Tablet and Pen: your purchase benefits in part LCC (click image to buy)The Levantine Review's poetry editor, Sholeh Wolpé, has selected three poems from the new anthology Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East (W. W. Norton, 2010) for our November selection (you can hear live readings at the Los Angeles Public Central Library on Nov. 9, 2010, but RSVP early. Go here).

The countries that stretch along the broad horizons of the Middle East—from Morocco to Iran, from Turkey to Pakistan—boast different cultures, different languages, and different religions. Yet the literary landscape of this dynamic part of the world has been bound together not by borders and nationalities but by a common experience of Western imperialism. Keenly aware of the collective scars left by a legacy of colonial rule, the acclaimed writer Reza Aslan, with a team of three regional editors—Michael Beard (Arabic), Sholeh Wolpé (Persian), Zeenut Ziad (Urdu)—and seventy-seven translators, cogently demonstrates with Tablet and Pen how literature can, in fact, be used to fo4rm identity and serve as an extraordinary chronicle of the disrupted history of the region.

Acting with Words without Borders, which fosters international exchange through translation and publication of the world's finest literature, Aslan has purposely situated this volume in the twentieth century, beyond the familiar confines of the Ottoman past, believing that the writers who have emerged in the last hundred years have not received their full due. This monumental collection, therefore, of nearly two hundred pieces, including short stories, novels, memoirs, essays, and poems - many of them presented in English for the first time - features translated works from Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Turkish. Organized chronologically, the volume spans a century of literature—from the famed Arab poet Khalil Gibran to the Nobel laureates Naguib Mahfouz and Orhan Pamuk, from the great Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis to the grand dame of Urdu fiction, Ismat Chughtai—connected by the extraordinarily rich tradition of resplendent cultures that have been all too often ignored by the Western canon.

By shifting America's perception of the Middle Eastern world away from religion and politics, Tablet and Pen evokes the splendors of a region through the voices of its writers and poets, whose literature tells and urgent and liberating story. With a wealth of contextual information that places the writing within the historical, political, and cultural breadth of the region, Tablet and Pen is transcendent, a book to be devoured as a single sustained narrative, from the first page to the last.

Hamid Mosadiq, Nazim Hikmet, Saadi Youssef
HAMID MOSADIQ (1940-1998)

Blue, Black, Grey (excerpt)

Whoever keeps you and me
from being we,
let his house cave in.
If I don't become we, I'm alone.
If you don't become we,
you are just you.
Why not make The East
arise again?
Why not force open
the hands of the vile?
If I rise,
if you arise,
everyone will be roused.
If I sit,
if you take a seat,
who will take a stand?
Who will fight the foe,
grapple the foul enemy hand to hand?

Translated from the Persian by Sholeh Wolpé and Tony Barnstone

NAZIM HIKMET (1901-1963)

Since I Was Thrown Inside

Since I was thrown inside,
                       the earth has orbited the sun ten times.
If you ask it:
            "Not even worth mentioning,
            a microscopic time."
If you ask me:
           "Ten years of my life."

I had a pencil
            the year I was thrown inside.
I used it all up in a week.
If you ask it:
           "A whole life."
If you ask me:
           "Come on now, just one week."

Since I was thrown inside,
                      Osman, doing time for murder,
                                  finished his seven and a half years and left,
                                  drifted around for a while,
                                  was thrown back inside for smuggling,
                                  did six months and was rereleased,
                                  his letter came yesterday, he's married,
                                  his child will be born in the spring.

They're ten years old now,
            the children who were conceived
                  the year I was thrown inside.
And that year's trembling, long-legged colts
             have long turned into confident, wide-rumped mares.
But the olive seeds are still olive seeds,
             they're still children.

New squares have cropped up in my faraway city
                               Since I was thrown inside.
And my loved ones
            are living on a street I don't know
                                    in a home I've never seen

Bread was white, fluffy as cotton
                       the year I was thrown inside.
Then it was rationed
and here, inside, the people beat each other
           for a pitch-black, fist-size piece.

Now it flows freely again,
but dark and tasteless.

The year I was thrown inside,
             the second war hadn't started yet,
the oven at Dachau weren't lit,
the atom bomb hadn't dropped on Hiroshima.

Time flowed like the blood of a child whose throat's been slit.
Then that chapter officially ended,
and now the U.S. dollar speaks of a third.

Yet, in spite of everything, the days have shone
                      since I was thrown inside,
and from the edges of darkness,
          the people, pressing their heavy hands to the pavement,
                               have begun to rise.

Since I was thrown inside
              the earth has orbited the sun ten times
and just as passionately I repeat
                         what I wrote
                                     the year I was thrown inside:
"The people, who are plentiful as ants on the ground
                                  as fish in the sea
                                           as birds in the sky,
who are cowardly, courageous,
             ignorant, supreme
                                      and childlike,
it is they who crush
             and create,
it is but their exploits sung in songs."
                       And as for the rest,
                                 my ten-year incarceration, for instance,
                                                        it's all meaningless words.

 
Translated from the Turkish by Deniz Perin


SAADI YOUSSEF (B. 1934)

Koofa

We did not name it so that it would become a city.
We came to it thirsty
starved
limping on blazing sands,
blinded by sun glow.
We cut the world from Mecca to the palace of Naaman.*
We cut the world with a sword
Until bone protruded through our hands and whitened.
When we reached water we said
let us rest here
and watch the bank
where water pours, flows, and pours.
We dipped our swords in it.
Trembling, we sheathed our hands
and prayed.

We did not name it so that it would become a city.
We built nothing except the mosque
the wall
and the hut of Ali.

But the first century is no longer the first.
Here we are now leaving it
H
U
N
G
from
the gun barrels of tanks.

Translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa

*Naaman: A biblical figure mentioned in 2 Kings.