
Her tents to round their backs
And you will have
Your fill of spray to feed the shoots
Your fill of flood
Of cloud suspending
All integrity to keep
Alive the night trees and
The morning
And you will have your fill
Of shelter
And your fill of sweet
Fruit to the picker
Swaying
To be picked
Your fill of those who seek
Zarud and its sand
Who move
Their flock by singing
Who
Show them the way
(YS)
Garden in the wadi, if your trees will speak
Their shade for a while, a while only
Over my fever
Until they are gathered there
About her and her tents are raised,
Garden in the wadi, in the heart of you, oh then
You can have what you want
Of fine rain to feed
Your boughs, the downpours you want
And the damp from clouds’ constant
Back and forth above the trees, the shade on shade, the fruit that you want,
Fat in the eye and sagging the trees, and the song
Driving behind, and the line which leads in the front
Which you need.
(RM)
all those speak, nature poems
but you were busy
enclosing whiting your bones
2x/day for 500 yrs
just hold the line
till we have built
our capital on her back
now look what you
she is responding
not what you
but here it comes
all-you-can-drink
precipitation instant river
just add water clouds
high on deregulation flood
the fruit market with leaky
dreaming see you really
can of constant growing have
it but will there be
singing all
(YS)
picture such liquidity
your interest, your eye,
is in
what wells
in quiet accumulate
or ask for a draw
and summon lashings
far away high overheads
clouds bounce about the sky
it’s always cool
enough? you couldn’t pick
enough to empty the branches
do you have what it takes any more
wet heaven safe
beyond a pale of teeth
yours
what grew while you guarded the door
is singing
before you and after you
is springing inside of you
speak
(RM)
Yasmine SEALE is a writer and translator. Her essays, poetry, visual art, and translations from Arabic and French have appeared widely—in Harper’s, Poetry Review, Wasafiri, Apollo and elsewhere. Current projects include a new translation of THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS (W. W. Norton) and a translation of the poems of al-KHANSA (NYU Press). After five years in Istanbul, she lives in Paris.
Robin MOGER is a translator of Arabic to English recently moved from Cape Town to Barcelona. His translations of prose and poetry have appeared in Blackbox Manifold, The White Review, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Seedings, and others. He has translated several novels and prose works, most recently Haytham El Wardany’s THE BOOK of SLEEP (Seagull) and SLIPPING by Mohamed KHEIR (Two Lines Press).
IMAGE(s)—
Hasegawa Tohaku (長谷川 等伯), ‘Pine Trees’
(松林図 屏風, ‘Shorin-zu byobu’),
circa 1595