Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

In “Presiding Spirits”, Magma usually asks a contemporary poet to speak about how a poet of the past has influenced his/her work and practice as a poet. In this issue the source of inspiration is somewhat different. Sarah Maguire speaks about how a visit to Palestine in 1996 for the British Council inspired some of her recent work as poet and translator. She also talks about some of the other influences on her development as a poet. And we have a new poem from Sarah—Drinking the Sea at Gaza.


Photograph: Crispin Hughes

Q. How did you begin translating Arabic poetry? I began translating Arabic poetry after my first visit to Palestine for the British Council in September 1996. I’ve always been interested in international politics since I was very young and, of course, I was aware of the situation in Palestine. But nothing quite prepares you for the experience of actually being there. Just after I first arrived, the Israelis opened up a tunnel under the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, which provoked a furious reaction from the Palestinians, leading to what’s known as “the Tunnel Intifada”. Suddenly I was surrounded by tanks and guns. The British Council rang me from London and said that they thought I ought to come home because I was in a war zone. But I’d come to Palestine to meet the writers there and I was determined to stay and do that.

That visit changed my life. I’d always felt uncomfortable about certain aspects of the (predominantly white) literary establishment here. I made an effort to teach creative writing to groups frequently excluded from access to literature, such as people living with AIDS at the London Lighthouse and young offenders (I was the writer in residence at a prison for young men for two years). But I realised when I first met some poets in Palestine that I could make a significant difference by trying to translate their poetry in an attempt to get their voices heard here.

Q. It can’t have been an easy task? It’s been an uphill struggle: I’ve had no practical support, little encouragement and I’ve faced extraordinary obstacles, not the least being the illegal Israeli occupation. In September 2002 I made a nightmare journey, on my own, from Jordan to Ramallah in order to finish translating some poems with Ghassan Zaqtan (there’s only so much of this kind of work you can do via email and phone). The trip took five hours via four taxis across the checkpoints. Immediately after I arrived, a suicide bomb went off, Ramallah was besieged and placed under 24-hour curfew (again) and we were surrounded by tanks, snipers and Apache helicopters, which kept everyone, awake all night. And just down the road, Arafat’s compound was being bombed. Despite all this, Ghassan and I managed to finish working on his poems. I then had to escape in an ambulance because I had a plane to catch and there was no other way of getting out.

Q. How did your workshops at SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies) come about? My residency at SOAS was supported by The Royal Literary Fund as part of their fellowships scheme. I asked if I could be based at SOAS because of my wide interest in non-European literature. As I’d been translating Arabic poetry for some years, I knew the Professor of Arabic at SOAS, so it seemed like an ideal place for me to be. Because I’m so interested in translating poetry, I suggested setting up the workshops, which are completely different from anything else happening at SOAS, as the best way to use my skills as a poet.

Q. Your feeling for the Arab world comes across very much in your own poetry, in the poems about Marrakech and the Yemen in your recent collection, The Florist’s at Midnight, for example. It goes back a long way. I came across Salma Khadra Jayyusi’s anthology of modern Arabic poetry in the late ’80s and I was immediately fascinated by an approach to poetry which was entirely different from anything else I had been reading. Translations of Arabic poetry were much rarer at that time. I think what drew me was both its lyricism and the sense of their being an enormously sensual, even erotic, quality to much of the writing, as well as—or rather linked with—a deep political sense.

What fascinates me is that not only am I attracted to Arabic and Islamic cultures, but that clearly the attraction runs both ways. I am now in the peculiar position of probably being the only living English language poet with a selection of her work published in Arabic! It’s the most extraordinary thing that could have happened to me. And I’ve been beautifully translated by Saadi Yousef, the leading Iraqi poet, who is also the most distinguished translator from English into Arabic, from Walt Whitman to Wole Soyinka. The really good part is that when I first met Saadi,—to my astonishment—he quoted my poem Spilt Milk to me; it turned out he was familiar with it from the anthology Emergency Kit (edited by Matthew Sweeney and Jo Shapcott). So he’d actually begun translating my poems into Arabic before he met me, or had any idea that I was in turn translating his friends into English. His translation of a selection of my poems is called Haleeb Muraq (Arabic for “spilt milk”), and it has just been published in Damascus.

Q. What other influences have shaped your own work?
My mother read poetry to me from a very early age and we also played lots of word games (she was a teacher). I began writing poetry at school and reading everything I could lay my hands on. I particularly remember having a copy of the Collins Albatross Book of Verse; I kept it in my desk all through school and read and re-read it, without necessarily understanding it all. But I think it’s very important to read the “canonical” poets, whatever your eventual preferences. I read a great deal of Dylan Thomas at that stage, for his lyricism, although I haven’t read him for ages now. The Penguin Modern Poets series and the Penguin Modern European poets were very important. I particularly liked Joseph Brodsky, another strongly lyrical poet, and Osip Mandelstam. I have a theory that poets have to have been influenced by at least one of the three “high modernists”: Eliot, Yeats or Pound. In my case it was Pound. I felt I had to come to terms with the fact that I was repelled by his actively Fascist politics and yet was tremendously drawn by his writings, including his wonderful translations. In a way he’s such a bully, he tells you what you should read and what you should do as a poet (for example in the ABC of Reading, and the Blast Manifesto) and that’s actually what you need when you’re starting out.

I also learnt from the way he wrote—I don’t think anyone in English breaks a line better than Pound. And he helped me with finding the right sort of music for myself. I was looking to break away from the standard iambic metre that English seems to fall into. I learnt to write dactyls from his work. I also read people like Hughes and Plath and lots and lots of Heaney when I was a teenager. I learnt a lot from Sylvia Plath especially from the way she looks at things, something she in turn learnt from Theodore Roethke. He writes wonderfully about plant nurseries and horticulture.

Q. Gardens and horticulture are themes running through some of your own work, the latest collection uses that as a motif, but I also wonder whether your time as a gardener influenced how you approach poetry as a craft? When I left school early to train as a gardener it was partly as a way of escaping into the antithesis of my horrible girls’ school and also partly because I had this daft notion that gardening would give me time to think. I saw it as a way to be able to free my mind for writing. However, working for the local council, as I did, is sheer, hard, repetitive manual labour. It turned out to be mind-numbingly dull; all I wanted to do was sleep! However, what did fascinate me was the science of botany and the principles of horticulture. And I agree with your reference to poetry as a craft. Architects for example, need to understand all sorts of things like the mechanics of bridge-building or the nature of the stone they’re working with, which aren’t necessarily directly related to or visible in the final product. The poet also has to accumulate a body of technical knowledge of things like metrics and the work of past poets.

Q. Who are the writers you currently enjoy reading or find interesting? I like Robert Minhinnick very much at present, because of the sensual detail in his poems combined with his political intelligence. I really admire the US poet, August Kleinzahler, for his extraordinary music and his wide, often unusual, subject matter. I’m very impressed with how Sinead Morrissey is developing; again what interests me is her fresh perspectives. I also like Anne Michaels, from Canada, and a US poet called Charlie Smith. There are lots of other people I enjoy—Michael Longley, Kathleen Jamie, and John Burnside all spring to mind. Adrienne Rich is an abiding influence, I respect her political engagement and her feminism, but she’s also a fine translator. Her translations of Ghalib, the great 18th Century Urdu poet, had enormous influence on me. My own translator, Saadi Youssef, is unusually well-translated into English; he really is one of the greatest poets in the world today. I’ve been reading Yusef Komunyakaa for years and I’m delighted he’s now been published here by Picador; again it’s all about music and ideas—those are the things that grip me. In recent years I’ve also begun reading South American poets such as Octavio Paz and Cesar Vallejo. And I like the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Nazim Hikmet is another favourite—Richard McCane produced a good translation of his work recently (published by Anvil). I’ve also been getting to know the work of Greek poet George Seferis. And Yang Lian, who is Chinese and lives in the UK. Also Jack Mapanje, one of the most important living African poets, who’s from Malawi, and who’s lived here for over a decade; Jack is scandalously neglected in the UK—a real indictment of the insularity of the poetry scene here. One of my colleagues at SOAS, Martin Orwin, has been translating Somali poetry for years; it’s fantastic stuff and it would be wonderful if readers here could open their minds to this poetry, and poetry by poets from all over the world, much of which, of course, is actually being written in this country.

Some of the poets I’ve mentioned are ones we’ve been translating in the workshops. The process is fascinating. How it works is that participants, who are either native speakers or are studying the particular language, come along with a copy of the original (it’s always interesting to see how it’s set out), a word-by-word literal version (with a glossary) and an attempted translation. I distribute these texts via email before the workshops, and the ideal is for us all to have a go at producing a final version in the workshops themselves. We discuss the translations in minute detail, which is deeply satisfying! We’ve worked with a fantastic range of languages—Korean, Hindi, Arabic, Urdu, Spanish, Japanese, Turkish, Farsi (Persian), German, Sylheti (a Bangladeshi dialect) and Bengali. Having access to the people in the language and literature departments who really know the culture as well as the literature was a plus point. We also introduced each other to new poets and have deepened our knowledge of many others.

Q. Now that your two years at SOAS are coming to an end, what are you plans, in relation to your own writing or more generally? I’ve applied for Arts Council funding to set up a continuing poetry translation workshop at SOAS. SOAS are being very supportive of this. We hope to link this to the poets who will be featured or appear at Poetry International, on the South Bank—the 2004 Poetry International that is, as we’d obviously need the time to build up to that. If it happens it would be really exciting. We are trying in particular to encourage the translation of poetry from non-European languages. There is nothing equivalent to the old Penguin Modern European Poets for non-European poets in terms of regular book-length publication. In fact there is now nothing similar even for European poets, though the big houses do publish some European poets if they’ve “crossed over” into English, such as Milosz or Symborska.

And yet poetry only ever develops through translation. If Chaucer hadn’t translated the Romance of the Rose from French, or if Wyatt and Sidney hadn’t translated Petrach and introduced English writers to the sonnet form (from which the English or Shakespearean sonnet was subsequently developed), the whole history and tradition of our poetry would be much poorer. Or look at Ezra Pound’s Cathay, his versions of Chinese poets published in 1918, that influenced a whole subsequent generation of poets. Fascinatingly, Pound’s translations were re-translated back into Chinese, and had an influence on how Chinese poets wrote in the 40s and 50s by stimulating an interest in their past and affecting their attitudes to Modernism.

Translation helps you to apprehend the world in a different way and teaches you new ways of looking at things. Part of the pleasure for me of Arabic poetry is that it comes out of a very different world view to ours, a perspective which is crucial if we are to apprehend what’s happening in the world today. It’s also representative of a large community long established in the UK, especially in London. These people live with us and we live with them. It’s vital that we begin to understand each other better. And one of the most effective ways of learning about another culture is through its art, especially through its poetry because lyric poetry gives a unique insight into the relationship between intense subjective intimacy and a lived historical and political context. Poetry is the highest art form in Islamic cultures— which is one of the reasons I like being there! We get treated seriously for once. That is why I want to go on building on what I’ve done while at SOAS, if I can. I truly think translating this poetry can make a difference. As Marx said it’s not just about interpreting the world but also about changing it.