AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and Cindy Juyoung Ok on the Renowned and Rebellious Palestinian Poet Zakaria Mohammed

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected].)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha:

(READS EXCERPT FROM POEM IN ARABIC)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m Cindy Juyoung Ok. I’m glad today to get to focus on translation of many languages, including that of grief. Zakaria Mohammad, the renowned Palestinian poet and writer, recently passed away at the age of 73. Today I get to talk to one of his translators, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha about his life and work, as well as hear from her translations in the September issue of Poetry. Lena is a poet, essayist, and translator, with a forthcoming collection of poems, her third, called Something about Living, which won the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry. She focuses on translating modern Palestinian poetry and has also worked on essays and screenplays. Lena, welcome to the podcast.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Thank you.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: We originally reached out to you about this interview before Zakaria had passed. I’m so sorry that you lost your friend and, as translators sometimes like to say, your author. How are you doing?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: You know, I’m, I’m sad, I’m grieving. I came to know Zakaria through his work, and that was relatively late, considering what a literary giant he was and is. I was introduced to him by fellow Palestinian poets when I was curating a series for the Baffler magazine, looking for poems by living poets to translate. And I was amazed that I wasn’t aware of his work. But that’s one of the griefs, the ongoing griefs of exile is the patchiness—exile and diaspora life—the kind of patchiness of our awareness. And I only really had a limited number of email exchanges with him. I never got to see him in Ramallah, or share a cup of coffee with him, or attend a reading. And I grieve those lost opportunities.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It’s such a sad surprise. Once you started translating his work, were you able to engage with him in those emails about the content of the work, or were the emails more just getting to know him as a person?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: It was pretty focused on the work. But there’s a kind of collegiality that he extended to, I hear now from other poets, to everyone he interacted with, that I also experienced. So, you know, and the work was very personal. So it definitely gave insights into his life, although our correspondence was pretty limited to, you know, “Tell me more about this plant that appears in the poem,” or, you know, “Why this bird and not this other bird?” and sort of things like that. And, yeah, I feel like maybe if there had been more time, you know, maybe those conversations could have gone a little bit deeper.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right. So he was born in Nablus shortly after the Nakba in Palestine. Do you want to talk a little bit about what your understanding is of what the early ’50s would have been like there?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: I think that it cannot be overstated the magnitude of what Palestinians call “The Catastrophe.” The loss of homeland for those who were pushed into exile, and for those who stayed. Zakaria is certainly a member of a generation that came of age and had to make a life for itself in neighboring Arab cities. So like Mahmoud Darwish, and other contemporaries, he spent time working and living in Amman and in Beirut, and eventually was able to return to the Ramallah in 1994. So that was an important and pivotal year, it was a year after the Oslo Accords were signed and a lot of people who were involved in Palestinian resistance in various ways, cultural and otherwise, in some capacity, were able to come back. But they returned to a homeland that, despite all of the propaganda and the language around the Oslo Accords, was absolutely still under occupation. And is today.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Of course.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: And so I think that he was born in an era when people were still reeling from the magnitude of a loss that shaped and defined our culture for the next, you know, seven decades.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Are you familiar as well with his earlier poems and the arc that his books take? And how do you kind of conceive of him, knowing his work so well, across time?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: So, yes and no. I read most deeply the last four collections. He has a total of nine volumes of poetry.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: So the, my work on this manuscript that I’m sort of doing final edits on now, is focused on his late work. Poems from 2013 on. And I’m interested in that, because he has talked at length both in interviews and, you know, in public fora about how he felt specific change in his relationship with poetry and with his own writing, in that era. And I just thought that that was really fascinating. It’s sort of the gift of someone having a long legacy. Zakaria is someone whose first volume of poems was entitled, The Last Poems, which I also think is hilarious (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: and really insightful into how I think he has a very realistic relationship with art and a kind of—I’m trying to think about the exact word, but maybe it’s some, a little bit of a distrust of the Muse, let’s say.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Mm, playfulness, maybe.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: And I think that that era from 2013 until the most recent volume, which was called Date for the Crows, published in Ramallah, that is a time that was, like, thick with these intense personal, dark prose poems, interestingly, that were very concerned with death, as well as a kind of freedom from meaning making. He, I think he was really interested in just following the image to its final extension and less focused on ordering the image in the poem. That’s, that’s my take on that, poems of that era.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, it must be interesting to be able to have a sense not only through him, not only of his work and his arc, but also that era, and the many eras he’s written in. So when he returned to Palestine, it was 1994. Where was he before that?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: So Zakaria left—I’m not exactly sure the year, but I know he studied at the University of Baghdad, which is interesting, that’s where my father also went to school.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Wow.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Yeah, I didn’t make that connection until recently. And I know that after university, he moved to Beirut, to work in journalism. And that—Beirut in the, certainly in the ’70s, in the late ’60s and the ’70s, and into the ’80s was a center for culture and art and thinking and resistance for Lebanese and Palestinians, and, you know, many Arabs of different backgrounds. So it makes total sense that he would end up there. He worked as a writer and an editor in various journals and magazines and like, cultural and literary journals, in Beirut and in Amman, Jordan. I’m not sure exactly when he moved to Amman, but he started in Beirut and then moved to Amman. I know that he was, he worked at a magazine called Democratic Thought. And he, at some point, became the deputy editor of al-Karmel, which was the highly esteemed Palestinian journal who was, you know, the editor was Mahmoud Darwish. So he was his deputy editor. And that happened, I’m guessing when he returned to Palestine, just based on the timeline of when Mahmoud Darwish was there. He published in this, over the course of this, these decades, he published lots of books, not just volumes of poetry, but he also wrote, he was a researcher, and he was very interested in mythology and ancient religion, and pre Islamic Arabia. So he has lots of important books that he’s written in this era, as well as working as a journalist. And I think he also has two novels, if I’m not mistaken.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Definitely prolific.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Yeah, definitely a prolific writer. And then there were a lot of people in his field and in that kind of cohort who returned in 1994, to Ramallah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And you mentioned Darwish at the magazine. Do you have a sense of how much Zakaria and Darwish knew each other? You know, Darwish, obviously, is this huge name to the point where most Palestinian children can recite his poems, you know, in unison, it’s very beautiful, kind of national known poet. What was their relationship like? And do you think that they influenced each other’s poetry?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: I think it’s impossible to be a Palestinian who exists and writes and

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right. (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: not somehow be influenced by Mahmoud Darwish. Just the sheer presence of his work and the way it’s seeped into every aspect of our being. So certainly there was—and actually Zakaria has a terrific, terrific essay on this in Arabic, which one day I promised to translate,

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes, beautiful.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: because he talks about how he intentionally, like, wanted to not write in any way like Darwish. Because he felt like there were words and images that Darwish owned. And he talks about how he consciously and intentionally, like, steered clear of what he viewed as Darwish’s lexicon and style. And his style is completely different. So he, unsurprisingly, was conscious, not just of his own project, but how it fit into the cosmos of Palestinian literature. And I think he understood very clearly that he needed to distinguish his own work and develop his own voice. Because Darwish, you know, is read at the level of, like, Palestinian symbol, for better or for worse, and you have to sort of carve out your own space. And I think Zakaria did that very successfully.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Do you have that experience as well with Darwish at all in terms of, you know, knowing the work but also maybe resisting elements of it or having refusal to certain elements that you feel like are very Darwish when it comes to Palestinian and Palestinian diasporic literature?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: For me, I still, I have, because of distance and, you know, difference in age, I think, I have a deep reverence for Darwish and an understanding that because I didn’t get to grow up in Palestine, the Palestine that I know is largely made of Darwish’s words and poems. That’s very true for many of u. Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani’s novels are really important in many, many Palestinians in exile and in diaspora and in refugee camps, being able to conceive of a Palestine on our own terms. So there’s a relationship of reverence and almost a kind of familial love to the language that he crafted. But it is a very large shadow, and you have to figure out how to be in conversation with it, to sometimes, maybe pay homage to it, but also find your own words. And I think that, that that’s something that many Palestinian writers probably consciously or subconsciously are working through, when you have a national poet of that stature and whose reach is so extensive.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Let’s hear a poem that you’ve translated. Should we start with “August 15”?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Sure. I’ll read in English first and then the Arabic. This poem is from Zakaria’s collection Kushtban and the poems in Arabic have no titles. None of the poems in the collection have any titles. He just marked them by the date.

(READS POEM)

“August 15”

I await the end of August and the murder of September.

I am here, tardy Autumn, waiting for you. I’ve prepared you a wheat porridge and lit a fire. Come with your wind and sweep away the shameless sun. Lift its hand from my shoulders.

Summer lies heavily on my chest. But my white hand swears by Autumn, and readies the saddle for its wretched horses. Autumn considers my idea then implements it: rows of stones ringing the hillside, and scattered clouds climbing the slope of the sky. Nothing more than this, nothing more.

Of course, you could add a burst of lightning to shatter my bones and the bones of the world.

You were all mistaken. You thought that horses live on the hills of Spring.

Autumn’s hills are the horses’ residence. The scent of rain excites them, their nostrils flare, then they leap over stone walls toward the summit, to graze on the edges of clouds.

(READS POEM IN ARABIC)

أنتظر نهاية آب ومقتل أيلول
أيها الخريف الذي يتلكأ، أنا هنا بانتظارك. طبخت لك
عصيدة، وأشعلت نارا. تعال، واكنس بريحك الشمس
الصفيقة. ارفع يدها عن كتفي.
الصيف يجثم ثقيلا فوق صدري. لكن يدي البيضاء
تحلف بالخريف، وتُعدّ له السرج. آه يا حصان الخريف
الأبلق. يا من يدرس فكرتي وينفذها: سلاسل حجرية
تصعد سفح التلة، وغيوم مشتتة تصعد سفح السماء.
ولا شيء غير هذا، لا شيء. بالطبع، يمكن زيادة هدّة
رعد كي تتخلخل عظامي وعظام الدنيا.
أما أَنتم فقد ظننتم خطأ أن الخيل تسكن في تلال
الربيع. لا، تلال الخريف هي مسكن الخيل. تَشْتمّ
مهتاجة رائحة المطر، فتتسع مناخرها، وتقفز فوق
السلاسل الحجرية صاعدة نحو القمة، كي تقضم
أطراف الغيمة.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Thank you so much for reading Zakaria’s poem and your own translation of it. It’s really beautiful to have the phrase “murder of September” in the September issue, and have this kind of, (LAUGHS LIGHTLY) you know, also the “horses grazing on the edges of clouds,” such an amazing ending, this kind of, the idea of the edges of things, the bounds and the carries to the next. Do you want to talk a little bit about this collection that these dated poems are from?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: So Kushtban is the first—that collection Kushtban, which, by the way, means “symbol” is the first in that era of new, or let’s call it, in his late style. And he writes a beautiful introduction at the beginning of that volume—nd I’ve incorporated some of that in the manuscript for these selected poems—about how he feels about this change in himself and in his writing and why he’s choosing to write this way. And it’s interesting that you note the horses, he talks in the last volume of his poems, Date for the Crows, he talks about the symbolism of horses in his own poems, and the role that they play and, and very much in conversation with death and his concept of death his sort of encountering it. And so, he writes about how he would write drafts of these poems, of course, on his own, whether in his notebook, or however he did that, and then he would put late drafts of them up on his Facebook page. Which is kind of a wild thing to do when you’re a poet of Zakaria’s stature. But he had almost a flippant approach to, like, all of the formalities of publishing,

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Publication,

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: right, ideas about institutions and restrictions. And he’s sort of over all of that. And people, just like very famous poets, but also regular people who know nothing about poetry, would comment or, you know, there was, of course, a lot of praise. But friends would suggest, “Hey, what about this?” And sometimes he would think about these suggestions. And there would be this, like, live conversation about Zakaria’s poems. And then these poems that we had seen iterations of on Facebook would become a collection of poems that is published. And it’s a very democratizing and a little bit terrifying thing to do. But I think he liked that institution-busting approach. He described himself as rebellious, he was viewed as being rebellious by his contemporaries and the people that knew him, in terms of his approach to institutions in general. And so, that was an interesting thing. And he reflected on how pre-publishing late drafts influenced him. And he reflected on his own awareness of the audience that he thought was, like, maybe a little bit unhealthy, like he was sort of running a psychological experiment on his own writing as he wrote these late poems, and just was very open about reflecting on it in the book. And I found that really endearing in an era where a lot of us are, you know, thinking about our work publicly and having to share it on social media. And there’s the very private and intimate act of reading a book or a poem in a journal, but there’s also the very public act of liking it, you know, on Facebook, or tweeting it out or whatever. And, and instead of sort of having those thoughts quietly to himself, he just pushed those doors open and modeled how you can engage with the impact of social media forum on your own creative process. And I just thought that was really exciting to see.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, it reminds me of what some professors were doing within academia, at the beginning of the pandemic, of sharing their Zoom links for their classes with the public and trying to bring down some of the logistical walls that have made academia this, you know, very exclusive space, and tried to take some of their lectures international, of course not with the support, I think, of the university. But the fact that there are these online options for doing that maybe is, is like what you’re describing with this Facebook interaction.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Yeah, I love that. Because, you know, we’ve, we know, of course, that Facebook is not really a Democratic forum. (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: It’s not a free space, let’s just put it that way. And certainly, Palestinians experience that when we try to write or talk about our lives, or, you know, during times of bombings or attacks, we, a lot of our posts are disappeared, or edited or flagged or whatever. And so, despite that, I think his ability to engage in this, on this platform on his own terms was remarkable.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, and you’ve often worked with living poets. And how does that affect the way that you translate? Are you, when you’re working with currently writing poets, are you curious about that editing process to be collaborative? Do you have an instinct to engage with them and work together with them on certain decisions?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: So far, I’ve sort of taken my cue a lot of the times from the poets themselves. And I think it’s, you know, it varies by personality, but also by the degree to which maybe they have been published or have interacted, possibly, with other translators. When someone wants to do more collaborative work, I really enjoy that and I’m very open to it. And others just like, will send you their stuff, which is great and a little terrifying. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Like, “I don’t if I’m getting this right.” But I think it’s, it’s, it always feels like just an incredible privilege to be, you know, to be given the opportunity to do this really intimate correspondence. I try to keep, actually, my questions are fairly minimal, because I find that I don’t want to be hyper aware of personality, and anecdotes. And I want to just try very hard to focus on the work,

Cindy Juyoung Ok: The work itself.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: And what it’s teaching me. Because I’m human, and I don’t trust that the noise of other information won’t be too much in the mix. You know, who knows if that’s right or wrong. But that’s, that’s been my approach.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, it sounds like it’s been helpful for you.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: So far, that’s what I’ve done. And, you know, that has been largely the experience of translating Zakaria’s work. I don’t really know him personally. I didn’t really know him personally. But I—he was very present all over Facebook. And then I have his poems. And ultimately, I’m, it’s important to remember that the poems aren’t ever, the poems aren’t ever the poet, right? They are work that is crafted. And so I try to stay with the work as much as possible.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Are there differences in the communications that indicate for you the way that languages work? I ask because I also translate an author that I can email with, and the Korean styles of email are so different that every time I have to send an email, it’s such a different experience than when I send emails in the US.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Oh, I’m so glad you understand that.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I have to think about, like, the honorifics. (LAUGHS)

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: That’s so anxiety-inducing for me.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Oh, I’m so glad you mentioned that, because Zakaria is not a super form— was not a super formal person in his interactions and his emails. Like I said, he was very accessible and easygoing. But I’m also like, as a Palestinian who was maybe raised a certain way, like, really aware that this Zakaria Mohammed, right, who is significantly older than I am and has a certain literary stature. And so, I remember, like, the first few emails I tried to draft were just laughable. They were like, in very classical Arabic and sounded absurd. And I had to kind of write that out first. (LAUGHS) And then redo them, and be more conversational. But I don’t write a lot of emails in Arabic, because I live here, you know, I talk to people on the phone back home, but I don’t send a lot of like professional correspondence in Arabic. So I have to think about how to peg that. And then there’s also just like, email etiquette, right, in every language that changes over time. And so, I found that in the beginning, my approach was a little bit dated, and I had to freshen it up a bit.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: So that was, that was an entertaining layer of the translation that I did not think about before.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Exactly. I’ve had a lot of people, when I ask people who live in Korea to just check my messages for me, they’re like, “You know, nothing’s wrong, but you’re so cute. Like, you’re, you answer every question like, such,” you know, (LAUGHS)

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Yeah. The cuteness is, yeah, that’s exactly right.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, I think that’s the kind of interesting thing.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Better to err on that side that come across, like, you know, disrespectful.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Oh, definitely, as many honorifics as I can think of, as many, you know, buffer questions. There’s a lot of things like that, like, when you’re cheersing about, you know, your cup should be lower if you’re younger, right, so your cup shouldn’t match exactly, it should be, like, little things like that, because it’s so instinctual that no one’s going to tell you directly, but (LAUGHS). So I’m always thinking of my emails that way, like, make sure my cup is lower.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Oh, I love that image. That’s so great, Cindy, I’m gonna borrow that and give you full credit. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes! No, take it, it’s a kind of bowing of the object, I guess.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Yes, I love that.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Well, translating has always been a part of your life.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Mm-hmm.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right? For a long time, translation was something that you did on the regular, so as a writer, what was it like to have access to multiple languages? Were there moments where you felt you were living and dreaming more in one? Are there times that you’ve been able to feel most at home in multiple of these languages?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Gosh, the quest for home. (LAUGHS) You know, it’s definitely a gift, it allows you access, it has allowed me access, intimate access and moments or flashes of belonging in ways that maybe if I didn’t have both those languages at this level, I wouldn’t be able to experience. But now in my, at the age I am, I don’t know if I belong fully in one more than the other. I think, I think the travel feels the most authentic between them. I remember very vividly moving to the US, that feeling, because I had lived in the Arab world for so long. My childhood was primarily there, and, but even there, at different school systems, Arabic, primarily, or English, but the world around me was largely in Arabic. So I remember the feeling of letting go of the thread a little bit when I came here in late high school. And of the dreams changing. That was very weird. And there’s a little bit of a grief with that, I guess. And I also remember feeling like, I remember the moment where I started to notice that my academic Arabic or my intellectual Arabic, if I didn’t work twice as hard, was going to stay, like, at the high school level because I was going to college here. And so there are these, like, little windows into the more that you could have had, that you have to work hard to keep or to get, yeah, I don’t know if that answers your question.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: No, it totally does. I definitely understand that, too. Like the academic register, or like the medical register is another example, where it could be you have total fluency, but you just don’t have a certain vocabulary updated.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: You’ve talked a bit about the effects of English and French words that come into Levantine Arabic, differently, of course, for lots of different communities and at different times. Is that something that comes up in your work at all?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Yeah, I, you know, I think there’s just an awareness, both in my work as a poet and in translation of the different valences that language can have, the way that a word enters and is colored by the experience of the people who, on whom it may have been imposed, the way they can remake it to serve them. Language is, in my experience, a place that we inhabit.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: That makes so much sense. And I think those kinds of, you know, trainings around languages can come up a lot. You know, like you mentioned with Facebook, like it can happen with headlines, news headlines, where the murder of Palestinians can be written up in the third person as though it’s some kind of mystery, or the defensive action is treated as an aggression in a headline, rather than in guarding. So the stylistics and grammar of these completely reveal how the writers understand the world and also the impact on its readers, right, especially unconsciously and about humanization. So, is that something that you are thinking about when you are translating about your audience or the impact that your choices have? And even like the smallest grammatical or syntactical movements, how that kind of creates something in the English, in this kind of Imperial language?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Absolutely, you know, and there are many writers who are even reflecting on the notion of translation at all. Just interrogating the act of translating, and teaching me a lot in the process about how we conceive of an audience and who art is for. And I think having those disturbances and those questions is really important. I think it’s really important to remain to some degree unstable and unsure of the enterprise of translation.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Mm-hmm.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Over time, I have learned to explain less than less, both in my own work, I hope, and in the work that I translate. And so I’m thinking a lot about the audience of, for example, though, I don’t translate exclusively for them, but I think a lot about the audience of Palestinians who read primarily in English, wherever they may live. Because, again, it’s a diasporic community and a community of so many refugees. And I had to unlearn the assumption that translation was for, you know, people who are not Arab, right? And I think it’s an assumption that many of us enter into, that, oh, I’m offering these Palestinian poems to people who are not somehow connected to Palestine, primarily, to, and maybe the kind of the rest of that implied is to teach them about or, and I am less interested in that. I’m more interested in recognizing that Palestinians exist everywhere, and many of them don’t have access to Arabic, necessarily. There’s a generational divide and an issue of distance and lack of access to home. And so that work should be mindful of and primarily, in my view, address them. And that’s a different headspace to translate from, than to offer something to the Empire, you know.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Totally.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: I also really believe deeply in the beauty of Palestinian literature and art. And think that everybody will want to read it, and, the same way that I approach all kinds of world literatures with reverence and interest and trust in the quality of the art. So I try to hold all those pieces as I’m working. But it is a different posture than, certainly than I was raised with or that we were educated in, in Western schools. There’s always this, like, the curse of the translator, right? That “Oh, you can explain, you can make available.”

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: And then you start to feel complicit in something that you want no part of.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right. Yeah. And what’s that transition into understanding it and kind of complicating that received education, was it kind of sudden or was it gradual over many texts and, you know, many friends and many years, or was there like an aha moment?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: I think it was probably more gradual. There are certainly moments where, whether in my own poems, or, you know, in interactions with—interactions meaning like, with readers at a reading or some sort of correspondence or something where you start to realize from the question you’re getting that the person who is perceiving your work has a very different agenda. Or you start to understand the system that your work slots into.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Mm.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: And then you realize, okay, I have to actually be conscious about this,

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: I have to choose if I want to participate in this and understand how my work will be, what it will serve. And I have the I have choices to make. And a lot of times, if you come from a minority or minoritized community in the United States, you don’t just have the luxury of thinking all these things, you’re just running, you know, all the time, trying to find that air to breathe. And one of the gifts of reading, of poets who are interested in liberation, and who come from a tradition of resistance, is that you learn to slow down and think more intentionally about your choices. So I have tried, humbly I say, who knows, but I’ve tried to be really conscious about how work will land and what it might inadvertently serve. And you can’t completely control that, of course, because once you make the thing, it doesn’t belong to you anymore. But you have to also be comfortable saying no, and not participating for that reason.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right. I think that’s definitely true. Yeah, the wariness can be something that’s empowering actually, yeah. I think there are always moments where, I don’t know, someone seems to appreciate your work, but then it’s like this narrative that they have, or this, like, fantasy that they’re creating that’s racial or that’s, you know, about the other. And then, and then you have to learn from that and understand, like, how to know when that’s happening. And I don’t know, it’s, it’s tough, because you also still want to be very earnest, and

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Yeah, you have to build your own Orientalism detector. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes! That’s what it is.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Scan the room for like, what is, is this happening? Okay, nope, we’re not doing that today.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. Yes, exactly. Build the Edward Said of your heart.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: That’s right. Exactly. Yeah. And you just got to go back and read those books periodically to refresh and think about

Cindy Juyoung Ok: So true.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: what am I, what am I actually engaged in here? And for this, I mean, not to sound like too much of an old lady, but for this, it’s important to be in conversation with poets who are younger than you, as well as elder poets, right? Like, because I think everybody, hopefully, is engaged to some degree in the work of liberation, and different generations have access to different language and different ideas, and can really hold you accountable for some of your assumptions. And I find I learn immensely from that. You know, my boundaries are pushed in healthy and important ways. So I think also, like not, not calcifying in just your little group of like-minded people, and opening yourself up that way can be powerful.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, and I think in poetry, it’s always been such an amazing energy across generations. Right, that kind of, what you’re talking about, being exposed to elders and to the young people. And we have this question for you, which is a question into the void, a question a poet gave who is a former guest, and didn’t know that you would be responding to. And I think it relates to these moments of languages, resisting and illuminating as a writer, and also as a translator.

(RECORDING PLAYS)

torrin a. greathouse: Hi, I’m torrin a. greathouse. And my question for you, whoever you may be, is, what does your poetics define itself in opposition of?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Oh, wow, that’s such a great question. I hope that my poetics defines itself as being in opposition to, to violence, and to erasure. And I think they are linked. My work is really interested in, in naming, on my own terms, and in insisting on the problematic concept of beauty, on my own terms, as a Palestinian Arab woman, who’s writing in the language of empire. I think that that is really necessary in the face of the violence of erasure. So, it’s my hope that that’s what my poetics is opposed to.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It’s such a difficult question, but that’s such a moving answer, because that poetics is so relevant to every literary act, right? And you have writing, you have translating, but I’m sure that’s just some of it. You’re also reading, you’re also engaging in all these other ways. I wondered if we could hear maybe a poem of yours from your new manuscript, Something About Living, yet unpublished but forthcoming from University of Akron press next year. Let’s hear “To Be Self-Evident.”

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha:

(READS POEM)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It’s such a beautiful poem and amazing to hear you read it because there’s all this kind of critique of this neoliberal language and the rebranding and revelation. But there’s also this heart to it in that resistance. There’s this intense confidence in the anger, in the naming, in the just basic acknowledgement of the reality. It’s pretty incredible.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Thank you. I remember hearing this story when, I think it was when President Biden pulled the troops out of Afghanistan, just this, you know, the horrific stories about people chasing after planes. And this is a repeated image, right, in United States history, unfortunately. And were there spaces on the plains and people trying to crowdsource how to get their loved ones from Afghanistan out and it just, you know, and it is both singular and unique to Afghanistan and distressingly familiar. And I read or heard somewhere this business of the dogs on the flights, the spots reserved for the dogs. And I just could not get that image out of my head.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, I think that maybe many of your poems have had that image that won’t leave and then turn it into something totally different and totally new and become something that can’t get out of someone else’s head but in a different way.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Reclaim and make it fit into the puzzle, as you see it somehow.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Exactly. It’s been so nice to get to talk about your work in translation and also in writing. And I’m curious if poetry has been a part of your life, in terms of grief at any other points? Is it something you turn to? Or is it something that helps you make sense of death in any way?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Poetry is a mainstay and has been my whole life. My maternal grandfather was the poet laureate of Jordan. His name is Husni Fariz. And it was sort of wild to grow up, you know, spending summers in his backyard, in retrospect. I mean, he was just my grandfather, but like, the air we breathed was full of poems. And his humble home that was bursting with grandchildren all summer had bookshelves in almost every room. And that was just like a dreamscape for me. And so, the correspondence between us—and he and I were very close—the correspondence between us was a lot about language and poetry. And as I was showing him my garbage drafts of Arabic poems (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: “What did you think about this one?” and he would just get really quiet. But when he passed, I was, I think, 15 or something, young, and his poems were like what I got to keep of him that could come with me anywhere I went. I mean, he was a very well-known and beloved and respected educator and poet, so a lot of people knew him, and a lot of people felt like they understood him and knew what he was about. But the poems, even though they were public record and parts of his many volumes of books were, just became this kind of correspondence that I got to keep forever. And, you know, I read them as I age. I didn’t get to know him as an adult. But the poems changed with me. So.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right, at different periods. And it’s like what you were saying about the Said, when you go back to these poems, there are probably new phrases you notice or ways that you can connect to them and understand him better through his work.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Absolutely. And so, yeah, poetry has always been that, that experience taught me and just growing up as part of that family taught me of the solace and richness and longevity of poetry and of art, and of words, and so it’s a relationship I cherish.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And it’s in the family. I’m sure that there are other people in your family affected by those same landscapes of poems and bookshelves and summers. Have you ever thought about translating his work? Or does it feel less relevant to that realm?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: You know, it feels really big and heavy. He has a large living family and I don’t know. Yeah, it feels like a lot.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: But maybe one day, some poems. Yeah, I don’t think there’s anything of his that I’m aware of that is translated into English. He was a prolific translator. He translated from English into Arabic the Indian poet Tahir. I think he was the first to make an Arabic translation of him available. He translated a book about Greek and Roman myths, he was a very prolific writer.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Let’s return to your translations of Zakaria’s poems. So the ones in Arabic have the year 2013, August 15 and 16. And then the English ones just say, August 15 and 16. What went into that decision to leave off the year or to include the date for these untitled poems?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: I felt like in a journal, it was confusing, because the context of, you know, the whole body of work with these dates wasn’t present. And I wanted to keep the confusion to a minimum. But I felt like the day and month were important, because you start to notice patterns. There’s a burst, you know, in a week in August, and then there’ll be another, you know, and so, there are these kind of fever dream times when a bunch of these poems are being crafted. And one of the other very cool and democratizing things that you learn is that some of these poems look like iterations of each other. You know, he’s still published them, as, you know, works in their own right. I think he was very much a writer of the unfinished poem, which I really appreciate. And so I hope that the, in the finished manuscript, the existence of those dates, just as he included them, gives people, gives readers a feel for that, that kind of mood that the poems were happening in.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: That’s definitely the mood I sense, so I think it was the successful.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Great.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, and I think it makes sense that it would be different in a book versus in a journal and that all these choices do—all these modalities do affect how you see the poem and its framing. Yeah, let’s hear another poem of Zakaria’s titled, “August 16.” Do you want to read them in both languages?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Yes, I would love to.

(READS POEM in English)

I sing of you, migrating heron.

I sing of your whiteness and your sauntering gait in fallow land.

And I sing of you, resident hoopoe.

I sing of your little crown as you gather seeds from a plowed field.

This is how I am, my song is confused,

it plants one foot in fallow land

and another in plowed fields.

Sometimes I recite the resident’s prayer,

other times the prayer of the traveler.

(READS POEM in Arabic)

أغنيك يا طائر البلشون المهاجر.
أغنى بياضك، ومشيتك المتمهلة في الأرض البور.
وأغنيك أنت أيضا يا هدهد الإقامة.
أغني تويجك وأنت تلقط الحب في الأرض المحروثة.
أنا هكذا أغنيتي مبلبلة
تضع قدما في الأرض البور
وأخرى في الأرض المحروثة.
مرة أصلي صلاة المقيم
وأخرى صلاة المسافر.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Thank you again, Lena, so much for sharing Zakaria’s poems and about his life, his work, and your relationship to them.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Thank you. Yeah, I’m really grateful that they are in Poetry magazine. I think that our understanding of modern Palestinian literature is incomplete without Zakaria’s voice. And it’s an immense privilege to introduce new readers to his voice and his writing, and I’m really grateful to have this conversation with you about him and his work.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: شكرًا لك to Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. Lena is an Arab American poet, essayist, and translator. She’s the author of three books of poetry: Kaan and Her Sisters from Trio House Press, Water & Salt from Red Hen Press, and Something About Living, forthcoming from University of Akron Press. In 2022, she was the translator and curator of the series Poems from Palestine at The Baffler magazine. Zakaria Mohammad was born in Nablus, Palestine. A freelance journalist, editor, and poet, he authored nine volumes of poetry, including Kushtban, out from Dar Al-Nasher Press in 2014. In 1994, after 25 years in exile, he returned to his homeland to live in Ramallah. He passed away this year at the age of 73. You can read Lena’s translations of Zakaria’s poems in the September 2023 issue of Poetry, in print and online. If you’re not yet a subscriber to the magazine, there’s a special rate for podcast listeners. For a limited time, you can get a full year of the magazine for $20. 10 book-length issues for just $20. Visit poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer to subscribe. That’s poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer. This show is produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Resavoir, Alabaster dePlume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Until next time, with love to Zakaria, his family, and his readers, thanks for listening.