Adonis's "Time" Poem: Translation and Analysis

Author(s): Mona Takieddine Amyuni

Source: Journal of Arabic Literature , Sep., 1990, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Sep., 1990), pp. 172-182
Published by: Brill

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4183226

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 Journal of Arabic Literature, XXI

ADONIS'S TIME POEM: TRANSLATION AND ANALYSIS

IntroductionlI

A powerful work of art captivates you. It grows on you slowly and does
not let go; it insidiously becomes part of you. In this poem, Adonis
transmutes a humiliation into an act of defiance, death into rebirth, an
end into a beginning; he inserts the poet and his city into the history of
all poets and cities decimated over the epochs, emerging triumphant.
The poem is propelled into an ever ascending spiral movement by an
artist-creator who confines so much time and space within a narrow
compass-Beirut, June 4 - October 25, 1982, Adonis notes at the end-
only to sharpen both and use them as rockets which shatter all time and
space. The intense spatio-temporal concentration is so charged with
emotion that, paradoxically, the poet flies through time and space and
soars to intoxicating heights. He leaves behind him the narrowness of his
individuality and locality, and merges with the universe in the wake of
many artists-seers.
I have retraced step by step the poet's wanderings amidst the shambles
of his city, in an attempt to recapture the dynamics of the poem. The poet
goes out at dusk in a nightmarish situation; he is assaulted by thousands
of clashing images and sensations, by a primordial violence which
becomes the raw material of a lived, agonizing experience which he
transmutes into a fine work of art.
I have taken the liberty to give numbers to the verses which do not
exist in the original. The great fluidity of the verse and the topography
of the poem become part and parcel of the theme of the walking poet,
the running streets, the precipitation of days, seasons, and epochs, in
brief, of an urban drama2 in which the narrator speaks for the most part
in the first person. At other instances, the interior monologue splits up
into a dialogue between the self and the other, then turns to address the
many, and feels himself to be legion. The poet thus borrows many

I "Time", " first appeared in Adonis's own literary journal Mawdqif 45:
Winter 1983, 21-30. It was later reproduced in a volume of collected poems entitled The
Book of the Siege, June 1982-June 1985, Beirut; Dar al Adab, 1985. Cf. M. T. Amyuni, " The
Image of the City: Wounded Beirut", Alif, Journal of Comparative Poetics 7: Spring 1987 (The
American University of Cairo), 27-51. 1 have borrowed a few passages from this essay.
2 Lewis Mumford uses this expression in his book The City in History; its Origins, its
Transformation, and its Prospects, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973.

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 ADONIS'S TIME POEM 173

technical elements from the theatre and the avant-garde to create such
dramatic effects.
My translation keeps closely to the original, as do my punctuation and
verse division.3 The section divisions that are most broadly spaced in
Adonis's topography, start with the recurring refrain "Carrying the
seeds of time my head a tower of fire", as in a piece of music. The
musical metaphor is to the point, I think, for as with the Symbolist poets,
Adonis takes from music what, in the view of these poets, essentially
belongs to music: refrains, rhythms, leitmotifs, echoes, codas, theme and
variation, etc... The poet establishes, thus, a network of correspondances
between the visible and invisible, and moves freely from the realistic to
the fantastic, until the last jump beyond the boundaries of time, his
essential preoccupation in the poem, as the title well indicates. Indeed,
one might think of Adonis as a direct descendent of Baudelaire, Rim-
baud, and the Surrealist poets of our century.

1. Carrying the seeds of time my head a tower of fire:

2. what is this blood sinking deep into the sand, what is this
decline?
3. Tell us, 0 flames of the present, what shall we say?

4. The tatters of history in my throat

5. on my face the victim's scars
6. how unavailing has language become how narrow the alphabet's
doors.

7. Carrying the seeds of time, my head a tower of fire:

8. ... has a friend become a hangman? has a neighbor
9. said: How slow is Hulagu? Who knocks at the door? A tax
collector?
10. Pay him the ransom... forms of men
11. and women... walking puppets/we pointed at them
12. we whispered: our steps
13. a path of killing/
14. is your killing commanded by your God I wonder
15. or is God born of your killing?
16. - Confused by the riddles
17. he bent a bow of terror over his bent days.

3 My gratitude goes to my friends and colleagues Jareer Abu Haidar, Roselyne Edde,
Khalida Said, and Nazik Yared, who helped me refine my translation.

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174 ADONIS'S TIME POEM

18. My brother is lost, my father demented, my children dead

19. Where shall I seek relief? Shall I embrace the door? Com-
plain to the prayer rug?
20. -His head swam, hasten to revive him with
21. a pinch of the holy men's snuff.
22. Corpses the assassin reads like anecdotes/piles of bones,
23. a child's head is this, or a piece of charcoal?
24. Is what I see a body or a heap of clay?
25. I bend, patch up a waist, repair two eyes
26. some inkling may guide my memory may help me
27. yet in vain do I examine the thin thread
28. in vain do I piece together a shattered head two arms two
legs, lost identity of this corpse
29.

30. -Who does the ant teach its lesson to?

31. Why this bewilderment? Is the mixing
32. of these tormenting sparks in the eye poetry is it a mystic
ecstasy
33. to see your house fly in splinters up to the sky?
34. A diviner's owl screamed high on a minaret
35. wove a rainbow with its voice
36. wept choking with joy.

37. Carrying the seeds of time my head a tower of fire:

38. .../the fool revealed his secrets
39. said this rebellious time is a jeweller's shop,
40. a marshland of prophets.
41. The fool revealed his secrets
42. the truth will be death
43. death bread for the poets
44. and what was called or had become a homeland
45. is nothing but an epoch on the face of time.

46. The fool revealed his secrets

47. where is your key 0 glorious flood? Drown me, I beg you
48. take away my last shores carry me away
49. bewitched by a blazing eddy
50. bewitched by a burning straw
51. bewitched by roads that terrify roads.

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 ADONIS'S TIME POEM 175

52. Carrying the seeds of time my head a tower of fire:

53. forgotten are all loves
54. forgotten the heritage of my soul hidden deep down in the
house of images
55. forgotten the language of the rain, the inky letters of the tree
stumps,
56. my soul only draws
57. a seagull tossed by the waves onto a ship's rope
58. my soul only hears
59. steel screeching: watch the city's heart
60. like a split moon tied to the navel
61. of a ghoul of sparks
62. it has forgotten that God and the poet are two children sleeping
on the stone's cheek.
63. Forgotten are all loves
64. terrifying the darkness-the incipient morrows
65. doubt invades me dreams rebel
66. fettered I run from fire to fire
67. drowned in my spurting sweat I share with the wall
68. the night's insomnia/(beasts of prey the night's footsteps...)
69. often have I said to the poem in my memory:
70. what handsaw on my neck
71. dictates a verse of silence, to whom shall I recount my ashes?
72. When I ignore to pluck out my pulse and throw it on a table
73. when I refuse to turn my misery into a drum for the sky,
74. Then let me say: my life has been
75. a windmill, a house of ghosts.

76. Carrying the seeds of time my head a tower of fire:

77. the love trees in Kassabin befriend
78. the death trees in Beirut, and here
79. the myrtle forest sympathizes with
80. the forest of exile,-as Kassabin enters into the map
81. of grass, and extracts the insides of plains
82. Beirut enters into the death map/tombs
83. like meadows, and torn-off limbs-fields.
84. What does Kassabin pour into Saidon, into Tyre, and Beirut
85. which itself pours?
86. What is this faraway thing approaching?
87. What mixes this blood on my map?

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176 ADONIS'S TIME POEM

88. ... Summer has dried up and autumn hasn't come

89. and the spring turned black in earth's memory/winter
90. as if drawn by death: agony or hemorrhage
91. an epoch which escapes from the vessel of determinism and
the hand of fate
92. an epoch of divagation which improvises time and ruminates
the air,
93. how?, whence would you recognize it?
94. A killer with no face/wearing all faces...

95. Carrying the seeds of time my head a tower of fire:

96. exhausted I turn and look up-what are those tatters?
97. History is it? Countries? Banners on the shores of dusk?
98. Behold! Here I was reading ages in the instant and thousands of
corpses in one corpse
99. the absurd overpowers me
100. my body breaks away
101. my face is lost to the mirror
102. my blood gushes out of its veins...
103. Is it because I lost the light which carries my dreams to it?
104. Is it because I am the extreme point of a world blessed by others
and cursed by me?
105. What tears out my entrails and departs
106. amidst jungles of desires, countries-oceans of tears and myriads
of symbols
108. amidst races and species-epochs and peoples?
109. What divides up my soul?
110. What is it that destroys me?
111. Am I a crossroads
112. has my road ceased, in an instant of vision, to be my road?
113. Am I more than one, my history my abyss, my destiny my
114. burning up?
115. What rises out of my choked limbs roaring with laughter?
116. Am I more than one person each
117. asking the other: who are you? and from where?
118. Are my limbs battle jungles
119. ... in my airy blood, in my paper body?

120. Madness? who am I in this darkness? teach me guide me

121. 0 madness

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 ADONIS'S TIME POEM 177

122. Who am I 0 friends? 0 seers and fools

123. Could I but shed my skin and forget who I was,
124. and who I shall be,
125. I look for a name and for something to name,
126. and nothing can be named
127. a blind epoch a blinded history
128. a muddy epoch a shattered history
129. and the master is mastered, glory to you 0 darkness.

130. Carrying the seeds of time my head a tower of fire:

131. my Semite ancestor is caught up in what blind fate unravels
132. A parrot? or a prophet cast in a mummy?
133. 0 ancestor from whose path I now deviate
134. fine with me, you who live in the molecules of water and the layers
of the sky
135. it is wise that you walk, as you do, haughtily backward
136. you are the secret and the kingdom packed
137. with prohesies-it is I who fail to understand you, lost in error,
138. you are the miracle.
139. 0 ancestor I now reject you though I have loved humanity
140. in your creative self, you will no longer recognize me, nothing will
tie me to you anymore
141. except vestiges sunk in my soul-which weep over me, and make
me weep over you.

142. Carrying the seeds of time my head a tower of fire:

143. The end of the epoch which rained stones of baked clay meets
144. the beginning of the epoch which rains oil
145. and the god of the palm tree kneels down
146. before a god of steel,
147. I am the spilt blood and the retreating caravan
148. I gaze at my dying embers
149. and wonder how to appease
150. my indomitable death in its deserts,
151. I say the universe is woven by my dream... the threads
unravel
152. I fall over a precipice, I let go in the dark abyss
153. I see things a wheel of smoke

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178 ADONIS'S TIME POEM

154. the world a hunting game

155. the table is laid-bodies are herbs
156. and vessels heads.
157. God sits at the hunter's table, a gazelle
158. was a baker, a lizard
159. a soldier/is it a god
160. who eats the quarry, or the quarry the god?
161. Roads which lie, beaches which deceive
162. how can one escape being crushed by madness?
163. Thus I reject the eater and the food and welcome all roaming
164. I find solace delving in my dream,-I walk on the shore, float
165. and sing the desire for rebellion, and rave of
166. Venus's orbit an anklet for my days, and Aries a bracelet
167. I say: the flowers on their coronae
168. are balconies...
169. my consolation my desertion-I mobilize all desertions.
170. Saddle those wild winds
171. history is slaughtered the slaughter is but the beginning
172. leave the slaughterer the slaughtered and the slaughter as
witnesses
173. and bury me in the remains
174. a ruin amongst ruins.

175. Thus I draw wisdom from its source

176. I shout: welcome my remains welcome my defeat
177. tomorrow death will extinguish me but I won't die
178. tomorrow I shall go forth from light to another light.
179. True, weaker am I than a thread yet nobler than a god.
180. Thus I begin
181. I embrace my soil and the secrets of its desires-
182. it loves the body of the sea, a love whose hands are of the sun
183. a body the warehouse of thunder, the bower of tenderness
184. a body a promise in which I lose myself
185. I emerge from this challenge
186. a body/you men cover up with the compassionate rain the
daisy's face,
187. and let it be...
188. I embrace the coming epoch and walk
189. defiant, with a captain's gait, I sketch my country,
190. Rise 0 men to its loftiest summits
191. descend to its furthest depths
192. you will meet no fear no fetters-as if the bird were a branch

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 ADONIS'S TIME POEM 179

193. and the earth a child, and fables women

194. a dream?
195. I pass on to my successors the conquest of this space.

196. My skin is not a cavern of thoughts, nor

197. my passion memory's woodcutter-
198. my lineage is refusal, my weddings the grafting
199. of two poles; this epoch is mine
200. the dead god, the blind machine-my epoch
201. is that I dwell in the pool of yearnings
202. my remains are my flowers, I am
203. the Alif of water and the Yd' of fire-the mad lover of life.
204. Revealing to time the secrets of his love:
205. thus he confesses:
206. he is the dissenter, the rebel, the prodigal.
(Beirut, June 4 - October 25, 1982)

The Dynamics of the Poem

Present

In besieged Beirut, shelled day and night, the poet's muses are
naturally the "flames of the present". Only the flames may inspire him
in a world "gone darkly", on a dying evening.4 The dialectic of fire and
darkness operates immediately and develops into a rich imagery from
which will be weaved the fabric of the poem. The atmosphere is
apocalyptic; the "seeds", however, suggest fertility while the poet's fiery
brain announces an imminent explosion, namely, the poem which is
about to be composed. The time is the present, the place the bleeding
city, the verse is highly fluid as it is carried on by the walking poet. The
scene is by the seashore of Beirut where blood sinks deep in the sand and
the moon is in decline. It next moves into the destroyed streets of Beirut.
On the other hand, tatters, scars, and narrow doors give a concrete
image of wounds and decimation, of claustrophobia further enhanced by
traps, ropes, chains, and imprisonment. The language and the alphabet
(6) echo the invocation of the "flames of the present" to allow the poet
the exorcisnm of his terror, the taming of his nightmare, the birth of his
poem which a handsaw threatens to kill (72). We shall actually witness
the hard labor of the poetic act which will shatter the "alphabet's doors"
(6) in the midst of carnage and emerge triumphantly (185).

4Reminiscent of Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" which ends with "And we are here
as on a darkling plain/swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant
armies clash by night".

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 180 ADONIS'S TIME POEM

The tatters of history parallel the seeds of time, both history and time
being as decimated as the realistic scene in which Adonis's drama will be
enacted. Slowly, with difficulty, in syncopated style, with half uttered
words and lines, with an accumulation of question marks, the poet brings
to consciousness, bit by bit, the scenes of horror that he has lived. An
imagery of dislocation and dismemberment, of treason and killing,
unfolds, allowing the chaos of sensations to fall into shape and overcome
the absurdity of it all.
The present is crushing. In one instant of vision (100, 113), the poet
takes stock of what is happening to him, to his fellowmen, his city, coun-
try, and epoch. He is invaded by hundreds of images: a house in
splinters; a brother, a father, lost children; shattered corpses, piles of
bones he cannot identify (22-32). All is madness. An inner split occurs,
the poet becomes another man he wants to console- "receive him" he
says, adding ironically: heal him with a "pinch of the holy men's snuff"
(20-21)-he, then, multiplies into many men and animals with whom he
identifies. The prophets and the fools, the wretched, the ant, and the owl,
are creatures in close contact with the elemental forces of the universe.
They scream and choke with joy, they flirt with the rainbow and stand
high on minarets, they know the heaven's secrets and time's mysteries.
Wars, massacres, countries, and epochs, are but moments on the trajec-
tory of time (44-45).
In this visionary instant, the "fiery instant" as the critic Khalida Said
calls it,5 along burning beaches and through hellish roads, the poet calls
on the flood and the blaze of the ocean to embrace him, cleanse him, and
bring him forth with renewed vigour (48-51).
The present persecutes the poet and terrifies him. Beasts of pray gnaw
at his inner soul which forgets all loves, all desires. The handsaw is on
the neck, but the poem is the very pulse of the artist who will not pluck
it out, will not throw it away, even if it were a song of ashes, his life a
house of ghosts, a windmill, mere illusion (71-75).

Past

In an Eliotic stance, the poet feels the approach of a foreboding which

will tear out his entrails (85, 105). His head spins, dizziness takes over:

5 Adonis's wife and best critic studies the fiery instant in Adonis's poetry; the
atmosphere of madness and fire in which many of his poems, she says, move through
dreams and yearnings, death and metamorphosis, errantry and rebirth. Khalida Said
adds that Adonis introduced the concept of refusal to Arabic poetry when he created his
Songs of Mihyadr the Daamascene in 1960-1961; cf. The Creative Process: Studies in Contemporary
Arabic Literature Beirut: Dar al-'Awdah 1982, 97, 98, 123. (I have translated the Arabic
title). These remarks are highly relevant to our poem.

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 ADONIS'S TIME POEM 181

cities, countries, seasons, forests, plains, entrails, tombs and torn-off

limbs... all merge and topple upside down (76-87). Time and space are
telescoped in that maddening instant. In an epoch of divagation, time is
a hangman with no face (94). Exhausted, the poet loses his body, his
blood, his face; his corpse becomes all corpses, the instant all instants,
all ages (98).
Such an accumulation of plurals universalizes the disaster. The poet
now welcomes the darkness and the madness: "teach me guide me 0
madness" (120-121). Light and logic have, indeed, died away. History
is shattered, the poet is at a crossroads. He briefly looks back, addresses
his Semitic ancestor, proudly invokes his nobility and royal gait. Yet, he
deviates from his ancestor's path, he rejects him and, in the wake of
Mihyar the Damascene, he glories in his aloness, in his difference. His
roots are in his footsteps,6 he keeps within him mere vestiges of the past,
ruins amongst ruins (174). With compassion he weeps over present and
past. Caught between the two, clay and oil, palm tree and steel, two gods
that crush him and defeat his caravans (143-147), he falls into the abyss,
looks far away, sees the hunt but refuses the defeat.

Future

The poet-narrator gathers his dying embers (148 ff), and weaves a
world of his own loves and desires. His soul recaptures its essence in
dream, in refusal, in madness. It sings the desire for rebellion (165 ff),
wears the jewels of Venus and Aries, and takes off.
The ancestor's nobel gait is now his own triumphant taking off: "Sad-
dle those wild winds" (170), welcome those forces that ruined me! I
refuse to be ruined, the poet says, I shall not die, I shall run forth from
light to light. A complete reversal takes place, a beginning is announced
(170-180). Anchored in the soil, the poet embraces it, listens closely to
the hidden thunder in its folds, feels its tenderness ready to burst forth.
He releases both and emerges from the challenge, his body healed, his
soul refreshed by the daisy and the rain (186-190). The soil and the air,
water and fire, are interwoven in the finale of the poem: the first person
narrator walks triumphant, a bridegroom to the basic elements of the
universe, tha mad lover of life. He has embraced the soil, saddled the
wind and is now the Alif of water and the Ya' of fire. Master of the beg
ning and the end, his lineage is of his own making. Indeed he is the

6 As Adonis had described Mihyar in the wake of Rimbaud "l'homme aux semelles
de vent", "the man with soles of wind".

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 182 ADONIS'S TIME POEM

"dissenter, the rebel, the prodigal" as he had always proclaimed since

the creation of his alter ego, Mihyar.

Conclusion

The haunting refrain of the walking poet with his brain aflame gives
Adonis's "Time" poem an incantatory quality, while new wholes are
constantly formed, fusing as T.S. Eliot puts it, disparate experiences into
an organic unity.7 The poet sets forth the sordid-realistic layer of his
urban drama, then abruptly shifts to a surrealistic plane. The barriers
between the objective and the subjective worlds break down. In this
fashion, dismembered Beirut is transformed into the launching-pad of
the poet who walks on it for a while, to heat up his brain, his nerves, all
his senses, in preparation for taking off. A kind of "cosmic enchant-
ment"8 elates the poet who flies further and further away from the earth
in dream and madness, until he merges with the universe. In his second
Manifesto of Surrealism, Andre Breton talks about the total recuperation of
our psychic strength through poetry. Breton believes that there is a point
of reconciliation of all contradictions in the spirit. Life and death, the real
and the imaginary, past and future, the heights and the abyss cease to
be perceived in opposition. Surrealism aims at this focal point, Breton
adds, in which a total recuperation of one's psychic strength obtains9.
We have magnificently witnessed the centrifugal power of this instant
in Adonis's "Time" poem. Through the creative process, images of
dislocation and dismemberment slowly give birth to this "total recupera-
tion" of the poet's "psychic strength". The poet has certainly exploded
language and forced the "narrowness of the alphabet's doors" to reach
out towards new frontiers.

American University of Beirut MONA TAKIEDDINE AMYUNI

"The Metaphysical Poets", in Selected Essays, London: Faber and Faber 1972), 287.
8 Marcel Raymond describes in these terms Apollinaire's experiences during World
War 1, in De Baudelaire au Surrealisme, Paris: Corti 1966, 230.
9 Breton writes: "Tout porte a croire qu'il existe un certain point de l'esprit d'oiu la
vie et la mort, le reel et l'imaginaire, le passe et le futur, le communicable et l'incom-
municable, le haut et le bas cessent d'etre persus contradictoirement. Or, c'est en vain
qu'on chercherait a l'activite surrealiste un autre mobile que I'espoir de determination
de ce point... L'idee de surrealisme tend simplement 'a la recuperation totale de notre
force psychique". Le Second ManiJeste du Surrcalisme, Paris: Gallimard 1946, 76-77, 92.

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