Review by Patricia Thrushart
Tango Below A Narrow Ceiling
By Riad Saleh Hussein (1954 – 1982)
Translated from the Arabic by Saleh Razzouk and Philip Terman
The Bitter Oleander Press, Fayetteville New York, 2021
A Review
I rarely read poetry in translation. At most I’ll seek out books with interlinear translations, especially in Spanish or German, where I have at least a rudimentary understanding of the language, its sonority and its rules. In favoring these books, I’ve convinced myself that I am experiencing the poet, however imperfectly, in his or her original voice. Otherwise, I must admit that, when reading poetry in translation, I always fret that I am a step removed, closer to the translator than to the writer, separated as if in another, impenetrable dimension where the poet is just a shadow.
I realize that this stubbornness has robbed me of experiencing an immense body of work, painstakingly created by translators who adhere to their own set of rules, standards and ethics; who are most often motivated by a tremendous respect for the original poems.
When Clarion professor and poet Philip Terman announced that he had collaborated on a translation of Syrian poet Riad Saleh Hussein, I put aside my normal wariness and ordered a copy of the book. The project was compelling on so many levels. First, there is Hussien’s tragic timeline: suffering from a childhood illness leading to an operation robbing him of his senses of speech and hearing; living with the political vicissitudes of Syria— arrested and tortured, even; and dying at the age of 28, having already influenced a generation of Arabic Beat poets.Then, there is the chance to experience a voice from a culture so far removed from mine to be almost mythical— an ancient, proud, palm-studded country whose name now renders up images of refugees and bombed-out buildings. Finally, there is the marvel of a Jewish-American poet working with a Syrian university professor to bring the poetry of a long-dead, Arabic-speaking writer to the shelves of America.
Beyond all of that, I knew that under the beautifully deft attention of Terman’s poetic skill, the voice and meaning of Hussein’s work would be honored.
I dove in.
In Hussein’s poetry I found a heady and sometimes head-spinning mixture of the abstract and the tangible, the former challenging me as a reader to let go of discernment, and the latter bringing me back to a grounded place from which I could connect to Riad’s world. Take, for example, the opening lines of his poem, The Bad Guy, dedicated to Sylvia Plath: “And I remember that the blue woman, when she had seen me weeping corpses/ and the poor,/Said: your two eyes are mirrors showing fifty continents of aches/and useless waiting…”. Contrast that language to his ode to his country, the first poem in the book: “O happy and beautiful Syria/like a store in December./O Poor Syria/Like a bone between the teeth of a dog…” Both beautiful; the first almost hallucinatory, the second with the clarity of Whitman. Throughout Hussein’s work, archetypes return again and again to remind of our commonality: the moon, a beautiful woman, the sea, love, and always, too much death.
After reading Tango Beneath A Narrow Ceiling, my thoughts were a jumble of emotions and images, and I went back to that poem for Sylvia Plath, which ends: “I am the bad guy/I had to die early/Before a rose preys upon me/Or a clean artist engraves amulets and earrings out of my bones.” Hussein did die early, leaving us to wonder what he might have created with the wreckage that Syria became. The last poem in the book is by Terman, written for Riad, which I read as a lament and an elegy. In it, he asks: “Can this translation give you back the voices you heeded in your soul’s privacy?”
The answer, for this reader, is a resounding “yes.”
