Green Birds in Jerusalem: On Translating Gazan Poet Heba Al-Madhoun

https://tinyurl.com/TranslateHeba

I’ve been entrusted to translate a Gazan poet’s manuscript, which I can’t read. I speak almost no Arabic and can’t decipher a single letter. I was not taught the Arabic alphabet at any stage of my Israeli schooling, elementary, middle or high.

It is the poet’s widower who entrusts me with her work. When I meet him, I am under the impression that he aspires to translate his late wife’s writing himself. A public radio story about him mentions this hope. While he sits in my Boston living room I ask after the translation. He has retired the effort for now. Understandable, I tell him.

Literary translation is profoundly demanding work, even for the skilled professional. The poet’s widower is not a literary translator. He is a political analyst.

He is the survivor of cataclysmic violence, the father of four of whom two survive. His hands are full with the demands of the ameliorative chapter he endeavors to seed in the United States.

His wife was at home when an Israeli airstrike buried her under the ruins with their children. He had just crossed the street to speak with a neighbor.

Two of his children will be rescued. In my home he will refer to certain injuries and their complications.

The poet died alongside her eldest and youngest. Eighteen and eight, ages I’ve done my best to mother, too.

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Initially the survivor sits on our sofa, inclined to relate right away the most crushing elements of his recent history. Our elderly cat is entranced by his voice.

The animal has settled very near the survivor’s socked foot. Occasionally the pink nose assesses while the jade eyes squint. A narrowed cat eye signals trust.

A guest inspiring these behaviors sometimes will respond with a solicitous word, a glance or petting that will invite the next feline gesture, a paw on the foot. Ultimately the ginger rescue’s appetite for friendship can be misread as aggression. The insistent touch involves claws.

Today the cat elects restraint while a survivor holds forth. Soon we will transition to the dining room and eat.

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This speaker’s vocal powers were nulled for some weeks after his mother was killed in the aftermath of his wife’s death alongside two of their children. I heard this testimony in the radio interview. In my home it is retold by the guest facing us. I have seen that expression before. I recognize shock.

Active horror fuels our peaceful dialogue, during which we establish a lively rapport. Our experiences differ but our outlooks align. Themes that compel me as a writer, the political analyst explores in a pragmatic field. We share a preoccupation with leaders disconnected from their obligation to living people.

We articulate our cognizance of authority figures unconcerned with our welfare, more attached to delusion and greed.

While inducing mayhem they’re pilfering our assets and misshaping our spirits. They involve us in bottomless suffering and incessant panic. The more tolerable renditions of these crisis modes are ecstatic loyalty and conscienceless rage.

After the visit my husband will dream that Boston has been flattened.

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I sent the survivor a message. I offered to help with the translation effort. He accepted my offer. That is not to be taken for granted. I am not the most reasonable assignee to this project. I can’t read a word of Arabic.

In my childhood and youth I am the enrollee of a certain Israeli public school subset. My basic education habituates me in segregation by sex.

My curriculum includes an indoctrination in an ancient faith. We hold divine the literatures of Iron Age visionaries. We trust in the decryption by medieval exegetes.

In one way my religious schoolmates and I are no different from the irreligious majority of Israeli public school cohorts. We are taught Arabic ineffectively.

In the late elementary grades we’re assigned Arabic textbooks printed in Hebrew. Our illiteracy in Arabic characters thus resolved, we recite transliterated skits in class.

I remember a line to this day, a scrap of dialogue from a restaurant scene. The customer requests a cup of carrot juice.

Notably that line is seared into my brain because my performance was halted by an angry teacher. I was overexcited by the new classroom routine, drama units acted out in a fresh language. I was a shy girl starving for creative outlets. As an Arabic-language actor I toggled from anxious to hammy. Next, ashamed.

Oddly or not the line about carrot juice wasn’t mine. I played the waiter, whom I portrayed as a panicky wreck. I grabbed the class broom as a prop. Summoned to serve while sweeping, I drop the long-handled cleaning implement on the concrete-and-stone amalgam tiles, causing a resounding clatter. I don’t recall the waiter’s lines.

I retain without a residue of shame the melody of an Arabic song included in our textbook, and a fragment of verse. We were singing about olives. The narrator asks Ya Rabi to bless an olive tree. With olives, presumably. Ya Rabi does not mean you rabbi. Ya Rabi is an appeal to God.

In subsequent grades Arabic becomes an elective. But whether you choose Arabic or another option, typically you will not attain literacy in your secondary language. The average student’s sense of inutility has something to do with this. Where will I apply this language, a student wonders.

When will I speak it, to whom? A typical Israeli student’s sense of inutility as it relates to Arabic could have been resolved, theoretically, by a field trip component. Students living in mixed cities are situated ideally for an educational routine of this category.

I didn’t live in a mixed city. Nevertheless the implementation was feasible. My Israeli hometown like any was proximate to Arabic-speaking communities.

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Entrusted with a late Gazan poet’s work, in time I will deliver the manuscript to the qualified literary translator I’ll track down with a local literature professor’s assistance. First I’ll consider asking a convenient Arabic speaker to read over the verses and give me the gist.

I decide against that. I don’t want to set up anyone to refuse the task. I can imagine refusing it. For example the friends who have lost to the destruction of Gaza twenty-one family members might find the immersion in a slain Gazan’s verses painful.

While figuring out what to do, I subject excerpts of the poetry to translation by artificial intelligence. The translations simulated by this system bury the original poetry in ungainly analogs and, as I’ll discover later, random invention. Nevertheless I encounter a relatable spirit. This writer greets the morning from an exiled outlook.

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She envisions a legendary city she can’t reach, an urbanity she populates with fantastical beings. Avians of an unstated species, they are not like any birds I ever saw in Jerusalem. She endows them with an impossible color.

This poet is going for a touch of magic, my initial assumption. As a lyrical writer will traditionally, Heba Al-Madhoun injects a line of verse about Jerusalem with extraordinary color and a sense of the uncanny. Odds are that a Gazan poet of her generation has never set foot in the Holy City, categorically banned.

I was a girl growing up downland. Jerusalem was accessible by an hourlong bus ride. Green birds in Jerusalem, imagine. This poet waxes psychedelic.

No, she doesn’t. A competing idea prompts the research proving that green birds in Jerusalem are a solid reality.

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A Gazan poet picturing green birds in Jerusalem is not being inventive. She is describing her region’s changing biosphere. Feral parakeets invade Jerusalem, two varieties so far.

The freeborn heirs of escapees, their dauntless ancestors will soar among them for a time, the original fugitive pets. It does not take long for paired parakeets to establish a flock in a temperate clime.

Champions of native and sojourning songbirds bear witness sadly. The emancipated captives can no longer be controlled, per expert opinion.

I am certain I absorbed this ecologic update in a recent season of life. The knowledge receded. I forgot about the parakeets.

I reverted to memories of the Jerusalem I visited routinely in my formative days. Most of my time there was spent in the tower block neighborhood where my stringently pious relatives lived, a locality inhabited by birds of modest plumages, feathers emulating earth and rock. And shadow. Consider the white-spectacled bulbul, gray transitioning to black.

But in flight or attack this little songbird flashes a distractive signal, a fluorescent yellow undertail.

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When the translator sends me a first batch of translations, he includes the introductory poem situating green birds in Jerusalem. It is actually quite plausible that Heba Al-Madhoun intended that these birds be read as mythic.

After all, their voices draw the listener into a legend restoring the city to unspoiled beauty. The legend that the birds promote is made of tales centering a value often trumpeted while undercut, love.

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According to her bereaved husband, Heba Al-Madhoun did not like for her picture to be taken. In the low-resolution digital image he has shared with me, she is draped in the garb of a devout Muslim woman, a white hijab and a black abaya. She is seated on a cushioned bench, smiling in the company of people whom her husband identifies as colleagues at a writers’ event. They’re smiling too.

Was her camera shyness an expression of devoutness? Among Muslims as among Jews, a devout adherent may eschew the picture-taking on religious grounds. Her widower recounts that she would allow a photo to be taken if she was with students or colleagues. The mindful reader will discover the same spirit in her writing. Hers is a voice of ardent faith and independent judgement.

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Her widower describes her as a bold internal critic. Heba spoke out against the routinization of violence by the literalist theocrats running the show where she lived. Naturally she suffered threats. Unsurprising that the poem launching her collection prompts a redefinition of exile and homeland. She repositions these concepts as conditions of the heart.

Concerning the green birds she involves in the same meditation, if they refer to feral parakeets, that meaning is secondary. More importantly, to Muslim readers the green birds are vessels for the souls of martyrs. That is their role in sacred text.

In a modern-day Gazan’s poem their function is consolatory. Green birds are a comforting vision evoked by a poet whose own biography proves that martyrdom need not be sought. A Gazan mother is selected while going about her business at home, her two sons alongside her, the eldest and youngest.

The two middle children will survive, a boy and a girl. In the next poem their mother goes on to lambaste the glorification of martyrdom, which she ties to its commodification.

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Online portraits of the literary translator we’ve contracted show him wearing a white turban and a white jalabiya, his aspect sober. He does not translate the poems as the Large Language Model did. He refers to Jerusalem by another name.

Al-Quds, an Arabic geonym, expressive of the city’s holiness. Knowledge I picked up while growing up in that region, maybe in Arabic class though I could have inferred it myself. The words for holiness in Arabic and Hebrew are closely related, sharing a common ancestry.

But will the meaning be lost on anglophone readers? Most will be unfamiliar with the standard name referencing Jerusalem in the region where the city persists. Something to address with the poet’s family. Certainly now is not the time to involve the translator, whose work must proceed in peace.

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https://tinyurl.com/TranslateHeba

—- by Naama Goldstein