The Heart of a Stranger

by André Naffis-Sahely

  All too often, however, exile ends in tragedy, as it does for Ribka Sibhatu’s Eritrean refugees aboard their ramshackle boats while attempting to cross the Mediterranean to begin new lives in Fortress Europe. On the other hand, fleeing one’s home may gain one a kingdom, as is shown by the excerpt from John Barbour’s (c.1320–95) The Bruce of Bannockburn, which details the rise to power of Robert the Bruce, King of Scots (1274–1329). Indeed, while history has taught us to look upon exile as a judgement passed by inscrutable higher powers or power-drunk despots, it is abundantly clear that exile can also be a choice. As Robert W. Service tells us in “The Spell of the Yukon”, “I wanted the gold, and I sought it”, which appears as popular a reason to leave home as any. Encouraging one to go into self-imposed exile can also be sound advice, as Jee Leong Koh does in “To a Young Poet”: “Quit the country soon as you can” he counsels, adding “Pay no heed to the village elders. / They are secretly ashamed that they did not leave.” After all, what does “home” truly mean if it does not truly accept who you are? While this anthology does not seek to define exile, what should hopefully be clear by the time one has read this book cover to cover is that there never has been — and never will be — a definitive definition for this famously elusive condition.

  Entirely unsurprisingly, I am indebted to the translators featured in these pages for their warmth, generosity and enthusiasm for this project. The overabundance of material uncovered during my research was probably as daunting as the condition of exile itself, and I must therefore beg the reader’s forgiveness for the sins of omission I will undoubtedly have committed. In the end, I was forced to discard more than three times the number of poems and stories than what eventually made the cut. I agonized over certain decisions, while others proved far easier. The reader will see nothing here by favorites of mine such as Abdelrahman Munif, Bertolt Brecht, Pablo Neruda, W.H. Auden, James Baldwin and Gore Vidal, none of whose works I could afford to feature in these pages. As there was no attempt on my part to put together a “canonic” portrait of the literature of exile, this was no great restriction. In fact, this allowed me to make the anthology more pronouncedly political. Rather than focus on clichéd accounts of happy lives in sunny climes — Paul Gauguin in Tahiti or Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa spring to mind — I wanted the reader to experience Madame de Staël’s thoughts on Napoleon’s tyranny, or to picture the Communard Louise Michel on her way to the penal colony in New Caledonia, or to see the parallel to our present times in Mary Antin’s campaigns for immigrant rights during a particularly xenophobic moment in American history.

  In addition, I feel it necessary to add here that the fetishization of privileged cliques who took to “exile” like some take to resort holidays has never held any interest for me; ergo my decision to overlook the Lost Generation of the 1920s — Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes and Ernest Hemingway — since they’ve all been amply dissected over the course of the past century. There is something sickeningly self-satisfied about the self-imposed exiles of James Joyce in Trieste, the Beats in Morocco or Joseph Brodsky in Venice. If you’re going to stare into a mirror, you might as well do that at home, especially if you are fortunate enough to have one. As an exile myself, I have little love for well-heeled “literary expatriates” who write the same books elsewhere that they could have written in their home towns, and as such tend to think of most of them as “parasites in paradise”, to borrow from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s description of European settlers in Kenya.

  What readers will find here, instead, especially in the more contemporary sections of the anthology, are non-Western poets who deserve far more attention in the English-speaking world than they have thus far received: examples here include the Iraqi-Assyrian poet Sargon Boulus, the Chinese Uyghur poet Ahmatjan Osman, the East Timorese poet Fernando Sylvan and the Egyptian poet Iman Mersal, to name only a few. In conclusion, owing to its historical scope, I must stress that this anthology does not seek to give an accurate portrayal of what exilic literature looks like today and this is a task I am sure will be taken on by younger poets in not too distant a time. I imagine such an endeavor would spill into several volumes — many thousands of pages at least — and I certainly hope someone will undertake that task in the near future. After all, we have been banishing one another for ethnic, religious, sexual and political reasons for longer than we can remember, and unfortunately, as the first two decades of the twenty-first century have shown us, since we do not appear to have tired of these practices, the topic remains as ripe for investigation as ever.

  André Naffis-Sahely

  Los Angeles, November 2018

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The introductory prose in this volume was published in serial form by PN Review in their January–February, March–April and May–June issues in 2019. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the editors of the magazines in which some of these translations first appeared: Ambit, Asymptote, Jewish Quarterly, Journal of World Literature, Modern Poetry in Translation and New Left Review. The editor and publishers are grateful for permission to reproduce the following copyright material. Any errors in the list below are entirely unintentional.

  Naguib Mahfouz, “The Return of Sinuhe”, from Voices from the Other World: Ancient Egyptian Tales (American University in Cairo Press, 2006). Translated by Raymond Stock. Reprinted by permission of the translator and publisher.

  Anonymous, Exodus 23:9, from Holy Bible: King James Version (Collins, 2011). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Anonymous, Psalm 137, The Book of Psalms, from Holy Bible, New International Version (Biblica, 1978). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  “Now at their native realms the Greeks arrived”, from Book I of The Odyssey of Homer, translated by Alexander Pope.

  Sappho, “Fragment 98B”, from If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Vintage, 2003). Translated by Anne Carson. Reprinted by permission of the translator and publisher.

  Xenophanes, “Fragment 22”, translated by André Naffis-Sahely. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2019.

  Seneca the Younger, “Letter LXXXII”, from Moral Letters to Lucilius / Epistulae morales ad Lucilium (Loeb Classical Library, 1917). Translated by Richard Mott Gummere.

  Plutarch, “The Life of Cleomenes”, from The Parallel Lives (Loeb Classical Library, 1921). Translated by Bernadotte Perrin.

  The Desert Fathers, “Abba Longinus”, from The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks (Penguin Classics, 2003). Translated by Benedicta Ward. Reprinted by permission of the translator and publisher.

  Abd al-Rahman I, “The Palm Tree”, from Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain (Penn State University Press, 2003). Translated by D. Fairchild Ruggles. Reprinted by permission of the translator and publisher.

  Du Fu, “Dreaming of Li Bai”, from The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (Anchor, 2005). Translated by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping. Reprinted by permission of the translators and publisher.

  Bai Juyi, “Song of the Lute”, from The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (Anchor, 2005). Translated by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping. Reprinted by permission of the translators and publisher.

  Christopher of Mytilene, “On the ex-emperor Michael Kalaphates, when he was arrested and blinded for having banished the Empress Zoe from imperial rule”, from The Poems of Christopher of Mytilene and John Mauropous (Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, 2018). Translated by Floris Bernard and Christopher Livanos. Reprinted by permission of the translators and publisher.

  Ibn Hamdis, “Oh sea, you conceal my paradise”, from Giuseppe Quatriglio, A Thousand Years in Sicily: From the Arabs to the Bourbons (Legas Publishing, 1999). Translated by Giuseppe Quatriglio and Justin Vitiello. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Moses ibn Ezra, “I am weary of roaming about the world”, from Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews: High Middle Ages, 500–1200 (Columbia University Press, 1957). Translated by Salo Wittmayer Baron. Reprinte
d by permission of the publisher.

  Anna Komnene, from The Alexiad of the Princess Anna Comnena: Being the History of the Reign of Her Father, Alexius I, Emperor of the Romans, 1081–1118 A.D. (Routledge, Kegan, Paul, 1928). Translated by Elizabeth A. S. Dawes.

  Attar, “Parable of a Pauper in Love with a King”, from The Conference of the Birds (W.W. Norton & Company, 2017). Translated by Sholeh Wolpé. Reprinted by permission of the translator.

  Dante, “Cacciaguida’s Prophecy”, from Canto XVII of Paradiso, The Divine Comedy (Forum Italicum, 2000). Translated by James Finn Cotter. Reprinted by permission of the translator.

  John Barbour, from The Bruce of Bannockburn (E. Mackay, 1914). Translated by Michael MacMillan.

  Michael Marullus, “De exilio suo”. Translation by Amy S. Lewis. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2019.

  William Shakespeare, from Coriolanus (Arden Shakespeare, 1976).

  Andrias MacMarcuis, “The Flight of the Earls”, from David H. Greene, An Anthology of Irish Literature (NYU Press, 1985). Translated by Robin Flower.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie, in Charles W. Eliot, The English Poetry III: From Tennyson to Whitman (P.F. Collier & Son, 1914).

  Olaudah Equiano, “The Middle Passage”, from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, written by Himself (London, 1789).

  Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin, from The Wonders of Vilayet: Being the Memoir, Originally in Persian, of a Visit to France and Britain in 1765 (Peepal Tree Press, 2002). Translated by Kaiser Haq. Reprinted by permission of the translator and publisher.

  Phillis Wheatley, “A Farewell to America”, from Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (A. Bell, 1773).

  Francis Baily, from Journal of a tour in unsettled parts of North America in 1796 & 1797 (Baily Bros, 1856).

  Mary Shelley, from Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Mirabeau, Madame Roland, Madame De Staël (Lea and Blanchard, 1840).

  Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”, from Hamilton Fish Armstrong, The Book of New York Verse (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917).

  Robert W. Service, “The Spell of the Yukon”, in The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses (Barse & Hopkins Publishers, 1907).

  Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, from Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion (Tsala Ea Batho, 1920).

  Mary Antin, from They Who Knock at Our Gates (Houghton Mifflin, 1914).

  A.C. Jacobs, “Immigration”, from Nameless Country: Selected Poems (Carcanet Press, 2018). Edited by Merle Bachman and Anthony Rudolf. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, “A Colonial Affair!”, from Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary (Heinemann, 1981). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Sargon Boulus, “Du Fu in Exile”. Translated by Sinan Antoon. Reprinted by permission of the translator. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2019.

  Jusuf Naoum, “As a Dog”. Translated by Martin Kratz. Reprinted by permission of the translator and the author. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2019.

  Luci Tapahonso, “In 1864”, from Sáanii Dahataal / The Women Are Singing: Poems and Stories (University of Arizona Press, 1993). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Adnan al-Sayegh, “Iraq”, from Pages from the Biography of an Exile (Arc Publications, 2016). Translated by Stephen Watts and Marga Burgui-Artajo.

  Ribka Sibhatu, “In Lampedusa”. Translated by André Naffis-Sahely. Reprinted by permission of the translator and the author. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2019.

  Percy Sholto, “An Irish Colonel”, from The Percy Anecdotes (J. Cumberland, 1826).

  Polish Legion in Haiti, “Letters Home”. Translated by Boris Dralyuk. Reprinted by permission of the translator. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2019.

  Madame de Staël, from Ten Years’ Exile, Or Memoirs of That Interesting Period of the Life of the Baroness De Staël-Holstein (Howlett & Brimmer, 1821). Anonymous translator.

  Ugo Foscolo, “To Zakynthos”. Translated by André Naffis-Sahely. Printed by permission of the translator. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2019.

  Giacomo Leopardi, “On the Monument to Dante Being Erected in Florence”, from Canti: Poems / A Bilingual Edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). Translated by Jonathan Galassi. Reprinted by permission of the translator and the publisher.

  Adam Mickiewicz, “While my corpse is here, sitting among you”. Translated by Boris Dralyuk. Reprinted by permission of the translator. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2019.

  Pierre Falcon, “General Dickson’s Song”, from Margaret Arnett MacLeod, Songs of Old Manitoba (The Ryerson Press, 1960). Translated by Robert L. Walters.

  George W. Cable, “Café des Exilés”, from Old Creole Days (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1893).

  Romain Rolland, from Jean-Christophe In Paris (H. Holt and Company, 1911). Translated by Gilbert Cannan.

  Khushwant Singh, from Train to Pakistan (Penguin Books India, 2009). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Tin Moe, “Meeting with the Buddha”, in Bones Will Crow: An Anthology of Burmese Poetry (Northern Illinois University Press, 2013). Edited by James Byrne and ko ko thett. Translated by Maung Tha Noe and Christopher Merrill.

  Michèle Lalonde, “Speak White”, from Speak White (L’Hexagone, 1974). Translation by André Naffis-Sahely. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2019.

  Mahmoud Darwish, from “A State of Siege”, in Modern Poetry in Translation, Series 3 No. 1, 2004. Translated by Sarah Maguire and Sabry Hafez. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Abdellatif Laâbi, from “Letter to My Friends Overseas”, in Beyond the Barbed Wire: Selected Poems (Carcanet Press, 2016). Translated by André Naffis-Sahely. Reprinted by permission of the translator and the publisher.

  Valdemar Kalinin, “And a Romani Set Off”, in Index on Censorship, Volume 31 Issue 3, 2002: Home and Away. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Souéloum Diagho, “Exile gnaws at me”. Translation by André Naffis-Sahely. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2019.

  Ahmatjan Osman, Uyghurland, the Farthest Exile (Phoneme Media, 2015). Translated by Jeffrey Yang. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Kajal Ahmad, “Birds”. Translated by Choman Hardi and Mimi Khalvati. Poetry Translation Centre. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2009. Reprinted by permission of the publisher and translators.

  Omnath Pokharel, from “The Short-Lived Trek”, in The Silhouette of Truth (Discourse Publications, 2015). Reprinted by permission of the estate.

  Victor Hugo, “To Octave Lacroix”, in The Letters of Victor Hugo: From Exile, and After the Fall of the Empire (Houghton, Mifflin, 1898). Translated by Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer.

  Louise Michel, “Voyage to Exile”, from The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel (University of Alabama Press, 1981). Translated by Elizabeth Gunter and Bullitt Lowry. Reprinted by permission of the publisher and translators.

  Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, “Zola Leaves France”, in With Zola in England: A Story of Exile (Chatto & Windus, 1899).

  Card No. 512210, “Bisbee”, in One Big Union Monthly, August 1919.

  Emma Goldman, from Living My Life (Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1931).

  Teffi, “The Gadarene Swine”, in Subtly Worded (Pushkin Press, 2014). Translated by Anne Marie Jackson. Reprinted by permission of the publisher and translator.

  José Carlos Mariátegui, “The Exile of Trotsky”, in Variedades, 23rd February 1929. Translated by Michael Pearlman.

  Leon Trotsky, “Letter to the Workers of the USSR”, in Fourth International, Volume 1 Number 5, October 1940, pp. 140–41. Translated by the Fourth International.

  Victor Serge, from “Mexican Notebooks”, in New Left Review 82, July–August 2013. Translated by Ros Schwartz. Reprinted by permission of the translators.

  Marina Tsvetayeva, “Homesickness”. Translated by Boris Dralyuk. Reprinted by permission of the translator. All rights re
served. Copyright © 2019.

  Anna Seghers, from Transit (NYRB Classics, 2013). Translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Cesare Pavese, “Lo Steddazzu”. Translation by André Naffis-Sahely. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2019.

  Yannis Ritsos, “A Break in Routine”, in In Secret: Versions of Yannis Ritsos (Enitharmon Press, 2013). Translated by David Harsent. Reprinted by permission of the translator.

  Carlos Bulosan, “American History”, in Poetry, April 1942. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Barbara Toporska, “The Chronicle” (Athene noctua, Kontra, London 1973, 2nd ed. 2013). Reprinted by permission of the translator and original publisher. All rights reserved. Original text © 2013 Nina Karsov. Translation © 2019 Boris Dralyuk.

  Silva Kaputikyan, “Perhaps”, in The Anthology of Armenian Poets, Volume I, edited by Samvel Mkrtchyan (SamSon, 2012). Translated by Diana Der-Hovanessian

  Alessandro Spina, “The Fort at Régima”, in The Fourth Shore: The Confines of the Shadow, Volume 2 (Arcade Books, 2019). Translated by André Naffis-Sahely. Reprinted by permission of the translator and the publisher.

  Miguel Martinez, from “Spanish Anarchists in Exile in Algeria”, a talk given at the Centre Ascaso-Durruti in Montpellier, France, in October 2002. Translated by Paul Sharkey.