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FOREWORD

PETER COLE

ON ʿANTARAH’S WAR SONGS

Translation begins in a listening. Its art starts in the ear that takes us in, with all the craftiness that entails. When it’s working, translation transports and entrances. It tricks us into suspending disbelief and moves our imagination from where it had been to another place (often distant) and another time (which is somehow now). That mysterious shift through hearing leads to cadence and timbre and balance, to a surface tension that images ride, to currents of feeling swirling beneath them.

Improbably, much of translation takes place in the reception of the original creation, before a single syllable is mouthed or jotted down in the translator’s language. The quality of this initial absorption is, in fact, so vital to the transfer of energy translation involves that it’s tempting to say it matters even more than what happens next, on the expressive side of the ledger—since without it, nothing of worth will happen there. So that when James Montgomery declares, in the name of ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād—

Fools may mock my blackness

but without night there’s no day!

Black as night, so be it!

But what a night

generous and bright!

All the paltry ʿAmrs and Zayds

my name has eclipsed.

I am the Lord of War!

he isn’t rehearsing hand-me-down gestures, or giving us static English equivalents for words attributed to a valiant poet of pre-Islamic lore; he is writing out of an embodied reading of the Arabic text and tradition, through his deepest instinctive and critical response to it. He is doing all he prosodically can to bear and lay bare a charged aesthetic matrix that mattered centrally to medieval listeners, and might mean something potent for readers in English today. In short, he is, with Richard Sieburth’s assistance, performing an early Arabian drama and presenting it to us as a present—a gift of time. Historical time and the time that is rhythm. Existential time and the pulse of a person. Of two people. An entire people. Of peoples.

“All language is vehicular,” says Emerson, and none more so than strong translation, which can move across centuries and seas, and then through the difficult inner terrain of every reader, including the translator. What James Montgomery understands, what he conveys within that understanding and hears in his hosting of ʿAntarah’s verse, is the resonant, layered nature of the “war” that the poet proclaims himself “Lord of,” which is to say, the poetry within the violence. And he sees, as plainly, that ʿAntarah’s fight isn’t simply for the honor of the tribe, or for specific values his community prizes: fortitude and bravery; or belonging and fighting to belong, and guarding the weak as part of belonging. Montgomery knows, and his Glaswegian English helps him know, that these lines refer as well to the struggle of a social and literary outsider who both does and doesn’t want in—a black man who’s proud of his difference, and angry at the difference it makes. He realizes, too, that the fight lives on only in the agon of a poet battling for his poem. And that all these wars are to the death.

Our squadrons stand

arrayed for battle

banners flapping

like vultures’ shadows.

Motion in stillness, quiet through noise, the chiaroscuro of premonition. Each is deftly deployed, syllable by syllable, in this quatrain and its haunting chiasms. And that—the spirit, and the darkening sap of ʿAntarah’s combat—is what courses through the turns of these renderings, which channel the translator’s own “mental fight” for the poem.

• • •

“Did poetry die in its war with the poets?”

Montgomery’s opening of ʿAntarah’s “Golden Ode,” one of the best-known poems in the history of Arabic, jolts this volume into high gear. It’s a radical reading, pulled off with panache. Instead of the (also powerful if more wistful) musing that inflects the usual construal of the verse—“Have the poets left any place unpatched?”—Montgomery’s ʿAntarah bolts out of the gate with a signature defiance, stakes raised high, for himself and for poets to come. For translation too. And that because this isn’t “only art” for ʿAntarah, it’s life. It’s love and loyalty, an idea of the good and magnanimity, a sense of self-worth and others’ honor, compounded by a vivid if obsessive inwardness,

evenings when water flows unchecked

and the lone hopper, look,

screeches its drunken song

scraping out a tune

leg on leg like a one-arm man

bent over a fire stick.

Will the translator, as poet and scholar, survive the journey into the desert and emerge with the prize of a poetry that gives us “ʿAntarah,” an ʿAntarah that’s his, and ours, and ancient at once?

The years passed

and the East Wind blew.

Even the ruins

fell into ruin—

tired playthings

of Time

and the thunder

and rain.

Clan Hind lived here once.

You can’t visit them now—

Fate has spun

their thread.

When Montgomery sings with such elegiac litheness, translating with fine-tuned attention to pitch and footfall, to the distribution of weight along a line, to the deployment of texture and effects of sound, we have our answer, as his poem, ʿAntarah’s poem, reaches us on a visceral level with unmistakable force through its suppleness. Or maybe we’re lifted and taken back to it. Or both: ancient poet and modern reader meet through the magical agency of the translation, in a space between that exists as fiction, or myth.

More miraculous still in this mix is that the translation can follow the currents of the sixth-century verse through further modulations, in the same poem, from tenderness into ferocity, from a gentle resignation to fierce plasticity:

I am Death.

I’ve felled many

a foe, their chests

dyed in rivers of red jiryāl,

their bodies unburied

on the open plain,

their limbs torn

to shreds

by dusky wolves,

aortas pierced

by the pliant spear

gripped tight

as I closed in.

Then back again:

I’ve served wine

to high-born and brave

at dawn,

bewitched

pert-breasted girls

with a flicker of shyness

in their eyes,

white as the marble

effigies of goddesses.

War Songs is full of such terror and grace. As Montgomery notes in his panoramic introduction, the warriors of this pre-Islamic desert world “cherished their vehicles of war … their weaponry and armaments” (“we skewered their loins / with Rudaynah spears / that screamed as if / squeezed in a vise”), and he grasps that just as horse and camel, sword and spear complete the warrior, making him what he is, freeing him to do what he’s meant to do—in a word, ornamenting him in the etymological sense (ornamentum > L. to equip)—so too the poets of this warrior culture took up the tropes of the poem, the equipment and weapons of sensibility, to intensify our sense of experience, to let us dwell on it and in it, to make it memorable and pass it on.

Among the many marvels of Montgomery’s inspired assembly of ʿAntarah’s songs—easily the finest and boldest translation we have of a single pre-Islamic poet in English—the sheer nerve of it bounds off the page. The verve. Montgomery doesn’t shy away from convention’s challenge: to focus consciousness around a moment and bring it suddenly to larger life. He doesn’t apologize, doesn’t expurgate. He translates form and ornament through function. Understanding their purpose in the Arabic poem, he finds ways to get like work done in English, breaking down the Arabic line, for instance, into a variably staggered measure, one that allows him to magnify images within their off-kilter metrical frames, to bring out the directional tugs of rhetoric, the animating sonorities and their odd valences, in a way that the Arabic quantity does. All of which yields the rush and thrusts of the verse, the sharp swerves of perspective and tone. Call it modern, or the Arabic’s musical spell, kinesthesis or analepsis. It doesn’t matter. Picking his spots, Montgomery heads into the fray—sacrificing wisely, but preserving the heart of the poetry’s concretion, and making even place and proper names earn their keep, as a kind of percussion section in this orchestra:

Ask Khathʿam and ʿAkk

about our feats.

Ask the kings.

Ask Ṭayyiʾ of the Mountains.

Ask Ḍabbah’s folk about Shibāk

when in the fray

the Bakr yielded

their wives and ʿIqāl’s kin.

Ask Clan Ṣabāḥ

how we butchered them

at Dhāt al-Rimth

above Uthāl.

Ask Zayd and Sūd.

Ask al-Muqaṭṭaʿ

and Mujāshiʿ ibn Hilāl

how our spears

sought them out

how our horses

filled them with fear …

One reads this and wants to applaud. The enumeration of tribes and sites, like Homer’s list of ships or the Old Testament’s genealogies, are tests of investment through technique. And if, for all that, it seems the poetry doth protest just a little too much for contemporary comfort, if the self-vaunting (fakhr, literally “pride”) comes across as a bardic wee bit out of control, this, it soon becomes clear, is part of its action-hero or rapper-like over-the-topness, the artfully hyperbolic presentation of a fabled, contest-crazed figure, one who’s endowed with super- or at least superior powers, which he wields against the tallest odds. It’s a figure who, in the weave of Montgomery’s lines, calls to mind the dragon-stalking Beowulf and Pound’s wyrd-weary Seafarer, as it also invokes the Achilles of Logue’s cinematic War Music, or Prudentius’ Psychomachia, with its allegorical war for the soul.

Throughout, Montgomery gives us what Pound said a translator must: “Trace of that power which implies the man”—here, a figure of elemental vitality, a magnetic literary character who, in the fullest sense, is a product of translation’s sustained audition. And palpably within that hearing, inside the poetry’s winning belligerence, and its half-hallucinatory boasts and assault, ʿAntarah’s reiteration of prowess betrays an anxiety that belongs to us all. There is, again, the pathos of the not-quite-member of the tribe (excluded, in this case, by virtue of his race). But evident too are other aspects of exile’s anxiousness echoing across these lines. For ʿAntarah is always on the cusp, always at the precarious edge, or stranded in the slippery middle. He is inside the fight but beyond it (composing); within the present, but before and past it; together with his beloved (ʿAblah in memory), but forever far-off and denied her love. As daunting warrior and defender of repute, he serves as spokesman for his clan. But as poet whose ultimate weapons are words, as solitary soldier of extreme exposure—vulnerable in the face of Fate and Time—he wars at the margins to defend the center, the heart of the human matrix that made him.

It’s in that trial, played out against the desert’s starkness, that we discover the poet’s resolute spirit, which James Montgomery takes up in these versions and releases to you now.

Peter Cole

Yale University