Michael Karam

on translating Mansur Al-Hallaj

At a time when Iraqis are dying in the streets as they protest for a better life, I wanted to choose a poem that can remind readers of a different Iraq we rarely hear about in the news.

The verses of the poem are written in pairs, which I tried to mimic in English. While al-Hallaj uses a combination of the past tense and nonverbal sentences to indicate an element of timelessness and permanence in his poem, I resort to writing entirely in the past. English lacks nonverbal sentence structures, so I settled for the past’s intransient nature.

In more than one way, the translation strips the poem of the connotations that defy religion. While the original starts with “and Allah” and ends with a statement about how “my religion” is different than “the people’s religion,” I have liberally written the poem about an obsessive love, one that defies the people’s beliefs. In the poem’s final verse, the poet uses دين, which literally means “religion,” but I have interpreted it not as a reference to structured schools of faith but to the purest form of a religion: beliefs.

Where the translation reads “boy in the street,” the original actually says “boy of the neighborhood.” I wanted to translate that as “boy next door,” a type of character that is young, nosy, and watches over the neighborhood or naturally knows all that’s going on. I felt, however, that it carried a connotation of some type of love affair, and I did not want to overtly imply that the poem is about a man or boy. Simply, the verse addresses the boy in a call for sympathy as he sings the speaker’s ballad.

This brings me to the topic of gender. Arabic is a gendered language, and the original poem is addressed to a male “you.” Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean the speaker is addressing a man. This is simply a feature of traditional Ghazali poetry. I wanted to maintain this gendered ambiguity in English, giving the listener the chance to imagine who the subject of this obsessive, controversial love is.