Lightning Strikes our Age

Literature from Oman has received little attention in Germany. Now the publisher Hans Schiler has presented a bilingual collection of poems by Saif ar-Rahbi. Volker Kaminski reports

Saif ar-Rahbi (photo: Samuel Shimon)
The Omani poet Saif ar-Rahbi

​​Saif ar-Rahbi is no newcomer to the literary world. Since the 1980s he has regularly published poetry collections in Arabic. Several of his poems have been translated into English and published in the literary magazine "Banipal", which appears in London.

Until now German readers have had to content themselves with a small selection in anthologies of Arabic poetry. Now the Berlin-based publisher Hans Schiler has come out with a selection of 44 poems entitled "Ds Heulen der Wölfe" ("The Howling of the Wolves"), providing an overview of the Omani author's poetic work. The collection is bilingual, with the Arabic text on the left and the German translation on the right.

Saif ar-Rahbi covers a wide range of themes: loneliness, flight, war, travel, memories of the homeland, life in exile and in the desert. Often one feels as if transported into a dream world.

The poetic narrator describes sensual impressions that sometimes verge on the fantastic, and draws unusual mental connections. Many poems are filled with an intense, sometimes uncanny atmosphere.

Saif ar-Rahbi
was born in Oman in 1956. He studied in Cairo and later lived in Lebanon, Syrian, Bulgaria, Holland and France, among other places, returning to Oman in 1990. He is the editor in chief of the Oman culture magazine "Nizwa". One striking feature is his strong reliance on the natural and animal worlds, often writing of snakes, foxes, wolves, camels or trees, ravines, rocks. Despite the pronounced imagery, however, there is also a high degree of intellectual abstraction, with strange, cryptic trains of thought which often stubbornly resist understanding.

One image that is difficult to decipher is the "wolf turning its head, in whose laughter I recognize the emigration of the ancestors", or "veins" that "spread over the eyes of a hungry man carried away by a cry of protest".

Other tricky passages are the "wounded snakes moving uncertainly through winter’s memory". What are "roads most difficult for silence to travel?" Similes like the following are common in ar-Rahbi’s writing: "the midday heat that knocks on the doors of longing with the blind man’s stick." This sort of thing has an overblown, unpleasantly pretentious effect.

Inaccessible

Though most of the pieces are short prose poems of only one or two pages, it is often difficult to grasp what they are about. Long, often complex and labyrinthine sentences convey thoughts, feelings and memories whose content seems encrypted.

Though most of the poems have short titles like "Arrival", "Love", "Return", "The Cry", "Autumn", "Prayer", "Desert", the stubbornly hermetic nature of what is expressed makes them inaccessible. The pathos of the imagery alienates readers accustomed to the Western European poetic tradition.

Images such as the following seem laid on too thickly: "a hammer that penetrates into the goldmine to drink its glowing spittle in the depths". This is a line from a love poem.

Of course one must take into account the fact that poetry cannot be translated into another language, at least not adequately; also, the cultural difference between the Arab and European (literary) worlds results in a different feel for language.

Somewhere a glimmer of hope

Nonetheless, the collection does contain several poems which leave behind a strong impression and touch the reader, poems in which the enigmatic becomes magical.

For instance, in the poem "Return" the poetic narrator depicts homecoming as an act filled with fear and hesitation; while the narrator reflects on the past and the future, a glimmer of hope appears somewhere:

"At last I return/after exchanging all my tears on the streets/for a loaf of bread/or a memory/Thus awakes my old fear/of the labor of the first step/of the splendor of motherhood and the tyranny of fatherhood/…/I will carry them with their thousand mirrors/their streets, their betrayal and their magic/until a shooting star falls on my head…"

A strange world

To read ar-Rahbi, we must be willing to open ourselves to the author's imagery. He offers a world unknown to us, with strange noises, unusual glimpses of the world and enigmatically cryptic thoughts.

The above-mentioned kinship with dreams entails rapid shifts in scenery, things that undergo constant transformation. Many things are left at brief hints, barely breathed out, like a memory that emerges for a single moment. Meanwhile, other things seem boundless, irresolvable, speaking of a closeness to death that constantly makes itself felt.

The longest poem in this collection is entitled "For Twenty-Six Years", seven pages which contain what can be regarded as ar-Rahbi's fundamental message, a résumé of his life:

The observer sits on his balcony with a glass of wine, watching the eternally similar motions of everyday life; meanwhile, his thoughts revolve around dramatic incidents of his escape, roam back to a homeland he has long since abandoned, and mingle subtly with the images of the city where he now lives.

"The taverns open/(you watch as the waiters wipe the tables/in the dusky whore light)/and the office workers congregate/on squares and in the offices/the laborers too/the priests and the drowning ones/who need neither caravans/nor leaders."

Though the language remains calm, unruffled and almost austere, in bold images it conveys something immense and difficult to name, approaching the unsayable. Ar-Rahbi immerses himself deeply in the objects of the world he describes. As his publisher Khalid Al-Maaly writes in the afterword, he is a "meditative poet".

Volker Kaminski

© Qantara.de 2007

Translated from the German by Isabel Cole

Saif Ar-Rahbi: Das Heulen der Wölfe. Translated from the Arabic by Khalid Al-Maaly and Heribert Becker. Verlag Hans Schiler; paperback, 140 pages. 19.00 €

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Website Hans Schiler Publishers (in English and German)