EthicalDative

I was sleepless, and I passed the night keeping vigil, as if my eyes had been anointed with pus, […]

That’s Arberry’s reliable translation of line 1 of the sixth-century elegy on the death of her brother Sakhr by the poet al-Khansā’. (1) 

I posted about this poem some time ago. I want to comment here on line 1. Here’s my transliteration:

1 ‘innī ‘ariqtu fa-bittu-l-lail(a) sāhiraẗ(an) | ka-‘anna-mā kuḥilat ^ain(ī) bi-^uwwār(i)

I love Arberry’s phrase “keeping vigil,” although there’s something of purposefulness to it that doesn’t feel quite right. It represents the Arabic’s adverb of manner, the feminine active participle (sāhiraẗ) of a verb meaning “to be wakeful.” Even less does “anointed” seem optimal in relation to applying what today would be eyeliner. The Arabic uses the passive voice of a verb (kuḥilat) meaning “to rub, paint or smear with kohl (the eyes).” (2) “Pus” is accurate for ^uwwār, just icky and dead-sounding, like “poo” for “shit.”

Here’s my translation:

 Truly slept not I, so passed the night being wakeful, as if were kohl’d the eye of me with matter. 

Yes, “eye” is symbolic singular in the source. Having experimented with “rimmed,” I’ve gone whole hog and jimmied “kohl” into a notional verb to represent kuḥilat. Hey, you miss all the shots you don’t take. “Matter” is a clinical reach, but I’ve already mentioned how “pus” makes me sad.

I know I’m beating my own drum here, but my version has a rhythmic alternation of stresses which pleases the ear. It replicates closely the Arabic sequence of wording. For example, “slept not I” matches the Arabic’s suffixed subject pronoun. Likewise, “the eye of me” approximates congruency with the Arabic’s suffixed possessive pronoun. 

These expedients entail legible but inverted phrasing no longer much used. They don’t domesticate the Arabic into Arberry’s prosified English. They do make my translation sound “poetic” in the bad way, which is to say, mannered, highflown and slightly archaic.

Here’s the twist: I might be willing to live with the tradeoff in retrograde styling. 

For the reader to think, We don’t talk that way now, might be what’s apt for preserving something of the alien feel of another language’s expression. My current view is that such feel need not be refined out of the readerly experience. This is true at least for poetry, whose mission is to discomfit and astonish, foregoing the familiar with verve that feels not fussily tawdry or facile or exquisite or rebarbative but rather inevitable — a fierce rope-walk. 

As it happens, the verses of al-Khansā’ are expressed in the elevated manner of classical Arabic. Does the heightened tone of my version establish a felicitous concordance between it and the original? One not earned by design, but by simply adhering closely to the source’s syntax, falling back on disused but evergreen registers of English for equivalences? Does this hint at more affinities within the deep structure of two disparate languages than one might suspect?

Notes
(1) Arabic Poetry: A Primer for Students, Cambridge University, 1965, p. 39.
(2) A black powder made from antimony or galena and used to line the eyes.

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