Abol Froushan
Fragments
In all cases, between the poem as it is, and what we want it to be, there is a lag. Should this gap be removed?
Calling on London Skool - that avant garde band of multi-lingual poets and critics, who aim to generate poetry and text from hybridisation of languages, genres and lifestyles in order to endanger the tranquillity of norms and shake up the standards of the literary genre, to propose the new directions in the Risk – to endanger to engender poetry.
In Parham Shahrjerdi's opinion, “this gap should not be removed. Otherwise, the poem changes its nature, becomes distorted. That is what we must discuss. Have we the right to distort the poem, voluntarily or involuntarily, for easy reading? To bring it whole in “our world?”
The issue is one that arises in the context of London Skool's activities to globalise poetry on a fair trade basis, between Persian and English, French, German, Turkish, etc. through translation and analysis; delivering that spirit of Risk in a collage of poetry, literary theory, imagery, fantasy, voices, music, exile, before and long after.
The issue also arises in the axiom of choice, which the critic follows to deliver a critique in, say, English of a Persian poem. Given a choice of translators and translations, which pairing would you choose?
In all cases, between the poem as it is and what we want it to be, there is a gap. How should this gap be observed? This is true of the critic as much as the author.
Go towards the go that you went, don’t go so I’m left behind
that from the direction of both hands, two friends,
and you with no me standing I drive
Always without wanting, I was taken
to the place where I was taken from
I looked for you in the lines I had not yet written a lot
I still write because I’m sorry
the one who has to if she comes she’s not coming anymore[1]
Here in the poem from the book “In Riskdom where I lived” which I have chosen there are many such gaps in the original text and in the English version, because this poem is propelled by a conflagration of the poet's feeling and fervour that has infiltrated the language and has taken it to the other side of grammar. I need to mention that the original text too crosses the rules of Persian grammar and therefore in translation also, the same crossing, the same gap had to be shown and I therefore had to map or execute the same crossing in my translation. This is how it came about that a few lines of the translated text appear to have been miswritten. In this miswriting the gap is redoubled. For example note the make up of this line. :
Go towards the go that you went, don’t go so I’m left behind
Would it have been better to translate it as a plea for you to stay with me any which way I go?
The issue arises too, with the linguistic choices a writer makes to deliver a representation of the objective presentation that inspires the writing. There is a gap between the poem and the poem it wants to be? What words, what coupling of words, what expressions, what play of imperfect language will come under the axe of choice by the author?
For the creative poet, to write is to apologise to the world because in his work he keeps taking a hand in the world to falsify its truth count. That is, for a poet the world is a poetic text and in the poems he writes, he always writes over this transcendental text, and replaces the other lines, the world lines – the site of the poem.
.
The one who writes a poem
always rubs out other poems
Poets! Stop writing hands up!1
And in this way a new gap is created by this intervention in the definition of the world, and the creation of a gap with the original text, which the poet writes:
I still write because I’m sorry
The issue arises as soon as a poem in one language, representing a multiple of presentations occurring in the native soil of a poem, needs to be mapped to another language, representing the same or a transposition of the same-other-sided presentations occurring in the native site of the translation. Which mapping strategy? What turns of phrase, expressing what's said, by who and to whom and in what context shall I, the translator, adopt to represent the mirroring and distorting, the alluding and colluding, the denoting and connoting that the original author had died into?
In order to point you in the right direction, consider the text of War War To Victory and its multi-vocal reading on poetrymag.ws.
As a bilingual poet, I'll do what can be done to mind the gap between what a poem is and what we want it to be, mind the gap between the original and its reconstruction, the gap between the critical role a poem can play and where it goes beyond one perspective.
There is always an element of excess in a living piece. In fact, without that excess it cannot be literature. It would be propaganda for a particular god. "Excess designates the measureless difference" says Badiou " between the state of a situation and the situation".6 Take the situation of Ali Abdolrezaei's poem. The gap which Parham Shahrjerdi is talking about is the same element of excess, i.e. an excrescence which is included in the state-of-a-situation - the poem's meta-body - but does not belong to the situation - the poem describes, or the poem itself.
For example in Ali Abdolrezaei’s poem Adverbial (my translation) this element of excess happens as a linguistic event which although stands in for an external event, nevertheless those adverbial parts of speech which have the role of qualifying the verb, themselves take on other parts in the linguistic play in order to transmit the mood and evidence of the poetic event.
Nothing happens accidentally that is accidental.
Even the world, which I certainly didn’t want, was an accident.
I ought to pick up before for I don’t have time for after.
There’s no good in being so good as merely be…
And a courage vis a vis the world itself as an event, an accident.
A not being afraid that resulted in this fear
A fear that sometime passes the real pays no heed
except for nothing it leaves nothing really
just an incidence that is happenstancing.
In fact a poem is an event, of a given evental [2]site (outlined by the corpse or corpus of the poem) which is made up of elements of that site - lines, words, phrases, phonemes, rhythms, structure - on the one hand, and the event itself on the other. Like an event, the poem carries its point of excess.
When the translator comes in, like Sherlock Holmes with his magnifying glass, examining the corpse lying on the evental site, his preoccupation is how was the poet killed, lying dead in this poem? The detective observes the fatal wounds, the angle of entry and the cut of the lines, the phrases, the diction and the register of the poet. In order to rediscover the fatal/fateful situation through its markers, its mood and tone and slant of voice. The translation machine kicks in a quasi mathematical transformation of the traces, from one language system to another. Persian to English. What's made into the common bonds of human experience, on the street or in bed, to a spoken to, who's the speaker? What's his accent, grammar? All this goes through a geo-cultural translation, from Langrood[3] to London, phrase by phrase, verbatim. Then the corpse is reconstructed, like a photo-fit, or a portrait of the culprit.
(See my Critique on Censorship - London Waiting Sisterly, translator’s detections, poetrymag.ws)
This re-detection of a poem in the act of translation is to re-create the evental site, and its elements, as if by transplacing it from Langrood to London, or from reading the clock face in Tehran[4] to a clock face in Toronto. The translation by another poet, who is capable of the excess required in the new language, the audacity required, the riskdom[5] that is lived in this England, or
Freedom Square, make the translation, an event in itself. It, like the original, now self-belongs. Therefore, no critic, can, may or should cajole the translation into his detection of the poem's situation. I would go further and warn that we run a great risk when we try to fit the original poem to our critique, by means of a tame replica, by shoehorning the poem into the critique, as in putting the shoe on the wrong foot.
The master of words is also the master of the multiple[6]
In other words, the multiple (e.g. a word or a poem) doesn't allow its being to be prescribed in language alone. Despite language there is a gap between the poem's body and the shadow of the real that it is which also mirrors the gap between the poem's presentation and its metabody[7].
I do not therefore have the power to count as one, to count as 'set' (e.g. a poem) all the words that have the property of belonging to the poem. This ruins the second chance to define a poem (as a set of words) as a set of properties [e.g. meanings] and their extensions (Frege) rather than on the basis of intuition and its objects (Cantor). So the definition of a poem as a set of words fails to secure the purity which allows the poem to count as one – that is to count as a pure poem, for to say any set of words don't make a poem is quite banal . So is the statement that language has the constitutive power over text (being-multiple). But Russell considers the paradoxical sets. The set of words that don't belong to themselves. Rather like the tables of content, which do not list the page entry for themselves. Or the set of all natural counts that itself is not a natural count – counts of poems, or counts of associated words in a book of poem are themselves uncountable. This count of a count makes up a poem's topology or transformed states, or what in general we call the poem's metastructure. But what defines a table of contents is that it lists page entries of all Headings in the book, in which case it must be a member of the list. Every metastructure has its structure as a member, the first element of the metabody of a poem is the poem itself
Poets! Stop writing Hands up1
This is better understood with the parable of the egg yoke of history's egg of events. That is, history with its key decisions that count (as) events, juxtaposed against a nature where all belong to one another. Thus the egg of history - the world of events has a yoke that forms the metastructure of all poems where poetic events re-occur. Each poem's body, in other words its structure, gives rise to a metastructure, the poem's metabody, which may belong to the egg yoke of historic events.
All other linguistic events or historic events fall into the egg white of history.
If being denies event as Badiou discovers in Being & Event (because each event is in and of itself, belongs to itself and natural beings just belong to one another, and not to themselves), then does poetry stand outside being? The poem stands outside being as such and in the egg yoke (the metastructure of all poems). And the poet stands apart from the universe of beings in nature. So Pocket from Heaven ends in:
“Look, he is joining the universe!”[8] . Or is it the void? (See below).
Are we at liberty to form a poem from any set of words? The set of all the words that count as members of poems may be 'too large' but is finite and well in excess of one poem, rather than in excess of language. The words of a poem complete the count of the set of all the words that belong to poems, which is not infinite. If finite, then the infinity that sits beyond the halting point from which we use the rule to measure the measureless, or count the uncountable, always subtracts itself from the count, as if to play a zero sum game. In other words every poem is written such that it wipes another.
The one who writes a poem
always rubs out other poems
One can say that the egg white belongs to the egg yoke as the world of events belong to the poems in the yoke. Yes, the poem can present nature in the manifestation of its being. It tries to fuse representation to presentation. Bring them as close as an illusion to its reality. But the pure poem also belongs to itself and so doubles itself against the situation that it represents.
All poems with a title have a name that is included in the poem. Doesn't the title count as a part of the poem?
Circle
You are reading a poem called circle
Hold it there
Hands off the library
Arm around the windows and the doors
Bedding into the sofa
Now you may read a poem by Ali Abdolrezaei
Please open the book
You see?
You are reading a poem called Circle
So hold it there
Take your hands off the library
Kick the door out of the house
Tumble down the stairs
In the new park or the old one behind the Town Hall
On the same bench that sent my father door to door and
stopped my mother Sit down
Tell them off those children playing ball
Now you may read a poem by Ali Abdolrezaei
Please turn the page of this gate whichever way you like
It’s a shame you are standing at the end of a poem called Circle1
Some poems like the Circle also refer back to themselves and so imitate, in their structure, that of an awareness that is self-aware. They repeat Russell's paradox. They are a table of content that lists itself.
Does any set form an element of itself? Does any set self-belong?
My girl! I introduce my boy!
My wedded wife this lady This is mine! and that…!
No one is ours they self belong
for a moment Christian a moment Muslim Jewish or Buddhist they are
‘cause they’re none of these[9]
Interjection: A key characteristic of a theocracy is that it does not recognise the self belonging of its subjects. If they break with the ranks, they are executable for apostasy. Human Rights is about ensuring self belonging of the individual. Rape or any such claim of another's body, right up to capital punishment, radically challenges that right of the individual to be ultimately self-determining, to self belong. Hail the cylinder of Babylon.
The multiple representation of the individual who counts as one, by dint of their self-consciousness, includes, an ego, an I, a subject of enunciation. That is as any set which carries itself as a member.
I who feel and think and say I
I who am who I am, do I am?
'Cause things of black and white
are black
and white8
There is an infinite recurrence here between that poem which mentions itself, and those multiple meanings that belong to the poem.
And in the girl who will tumble at this poem's end
build a house
filled with a door open like a wound[10]
Or as in the ending of the poem Circle:
Please turn the page of this gate whichever way you like
It's a shame! You are standing at the end of a poem called Circle1.
That circularity of a count as one (voter) who belongs to itself, as a member of an electoral camp, or a group that forms a subculture, a subset of society, points to an infinite recurrence, a fractal hall of mirrors.
Null: The Void, the No, Allah, the empty set, silence?
Allah, The No the proper name of god that is the empty set { }. It holds no belongings. It does not present itself as anything. Yet despite the nullity of its belongings, it excels at inclusion. Because the void is a subset of any set. The empty set is universally included. This testifies to the omnipresence of the void. The void as silence has an errancy in everything.
So if the void through its silence ever was to present a voice, then that voice would appear everywhere, like the voice of God.
Tell me what happened that Allah became the origin?
El which was the Allah of the Jews is prefixed to La
That El or Al are just pronouns every Arab knows for sure
That god turns single-handedly into No - in Arabic La
Pray tell the meaning of Allah is La itself
No is great, is beloved, is against the rest[11]
And yet, the void possesses a subset which is the void itself {{}}. The void echoes itself. Silence also echoes. This is because the void is universally included, so it includes itself. Here is sown the seed of consciousness. The token of a token. The name of the one god, in the echoes of our silence.
To make an Ultra One of London Skool's four parts into the same metabody.
What's our metabody, the structure of our instances and traces, confluences
and pretensions, performances, emails, reviews, reflections, leadings and followings.
Given a set there is always a meta set to which it belongs.
London Skool: The Other of the infinity that's London in exile.
Let's say I'm happy to belong to where I'm represented and included by way of language and culture or politics – a happy citizen. Then think exile when you've left the house like electricity in a black out, and although you still belong, you're no longer in the room, which now migrated. The normal room versus the meagre room that emigrated. Yet imported-goods like to my host culture I'm now included perhaps as an exiled writer but where I never belong. This exilic site is not a site of belonging. So exile is intransitive, whereabouts belonging splits from inclusion, representation – the right to vote. The write-to-a-voice. Exile is founded on a singularity on the edge of the void.
It so happens that this foundation, this on-the-edge-of-the-void makes up a general law of all that is - ontology, that which is, and specifically poetic ontology.
Within the multiplicity of given poems there always exists a poem which presents being on the edge of the voice in relation to the poem. There's always a poem which founds the first – the poem that's presented, performed. This singularity of a poem sits on the edge of the void. Isn't that what is true exile?!
From the edge of my humming voice that lived on the edge of a hamlet of voices[12].
What's said, what's spoken at the edge of the voice. The poem of the poem consists of a foundation poem which presents the Otherness in the presented piece. The second poem in the poem of the poem is a site in the poem which is other than the poem.
The World like an antique rug stuck in a corner
in a piazza with a vast dizziness that was empty12
This vast dizziness that is empty (in the poem Story) is none other than a name of the void which is a part of each situation as that of a piazza in Venice after the carnival.
Given a poem whatsoever there always belongs to it another poem on the edge of the void, the edge of emptiness. Every non-empty poem contains some Other. It's existence as a site on the edge of emptiness (void) gives the poem its historicity – it's exile. A subtraction of the Other from the site that is language.
Concerning that gap-
The gap or the divide that was on our table earlier was about the birth of a poem in one language, say, Persian and its rebirth in another, say, English, just as Abol has written about and also in my view should be preserved. Here the problematic is not one of mass production, but how can a poem be produced in one language, and yet be born anew, afresh, out of thin air, from the beginning?
Another problematic is that of a poem which is first born, say, in Persian and yet stands apart, at a distance from Persian itself. This distance from language itself can in a way mean that the language of the poem in question is alien to Persian. How this alienation with grammar, with the thinking of the language, with linguistic norms, with the language of poetry, with the dominant ideas of the language of poetry, with rules of poetry or poetic techniques can estrange the poem from the mother language.
How can you reside in a language [like a tenant] and yet be a stranger to it? This is a gap. This is also a gap which is translated when this poem wants to migrate to another language. We're concerned with this heavy burden of distance. In translation, one doesn't remove this burden, but aims to recreate the distance. We don't aim at familiarisation but endeavour in defamiliarisation. In this way the more distance we build it seems the greater our fidelity to poetry and the poetic principle. How contradictory, and how true can this be. Is it not so?
Expression is in hard constraint, the tongue is constrained, all these crusades are for breaking free from this strait jacket of language. I've always loved these lines of Shams and Ali's last message reminded me of it. What's the meaning in this? O well, language is constrained. But what can one do with the strait of language? Sometimes one should take on this strait jacket at its game. To open up the constraint of language. A taking on that is the basis of pure poetry: to make language. Of course the poet feels suffocated by prevalent language, by conventional language. It's from this language that he is distancing himself. From this language that he exiles himself, or from that language which sends the poet to exile: to exchange the language he wants to besiege with the language he wants to open up, release. This is how at times an unprecedented language is created. Thought, imagination, sensuous desire or tick leave no way except to tunnel through language (that is through thought, through imagination). That unique moment of creation must be somewhere around here.
Parham Shahrjerdi (London Skool email correspondence 6 October)
Picture a pair of parting lips
The lower lip is grammar, conventional language – the upper lip the poem that is in exile from the lower. So an utterance, a poetic announcement always breaks the silent void that is thus opened. Poetry arises in the gap I mind and out of the speaker's pair of parting lips. Or perhaps the ink bleeding through the gap in the nib.
In the massacre of my words
they've beheaded my last line
and blood ink like is hitting on paper
there's death stretched over the page
and life like a window ajar shattered by a rock
a new gun has finished off the world
and I imported goods like through this alley's doors
am still the very meagre room that emigrated
I in my life who am pen like to the lines of this meagre page am mother10
Parham's observations come to my aid in that they make it clear what I mean by saying for a poem 'it's existence as a site on the edge of emptiness (void) gives the poem … it's exile'. Exile exemplifies the relationships between the poem and its mother tongue. This is foundational to the purity of a poem. Or the poetic principle. This is where belonging splits from inclusion. Just as the baby (no longer a foetus) separates from the mother to be born.
Maybe in the above statements the other poem is none other than the reflections of conventional language. The void element always brings out the inconsistencies of conventional constrained tongue. Those empty edges of rationalisation of language. Focal to the place, the space in which the void happens to show its errancy like the wind.
The other poem, the other than poem, the non-poem in the poem is founded by the void of silence – the empty edge of the womb, if the poem is (merely) natural – i.e. transitive, whereby to be present is to be represented, to belong is to be included. Which is not always so viz. exile.
I'm at a loss how these pictures of lips that have smiles
are movies of eyes that have cried[13]
An axiom falls like an axe at the foundation of all that is.
There is a void foundation of void foundations.
Why are the billion stars up there!
So that I live?[14]
A situation being that of a poem is historical if it contains at least one evental site,
a foundation on the edge of the void.
A woman that in a quiet cloud took habitat
and threw a net in the deep swamp of my solitude[1]
This woman (the poem of this poem) is the Other that is subtracted from the ground (site) by taking habitat in a cloud (thus ungrounded). The net on the other hand is thrown from the edge of the void into the silent abyss.
To every pure poem there always belongs at least one other-poem (or site). Does this site implicate the real, the historical situation, implicated in the signification process?
A text formalises a historical situation if at least one other poem belongs to it which is not the name of the void, or God. It's a simple foundation for the other-than-God. Or there, where god catches a glimpse of himself.[15]
(See Allah Khani, Sohraab, Neda, Sarbedaran....)
The belonging to itself of the event or rather the belonging of the signifier of the event to its signification, plays a special role in poetry. Considered as an event a poem contains besides 'the elements of its site', itself. So the poem is presented by the very presentation that it is.
P belongs to (Є) P. It self manifests. It is self aware. Self critical. Voices itself through its narration.
A poem's identity can only be specified on the basis of the poem itself. The poem identifies itself by arriving before itself to introduce itself, give over to a recognition.
O yes this is a poem
before and after it is read
making pieces of its meta body
metastructure
Mehta
Mehdi
Mehr
Mum
The Ultra-poem of a poem.
Sets that belong to themselves are christened extraordinary sets (Mirimanoff)
Poem A belongs to A
If A exists, its singleton {A} also exists because forming into one is a general operation.
The singleton of a poem is its forming into a poem. To the poem forming into a poem, the poem alone belongs. However if the poem belongs to itself it has another in itself that's not the void.
The Other poem is not the name of God or the void.
It is something else.
It's itself – the poem in question – not the name of the void
no longer in exile
returns home
to its meagre room
Between here and infinity
there may be zero distance
but the time in between
may be infinite[16]
Cantor's doctrine of the absolute: if some multiplicities cannot be totalised, or “conceived as a unity” it is because they are absolutely infinite rather than transfinite (mathematical), associating the absolute with inconsistency. There where the 'count as one' fails, stands God.
There god catches a glimps of himself 15.
Each line of a poem is waiting for the death of its poet
And at the same time forms the poet's meta body.
Some are born posthumously (said Nietzsche)
A poem's metabody embraces all the readings, its writing, the acts of its performance
the critiques written for it (form) plus many more occasions when the poem becomes part of the Poem of each poem.
I love love when love recedes
I love the white lilly
as it withers in my hand
and grows in my song
Wait for me
my song![17]
The poem is part of the poet's metabody (when poet's living). On his death, the poet rejoins it's parts, nay his metapoem.
The poem a poet writes
joins the yoke of the poet's egg
his metabody which the poet rejoins up on his death.
The poet must die so the poem lives.
Always be asking the question: What killed the poet in this line?
Abol Froushan
August 2009
[1] All the poems so designated come from Ali Abdolrezaei (2008) In Riskdom where I lived, Exile writer Ink.
[2] Of or belonging to an event.
[3] The town of Langrood is the birth place of the poet
[4] Capital of Iran
[5] I coined the word Riskdom for the title of the series of Ali Abdolrezaei’s poems which in Persian used the equivalent of dangerous though not as an adjective but as a place-noun. From the equivalence of danger and risk on the one hand and kingdom and freedom or unfreedom, on the other, I produced riskdom.
[6] P40, Alain Badiou (2005) Being and Event, Continuum
[7] Metabody refers to the state of the situation that a poem is, through its interactions with the world of literature. It includes all that is included or may be included in the poem or about the poem. Any intervention on the poem, from the author to the reader the critic, the publisher, the library. This is being explained in practice in this article.
[8] Abol Froushan (2008) A Language Against Language, EWI.
[9] Excerpt from Ali Abdolrezaei’s epic poem So Sermon of Society (translated by Abol Froushan)
[10] Ali Abdolrezaei 'Censorship', http://abdolrezaei.com/censorship, translation: Abol Froushan
[11] An extract from the long poem Allah Khani, by Ali Abdolrezaei.
[12] From the poem Story, reference 1.
[13] From the poem Album, reference 1.
[14] From the poem Bandar Abbas (Get Lost), reference 1.
[15] From Eternity, reference 8.
[16] From Here to Infinity, unpublished, Abol Froushan
[17] From There is no death in a death, reference 8.