Michael Karam

on translating Nizar Qabbani

I chose to translate a Qabbani poem because of how much his name and works remind me of my early schooling in Lebanon. While he is not as famous in America, I hope this is a step toward a growing fascinated audience. Because Arabic is a gendered language, it is clear that the speaker is a woman, a fact which gets lost in English. Because the word “passion” (الهوى) and the speaker’s lover both use the same set of masculine pronouns, a reader of the original cannot properly identify to whom or to what the speaker is referring. In English, these two nouns use different pronouns (“it” and “he,” respectively), requiring the translator to decide when “passion” was the antecedent and when it was the lover. The original, like most modern poems in Arabic, uses ellipses heavily, which I don’t enjoy as much in an English poem; I opted for longer spaces instead.