issue 31: monsoon 2025
ROBIN MOGER
Indebted
for Golan Haji
A selection of texts and poems about and by Dhul Rumma (c.696 — c.735 AD), thought to have lived in the southeastern Najd, in what is now Saudi Arabia, and one poem by Golan Haji, (b.1977), a Syrian-Kurdish poet, essayist and translator who lives in Paris.
from Ammonites
from Section One
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Intolerable the world if it could not be thought.
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Poetry is exile, to the origin.
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More important than creation, the coming to terms with creation.
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Pilgrimage as lived place, its lantern.
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The slow rhythms of light mobilize the root.
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Discovery, the invention of the lived.
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Even late, the word determines the dole.
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A shadow, minus its limits, would burn off.
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Out of empathy, placing the pot in a more scenic spot.
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In absolute darkness, she still feels the star’s blaze.
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It’s the wound that ferries us to shore.
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Listening to the limit, then recognizing yourself in it.
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I succeeded in making your absence my residence.
The translator of romance novels in Athens
(to Robin Moger)
by Golan Haji
[The title of this poem dedicated to Robin Moger was inspired by something the Lebanese poet Wadih Saadeh mentioned to me during a brief encounter in Damascus, the summer of 2010. He told me that when they were both penniless in Athens, he and the Iraqi poet Sargon Boulos used to translate romance novels for the Abeer, or “Perfume”, series. It was anonymous piecework and his name never appeared on the covers of the books — GH]
My regret here is what I said there:
“My weeping is what saves me.
Between I and they lies this horizon
and their dream is killing me.”
Indebted in a land indebted
I leant against a boat’s wreck and did not go on;
did not leave Greece then God left me
once my penitence was done
and this archipelago took me in;
its low white walls, blue doors
like small skies planted in the snow by winds,
made me their friend.
The eye clears in the islands’ air
like a monk’s mind after fasting days,
and no fear clouds the morning clear,
no lightning sears the collars of the clouds.
My eye was emptied of what it saw,
the clean air with that sun of calm
flooding my gaze.
A few paces are enough to have my shadow and the pine’s shade fuse,
to see beneath my lids
a girl let down her lids upon her lover.
She wears a light green shirt that lets show through
the aureole, dark like wine like Homer’s sea,
her nipples lifting, lengthen gradually
like snail’s horns
in the close damp air
between two thunderstorms.
Jeannette Lozano Clariond is a poet, translator, and founder of the Vaso Roto Editions in Spain and Mexico. Along with the Gonzalo Rojas National Poetry Prize, Jeannette L. Clariond has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship; the Arts Award from the University of Nuevo León; the Efraín Huerta National Poetry Prize; the Best Translation Award for her book collaboration with Harold Bloom: The School of Wallace Stevens: A Profile of Contemporary American Poetry; the Juan de Mairena Award from the University of Guadalajara; the International Latino Best Book Award for her translation of Anne Carson's Decreation; the San Juan de la Cruz International Poetry Prize; the Pilar Fernández Labrador International Poetry Prize of Salamanca; and the BIBLOS Award for Merit.
A writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Best Translated Book Award, Gander has been a signal voice for environmental poetics. His most recent books are Mojave Ghost: a Novel Poem and Across/Ground: Photographs by Lukas Felzmann.