{"id":14829,"date":"2016-07-25T07:58:08","date_gmt":"2016-07-25T11:58:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=14829"},"modified":"2016-07-25T07:58:08","modified_gmt":"2016-07-25T11:58:08","slug":"the-first-abdellatif-laabi-collection-of-2016-out-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/the-first-abdellatif-laabi-collection-of-2016-out-now\/","title":{"rendered":"The First Abdellatif La\u00e2bi Collection of 2016 Out\u00a0Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

via Arab Lit (in English) BY MLYNXQUALEY<\/a><\/span><\/span> on<\/em> 0<\/a> )<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

There are two volumes of poetry by Prix Goncourt winner Abdellatif La\u00e2bi out in fresh English translations this year:<\/em><\/p>\n

\"laabi2\"The first, Beyond the Barbed Wire<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>is out from Carcanet this month.\u00a0The second\u00a0is\u00a0In Praise of Defeat<\/i><\/a><\/strong>, translated by\u00a0Donald Nicholson-Smith, published by\u00a0Archipelago, set for release in November [Permit me to add that this volume has a preface by me, Pierre Joris].<\/p>\n

The poems in Beyond the Barbed Wire\u00a0<\/em>were\u00a0translated and selected by\u00a0Andr\u00e9 Naffis-Sahely, introduced,\u00a0somewhat surprisingly, not by a Moroccan poet or scholar but by American poet Jim Moore.<\/p>\n

Moore connects with\u00a0La\u00e2bi urgent work as a poet, but also personally: \u201cI wish Abdellatif La\u00e2bi had been with me, some forty years\u00a0ago, when I was in prison! La\u00e2bi and I were almost exactly the\u00a0same age, and halfway across the world from each other the\u00a0Moroccan poet and I were doing time.\u201d<\/p>\n

While in prison, Moore discovered a hidden book of poetry in which, he said, inmates had written poems that were important to them. \u201cI hadn\u2019t quite understood that\u00a0poetry doesn\u2019t only matter to people with college educations;\u00a0that it is a medium that those in trouble turn to instinctively.\u201d<\/p>\n

The poems in this collection are pulled from different moments in\u00a0La\u00e2bi\u2019s acclaimed career,\u00a0with the largest selection coming from his from his 1981 collection, The Poem Beneath the Gag,\u00a0<\/em>and his\u00a01993 collection The World\u2019s Embrace<\/em>.<\/p>\n

A poem from the first, \u201cLetter to My Friends Overseas<\/a>,\u201d appeared in Asymptote. There, Naffis-Sahely wrote that \u201cThe original text of \u2018Lettre \u00e0 mes amis d\u2019outre-mer\u2019<\/em>\/\u2019Letter To My Friends Overseas\u2019 was first published in La Nouvelle Critique<\/em> in August 1978, after being smuggled out of prison piecemeal to friends of La\u00e2bi\u2019s in France and later reassembled.\u201d<\/p>\n

It opens:<\/p>\n

Friends
\nyou\u2019ve become
\none of those beacons of light
\nwho help to defend me
\nfrom the forceps of the night<\/p>\n

La\u00e2bi is still concerned with the work of imprisoned poets, and recently brought Ashraf Fayadh\u2019s\u00a0Instructions Within\u00a0<\/em>from Arabic into French.<\/a><\/p>\n

His \u201cDeath<\/a>\u201d also came from that collection, which opens with the ringing and plain-spoken:<\/p>\n

Here I am aged thirty-three years
\nand I too start to think
\nabout death
\nI\u2019m not talking
\nabout death with a capital D
\nbut simply my own
\nwhich might come any day now
\nand is an experience with which
\nI must settle some scores<\/p>\n

An interview with Naffis-Sahely just published in\u00a0Guernica <\/em><\/a>sheds light on the poems that he chose for his\u00a0collection.<\/p>\n

Donald Nicholson-Smith, we can assume, chose different poems. One appeared in March in\u00a0Bomb,\u00a0<\/em>\u201cPoems Fallen from the Train<\/a>.\u201d Its urgency is somewhat different, and it is laced with humor. And this wonderful line:<\/p>\n

Reading sometimes means
\nbeing humiliated for not writing<\/p>\n

These two collections represent a major push toward making\u00a0La\u00e2bi\u2019s work more available in English; they will be interesting to read against one another.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

via Arab Lit (in English) BY MLYNXQUALEY on JULY 25, 2016 \u2022 ( 0 ) There are two volumes of poetry by Prix Goncourt winner Abdellatif La\u00e2bi out in fresh English translations this year:...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[498,66,91,103],"tags":[123,1650,1874],"class_list":["post-14829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-maghreb","category-maghrebi-literature","category-poetry","category-translation","tag-abdellatif-laabi","tag-andre-naffis-sahely","tag-jim-moore"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14829"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14832,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14829\/revisions\/14832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}