Mohammad Nour al-Din
If we followed the saying that what is lost in poetry when it is translated is poetry itself, no nation would ever have come to know what other nations have created, at least in poetry. But let us reject from the outset the claim that poetry vanishes in translation. It is a dilemma that has never found, and never will find, a solution. Between poetry that rests on “play” with language and poetry whose essence lies in the “image,” so that when the image is gone the whole poem is gone, the “schools” of poetry translation swing back and forth.
Translation, then, is unavoidable; it is a necessity, as the proverb says, “forced, not out of heroism.” Perhaps we should leave translators their freedom and not bind them with particular rules. We should not tell them, for example, not to add too much of their own, as Nicolas Fayyad did when he translated “The Lake” by the great French poet Alphonse de Lamartine: his translation read as if it had been written “from point zero,” as people like to say these days, and we found ourselves before another “lake” no less beautiful than the original. Nor should we tell the translator not to translate literally, or not to translate without some formal embellishment. All of these are subjects of endless debate.
What remains to be said, however, is that the work of poetry recently translated from Arabic into Turkish and published in Turkey is unprecedented, and no ordinary work. The Turkish scholar Mehmet Hakkı Suçin, professor of Arabic language and literature at Ankara and Gazi universities, dared to dive into a rough and surging sea, and not just any sea: the sea of al-Mutanabbi. There is no doubt that the “diver” Mehmet reached its depths and found its pearls and shells, as Hafez Ibrahim once put it.
Translators of modern literature, whether poetry, novels or stories, often “take the easy way” by choosing modern texts written, however “complex” they may be, in the language of their own time and understandable, even if readers sometimes have to make some effort to decipher them.
But for a translator to set out to “knock” on the high walls of a fortress of poetry from the pre-Islamic, Umayyad or Abbasid era, a task that is often hard to grasp even for an Arab reader, is the very height of adventure.
And what an adventure Mehmet Hakkı Suçin undertook! It was certainly no “reckless adventure”; on the contrary, it rested on the most precise and delicate calculations, both in its content and in presenting it in a form that would appeal to the Turkish reader. He thus preserved both virtues: the content and the poetic rhythm in Turkish, without excessive formal ornament. In a conversation with us, Mehmet Hakkı Suçin stressed this aspect of the translation, aimed at preserving the spirit of both the classical and the modern, so that al-Mutanabbi’s poetry reaches the Turkish reader neither “stiff” with the spirit of the past nor in a wholly contemporary language that would make one mistake him for a modernist poet.
Mehmet Hakkı Suçin did not come to al-Mutanabbi “from point zero.” Rather, without exaggeration, he had already completed long-distance races when he masterfully took on an immense body of poetry and poets, ancient and modern: the Mu‘allaqat, Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Hazm, and among the moderns Gibran Khalil Gibran, Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Nizar Qabbani, Mohammed Bennis, Naguib Mahfouz and Ghassan Kanafani. He has also translated from Turkish into Arabic two Turkish writers: the Sufi poet Yunus Emre (13th century) and the poet and philosopher Ahmed Yesevi (12th century, Turkestan). Suçin has received international awards for his translations.
Last November, Mehmet Hakkı Suçin’s translation of a selection of al-Mutanabbi’s poetry was published by Everest Publishing, with two prefaces, one by himself and one by Dr. Ali bin Tamim, chairman of the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Centre, known for his love of al-Mutanabbi. The cover, designed by the artist Kardelen Akçam, evokes al-Mutanabbi’s world: successive sand dunes crossed by a horse ridden by someone presumed to be al-Mutanabbi himself.
Mehmet Hakkı Suçin chose well in selecting al-Mutanabbi for translation, since he is the most important expression of Arabic poetry across the ages. If one had to choose, the choice would begin with Imru’ al-Qays, then al-Mutanabbi and Ahmed Shawqi, ending with Adonis. All that this quartet lacks in Suçin’s work is Ahmed Shawqi, who, with Adonis, is one of the two great expressions, even in their contrast, of modern and contemporary Arabic poetry.
The book runs to 356 large-format pages, and the translator has titled it İnsanın Şarkısı [The Song of Man]. In this he reflected his own selection of lines and poems by the greatest Arab poet in which the emotional dimension, and all that touches the depths of the human being, comes to the fore in the poet “who filled the world and kept people busy.” Mehmet Hakkı Suçin thus deliberately left out the poems of pride, boasting and grandeur (al-Mutanabbi’s famous forays into satire and panegyric). He believes that the “human” poems cross nations and geographies and make al-Mutanabbi a truly world poet.
Suçin’s selections range from a single line to several lines from the same poem, while translations of long poems are excluded. In a successful comparison, and perhaps for the sake of greater fidelity, he placed the Arabic text of the lines (fully vowelled) on one page with the Turkish translation on the facing page. The translated texts number 145, each occupying a page even when it is a single line, with a small number of longer texts spread over two pages. On page 39 he included a drawing of al-Mutanabbi as imagined by Gibran Khalil Gibran.
There is no doubt that what Mehmet Hakkı Suçin has done is an astonishing achievement. As readers of Arabic know, al-Mutanabbi is the poet of densely packed meanings and intricate language belonging to quintessentially classical eras more than a thousand years old. For a translator, Turkish or otherwise, to undertake his translation into Turkish therefore requires, first of all, a deep knowledge of Arabic. Suçin was not content with this quality alone; he translated the text into a modern Turkish that respects the “scent” of ancient times, thus bringing “the two ages” together. He also rendered the Arabic text in a Turkish that respects the essence of al-Mutanabbi’s “image-idea,” so that metre and rhythm were present too, in a difficult adventure in which his wife, the well-known poet Elçin Sevgi, may have had an influential “hand,” as the translator told us. Mehmet Hakkı Suçin has come through this adventure with great success.
Originally published as: Mohammad Nour al-Din, “Mehmet Hakkı Suçin in the Seas of al-Mutanabbi,” Al-Akhbar (Beirut), 16 April 2024. Translated from the Arabic for this site.