Taha Muhammad Ali: “Warning”

WARNING

Lovers of hunting,
and beginners seeking your prey:
Don’t aim your rifles
at my happiness,
which isn’t worth
the price of the bullet
(you’d waste on it).
What seems to you
so nimble and fine,
like a fawn,
and flees
every which way,
like a partridge,
isn’t happiness.
Trust me:
my happiness bears
no relation to happiness.

–Taha Muhammad Ali

Translation by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, Gabriel Levin

Taha Muhammad Ali: “Twigs”

TWIGS

Neither music,
fame, nor wealth,
not even poetry itself,
could provide consolation
for life’s brevity,
or the fact that King Lear
is a mere eighty pages long and comes to an end,
and for the thought that one might suffer greatly
on account of a rebellious child.

My love for you
is what’s magnificent,
but I, you, and the others,
most likely,
are ordinary people.

My poem
goes beyond poetry
because you
exist
beyond the realm of women.

And so
it has taken me
all of sixty years
to understand
that water is the finest drink,
and bread the most delicious food,
and that art is worthless
unless it plants
a measure of splendor in people’s hearts.

After we die,
and the weary heart
has lowered its final eyelid
on all that’ve done,
and on all that we’ve longed for,
and all that we’ve dreamt of,
all we’ve desired
or felt,
hate will be
the first things
to putrefy
within us.

–Taha Muhammad Ali (1989-91)

Translation by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, Gabriel Levin

The photo depicts one of the 3rd century mosaics in Suffurriya (صفورية‎), the town in Gallil where the poet was born and forced to flee in 1948.

Taha Muhammad Ali: “Revenge”

The poet reads in Arabic, and then his translator (the poet Peter Cole) in English. (6:44)

Video kudos: grdodge