thought and poetics is more in concert with each other than what early
revivalists might have thought.
Translation as a modernist engagement
Although revealing a changing consciousness, and a commitment to
a dynamic role of the literati, translation is a deliberate critique of the
present. To use Ezra Pound’s resort to a “long series of translations,” as
defenses against imposed limitations upon the artist’s voice, these “... were
but more elaborate masks.”^63 Translation is also an assault whose goal is to
undermine beliefs and platitudes. It is certainly a deployment of other tech-
niques and views to create new spaces. In the end, it transplants methods and
attitudes, and brings alien voices into new configurations. It ultimately
enhances intertextual density, as its achievement resides in its power to reach
and digest the registers of the original text. Depending on how cultivated the
translator is and how poetically self-preoccupied, the emerging text may
carry the traces of both the translator’s milieu and person. The anonymous
editor for the second print of Qaxm’id mukhtmrah min al-shi‘r al-‘mlaml
al-.adlth(Selected Poems from Modern World Poetry), translated by the
Iraqi poet Badr Shmkir al-Sayymb in 1955, noticed that the Iraqi poet made
“... the poems respond to his stylistic and linguistic capacities,” proving
“that he is unique, able to interact fully with world poetry through enough
acculturation.”^64 Yet, this is not the whole story, as the Iraqi poet made
a wide selection, covering Latin America, Italy, Spain, Germany, India, and
England. His selections include popular names like Neruda, Eliot, Pound,
Lorca, Rimbaud, Rilke, Stephen Spender, Edith Sitwell, and Nazim Hikmat.
The selections can be easily confused with the poet’s inventory, his images of
rain and color, his themes of love for his homeland, sentiments for women,
depictions of the poet as a rover, prison scenes and the gloom of death, and
urban life and longing. There are even the poet’s associations of tradition
and popular lore as exemplified in Walter de la Mare’s poem on Arabia, also
included in the collection.
While modern consciousness informs this kind of selection and guides the
poet’s choice of contemporaries and precursors from other cultures, it also
receives further impetus and perpetuation from this effort to reinvigorate the
Arab scene. Translation has a double role of invigoration and appropriation,
and could operate on the literary scene with great effectiveness. It offers
enough deviational poetics to elude censorship or open conflict. Its immedi-
ate contribution lies in its subtle undermining of classical canons of imita-
tion, with the form of the ancient qaxldahas the model. In periods of literary
transformation, the conflict between the old and the new, the imitative and
the creative cannot be underestimated. Writing about the resilient ancient
qaxldahform, the Palestinian-Iraqi critic and novelist JabrmI. Jabrm(d. 1995)
explains, “The wordiness, the poetic diction, was a continuation of a tradition
THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS