{"id":15494,"date":"2017-09-08T09:51:33","date_gmt":"2017-09-08T13:51:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=15494"},"modified":"2017-09-08T09:51:33","modified_gmt":"2017-09-08T13:51:33","slug":"exile-womens-turn-a-poem-of-east-and-west-by-nabile-fares","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/exile-womens-turn-a-poem-of-east-and-west-by-nabile-fares\/","title":{"rendered":"“Exile: Women’s Turn \u2014 A Poem of East and West” by Nabile Far\u00e8s"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Just out from Dialogos Press<\/a>, this excellent translation of Nabile Far\u00e8s L\u2019Exil au f\u00e9minin, <\/em>a poem sequence from 1990. A superb poet & novelist, who left us in 2016, Far\u00e8s may be best known in this country for his second novel, Un passager de l\u2019Occident (A Passenger From The West)<\/em>, which concerns his meeting and friendship with James Baldwin, also translated by Peter Thompson & published in 2010 by UNO Press (I wrote an introduction to that book which will be reprinted in my forthcoming Against Tyranny<\/em>). Here the blurb I wrote for Exile: Women\u2019s Turn<\/em>:<\/p>\n

The tri-consonantal Arabic root h.j.r. states the fact of exile in the nouns hejer\/hejira, while simultaneously naming the woman Hagar, mother of Ishmael, she who personifies exile as the condition of woman in the Abrahamic cultures, where, as Nabile Far\u00e8s says, she is \u201can illegal in language.\u201d And it is the great merit & beauty of these poems to speak to & of (without the male arrogance of claiming to speak for) the women (of his native Algeria, & of elsewhere & not only in the Arab world) in their double exile, \u201cthese women [who] resembled \/ Clandestine vowels \/ Of the Unwanted Languages,\u201d humbly declaring his work to be \u201cyour voyage \/\/ my translation.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And here an excerpt from the Foreword by translator Peter Thompson:<\/p>\n

\n

This most recent translation of Far\u00e8s is the first one to follow his death (August, 2016). I had greatly looked forward to giving him the English version. He was a reader of English and an admirer of Bill Lavender\u2019s book designs.<\/p>\n

I had also anticipated more conversations about the theme of the book. We had finished work on the manuscript, but its central image\u2013perilous crossings of the Mediterranean\u2013had surged back into the news. Within these journeys beats the brave, feminist heart of this book.<\/p>\n

Far\u00e8s had explained to me, about three years ago, that this poetry arose from a special moment in African migration and exile. Men, before the 1980s, had always been the ones to leave North Africa in search of work (mainly in France and Spain). They found dubious lodging\u2013often in exploitive dormitories\u2013and sent money home. That changed when women, in a considerable wave, undertook the sea crossing on their own. Exile: Women\u2019s Turn is that journey, and that sea change in women\u2019s destinies.<\/p>\n

When images were too obscure for my confident rendering, I found\u2013as I always have\u2013that Far\u00e8s\u2019s view of poetic image was really an enjoyment of constant mutation. He looked at problems I presented as if he had never seen the image before, and immediately started embellishing and extending his earlier version. As much fun as this was, it left me thinking that the English was indeed an extension of his thought, and that I had considerable freedom (I didn\u2019t abuse it) in making his poetry intelligible in the new form. That said, the real value of his modest yet exuberant exploration of his own earlier text was how he enacted poetry\u2019s deepest genius: the frustrating but exhilarating inability to rest, to be one version\u2013inert, defined, completed.<\/p>\n

Women, Africa, even the process of exile\u2013all these are protagonists in Far\u00e8s\u2019s imagination. Algeria is an element that unites them. Referring to my earlier interview (Crisolenguas, 2008), I asked (2011) \u201cAre you saying that Algeria will always be a protagonist in your work?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, so long as Algeria and above all what Algerian men and women are living is a part of humanity, and as long as this preoccupation doesn\u2019t exclude the world\u2019s other peoples, such as they appear in Le Miroir de Cordoue, L\u2019Etat perdu (untranslated), and Exile: Women\u2019s Turn. L\u2019Etat perdu is a book about the rights to life and residence of so-called immigrants, and which talks about the relation between the ideal of rights for people, women, children, men, old people, and what these people actually live through, today, in the contexts of political crises, military, national and international crises. I think it\u2019s because these books touch on questions that are so dense and important to each one of us that little is said about them\u2013as if a writer, like me, could have come from the ends of the world and a place that doesn\u2019t exist and wouldn\u2019t be recognized in his work. And above all because these are formulations that are not denunciations but warnings of much more serious troubles to come\u2026 which I probably owe, in some way, to my work as a writer and a psychoanalyst\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just out from Dialogos Press, this excellent translation of Nabile Far\u00e8s L\u2019Exil au f\u00e9minin, a poem sequence from 1990. A superb poet & novelist, who left us in 2016, Far\u00e8s may be best known...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[849,498,91,103],"tags":[546,1122],"class_list":["post-15494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-algeria","category-maghreb","category-poetry","category-translation","tag-nabile-fares","tag-peter-thompson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15494","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=15494"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15501,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15494\/revisions\/15501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}