New England Review

Translator's Notebook — "In the Underbelly of Beirut"

Suneela Mubayi

“Engaging with a text like this is not just another translation—there is a direct relevance out of a sense of feeling personally implicated, even if by proxy.”

Hilal Chouman’s novel, Sorrow in My Heart, is written entirely in standard Arabic, the form of classical Arabic prose that evolved in the late 19th and early 20th centuries mainly through the advent of journalism and translation. His writing style belongs to what we call in Arabic al-sahl al-mumtaniʿ—easy yet forbidding—and one of my favorite queer Palestinian writers, Raji Bathish, also writes in this fashion.

The (misleading) image of Beirut as a gay party destination for Westerners (and Gulfies) in the Middle East is omnipresent, as significant portions of the novel take place in nightclubs. “In the Underbelly of Beirut,” the excerpt published in NER 43.2, is split into fourteen mini chapters, and Hilal intelligently connects problematic implications with the legacy of one of the murkier periods of the Lebanese civil war. The narrator/protagonist Youssef, a gay man from Berlin, was one of the Lebanese children who were either kidnapped or sold by their parents to human traffickers, who then sold them for adoption in Germany in the mid 1980s. After growing up in Berlin, Youssef has finally tracked down his biological family and, encouraged by a Syrian-Kurdish lover, has travelled to Lebanon for the first time to see them. The narrative itself is an exercise in translation, as Youssef is thinking in German and translating himself into English to speak with his Lebanese interlocutors. When he gets high at a rave, he starts speaking to them in German, and all this is conveyed by Hilal in Arabic.

“In the Underbelly of Beirut” takes place in two prominent “gay” party spaces in Beirut; a gay bar/restaurant named Bardo (which sadly closed recently), and B-018, an underground club in the Karantina area just outside of Beirut that was actually the site of a massacre during the civil war. As a queer, nonbinary person and a student of Arabic literature who moved in these spaces in Beirut and maintains links with the queer community there, engaging with a text like this is not just another translation—there is a direct relevance out of a sense of feeling personally implicated, even if by proxy.

The sharply diglossic nature of Arabic is always an issue for translators as the way one talks sounds nothing like the way one writes. Hilal wrote the dialogue in roughly the same register as the narrative to reflect their “translated” nature, except for specific slang expressions used by the Lebanese characters, e.g., sharmout (“slut”), or nayyeek (“fuckboy”). Therefore, I chose to “slangify” the dialogue in the translation overall. Hilal is also not reticent to slip in English phrases that are used commonly in Lebanese Arabic, e.g., “graphic designer,” or when Jean yells out “fuck me!” to Farran the drag queen. Some purists of style might consider inserting these phrases instead of their Arabic equivalent to be rakaka, or poor style, but I believe they reflect the way people speak more realistically.

Translating the two sets of musical lyrics was the most interesting part of this translation. Both sets are sung by Farran during his performance. The first set of lyrics was in classical Arabic, and the other in Egyptian vernacular, both from songs by Umm Kulthum, arguably the greatest diva and most well-known voice of Arabic music in the 20th century. For the formal Arabic, I tried to render them in a slightly Shakespearian fashion as that is the effect they give in the original, i.e., they have that recherché, elevated tone. For the colloquial lyrics, I attempted to give a sense of rhyme that may sound slightly cheesy in English as they aren’t meant to sound “natural” to begin with.

Suneela Mubayi is a translator, independent scholar, and writer of Indian descent. She completed a PhD in Arabic literature from NYU with a thesis on vagabond poets between classical and modern Arabic poetry and has taught Arabic language and literature in the US and England. She is interested in the intersection between language, the body, and poetry, and gender and sexual liberation. She has translated close to a hundred essays, poems, and fiction pieces between Arabic, English, and Urdu for platforms such as Banipal, Words Without Borders, Asymptote, Jadaliyya, Mada Masr, and elsewhere.

Writer's Notebook — How to Write a Poem Called “Ho Chi Minh City”

Steven Duong

“What do truth, authenticity, and testament have to do with this poem, any poem? What is the difference between invention and revision, between imagination and falsehood?”

1. Leave Chiang Mai for Ho Chi Minh City.

2. Find a hostel in District 10, something with a nice rooftop and easy access to the street.

3. Book the single room at the top floor. It’s your first time sleeping alone in months, not surrounded by bunkbeds and the belongings of other travelers. It’s early February, 2020. The world has not yet shut down in the wake of a global pandemic. Accommodations are cheap.

4. Establish a routine: spend the morning writing, visit the market, return to the hostel for dinner and beers with the owner and his friends.

5. Before bed, smoke alone on the roof and consider whether a haphazard mix of marijuana and tobacco can ever truly replace the grand majesty of a pharmaceutical, something produced in a lab for the express purpose of making you feel at ease.

6. Watch the news: the country will be closing its airports any day now.

7. Book a flight home.

8. When the flight is cancelled, book another.

9. When your second flight is cancelled, book a third, a fourth, a fifth.

10. Finally, one holds. Fly from Ho Chi Minh City to Tokyo to Los Angeles where your parents are waiting to pick you up.

11. Move back home. This will be the longest and most indefinite stay you’ve had since you were eighteen. The air feels heavier here than you remember.

12. Fall in and out of old habits, patterns, ways of being.

13. Tell your parents about your time in the city they were born and raised in. Trace their faces for signs of recognition, both real and feigned.

14. Do not write.

15. In four months, move to a new city to be with people you love more than anything. Having lived in that love for months—only then consider writing.  

16. Write a poem about your last week in Ho Chi Minh City.

17. Return to the images you remember, your view from the roof of the hostel: the street cafés, the muddy river, the market and its vendors.

18. Consider whether these images present something true about your experience, or whether they present a vaguely exotic, diasporic fantasy of the city, this very real place that raised your parents and your parents’ parents.

19. Know the poem will be a ghazal even before your couplets keep landing in the same place—faces, facing, surfacing—all these variations on the face, the aspect of a thing it presents to the world. The face is both an object of perception and a reflection of its owner’s perception. It signifies presentation, but also directionality. What does a thing face? Like you, the ghazal obsesses over what it can never truly reach. It’s a kind of homing device, always facing what it wants most, and in doing so it creates a gravitational field, pulling the language again and again to the same center. Just as the poem attempts to root itself to a word, the speaker attempts to root himself to the city by locating all the surfaces upon which he might direct his attention.

20. Face everything you can.

21. Exhaust all the apparent possibilities of the face.

22. Title the poem “Saigon.”

23. Stop writing.

24. Go to work.

25. Love your friends.

26. After a few weeks, return to “Saigon” and discover it lacks a hinge. It’s not mechanical, not exactly, but the poem is missing some connective tissue, and you’re not sure whether anything you remember will provide it.

27. Fabricate a memory. It’s the sort of thing you might put in a short story or novel draft, a narrative kick to pitch things forward. Introduce to the poem this fabricated memory about your mother attempting to smuggle bougainvillea cuttings through airport security.

28. Imagine immigration for a moment as a kind of ecological infraction.

29. Imagine it also as a simple desire to be in a new place surrounded by old things. Even transplanted, the flowers will face what they’ve always faced: the sun.

30. Consider whether you’ve made this flower-smuggling fabrication in service of the poem, or the poet. Is it just a convenience? Should anything in a poem be this convenient? What do truth, authenticity, and testament have to do with this poem, any poem? What is the difference between invention and revision, between imagination and falsehood?

31. Stick to the flower-smuggling. It feels truer than the truth, so chase it where it goes, from face to face to faces.

32. Reach what feels like the end.

33. Consider the ending conventions of the ghazal form, how the poet traditionally includes their name in the last couplet as a sort of signature. It’s something you’ve always loved about ghazals, this nod to the act of writing, an admission of the self.

34. Instead of your name, use the word name. Or rather, named. The omission of your actual name feels crucial for a moment, both an adherence to tradition and a departure. The poet’s name is less important here than the act of naming. His name was something given to him. It was used by others, then passed on to him. He is not the first. He is not the last.

35. Interrogate the choice you’ve made to title the poem with the city’s old prewar name, a name your parents still use. They believe the city will one day return to its old self, which they see as its real self. People who actually live in the city only refer to it as that: the city. I’m going back into the city on Saturday. The city is unbearably hot this time of month. Et cetera. Why this title, then? Is it a revisionist impulse, a vestige of anticommunist propaganda, a nostalgia you don’t really even hold? Or is it simply habit? Perhaps you’ve learned to call the city by its old name because it was what was given to you. Having spent a month there, living in your hostel, your sixth-floor room, were you given anything else?

36. Go for a walk in your new city.

37. Stop at a shop selling furniture and home goods. There’s a globe there in the window, sitting on a chestnut nightstand.

38. Enter the store. Examine the globe. Maneuver it so that the city you left this time last year, the city you intend to return to for the rest of your life, again and again, finally faces you.

39. Retitle the poem “Ho Chi Minh City.”

Steven Duong is a poet from San Diego, California. His poems and short fiction can be found in the American Poetry Review, AGNI, Guernica, Catapult, and other publications. He currently lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where he is pursuing an MFA in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Writer’s Notebook—Hysterosalpingography

Rosalie Moffett

“There’s a syllogistic reckoning that makes poetry—writing it, reading it—an act of hope.”

For some reason, recently, Dippin’ Dots popped into my mind. Those weird little beads of “astronaut” ice cream, sold in cups at the mall. 

And with them, madeleine-style, came a memory-rush of the excited, futuristic ambiance of the turn of the millennium: the metallic space-suit-esque clothing, the candy-colored translucent iMacs, Britney Spears on Mars.1 The general optimism of the Clinton economy. 

Of course, I was born in 1986. And kids, perhaps especially millennials, were supposed to feel that all the doors would open for them, that if they loved what they did, they’d never work a day in their lives. Passion, etc. I didn’t at the time register Dippin’ Dots as a kind of promise about what the future held, but something sank in.2

I bring this up because I think one of the things that characterizes my generation is a grand dissolution. (And yes, disillusion…) What seemed to be solid ground is dissolving. In addition to literal ground—the rising sea levels eating away at the edges—I’m thinking of things like the idea of a career, democracy, of objective truth, which are disintegrating into the instability of gig-economy, decentralized armed militias, and whatever’s the opposite of a shared sense of reality.3

All that was already under way, and then the pandemic came along and jet-fueled the crumbling of certainty. 

No one’s having babies anymore. 

Just Google “Millennial fertility rate” and the lamentations and listicles pile up—it’s economic precarity, debt, climate anxiety, the mental health pandemic, the pandemic-pandemic, war, backsliding of basic rights…

A promise about what the future held—

Many of the poems I’ve been writing lately are trying to figure out how to think about the future, how to reasonably hope, and what we must be resigned to. How can you imagine the future when the present is so slippery, so ready to dissolve? And, in the absence of that ability to imagine, is it possible to hope?

Sometimes, it seems that hope requires a kind of willful naiveté, a protective heedlessness.4 But, I guess, one of the many utilities of poetry is how it helps us re-see, un-numbed and un-blindered.5 How it returns us to our world more sensate than before.

Conceive first meant “take (seed) into the womb, become pregnant,” and then, half a century later, took on the meaning “take into the mind, form a correct notion of.”6 It seems important to recognize that, apparently, we know intuitively that there’s a connection between having a child and conceptualizing, realizing. I would add that even thinking about having a baby stretches your conceived-of territory of the future, forces the mind to imagine—in practical, pressing ways—further than it feels comfortable doing. 

And poetry can think about time in a way nothing else can. In part through the collapse of it—in “Hysterosalpingography” the wiggle room in ancient roman prophecy becomes, through the tesseract of the lines, the hospital room the speaker finds herself in. We can be tricked into conceiving of vast swaths of time. Lineation instills an elasticity of comprehension. That “no one will recover” blooms broadly, anxiously into the blank space, before sharpening down into its specific, insignificant thought (“… my x-rays from the earth”) dilates the mind from the large to the small, from the big picture to the present. 

I don’t mean to say this as if I have mastered something, as if I am intentional. What I mean to say is that I feel that the form does this to me—as I fumble around in a draft, as I hit the return key like a horn in the traffic of the language—that the act of writing a poem is an experiment in feeling time and scale. 

The act of writing this poem was an experiment in conceiving of what it would mean to have, or not have a baby. What kind of world would she live in? What kind of future would stretch before her? What kind of divination—if I spread the entrails of the present out before me—could I muster? 

A hysterosalpingogram is a physically painful7 act of looking, of confronting the present. Something that you are most likely to undergo if you are interested in imagining a certain kind of future. It sounds right, in our particularly drastic, violent and bleak moment, to say that hope requires a willful blindering. Or a naiveté bordering on delusion.8

Dippin’ Dots seem now to me a kind of delusion—that an exciting future could be purchased, held, pressed against the roof of your mouth in the mall’s food court.9

Perhaps “Hysterosalpingography” seems like a very resigned poem. But there’s something hope-adjacent (devotion?) that comes with looking and allowing yourself to feel. Isn’t it the least-hopeful thing to look away, to cover your eyes—that is, to give up on it?

There’s a syllogistic reckoning that makes poetry—writing it, reading it—an act of hope. There’s a way that grappling with time—as I think one does, inevitably, in a poem—that makes it an act of devotion. That painful facing forward. This pulls against the dissolution that threatens my ability to consider the future, that makes me want to cover my eyes. 

I suppose this is when I should become “the speaker” for a moment and say that 6 weeks ago, I had a baby. 

I’m trying to finish this sentence, this essay, as my daughter is waking up. Soon she’ll cry, and time will both extend and collapse—the future arriving, ringing in the air. 

[1] “Oops!… I Did It Again” official music video

[2] “Dippin’ Dots ice cream is a cool, fun, out-of-this-world treat – but, in fact, it’s not astronaut ice cream!” 

[3] Not all of the dissolution is bad. Like, we didn’t need the hard—to some, comforting—binary of man and woman; we needed some things to blur and open themselves up to something multifaceted.

[4] “The good of this method, of any method / of divination is how it spares one / the act of looking / at what has been hauled, dripping, into the light.”

[5] “below, / doors to this world open along with shiny black exits, / unholstered… what has been hauled, dripping, into the light.”

[6] Conceive (v)

[7] Should you need to undergo this, I recommend ibuprofen at the very least, and someone to drive you home. I had neither, and it was a mistake. 

[8] The original appeal / of Magic Eye was in the disbelief in anything there / to see.

[9] Marketing, a failed CIA plot to innoculate / against letdown.

Rosalie Moffett is the author of Nervous System (Ecco, 2019), which was chosen by Monica Youn for the National Poetry Series Prize and listed by the New York Times as a New and Notable book, as well as June in Eden (Ohio State University Press, 2016). She has been awarded the “Discovery”/Boston Review prize, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and scholarships from the Tin House and Bread Loaf writers’ conferences. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Narrative, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor at the University of Southern Indiana.

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