Come, Take a Gentle Stab: Selected Poems

by Salim Barakat, Huda J. Fakhreddine (Translator), Jayson Iwen (Translator)

Introduces renowned Kurdish-Syrian writer Salim Barkat to an English audience for the first time, with translated selections from his most acclaimed works of poetry.

Although Salim Barakat is one of the most renowned and respected contemporary writers in Arabic letters, he remains virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. This first collection of his poetry in English, representing every stage of his career, remedies that startling omission. Come, Take a Gentle Stab features selections from his most acclaimed works of poetry, including excerpts from his book-length poems, rendered into an English that captures the exultation of language for which he is famous.
 
A Kurdish-Syrian man, Barakat chose to write in Arabic, the language of cultural and political hegemony that has marginalized his people. Like Paul Celan, he mastered the language of the oppressor to such an extent that the course of the language itself has been compelled to bend to his will. Barakat pushes Arabic to a point just beyond its linguistic limits, stretching those limits. He resists coherence, but never destroys it, pulling back before the final blow. What results is a figurative abstraction of struggle, as alive as the struggle itself. And always beneath the surface of this roiling water one can glimpse the deep currents of ancient Kurdish culture.

Genres: Poetry

132 pages, Paperback

Published March 8, 2023

About the author

Salim Barakat is a Kurdish-Syrian novelist and poet, born in Qamishli, northern Syria, in 1951. He studied Arabic language in Damascus for a year, before moving to Beirut in 1972, where he published five collections of poetry, two novels and two volumes of autobiography. In 1982, he moved to Cyprus to work as an editor on the prestigious Palestinian literary journal Al-Carmel, under its chief editor Mahmoud Darwish. Whilst there, he published a further seven novels and five poetry collections. In 1999, he moved to Sweden, where he now lives. His work explores aspects of Arab, Kurdish, Assyrian, Armenian and other cultures found in northern Syria.

Reviews

[Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm) · Rating 4 out of 5]

"8.
The lake, behind the door, knocking,
The desolation, behind my shield, smooth as a prince's robe, knocking,
Behind the waters are drummers and dolls made of fools' cries.

Mother, lay your baskets here.
Lay place like two slippers before the void for your drunken guest.
Father, let your vigil be long. Lay your head, like before, on the deep wells where space is a bucket and dust a cloying rope.
Knocking on every door,
Knocking on this, the greatest ruin, and the flood decorated shields."

from // Fog Composed Like a Gentleman



This book's Foreword identifies Barakat as the most distinctive among the practitioners of the 'Arabic prose poem': "His texts are the products of an aggressive and intimate excavation of the creative and logical potential of Arabic." Huda J Fakhreddine and Jayson Iwen would produce literal translations first before working on them to convert them into "poetic texts in English." I can certainly see it paying off in the dense, rich, almost intoxicating linguistic polish at display.

The collection tries to represent Barakat's vast body of work, which is laudable, but it results in a piecemeal selection that inevitably has to rely on incomplete excerpts with poems taken out of the context of their individual collections. As a result, the effect is scattershot and diffused. It is still an indicative sample that I hope paves the way for more substantial translations in the near future. This presents a startling profusion of images that ask for slow, gentle unraveling.

[غبار · Rating 4 out of 5]

"No clarification better than the citation of sand as an exhibit in verdicts. Objections are easy now that we've started receiving horror in rations. In rations we receive our lives, in iron ladles. Upon inspection, only minor objections to the stubbornness of ruin. Facile and negligible are the objections to divvying you up like cinder. Call it murder, call it murder by the names of all your days from now on, O Country ..."

—Syria, p63-4

[no · Rating 3 out of 5]

Salim Barakat is a character, but the prose poem is a challenging form for any poet, much less the translator. The English reads awfully slack for a writer whose command of Arabic gets talked up in the foreword by contemporaries like Mahmoud Darwish and Adonis. I also resent the decision to excerpt the poems. Good for a sense.

Takeaway:

Tearing and mending of the soul. The fury of stoning with ancestors'
bones, water ancestors, mud ancestors. The fury of stoning with
graves deceived of their corpses. The fury of the country, O Country.
You are the bags in which the disappointed gathers his clothes,
his tenacity, and the stolen throats of his children. Legitimacy
auctions you off, certainty is auctioned off within you. You are
the auction of shrines looted, graves looted, O Country:
a survey of property:

a castle in ruins
and invaders, invaders standing guard.

[David Burns · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mountain goat on a hill
and a stillness that raises its horns high as a mountain goat.
Don’t move a step closer, O guide!
Don’t move a step further.
Your place is the place from which roots eye roots
and the earth eyes its inheritance.

A mountain goat on a hill
and a stubborn stillness raising its horns high as the goat.

-Saliim Barakat

Come, Take a Gentle Stab: Selected Poems ** Read in KSA and UAE (November 2021)