Without An Alphabet, Without A face: Selected Poems of Saadi Youssef
Translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa
[Graywolf Press 2005]

Bad translation can kill even the best of poems. A brilliant melodic poem rendered into another language could become a bad poem with interesting philosophy or insights.

Fortunately, Saadi Youssef’s Without an Alphabet, Without a Face meets no such fate. It is the work of a master Iraqi poet translated by a master translator. As I recited each poem out loud, which is my test of a good translation, the poems were soft in my throat, smooth as warm milk and honey. They were melodic and not forced. In reading these poems one forgets they are translations and not the poems in their original language.

Poet Marilyn Hacker calls Saadi Youssef a poet not only of the Arab world but “of the human universe.” Without An Alphabet, Without a Face is a beautiful collection of poems selected by Khaled Mattawa from over thirty volumes of poetry, spanning forty-two years. In these poems Youssef does indeed speak to and from the human universe. Youssef guides his readers through senses and imagined possibilities, leaving behind expectations and preconceived notions. “The senses are the aim of poetry’s wave,” he says. “They are the aim because they are its receivers….And the idea is that the person’s relation to the universe is returned to its earliest stages, to its spontaneity.” It is thus that we enter and leave (or sometimes never leave) Youssef’s poems. Consider “Sparrows,” written in Yemen in 1981:

This morning I saw a sparrow
on a thin stalk of yellow corn,
the only plant adorning
the seaside hotel.
The sparrow cleaned itself;
the stalk shook.
Another sparrow came;
the stalk bent.
A third sparrow;
the stalk bowed quickly.
Then suddenly,
and in unison,
the three sparrows took off,
leaving the hotel.
And under my shirt
a thousand sparrows
shivered.

According to Youssef: “It is important that the poet develop a strong bond with life, to be able to observe and able to choose his subject matter…Afterwards, he can abstract things by abstracting coincidences, and symbolize them.” As Mattawa notes, this can lead to a process of surprise and discovery, as in one of his longer, best and perhaps most well known poems, “America, America”:

I too love jeans and jazz and Treasure Island
and John Silver’s parrot and the balconies of New Orleans.
I love Mark Twain and the Mississippi steamboats and Abraham Lincoln’s dogs.
I love the fields of wheat and corn and the smell of Virginia tobacco.
But I am not American.
Is that enough for the Phantom pilot to turn me back to the Stone
Age?
I need neither oil nor America herself, neither the elephant nor the
donkey.
Leave me, pilot, leave my house roofed with palm fronds and this
wooden bridge.
I need neither your Golden Gate nor your skyscrapers.
I need the village, not New York.

Youssef’s attention to detail while maintaining this process of surprise and discovery is what gives the poems fluidity and a sense of urgency, making it hard to leave them behind. They stay with you and bid you to return to the spaces they occupy again and again. In “The Ends of the African North” (from which the title of the book is extracted) he writes:

In the neighborhoods of Tunis and their winter cafés
at the gates of Africa’s spread thighs
I saw a girl weep
without an alphabet, without a face.
Snow was falling and a girl wept under it.

Eleven years later, he alludes to the same subject in “The Spring.” Here, he speaks of holding Aden, a city in Yemen, in his summer shirt pocket, like a magician’s rose:

………Once,
as we sat among fishermen in Beirut, a Palestinian girl told me:
“From here come the enemies’ planes.” Her index finger
pointed to the whole world.
Amman in San’a, or Ajman in Beirut,
or Baghdad a ringed orchard,
names of cities emptied and their impressions entangled.
Their alphabets have forgotten their shapes and their shapers.
They will make us forget those lands and their weeds
and God and the earths and our births.
They will make us forget veins that tied rib to rib
and the Arab in the hidden star
and the boy playing with toys made of his offspring.
But I hide for the young girl another rose.
…
I count a petal for ‘Ayne,
a petal for D------------âl,
a petal for Nûn.

Youssef’s poems contain no bitterness, no anger. They are whispers, intimate and urgent. Sometimes whispers are more effective than shouts. In his poem “A Friendship” he writes:

What we share is not trust.
We share the throat of the bleeding flower.
Between us the storm emerges
from its elements….
I say: “Let’s shake hands.”

Youssef was born in Basra, Iraq, in 1934. After receiving a degree in Arabic from the Teachers’ College at Baghdad University in 1954, his socialist sympathies took him on an unauthorized trip to a youth conference in Moscow in 1957, after which he was forced to settle in Kuwait until the 1958 revolution in Iraq. Since then the winds of politics has blown him from country to country, imposing, in his own words: “a life of forced departures.” He has lived in Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Yemen, Cyprus, Yugoslavia, France, Jordan and England.

Land where I no longer live,
distant land
where the sky weeps,
where the women weep,
where people only read the newspaper.
…
Country where I no longer live,
my outcast country,
from you I only gained a traveler’s sails,
a banner ripped by daggers
and fugitive stars.

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Sholeh Wolpé is a poet, translator and the author most recently of The Scar Saloon [Red Hen Press 2005]. Both Without an Alphabet, Without a Face and The Scar Saloon are available at Levantine Cultural Center's regularly scheduled events, or online through their publishers. Read about Sholeh Wolpé and her recent reading with poet Natalie Handal. Visit her site.

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