I made a breakthrough in my endeavor to translate poetry. Last night I read an interview with Armand Schwerner, the American poet-translator of Sumerian and Native American texts from the old American Bureau of Ethnology reports at the turn of the last century, and was inspired to make an attempt at translating from a language I barely knew the rudiments, Arabic. Then I checked out two tomes of the poetry of the contemporary Syrian-born poet who calls himself Adonis, Ali Ahmed Said, from the university library. I had typed in 'adonis' to search the catalog and was directed to 'adonis' written in Arabic. Later Mohammed, my Arabic teacher, would correct my pronunciation, because I had pronounced the first letter as a vowel, it is a glottal stop in Arabic written with aleph, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, which is often pronounced as a long vowel, but in this case it is merely the seat of the 'hamza', the glottal stop in Arabic. One begins saying this iconoclastic poet's name with a pause, a hitch in the throat, as if paying reverence to the source of a number of sounds in Arabic that do not exist in English, or for that matter in any other language, and more significantly to the source of poetry, the throat, from whence the warbler sings, or the meadow lark, or the thrush.

Dr. Abdul Rahman, a professor of Arabic at the university, graciously agreed to help me in my endeavor. He said he would direct me to the poem in Arabic that corresponded to the one in French that I plan to translate into English. I had explained to Mohammed that my purpose was to improve my own writing of poems by studying Adonis's poems, that I felt it was necessary to know the exact meaning of a word in French I was not certain of its meaning by referring directly to the Arabic word in the original poem. He suggested that Abderrazak, our Tunisian colleague, a poet himself, would be perfectly suited for the task since he is fluent in Arabic, French and English. In any case, he would relay my desires to Abdul Rahman. Then I met Abdul Rahman later after class and he graciously agreed to help me by finding the Arabic poem from my English translation of the first line of the poem, since he does not know French. Fortunately, Adonis is popular enough that his books have two copies in the library.

He seemed a bit incredulous that I liked Adonis and I said I liked him because he was not traditional. He proceeded to explain that he is widely popular but that he is despised, the word Abdul Rahman used, by some people because he is not traditional. I think he wanted to say that he has broken some taboos and I am not so sure he meant that he is controversial in his views on Islam. Abdul Rahman gave me his business card and told me to e-mail him. I wonder if he will benefit as much as I will from this undertaking.