Mightier Than The Sword
So, the "Mightier than the Sword" reading went off yesterday. It went well. The reading lasted for about two hours. We got a blurb on the local news, and the local Public Television station was there and taped the event for their "Living In Iowa" show. Word is that a segment could air within the next couple of weeks.
I ended up being the closer for the reading. I wasn't originally supposed to be the closing reader, however the closing reader (Robert Dana) was sick, and needed to be moved up in the schedule. In a way it probably worked out better that way.
So, what follows is something of a summary of the event. Unfortunately, I have the feeling that I am going to miss people. Unfortunately, I don't have a list of all of the participants in front of me, and it's hard to remember all of them. So, I will make sure that I hit the major readers, and try to recount a few of the more memorable readers.
We started with Saadi Samawe and Chuck Miller reading Iraqi poetry, both in the original and in translation. Comparing these two to Simon and Garfunkel yields some interesting observations. Chuck is loud, outgoing, and very earthy type of person. Saadi was very composed, reserved, observant type who spoke extremely softly. An original odd-couple of sorts, book-end representations of poets, writers, and artists in general.
Their reading was insightful. In the reading it was made clear that poetry always offers a challenge in translation because of social differences in origins of the work. In many respects, poetry often carries connotations of the culture that created it, which is often difficult, and sometimes even impossible to translate (this works for both to and from English -- I will explain more later). For an example, one of the poems was about "travel", and as Chuck stated, he didn't understand what the importance of travel as a concept was. Saadi explained that because of the political climate there frequently travel is often a more permanent departure, so chosing to depart often takes on more literal and philosophical questions.
Next came several readers from the Noble Pen writer's group. Tony Covington read several poems that centered on questions of meaning and purpose to our lives. How do we find that meaning, what inspires us, confuses us. These poems served to contrast and underscore some of the themes in Saadi's translations which questions things very deeply. Another poet, Demetrius, read a poem in which a child identifies with the part of his father that was at one time a warrior: the child wants to learn to be like his father. His father responds by saying that being a warrior was easy, the hardest thing to learn, and the thing that he had spent the whole rest ofhis life learning was how to bring life into things, such as the garden he had been tending to for many years after the war.
The next reader was Mary Swander, who's study of the Amish culture revealed some interesting comparisons between political policy and social values. For example, the Amish people financially and socially cut off those who stray from their beliefs. Possibly a harsh thing to do to someone who is part of your community. However, the idea is actually something that is practiced in political circuits now: this concept is known as sanctions. Mary proceeded to read a piece about older gentleman who talks about the things that he's seen in life, including being in both World Wars, and how he doesn't want to see it happen again.
After Mary, we returned to several more readers from the Noble Pen writer's group. Cathy Wilkie-Tomes had nearly everyone in tears with a piece she had written about woman who had met a soldier shortly before being called up to duty for Desert Storm. She waited while he was gone, and was reunited with him. However, after his return, things started to fall apart. He was unwilling to talk about the things that he'd done and seen during the war. She saw photos, but he would only say that he was guarding prisoners. During the conflict he had lost the Peace pendant she had given him before he left. Finally, one night, she woke up to him holding her in a neck-lock position, pointing his fingers in a mock gun at her head and muttering "I'll do it, I swear..."
Ian Philpott took the stage and read several pieces about war and patriotism in extremism that often lead to the perversion of thoughts and actions that lead to war.
I missed the next several poets as I had to depart for a few minutes to use the facilities.
I returned to Robert Dana taking the stage. He presented several pieces that presented perspectives on war from people who had actually been in previous wars. Including Korea, Viet-Nam, and WWII.
Next was Katie Ford, who presented some insight into the psychological affects that war had, not just on the participants, but on the civilian population as well. She then read a monologue from the perspective of a survivor of a war. And followed with a poem from her works that underscored the idea of trying to understand what is normal when there hasn't been anything normal to hold on to for an extended period of time.
Next were a couple more poets from the Noble Pen group.
I closed the reading with a diary entry from the Iraq Peace Team that talked about the affects of adjusting to the bombings in the middle of the night, and seeing a demolished farmhouse from those bombings. And lambasting the media for not reporting all sides of the story, including making the Iraq Peace Team sound like traitors, despite their attempt to focus the interview on the work and the things that they are finding (like the piece of a bomb one of the participants found at the farm house).
The piece closed with the following line: "The candle I use for my time of contemplation slowly burned itself out this morning. Not an omen, I hope!"
After cleaning up the place, and finishing all the other side work, I decided to go to Iowa City to hear Saadi and Chuck read again. (They will also have a couple of other readings in the area during the next month I hope to attend.)
At this reading, I was able to listen more closely to Saadi's readings in Arabic. I was able to listen to and hear the rhythmic patterns of the work, and the way the phrasings work. It's really fascinating, there are several marks in the way words end with inhalations or exhalations, and their intensity that serve as a way of marking the phrases. There's an arrangement of dipthongs and characteristics to the words that set up interesting rhythmic patterns.
After the reading I was able to ask him a little more about the translation of works, and the carrying of culture across languages. I asked him if it was as difficult to translate works to Arabic, knowing that the works of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and other poets had been translated, and were important to poets in that region. He answered by telling me that he had attempted to translate Allen Ginsberg's "Howl", but had to stop on the second line because there wasn't a way to translate "an angry fix" because drug addiction is very different there, it isn't a concept that translates well.
I ended up being the closer for the reading. I wasn't originally supposed to be the closing reader, however the closing reader (Robert Dana) was sick, and needed to be moved up in the schedule. In a way it probably worked out better that way.
So, what follows is something of a summary of the event. Unfortunately, I have the feeling that I am going to miss people. Unfortunately, I don't have a list of all of the participants in front of me, and it's hard to remember all of them. So, I will make sure that I hit the major readers, and try to recount a few of the more memorable readers.
We started with Saadi Samawe and Chuck Miller reading Iraqi poetry, both in the original and in translation. Comparing these two to Simon and Garfunkel yields some interesting observations. Chuck is loud, outgoing, and very earthy type of person. Saadi was very composed, reserved, observant type who spoke extremely softly. An original odd-couple of sorts, book-end representations of poets, writers, and artists in general.
Their reading was insightful. In the reading it was made clear that poetry always offers a challenge in translation because of social differences in origins of the work. In many respects, poetry often carries connotations of the culture that created it, which is often difficult, and sometimes even impossible to translate (this works for both to and from English -- I will explain more later). For an example, one of the poems was about "travel", and as Chuck stated, he didn't understand what the importance of travel as a concept was. Saadi explained that because of the political climate there frequently travel is often a more permanent departure, so chosing to depart often takes on more literal and philosophical questions.
Next came several readers from the Noble Pen writer's group. Tony Covington read several poems that centered on questions of meaning and purpose to our lives. How do we find that meaning, what inspires us, confuses us. These poems served to contrast and underscore some of the themes in Saadi's translations which questions things very deeply. Another poet, Demetrius, read a poem in which a child identifies with the part of his father that was at one time a warrior: the child wants to learn to be like his father. His father responds by saying that being a warrior was easy, the hardest thing to learn, and the thing that he had spent the whole rest ofhis life learning was how to bring life into things, such as the garden he had been tending to for many years after the war.
The next reader was Mary Swander, who's study of the Amish culture revealed some interesting comparisons between political policy and social values. For example, the Amish people financially and socially cut off those who stray from their beliefs. Possibly a harsh thing to do to someone who is part of your community. However, the idea is actually something that is practiced in political circuits now: this concept is known as sanctions. Mary proceeded to read a piece about older gentleman who talks about the things that he's seen in life, including being in both World Wars, and how he doesn't want to see it happen again.
After Mary, we returned to several more readers from the Noble Pen writer's group. Cathy Wilkie-Tomes had nearly everyone in tears with a piece she had written about woman who had met a soldier shortly before being called up to duty for Desert Storm. She waited while he was gone, and was reunited with him. However, after his return, things started to fall apart. He was unwilling to talk about the things that he'd done and seen during the war. She saw photos, but he would only say that he was guarding prisoners. During the conflict he had lost the Peace pendant she had given him before he left. Finally, one night, she woke up to him holding her in a neck-lock position, pointing his fingers in a mock gun at her head and muttering "I'll do it, I swear..."
Ian Philpott took the stage and read several pieces about war and patriotism in extremism that often lead to the perversion of thoughts and actions that lead to war.
I missed the next several poets as I had to depart for a few minutes to use the facilities.
I returned to Robert Dana taking the stage. He presented several pieces that presented perspectives on war from people who had actually been in previous wars. Including Korea, Viet-Nam, and WWII.
Next was Katie Ford, who presented some insight into the psychological affects that war had, not just on the participants, but on the civilian population as well. She then read a monologue from the perspective of a survivor of a war. And followed with a poem from her works that underscored the idea of trying to understand what is normal when there hasn't been anything normal to hold on to for an extended period of time.
Next were a couple more poets from the Noble Pen group.
I closed the reading with a diary entry from the Iraq Peace Team that talked about the affects of adjusting to the bombings in the middle of the night, and seeing a demolished farmhouse from those bombings. And lambasting the media for not reporting all sides of the story, including making the Iraq Peace Team sound like traitors, despite their attempt to focus the interview on the work and the things that they are finding (like the piece of a bomb one of the participants found at the farm house).
The piece closed with the following line: "The candle I use for my time of contemplation slowly burned itself out this morning. Not an omen, I hope!"
After cleaning up the place, and finishing all the other side work, I decided to go to Iowa City to hear Saadi and Chuck read again. (They will also have a couple of other readings in the area during the next month I hope to attend.)
At this reading, I was able to listen more closely to Saadi's readings in Arabic. I was able to listen to and hear the rhythmic patterns of the work, and the way the phrasings work. It's really fascinating, there are several marks in the way words end with inhalations or exhalations, and their intensity that serve as a way of marking the phrases. There's an arrangement of dipthongs and characteristics to the words that set up interesting rhythmic patterns.
After the reading I was able to ask him a little more about the translation of works, and the carrying of culture across languages. I asked him if it was as difficult to translate works to Arabic, knowing that the works of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and other poets had been translated, and were important to poets in that region. He answered by telling me that he had attempted to translate Allen Ginsberg's "Howl", but had to stop on the second line because there wasn't a way to translate "an angry fix" because drug addiction is very different there, it isn't a concept that translates well.