Translation
The Palestinian American writer Sarah Aziza opens her memoir The Hollow Half with a “Translator’s Note.” But rather than a reflection on the process of bringing someone else’s text into another language, this preface is a meditation on the distance between the English word translate and the Arabic ترجم. The English term, Aziza writes, figures text as a kind of “cargo,” something acquired and brought wholesale from one place to another, while the Arabic—whose “meaning emanates from interpret, touches expound, explain”—is more sensitive to what is “lost in uprooting”: “An open window wafting aromas of the bread you will not taste[,] ترجم can haunt us with all that it withholds.”
Hayan Charara’s poem “Translation” is similarly engaged with the question of what happens in the movement from one place to another. It opens with an act of translation, the speaker explaining their father’s words: “Get the get out of here my father / said to men and women he wanted / gone from his world.” Yet even as the poem explicates the father’s wishes, it alloys this clarity with doubt as the line breaks undermine the sense of the sentence. Taken as a whole, this opening tells the story of a parent antagonizing those who’ve intruded on “his world”—but the fractures change the meaning: The first line hovers as a threat to expel the father, while the second lingers on a desire the following line denies. As the poem proceeds, the speaker tries to clarify the father’s intention while vacillating between “I mean” and “he means,” each attempt at explanation rattling with what it cannot hold, generating the impulse for further explanation. “Translation” tumbles on like this, gradually turning over the terms entirely (“By here he means your world / not his”) until we reach what is at once plainly stated and ineffable—the violence that produced the encounter in the opening lines—and lands, finally, on a fragile “we” that bears the poem’s full weight, the irreducible whole constituted both by what the words reach and by a longing for what they can never touch.
– Claire Schwartz
Translation
Get the get out of here my father said to men and women he wanted gone from his world By his world I mean the beer and wine he built and ran in Detroit And by beer and wine I mean the convenience store he wanted to call Father & Son but went with Beer & Wine which is also the prison he made for himself Get the get out of here he told the kids with not enough money and the men buying quarts and forties before and after their shifts at the factory and the women who came to complain to him about their men Get the get out of here he said to them and by that he meant Get the fuck out of here By here he meant the store but also his face his life and maybe his world When he says it now he says I want to get the get out of here By here he means your world not his When he says my world he means my home He means where he was born When he says I want to get the get out of here he wants to go home and by that he means where he wants to die He wants to die at home Let me be clear My father doesn’t want to die in the house he lives in now surrounded by his children his walls his bottles his eyeglasses He wants to die in his home in his homeland and I don’t know if he means the house or the city he was born in but he should know though I have not told him yet that the house and the city he was born in have both been turned to dust and by turned to dust I mean obliterated and by obliterated I mean bombed to oblivion and of course by oblivion I mean where he is going and obviously by he I also mean we
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Hayan Charara is the author of four poetry books, most recently These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit. He teaches at the Honors College at the University of Houston.
