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Scorpionic Sun
Praise for Scorpionic Sun:
Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s poems speak from 1969 to the present with urgency, through an explosively anachronistic act of translation by Conor Bracken. As Khaïr-Eddine writes in “Black Nausea,” the poems “offer to the future this weird / fruit / which speaks in the mouths / of the thousands of innocents dead / in our black blood.” The distortive energies of Khaïr-Eddine’s “linguistic guerilla war” agitate for a politically convulsive poetry that dares to be strange, spastic and abjectly sublime. This is a return of a political surrealism when its convulsive bloom is most needed.
—Johannes Göransson
No, decolonizing is not a metaphor, but it is a proposal emerging from the place where land and consciousness meet. To get closer to that place Khaïr-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun resists any nation state—or any reader—who would take up land or consciousness, song or bodies as mere instruments. Wisely, then, Conor Bracken’s translation doesn’t so much use as it delivers English into the brutal ongoingness of what Teresa Villa-Ignacio has called Khaïr-Eddine’s “seismic line.” Thus thoroughly shaken and gone we can find one another “by a necessary association with events to come.”
—Farid Matuk
Khaïr-Eddine grabbed hold of the French language with a violent passion; he loved it ferociously, without concession, without moderation. Along with Kateb Yacine and Aimé Césaire, it is he who has done the most to rattle and enrich the language.
—Tahar Ben Jelloun, Le Monde
Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine (1941–1995) was an Amazigh Moroccan poet and writer. In the 1960s, he established the Poésie Toute movement and co-founded the avant-garde journal Souffles.
Conor Bracken is a poet, translator, and assistant professor of English at the University of Findlay.
Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s poems speak from 1969 to the present with urgency, through an explosively anachronistic act of translation by Conor Bracken. As Khaïr-Eddine writes in “Black Nausea,” the poems “offer to the future this weird / fruit / which speaks in the mouths / of the thousands of innocents dead / in our black blood.” The distortive energies of Khaïr-Eddine’s “linguistic guerilla war” agitate for a politically convulsive poetry that dares to be strange, spastic and abjectly sublime. This is a return of a political surrealism when its convulsive bloom is most needed.
—Johannes Göransson
No, decolonizing is not a metaphor, but it is a proposal emerging from the place where land and consciousness meet. To get closer to that place Khaïr-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun resists any nation state—or any reader—who would take up land or consciousness, song or bodies as mere instruments. Wisely, then, Conor Bracken’s translation doesn’t so much use as it delivers English into the brutal ongoingness of what Teresa Villa-Ignacio has called Khaïr-Eddine’s “seismic line.” Thus thoroughly shaken and gone we can find one another “by a necessary association with events to come.”
—Farid Matuk
Khaïr-Eddine grabbed hold of the French language with a violent passion; he loved it ferociously, without concession, without moderation. Along with Kateb Yacine and Aimé Césaire, it is he who has done the most to rattle and enrich the language.
—Tahar Ben Jelloun, Le Monde
Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine (1941–1995) was an Amazigh Moroccan poet and writer. In the 1960s, he established the Poésie Toute movement and co-founded the avant-garde journal Souffles.
Conor Bracken is a poet, translator, and assistant professor of English at the University of Findlay.
- GenresPoetry
124 pages, Paperback
Published September 10, 2019
About the author
Mohammed Khair-Eddine
38 books59 followersMohammed Khair-Eddine was amongst the most famous Moroccan literary figures of the 20th century. Born in 1941 in Tafraoute, as a young writer he joined the circle of writers known as the Amitiés littéraires et artistiques in Casablanca. In 1964 Khair-Eddir founded the "Poésie Toute" movement. In 1965 he was exiled to France where he spent years working in factories. In 1967 he started publishing again, writing for "Lettres nouvelles" and "Présence africaine". He returned to Morocco in 1979. Khair-Eddine died in Rabat November 18th 1995, the Independence Day of Morocco.
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