Homework

What is called homework in English, we called Aufgaben in my native lingo (with a bit of a Luxembourg inflection softening the German loanword). So coming home from school it was great to find issue#5 of Aufgabe, one of the stellar magazines of the US poetry scene, and one I’ll homework any day. Besides a fascinating, wide-ranging, very open section called “Re and Not Re ‘John Cage’,” the issue contains — opens, in fact, with — a 50-page section of current Moroccan poetry, most ably edited by Jalal El Hakmaoui and Guy Bennett, and with translations by Hassan Hilmy (from Arabic) and Guy Bennett (from French).

This selection gives a very good overview of the younger, just-emerged, generation of arabo-phone and franco-phone poets (though where are the berbero-phone, or amazigh writing poets?). Lamented by Jalal El Hakmaoui in his informative introductory survey of Moroccan poetry is the dirth of women — this selection includes only 4 women out of 19 poets — though he hopes that recent changes in family law and other legislative & social measures will bring about “a new generation of women poets [that] will soon make its voice heard.”

What surprised me a bit in the intro was the erasure of the elder statesman of francophone Moroccan poetry, Abdellatif Laâbi (see my blog entry for 25 february 2006), though Guy Bennett does mention him in his intro. Laâbi is not named while just about every other major figure is, while his magazine Souffles (the major avant-garde Moroccan poetry magazine of the sixties) is mentioned briefly only to be dismissed as turning too political and ideological. This could be understandable in that El Hakmaoui counts himself as part of a nineties generation of poets which he himself describes as “blasé, disillusioned and defiant. A lost generation that no longer believed in the successive corrupt governments, nor in the peddlers of ideology on the right or on the left, nor in the literature of their aging predecessors, nor even in the hoopla of pseudo-democracy.” A necessary move, possibly, probably. But ’nuff quibbled. It is wonderful to have this wide-ranging selection in what feels like excellent translations (ah, to have bi-lingual versions would have been paradise…) and informative, well-contextualized presentation. Here is the T.o.C.: