Ausable Press: About Khaled Mattawa


	BACK \| SELECTED POEMS \| AUTHOR EVENTS About Khaled Mattawa The author of Ismailia Eclipse (poems), and translator of three volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry, Khaled Mattawa has received a Guggenheim fellowship, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA translation grant. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Pushcart Prize Anthology, and numerous magazines, including Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Antioch Review, New England Review and The Black Warrior Review. Mattawa was born in Benghazi, Libya, and immigrated to the U.S. in his teens. He teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. IN HIS OWN WORDS Reflections on Exile: "People now are aware of how difficult it is for people of Arab descent to live in this country but it was never easy, you know. And I went to high school here, which was not an easy experience, in Louisiana." "This issue of a historical grievance, the anger, and a desire to preserve something which was about to be lost is what I had brought with me here. Even though I was writing in English, my sensibility is a different vision of the world." "When you begin a poem you really do begin with a point of helplessness, or a point of isolation. The poem becomes a reaching out to break the isolation. I really am still a poet of exile. And my book tried to deal with those issues as well—explain what baggage I brought with me here." "I think even the most sophisticated liberal audiences in America have in their minds a heavily ingrained notion of the immigrant rags-to-riches kind of story. . . . I don’t really tell the story of the happy immigrant. I would like to challenge the audience as to their privilege and mine. Also I don’t present the picture of a beautiful homeland that was lost to me. I don’t have that nostalgia for home. I missed my family, I didn’t miss a great nation whose people were all sweet. If someone wants to get a picture of what Libya is like from my book, it’s a human place, a place that has generosity and kindness and women who are oppressed and children who were abused." On Translation: "Some people write imitation as a beginning; for me translation was a kind of imitation. I would translate a poet and I would try to imitate that poet through translation." "Translation is something I encounter on a daily basis. As soon as I say my name I’ve put myself outside the border; I have to crawl back into the center. When a stranger asks me my name—and they ask maybe four or five times—every time they ask they’re telling me “I don’t know this name.” Then I have to find a way to translate or legitimate the existence of my name in this world. That is where translation becomes almost a kind of existential state." "What translation teaches you is that there is something before you that is whole, that needs to be conveyed. It teaches you to try to perfect the poem at the cost of yourself. The work is deeply impersonal—you are in the service of this poem and not of your ego." "The great poets are the ones who have a wider sense of what they can see, of what they allow themselves to see, let alone what they allow themselves to feel or empathize with. . . . . Maybe translation hones our ability to be sometimes less personal, more technical, more focused on the work of art and its possibilities rather than what it can do for the poet as a person." "The idea is to create poems in translation that widen the expanse of the language. . . . So, I really try to make the strange or unfamiliar beautiful. I would pursue the literal until I exhaust it and see if my pursuit of the strange utterance can render something that is interesting and surprising." "You know that now there’s greater interest in Arabic translation than ever before, and Arab culture. Much of the interest in translation is really a matter of spying. . . . Luckily poetry is not read much by intelligence people; they don’t have the patience. And because poetry appeals to our better selves, they have no appetite for it." "My job has been to introduce Iraqi echoes into the interior lives of American readers. We in America are a mighty people, and we can be a mighty stupid people. . . . Yet we also have a great many chances to let our consciences speak. I’d like to think that the poets I’ve translated have helped us shape conscientious decisions." On Lorca: "He came from Andalusia, from a kind of rural society and was so enraptured and frightened by the energy of New York City. He made New York into a real cross between an ancient nightmarish vision of Dante’s Inferno and surrealism. But you can sense that his surrealism was kind of medieval, almost kind of mythological; you can feel this underworld creeping up into the skyscrapers. That anger and that rich mythological or pseudo-mythological language appealed to me. It still very much appeals to me." "Ultimately it really is about living in fear. You can say that Lorca, this Andalusian, rural young man, found himself in a frightening place and yet he was willing to embrace his fears and name them, bring the nightmarish vision forth." On Ismailia Eclipse (his first book): "I found that the book now is recommended by Lonely Planet as one of the books to read about Libya. . . . I love the fact that Lonely Planet is recommending it and I love the words “lonely” and 'planet.' Maybe there’s an element of a native informant. A native informant can be a good thing, can be a good person; it does not have to mean you are an 'Uncle Tom.'” (Quotes from "Found in Translation," an interview by Farid Matuk in the Texas Observer.)