Earlier this week, the Library of Arabic Literature released the paperback edition of Fate the Hunter, a “timeless” collection (Esquire Middle East) of pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry on the beauties and perils of the hunt, translated gorgeously by James E. Montgomery. We had the honor of receiving a foreword for this book from award-winning poet Alice Oswald, and in celebration of the book’s recent release, we’d like to share her words with you. We hope you enjoy!
In midwinter, Fate the Hunter arrives at my door. It is raining and I’m glad to bring this desert voice into the room. The skylight is blurred, the city is misted, but up here in the top of the house there is a world inside the world and it is very light and the poems seem to blow through me leaving a layer of sand.
When I put the book down, before reading footnotes or introduction, I have an impression of whirling speed. Similes flash past: an ostrich like a bucket dropping down a well, a horse like a lunatic undressing, wounds like rips in cloth, teats like earrings, legs like striped cloaks, wolves like the clack of arrows. My senses move more quickly than my thoughts, as if I had been reading while running.
Every poem is flying fast and hitting something. Thwack, thud, crack: these are the sounds used by James Montgomery to translate the moment when a missile kills an animal. The impact makes a vortex in the language, the vortex makes a vector. It is so efficient, so focused, I’m reminded of hunting spells. These poems are like conversations with spirits. They are summoning the ghosts of animals and perfect kills are being promised. Certainly, if I were an ibex, I would be doomed already by the force of their descriptions.
I am used to reading poetry which is more impressionist. The English lyric tradition is moist, as if secreted by the tear duct. Poems spoken in the first person tend to come up clouded, mooded, pensive, confiding. “Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind, but as for me, alas, I may no more…” I have trained myself on Wyatt’s faltering voice. I was not prepared for the will-powered exactness of these poems.
From threnodies which include the deaths of animals, through various portraits of wild creatures in flight and humans in chase, to a prose account of a day’s coursing in the mountains, this book traces the evolution of a genre: the ṭardiyyah or hunting poem. A genre, like a secondhand shoe, never completely fits the wearer. Nevertheless, by connecting one poetry to another, it allows us to salute something utterly new, utterly strange, while also finding it familiar. Isn’t the ṭardiyyah a bit like the lament for Enkidu? Isn’t it comparable to the Inuit songs collected by Rasmussen? Isn’t it exactly what Hughes was describing in Poetry in the Making, when he spoke of “The special kind of excitement, the slightly mesmerized and quite involuntary concentration with which you make out the stirrings of a new poem in your mind, then the outline, the mass and colour and clean final form of it in the midst of the general lifelessness, all that is too familiar to mistake. This is hunting and the poem is a new species of creature, a new specimen of the life outside your own.” (Hughes, 1967)
Hughes’ hunting poems—schooled in the disciplines of fishing and shooting—have the same fierceness as many of the poems in this book. The hawk, sitting with eyes closed in the top of a wood in Lupercal is not so different from the goshawk sitting on the wrist of al-Shamardal:
“Just before sunrise,
I cross the dark,
hoping for a lucky day
with a curve-beaked gos
clad in chain mail, last
fed yesterday, hungrily
scanning the pool at Ṭams
and beyond with an irate stare
or the eyes of a man in fever’s
grip. When cast, she spots
twenty dusty houbaras,
waddling like women, backs
bent with bundles of firewood,
or like Christians in dark robes…”
But what does it mean to compare an eighth-century Arabic poem with a twentieth-century English one? Poets of the ṭardiyyāt were building a poetics by responding to each other’s work and for that reason, even in a selection which spans two centuries, there is a kinship between their poems. As far as I know, Ted Hughes was not familiar with al-Shamardal’s poetry. If a hawk marks the place where his gaze crosses al-Shamardal’s, then the similarities are worth noticing. But I am more interested in their differences!
Hughes pursues animals in order to catch Poetry itself and Poetry for Hughes is a goddess, who “cannot come all the way….she comes as far as water, no further…
She comes dumb she cannot manage words
She brings petals in their nectar fruits in their plush
She brings a cloak of feathers an animal rainbow
She brings her favorite furs and these are her speeches…”
Throughout his work, Hughes is hunting this impossible female, whose presence, just beyond his poems, gives them a slight theatricality. Hughes’ creatures seem to yearn beyond themselves. Like a set of characters in a mystery play, they emerge in dialogue and they have a certain charisma and courtliness, even in their violence. What surprises me about the ṭardiyyāt, at least in this translation, is the way the poems lead you to a giddying emptiness. Beyond the ibex, beyond the ostrich and the houbaras, even beyond the humans and the gods, the poems are facing something purely impersonal—which is Fate.
The word is al-Dahr. According to the translator, a more precise definition of al-Dahr is Time. Fate is a character, who might be appeased by humans, but Time is nothing. It is simply the law by which we move through moments, one of which will be our last. Between the present moment and the first moment after death, there is a blind spot—as inaccessible to thought as a blink is invisible to an eye. The blindspot cannot be known but it can be mimicked—and that is what these poems seem to me to achieve: they capture Time by means of mimicry….
“Death has laid Abū ʿAmr on the highlands beneath a heap of stones…
Why weep? Fate hunts the full-grown ibex in his glade
under wisps of clouds unwound like turbans….
…
Fate hunts the majestic
supple-winged eagle who rests her two fledglings on a bed
of hare flesh, the hearts of birds stored inside her nest like date
pits discarded by a reveler…”
Like a film of last moments, the poem moves closer and closer to its subject without quite touching what it seeks: from a man to an ibex to the flesh of a hare to the small hearts of birds to scattered date-pits—each death creates its own scale, magnifies its moment, and delivers a shot of pain, as if the aim was not to soften us with comforts, but to harden us with glances. Hughes has a hard glance, but he fires it at characters not nothingness.
In their original language, the ṭardiyyāt are highly wrought, each line a syntactical unit sealed by a mono-rhyme and perhaps these patterns mollify their message. According to his introduction, James Montgomery experimented with equivalent forms in English but he decided that the results were too rigid. In particular, he felt that the “hegemony of the line” made his versions “inert and onerous.” Montgomery has written elsewhere about translation being successful insofar as it doesn’t try to keep everything. He calls it an act of “trauma” in which “loss” is fundamental to the process and this is a useful image for thinking about the genre itself—which, in its mixture of scrutiny and compassion, is really a free translation from animal language into human. Two species exchange selves by means of mimicry. The death of a human matches the death of an ibex, the death of an oryx, the death of an onager. The pace of an ostrich feels like a bucket slipping from the water-carrier’s grasp when a rope snaps. Twenty dusty houbaras waddle like women “backs bent with bundles of firewood.” The simile stands between them like a simultaneous interpreter and the pain of the poem is generated by this very close but always imperfect likeness between species. I might even say (without knowing any Arabic) that the insights which connect predator and prey are continued and intensified by the insights which connect a good translation to its text. Which is another way of saying that a good translator (and Montgomery is a very good translator) has to intuit the animal’s thoughts as well as the original poet’s.
I think that’s why, over and over again, I found myself thinking of Homer, who meets the trauma of the Iliad through the pain of not quite matching similes, many of which dramatize the tension between predator and prey:
“Like an eagle, peering this way and that,
they call it the sharpest-sighted
of all upward things under the sky,
whose highest eye, the quick-footed hare
in a leafy thicket can’t hide from
when it suddenly plummets to the kill…”
Death in the Iliad speaks a trans-language between human, animal, arboreal, mineral, and meteorological. A man dies and the darkness clouds his eyes and he falls like a tower, he falls like a diver, he falls like a shock of corn… blood spreads like dye on the cheek guard of a horse and one man murders another like a lion leaping on the neck of an ox, or he falls on the enemy like wind battering the waves, or like a hawk cutting through starlings, or like dogs harrying a deer…and a head sinks over like a poppy under a rain shower, and a man falls like a black poplar growing in the marshes, with just a few branches at the top when someone cuts it down to make a chariot wheel…
When you read a simile in the Iliad, you are already pre-programmed by the similarity which shapes the whole poem: in Book 24, Priam and Achilles are on opposite sides but they discover something in common. The Iliad redresses difference. If one man kills another like a lion leaping on the neck of an ox, then something is given back when Achilles grieves for Patroclus, like a lion whose cubs have been stolen…
No doubt there are comparable qualities in the ṭardiyyāt, but they are not what makes this book essential reading for anyone who loves poetry. I want to praise it for a flavor which I can’t quite define, because I have not really encountered it before, but its trace is definitely here in this rained-on house in Bristol, long after I put the book down and I think it is to do with unredressed difference. When (Poem 22) an ostrich lifts its neck like a banner on a bargeman’s pole and shakes its tent-like wings clenched together as tightly as a miser’s fist and runs as fast as a well bucket slipping from the water carrier’s grasp, when it shakes like a halfwit and sleeps like a tent tied to its pegs and swallows food like a snake digesting a lump and moves like a shock of white hair on a dark collar or a star fired at a rebellious devil tumbling from the sky and finally crashes to the ground like a pack camel laden with gear….then identity is secondary to movement and the self itself is called into question. These similes will not resolve their differences. Like a series of blinks, they cannot be known, only mimicked and that’s why I will have to conclude this introduction not with a conclusion but with a simile.
I remember once I walked the streets of Paris, looking for a particular flavor. I was with a poet from Syria, who claimed that the scent of the Kurdish mountains could be tasted in a certain drink called arak. It is made of fermented grapes and aniseed, but in his description, I detected other flavors: myrtle and boxwood, broom, tamarisk, lemon and panic grass, black boulders and ibex and mirage. Arak is distilled in copper vessels, then left to age in clay jars and the part which evaporates is called “the angel’s share,” implying that in summer a thin layer of arak ascends in the heat haze and angels float about with bottles collecting it. We never found that drink. But not long after my return to England, a parcel arrived containing six volumes of Arabic poetry, including these pre-Islamic hunting poems. It is not that I want to compare the poems to arak, but perhaps the sense I have that a poetics beyond my knowledge has passed through me and has something in common with the evaporation of a drink I’ve never tasted, which can only be collected elsewhere by the angels or the jinn or the ghosts of hunted animals.
Alice Oswald
Bristol, England
Alice Oswald is the author of eight books of poetry, including Memorial and Falling Awake, and winner of the Costa Poetry Award and Griffin Poetry Prize. Elected as the University of Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2019, she lives in Bristol, United Kingdom.