Poets on Translation: “Where Do You Live?”

Poets on Translation is a series of short essays in which poets examine the intersections of poetry and translation in relation to questions of language, identity, authorship, and more.

“Where do you live?” Superficially, it’s a polite query traded by strangers. But for Dr. Hanaa Ahmad Jabr and me, two poets living an ocean apart, who have never met in person, and who do not share a language, it has been key to getting to know each other through conversations conducted via 21st century tech—for example, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Google Doc, Zoom—she in Arabic, and me in English. It’s also the title of our collaborative, bilingual poetry collection, Where do you live? أين تعيشين؟ a correspondence in Arabic and English poems (Arrowsmith Press), an epistolary exchange that plumbs the depths of this question to consider where we live in our memories, nightmares, longings, souls.

Hanaa and I were supposed to meet in 2017 in Dubai, along with about a dozen other women artists, writers, and translators from the United States and Iraq, at a retreat sponsored by Her Story Is (HSI), a peace-building and cultural-exchange collective. I was invited to join because I’d taught poetry workshops to human-trafficking survivors and had published a collection exploring sex-trafficking and objectification in the United States, and many of the Iraqi participants had worked with and written about trafficked and objectified Yazidi women. I accepted the invitation to join in part because of memories from my college days when I’d participated in several “Bridge of Peace” ceremonies hosted by the Women’s Federation for World Peace at various hotel conference halls. In each ceremony, I would walk to the center of a small, make-shift bridge where I would meet and embrace a woman from a former or current enemy nation of the United States, who had crossed the bridge from the other side. I wept every time.

I knew that Hanaa would be the only other poet present at the Dubai conference, and that we would be meeting as if in the middle of a metaphorical bridge of peace. But Hanaa wasn’t there when I arrived. Her travel had been restricted at the last minute and she couldn’t attend. And she missed so much! In addition to spending time together site-seeing and sharing culinary dishes from our respective cultural traditions, we attended each other’s presentations on a whole range of forms of artistic expression, from documentary filmmaking and collaborative playwriting to oil painting, woodcut art, and portraiture; I led a session on ekphrastic poetry.

I arrived home from Dubai heady with wonder and determined to find a way to create art that could bridge cultural divides. I reached out to Hanaa through Messenger to ask if she’d like to work together on an experimental, co-translation project, perhaps a poem series, or maybe a book. Our exchanges were a bit scattershot at first, because she speaks very little English and I speak no Arabic. Eventually, we were introduced to University of Basrah professor and linguist Tamara Alattiya and, later, to Alattiya’s protégé and student Wadaq Qais, both of whom became our interpreters and translators, and made it possible for Hanaa and I to truly collaborate.

At our first Zoom meeting with Tamara, Hanaa and I decided we’d correspond via poetry. We soon determined that we’d cocreate a full-length collection, in which every poem would appear in both Arabic and English. Much of that first meeting, and many of the meetings that followed, was focused on a discussion of the loci around which our exchanges would orbit, hence the title: “Where do you live?”

Through our facilitated conversations and co-translations, we tried to get to know each other on a deep level, to learn about each other’s childhoods and what motivates each of us to read and write poetry. As we learned early on, besides poetry, war binds us, too, both of us having wrestled with the emotional wounds that are its aftereffects. My life has been stained by my father’s participation in, and mental debilitation due to the Vietnam war. For her part, Hanaa has “lived through many wars.” It wasn’t always easy to talk about this subject matter. Inevitably, we did not always succeed at understanding each other.

After each of these conversations-via-translation, we took turns writing a poem. When Hanaa wrote a poem, she’d send it to one of the translators who’d create a trot in English—what I like to call “a raw English version.” I’d comb through it, make corrections, and beautify the English (with an eye toward best words, images, sounds, and lines), while trying to stay true to Hanaa’s intentions. I’d compile questions and meet with one of the translators to make sure I’d understood the poems. Sometimes, we’d bring Hanaa back into the discussion, to ask about adding punctuation that didn’t appear in the original, for example, or when I’d gotten stuck on an unfamiliar metaphor and needed an explanation from Hanaa in order to suss out the rest of the poem. When that co-translation was complete, I’d compose a poem of my own, often in direct response, and the process would start all over, but in the opposite direction. 

I remember panicking when I received Tamara’s first raw trot of Hanaa’s poem in English: “To ceasefire the sorrow / On the heads of the pedestrian / And sweep their hang around.” I had no idea what it meant! I felt like the Fool on a Tarot card—stepping off a cliff, needing to trust I’d find land. I gathered my questions and posed them to Hanaa—through Tamara—on Zoom, who told me about the bombed-out sidewalk in Mosul where local booksellers had once congregated with their wares, about how it had been rebuilt only to be emptied during COVID-19 lockdowns, and what that emptiness meant to the Mosul literary community, and to her. These hours-long conversations gave me the first inklings of Hanaa’s wryness and passion.

When we began working together, Hanaa had just started to confront the wars she’d survived and their aftermath of residual fear. As she put it in “Life, a Yellow Vehicle”: “Music alone wasn’t part of my biography, / it was a companion of war. / And, every song refers to my death in some war.”

In one early conversation, I’d told her I see my life as the aftermath of my father’s traumatic stint as a soldier. “I’m the tail-end of a small war,” I wrote in “The War I Control.” Later, in “The Falconers,” I invited Hanaa to visit the motel room my father had lived in for decades, “at the Budget Inn—the final place / my war-torn father held me. It was so odd. He’d held me / once before, forty-eight years before.” Writing can be healing, of course, but it’s often so lonely. My exchanges with Hanaa felt like healing in good company.

After learning a bit about my experiences in foster care Hanaa sent me her poem “A Girl of the Neighborhood (for Jennifer Jean),” in which she writes: “like the branches of a lonely almond tree… / She cared only about the azure ocean above her home / and every border keeping her from the lifeless ones.” Rendering her poem in English translation, I was struck by how accurate a representation of my growing up experience it was! Hanaa had been listening.

In her final poem in the book Hanaa writes:

Yes, I live here…
While my other eye is closed, hiding dreadful war scenes… 
[…]Jennifer[…] 
We are the two eyes together… forever.

These lines point to the bittersweet reality of what had, over the course of a seven-year-long collaboration in poetry and translation, become a deeply rooted friendship.

I have found that to translate is to converse deeply, and to discover how much we have in common with those we may feel far from. The careful, painstaking attention to detail that translation requires can, I believe, help heal our broken world. I hope our collaboration in and through translation can serve as inspiration to others who might reach across similar divides and experiment with art as a way to bring an end to suffering and begin the process of healing. Is this naïve? Part of me thinks it is. I can hardly type out such thoughts. But part of me believes that maybe one, maybe six, or ten poets or artists are out there telling themselves, “I can do that too. Easy.” And then they do.