Post by moira on Aug 30, 2008 20:47:48 GMT 2
Amina Saïd
Amina Saïd was born in Tunis in 1952 to a Tunisian father and a French mother. She has been living in Paris since her mid-twenties. As well as nine collections of poems, all published by Les Editions de la Différence, she has published two volumes of re-invented Tunisian folk-tales. She has also translated a novel and short stories of major Filipino writer Francisco Sionil José from English There is something of the re-invented folk-tale in many of her poems as well, tales of origin as in “Child of the sun and the earth, “ or an elaboration of Muslim/Christian legend in “Like the axe forgotten at the foot of the tree.” More than for most contemporary poets, there is a characteristic vocabulary associated with her work, like an underlying sketch: the sky and its silence, the sea, light, the human eye, stone, exile: an impossible eternal return to a landscape of childhood. But she has also presented her work at innumerable international festivals, and the idea of certain human verities, not all pleasant, that remain constant as the scenery and language change is also a preoccupation.
BLOOD OF THE SEA
1.
Djibouti
unstable star
beneath the moon’s capsized arc
Djibouti
crossroads of dust
naked children play
on the shore of the Red Sea
time’s shepherd man
looks towards the desert’s eternity
we are the pilgrims of errancy
says the poet
2
secret network of trails
shadow of stones at prayer
sacred circle
for chattering saints
stones upon stones
stones for life
stones for death
3.
the ancestors watch over
the children of Dammerjog
a goat meditates in the courtyard
the bird weaves its nest on the tree of sky
4.
what have you come to do in my country
says the tale of the schoolboy from Boulaous
and what are you looking for ?
5.
Maskali
white boat
come to meet an island dream
buttressed on the sea’s passion
where am I if there’s nothing but a horizon-line?
we approach the sandy cove
the trees here are made of coral
6.
canyon chasm inhabited by djinns
echoing the dark
of my childhood nightmares
7.
Goubet el-Kharâb cones of desolation
twin breasts
bathed by the sea’s blood
8.
stones upon stones
stones darkened by all the world’s sins
stones scattered on the earth’s fire
ambergris pearls of the divine rosary
stones to the right
stones to the left
stones for life
stones for death
hell and heaven have no borders
9.
camels, goats, gazelles
like a sign above us
a hawk breaches space
a few trees implore the cloud’s whiteness
a condensation of tears
as many prayers gone up in smoke
10.
gash, knife-wound, scar
in the mineral flesh
yawning gap in the fault
view of the abyss
11.
wide-open eye beneath a shroud of salt
Lake Assal pins the sun at zenith
crystals of pure light
caravans petrified as the world ages
saline waters of burning bitterness
virgin waters liquid veins
who struck the stone
so that the spring gushed forth?
12.
brute stones free stones
black and ochre pawns on the giant chessboard
stumps in the earth’s toothless laughter
Satan’s landmarks
there are no happy stones
13.
barbed memory
gripping the bronze soil
line of demarcation
rampart of thorns played with by the wind
the nomads have entered the city
14.
beneath the poet’s portrait
the child from Hadj-Diddeh asks me
did you know Rimbaud, ma’am?
***
Amina Saïd
Translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker
First published in The Manhattan Review and in Modern Poetry in Translation(UK)
Read more by this poet here:
Words Without Borders:
tinyurl.com/3nol2s
Poems.com
tinyurl.com/4egqfq