Poemes: Charbel DAGHER
Charbel Dagher was born in the bucolic village of Wata Hawb. He holds two doctorates from the Sorbonne: one in Modern Arabic Literature (1982), and the second in Aesthetics (1996). He is a journalist and a writer in both Arabic and French, and is a professor at Balamand University, Lebanon. Daghers poetry has been translated into French by Georges dorlian, Venus Khouri-Ghata, and Na'um Abi Rashid; into English (U.S.) by Juan-Camilio Gomez- Rives, Ben Bennani, and Basil Samara; and into German by Khaled al- Ma'ali, and Suleiman Tufiq. Dagher lias chaired and participated in various international conferences and panel discussions in Lebanon, Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco, Senegal, Malta, Italy, Belgium, and elsewhere. At present, he is a professor of literature at the University of Balamand in northern Lebanon.
Dagher has written numerous books in various fields (poetry, literary criticism, aesthetics, translation, and Islamic art and architecture). His volumes of poetry include Futat al-hayadh (Crumbs of Whiteness, 1981), Rashiu (Annointment, 1999), Takht sharqi (An Eastern Bed, 2000), Hatib layl (Night Woodsman, 2001), and Iaraban lishakel (Parsing of a figure, 2004), and others .
In a seminar in Paris, the French poet Jean-Pierre Fay said of the poet Charbel Dagher: "He is a transcender of milestones and cultures and a carrier, or rather a smuggler, of them. He is the poet of otherness whose meaning is not defined except in the other, and with it. He is a poet, a walker in wounded shoes where the pebbles are narra- tives of the self and the world."
In an interview about his books, Dagher said:
"I cannot establish a collective description of my poetry. Many voices pillage my poetry, or rather scuffle over it a thing I cannot control or adopt, especially when its essence does not emanate from an articulating self, but is defined by a structure that is linked to the out-side, with others and with the world itself. It is also difficult for me to delineate a goal for my journey in writing, for I have not hesitated to submerge myself, as if in a sea, surrounded so completely by water (hat I do not see an outlet or an exit except to strive and work and paddle continuously so that finding the way, eventually, is nothing hut the end of the struggle and the comfort of arrival (...). Nevertheless, I can say that in writing there is the promise that (lie act of writing gives itself through the writer and the promise to the reader that is often indirect, postponed, and at times unfulfilled like a letter in a bottle thrown in the sea. This promise is part of our aspired humanity which is heightened, driven and amplified through multiplicity of meaning".
In "My Computer, My Portable Metaphor", from his poetry collection "Night Woodsman", Dagher adds:
"For in writing, in concentrating on it, in the fact that it demands more energy of me than all my other activities, is what attracts me to it and what makes it my recreation, for its value is inherent within it; in performing it; in the fact that it spontaneously justifies itself; in that, although seemingly repetitious, it is a transformational activity for things that appear to be hidden from me but are in fact parts of me, closer to me than myself. If writing finds something outside itself that would justify that self to the reader, then this indicates to me again that our capabilities transcend us with their flying arrows, and that we can live in the realm of collaboration and rejuvenation".
The Password
Translated by Ben Bennani
She inhabits me without my seeing her
She is me
and I don't know me.
She is me
and I'm a name without a person
an unprotected name
a voice in search of words.
You, this limp body, this desperate
body, to what end do
these words come out?
My body is a booby-trapped alphabet and a mortgaged mansion but I have lost the password.
There used to be…
Translated by Ben Bennani
There used to be a land for us
The second we touched its extremities
It glowed
And there used to be a Hag for us
It had no fewer colors than other flags
And we used, with the idiocy of the happy,
to forget the colors of our houses.
Probation
Translated by Ben Bennani
She's of me, like my hand
She's in me, like my self
She has my physiognomy without my habits
Still, I stalk her, a stranger
An imp playing with my notebooks.
She outruns me as she teases me
And 1 run after her, after a thief.
My Child/My Father
Translated by Ben Bennani
In a lighted room
in broad daylight
I sit to write:
Voices, or echoes? A mirror, or a window?
I pass my fingers over a soft fur
fasten a talisman to it
and wait for a child
to elect me as its father.
The Stones Must Stay Awake
Translated by Basil Samara
If we fall asleep,
Must conceal our shadows
If we slip away,
In the nakedness of our irksome home
Among stones,
the apples of our primeval lust.
The stones must remain with us,
Past us,
In their sober patience,
We leave them behind
Unwittingly
To heedless children . . .
A pebble of recklessness
1 hurl into the air
A slingshot
Or the catapult
Of an army at my fingertips;
The pebble of my recklessness
Overtakes me
Unawares:
How would I travel from one hand to the other?
How would I pursue my limbs as I press on?
How would I cast my die,
And how would the pebble write me?
A pebble the size of my hand
Or my desire,
I entrust with sealed letters
That have no words;
it has the yearning of an arrow
Even if it strays,
It has a stencil
That tests its trembling anticipation
In the blasts of air;
A pebble other than the one that promised me
Deliverance.
the pebbles have skills
And habits,
I line them up for a showdown
Whose dust does nor clear,
1 capture them with my fingers
With the swiftness of a heavyweight
In the days of his recklessness.
A pebble that I pluck
from dust's meadow
I shield from the sight of others
Oil, what a discovery!
To find me in the guise of another!
The pebble of my infatuation
I polish into a minor
So it may see the color of a mulberry
On its lower lip;
Its pocket is the target of my pebble
It sparks a fire
As stone rubs against stone.
***
Thresholds
Are these borders
And my double fences ghosts
At home in the interstices of the walls?
Are these doubles
and my breath
wrestles stagnant wind
above the still beds?
Are these steps
Calling or repulsing
Attracting me or weighing me down?
These steps are a crowd
And I, like a traveler
In front of a policeman wait for my turn,
Wait for another to let me in my house.
Who will name me
My papers or my beard?
Who will admit me
The officer’s stamp
Or my neighbor’s gaze?
This is my neighbor at her window
Weighing with her eyes
What falls between each step
And her needle is quick to attach
Every thread of news.
How can I be naked in my house
Without her catching cold
How can I shake like a djinn
Without her denouncing me to the
lament of candles?
Here is my patron-saint
Over the altar
And in the roadside shrine
And in the holy water over the curtains
And the souls
Year after year
Chasing my obsessions
How can I not be that thief
Stealing a forbidden
Place of my birth?
The steps wait for me
A reader reciting the secrets
Behind the trespassers and the anguish
Of the waiting.
These steps have cracks
As numerous as volumes
How can I catch
The rush of words within me?
Obvious,
Someone else carries me to where I am
Expecting myself
I am incensed by the tap on my shoulder
And when someone interrupts me
An adolescent in the form of an old man
Staring at me with his eyes shut
Reading the tales of our ancestors
Told by eyewitnesses
About the other side of the sky.
On my steps are dry flowers
And grandfather’s moustache
Hanging on a cane,
And my mother’s rosary
Where I found the thorns she wanted
Hidden from me.
And her dresses dissolved under my
Hands.
On my steps I unleash my anger in a bolt
I forbid the angels from flying
I sit in the vessel of expectation.
I free myself from the glances glued
To my coat
From the rumors which reached me
In the alley
I forget the color of the curtain
I ignore the knocking of the rain on the
Window
I make sure that my tongue is my ink
and my hands the pages of a book.
These steps narrate my letters to the wind
Places the obsession between my fingers
It avoided me, did not invite me to wipe the
Stains on the pictures
And from the chairs tranquil in my
Memory.
The trees grow leaves
The balconies cannot hold
Are you going to mark my body
It will dissolve
At first contact
As long as we are writing with the same
Letters
Joined, dispersed,
A compendium, our breath cannot
Contain.
The waiting has crumbled the papers
It glows like a
Book just off press
Thus love elevates us
Precedes us
We aspire toward it
He is within our reach like an open
Letter deciphered before its author.
We chatter to disperse the ghosts
Roaming above our chairs
Laying down words
Like bread or a cushion
We will share
Under this solitary
Roof
.
(Translated f rom the Arabic by Simone Fattal with the gentil Help of Stacy Doris and Sarah Rigg)
