So What: New and Selected Poems 1971-2005

by Taha Muhammad Ali, Peter Cole (Translator), Yahya Hijazi And Gabriel Levin (Translator)

Taha Muhammad Ali is a revered Palestinian poet whose work is driven by vivid imagination, disarming humor, and unflinching honesty. As a boy he was exiled from his hometown, and from this devastating loss he has created art of the highest order. His poems portray experiences that range from catastrophe to splendor, each preserving an essential human dignity. So What includes Arabic en face and introductions by cotranslators Gabriel Levin and Peter Cole.

Genres: Poetry, Middle East

280 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2006

About the author

Taha Muhammad Ali was born in the village of Saffuriyya, Palestine, and died in Nazareth, Israel. He authored four volumes of poetry in Arabic and a collection of short stories. He operated a souvenir shop in Nazareth, and traveled to the United States several times to read his poetry at the Dodge Poetry Festival. In 2009 he was featured on PBS NewsHour.

Reviews

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grace and beauty in words and seamless translation. Destined to become a favorite of all time.

.
There Was No Farewell

We did not weep
when we were leaving --
for we had neither
time nor tears,
and there was no farewell.
We did not know
at the moment of parting
that it was a parting,
so where would our weeping
have come from?
We did not stay
awake all night
(And did not doze)
the night of our leaving.
That night we had
neither night not light,
and no moon rose.
That night we lost our star,
our lamp misled us;
we didn't receive our share
of sleeplessness --
so where
would wakefulness have come from?

[Shirin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read this collection on poetry alongside Victims of a Map: A Bilingual Anthology of Arabic Poetry and since both collections deal with displacement and identity within the Palestinian context I read those two collections in relation to each other.

Taha Muhammad Ali is more of a story-teller than any of the authors in the above mentioned collection. The tone of his poetry is much more conversational, light-hearted and even humorous at times. There is much more of enjoying the-little-things-in-life and living-in-the-moment despite his homeland's political and social "dead-end"-situation.
Through his poems he guides the reader into the life of a Palestinian village. He writes about various people in his village, how they live and what they do. These little glimpses into their lives are sometimes sad and sometimes with a smiling wink, but always with a shoulder shrug - 'so what'?! It is more a personal account of a single life in Palestine than an attempt to describe the destiny and experience of a people. And by focusing on the individuality of this experience he is able to show the gaps within the hopelessness and how they are filled instead with the simple pleasures of life.

[…]
And so
It has taken me
All of sixty years
To understand
That water is the finest drink
And bread the most delicious food,
And that art is worthless
Unless it plants
A measure of splendor in people’s hearts.
[…]

From “Twigs” p. 114-117

[Victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

In an important sense one's never finished with a book of poetry, so I'll mark this as Read, having read pretty much everything in it once or twice, though I'm certainly not finished with it. The poet's death on October 2nd, at the good age of 80 and after a tumultuous and highly unlikely life, occurred just before the awarding of the Nobel Prize in literature to a Swedish 80-yer-old poet, also widely translated, which is an occasion for a sort of wistful regret: how wonderful in a dozen ways it would have been for this prize to go to a Palestinian.

So What contains a very small part of Taha's published work, so we can think more translations will be forthcoming. I was delighted on ordering this book that it's in both Arabic and English, but the Arabic isn't transliterated, so one can't get a sense of how it might sound. It would be a boon if future translations included transliterations as well as the original language. YouTube, meanwhile, will help a bit: there are videos of Taha reading in Arabic followed by his English translator reading; these poetic performances shouldn't be missed; see the top items here:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search...

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first reading of a poet that was translated from Arabic outside of the Sufi Poetry of Rumi, Hafiz and Mahmud Shabistari. His poems are powerful and describe life from the view of a Palestinian who has seen his home destroyed during the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 and has lived in Israel making a living as a poet and owner of a shop. Poems from the book that I love are 'Twigs,' 'There was no Farewell,' and 'Meeting at an Airport.' A great Read!

I would recommend this book to a person who wishes to go beyond the American Poets and look at life in the Middle East through the eyes of an Arabic Poet.

[Najwa Zedani gw · Rating 5 out of 5]

what i can think about my grandfather's book!!!!..Every word has a deep meaning,i read it many times and in the futur i will read this Poems to my children and after them to my grandchildren.
we miss you..rest in peace

[Shamiram · Rating 3 out of 5]

Warning
Lovers of hunting,
and beginners seeking your prey;
Don't aim your rifles
at my happiness,
which isn't worth
the price of the bullet
(you'd waste on it).
What seems to you
so nimble and fine,
like a fawn,
and flees every which way,
like a partridge,
isn't happiness.
Trust me:
my happiness bears
no relation to happiness.

[Jesse Level · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve owned this book for nearly twenty years without really knowing what it is. This reading I was finally cogent of what I was reading, and what a powerful book it is.

[Amira Hanafi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to take it back to the library yesterday, reluctantly. And I re-read some of the poems, fraught with unintentional departures. "I would have swallowed a rope ten times as long, if only we could have stayed in our village." Loss bound up in simple language gives the absent presence, where impossible returns seem just out of reach. These poems remind me, as I mess with language on paper and elsewhere, that clarity, simplicity, a writing from the very gut, can have great and lasting impact. These poems give one of the clearer pictures of Palestine: the Palestine of the people, those who have left and those left.

My deep gratitude to the translators. And also, I am charmed that Ali runs a souvenir shop.

[Roberta · Rating 4 out of 5]

This Palestinian poet is self taught, having had only four years of formal education. His family fled to Lebanon after the Arab-Israeli war of 1947. He now lives in Nazareth. In this book, his poems are presented in both Arabic and English, side by side. Though his life has been hard and full of sadness, his writing shows humor and a love of beauty.One of my favorite poems ends with, "After we die, and the weary heart has lowered its final eyelid on all that we've done. . .hate will be the first thing to putrefy within us."

[ylin002 · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow. also just discovered him in the new nonfiction section. powerful lines.

[Shannon Hedges · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a Palestinian, he has learned a lot about humanity and writes of it in a stunningly beautiful manner. I bet the imagery is even better in Arabic.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful poems, and I loved having both the Arabic and the English translation to compare.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book--wonderful translations; moving poems of lost village life.

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was given to me, highly recommended. I liked it well enough--I enjoyed the facing pages to see the originals. The poems are good but start to sound the same after awhile...

[Robert Rhodes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another very fine Middle Eastern poet of today.

[Peyton · Rating 4 out of 5]

"In his life
he neither wrote nor read.
In his life he
didn’t cut down a single tree,
didn’t slit the throat
of a single calf.
In his life he did not speak
of the New York Times
behind its back,
didn’t raise
his voice to a soul
except in his saying:
'Come in, please,
by God, you can’t refuse.'

—

"Nevertheless—
his case is hopeless,
his situation
desperate.
His God-given rights are a grain of salt
tossed into the sea.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury:
about his enemies
my client knows not a thing.
And I can assure you,
were he to encounter
the entire crew
of the aircraft carrier Enterprise,
he’d serve them eggs
sunny-side up,
and labneh
fresh from the bag."

9/10

[J. Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another book recommended by a friend (so many friends who read so many good books!). While I was visiting Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, we were talking books and she quoted this portion of a poem:
And so
it has taken me
all of sixty years
to understand
that water is the finest drink,
and bread the most delicious food,
and that art is worthless
unless it plants
a measure of splendor in people’s hearts.

I was so taken by it that when I got home I ordered a copy of "So What" (the snippet came from the poem "Twigs"). I was not disappointed. It's a collection of lovely and powerful poems to which I will return often.

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

An anthology of poetry by another Palestinian poet, Taha Muhammad Ali. Ali's style is quite different from al-Qasim and Darwish, less intellectual and symbolic, more about everyday life; the introduction says it was written in a more vernacular language, although of course that wasn't obvious in translation. (The book is actually bilingual, but I don't know Arabic.) Some of the poems were humorous. I enjoyed the collection. The book also includes a short story, the title story "So What". The book is a longer version of a book that was published earlier called Never Mind.

[Izaak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful writing and poetry, this collection is definitely very prescient in our time and contains works that you can read over and over again, and they will still be just as prescient as when they were written decades ago.

[Waqas Manzoor · Rating 4 out of 5]

While reading you feel the pain the poet experienced while writing.

[Abi Mott · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has changed my life and inspired new thoughts on how to write poetry.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poetry of Taha Muhammad Ali offers a firm link between a Palestinian agricultural past and a future of mixed modes of production that are closer to the truth for many Arabs in Israel and the occupied territories. An important component of his mediating poetics has to do with the relationship between water flows and affect. On another agricultural village, his Saffuriyya, he writes:
A bright, hopeful joy
spread out over the people,
over the village,
like the joy of the year’s first rain (“The Kid Goats of Jamil” 66-69).


In “Abd el-Hadi the Fool,” Ali gives us a character profoundly divided between an anger justified by disasters which read as allusions to those of the Nakba and an essential foolish joy that hearkens to that which the kid goats inspire.

Ali’s long poem, “Falcon,” is addressed to a “sadness” that he experiences totally and desires to be free from. He is self-conscious of his identification of sadness with waterways: “For me it is sufficient to simply / not know sadness and longer— / … / The river’s vagrancy wouldn’t sadden me” (24-25, 30). While Ali’s sadness is associated with much that moves or changes, the river is a primary, returned to vehicle:
and you, O river—
after my sadness is freed from you,
rivers will no longer be rivers,
nor birds birds,
and even flowers themselves
will cease being flowers!
For without my sorrow,
at the end of the day
rivers will only be water (40-48)
As the poem progresses sadness transcends any one vehicle and becomes a fundamental part of Ali’s being:
you’re so much
greater than I am—
deeper than my wakefulness,
and more remote than all my dreams!” (173-176)

There is more than nostalgia in Ali’s representations of village-centered working life. He is alert to the dilemma of an economically marginalized population. Many Palestinians were and continue to be caught in the push-pull between attendance to traditional agricultural spaces and, forced by lack of economic alternatives, a construction work which amounts to participation in the production of the urban, Israeli spaces and practices which replace agricultural spaces and practices and, in the case of settlements built on agricultural land and aquifers, a co-option of Palestinian resources. Ultimately, Ali points to an ethics of a more mutual responsibility and stewardship. He acknowledges his own sadness and points to a shadowy history of dispossessions and massacres but refuses to be an affective sink, returning, instead, this excess of sadness to its source, an other “they,” while also affirming the sadness in and of itself as an intertwined subject which mediates the exchange between these two parties.

[Michael Shockley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book contains some of the author's work from 1971-2005. I am not sure if this text should serve as an introduction to this author, given that this is actually the only book I've read of his, and I know little about this author save for that he is Palestinian and writes his work in Arabic (this text includes the original Arabic, with English translations facing it), but I suppose it is as good as any, and though the details are a little hazy to me now, I don't suppose it would hurt you to read the introduction or anything.

In some ways, this work reads like what you'd expect from an Arabic poet; the structures, themes, and imagery are similar to what many modern Arabic poets are using these days in their poetry, and while Ali's work can at times be a little too derivative, there are some genuine moments of ingenuity throughout, and one is struck by the occasional flash of brilliance (I admit, however, that I cannot give his work or any other Arabic poet's work the exact assessments that they deserve, for I do not speak enough Arabic to judge their works by any metric save for those provided by translators).

Though the themes of identity, history, and exile are clearly on display in this work, and these are themes which are common to many Palestinians, Ali isn't just soap-boxing; everything from the mundane to the sublime, and from the ephemeral to the eternal, are given their dues in this book, sometimes within a single poem. I was particularly struck by how his work seemed to become less baroque as he continued writing, but without sacrificing anything of importance - a testiment to the kind of wisdom that can only come with age.

At the end, you will find a single short story, about a boy who is too poor to afford shoes, but is provided with the opportunity one day to get them. It is a fine story, not too spare, but not choking on adornments either. Give it a read - it's not bad.

[Mary Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful to discover a poet whose work speaks to both heart and brain! This poet writes about his life as a displaced person in a conflicted part of our world- so (therefore) many poems are filled with grief, loss, despair..... but his warm humor, irony, love and wit bring to the reading, often, an exhilaration and gratitude for the gift of human life. Highly recommend!

[Gilbert Wesley Purdy · Rating 4 out of 5]

"In the wake of 9/11, the Palestinian people, already largely ignored by the mainstream American press beyond memory, were even more abandoned. The Intifadah (or "uprising") that began in September 2000, shortly after Ariel Sharon strutted around the Temple Mount in order to show that the Arab holy site could be transgressed at will, and well after Israel had begun stonewalling on the implementation of the Oslo Accords, could not have come at a worse time. A year later, Al-Qaeda operatives rammed commercial jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the Palestinians, some of whom had committed suicide attacks prior to that against Israeli civilians, lost all of their limited political support at a blow."

Click here to read my complete review>>> at Eclectica Magazine

[Elaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, tragic, tormented, eloquent Middle Eastern poet. His poetry describes in heartfelt verses the deep, deep pain of losing one's homeland, culture. He also describes the essence and the heart of the people of his world and culture. Amazing poet

[Kayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

intense poetry. good view into the occupied Palestinian mindset.

[Subhankar Das · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bad translation work.

[Joanie Wells-alminiana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read Harder Challenge 2017 #23: Read a collection of poetry in translation on a theme other than love