The Man of the Sword: Two Poems by Nizar Qabbani »

Translator's note: Nizar Qabbani was the most popular and beloved Arab poet of the second half of the twentieth century. He was born in Damascus in 1923. He started out as a romantic poet, with daring poems of love and the heart’s adventures, but eventually he gravitated toward political subjects, and wrote unforgettable poems about the cultural and political maladies of the Arab world—he was a fierce opponent of dictatorship. He served as a diplomat for his Syrian homeland but gave that up in 1966 and settled in Beirut. The horrors of Beirut in the mid-1980s led him to exile in London, where he died in 1998. Naturally the Syrian despotism was eager to claim him, and the late dictator Hafez Assad sent a plane to take Qabbani's body back for burial in Damascus.

I.

Oh people,
I have become sultan over you
Smash your idols after a long darkness
Worship me.
I am not always visible to you
so sit patiently on the sidewalk
until you see me.
Leave your children without bread
Leave your women without men
and follow me.
Praise be to Allah for his blessings
He sent me to write your history
and history cannot be written
without me.

Every time I thought of abdicating power
my conscience devoured me.
Who, after me, will rule the good people?
Who, after me, will cure the lame,
the cripple, the leper, the blind?
And who will summon the dead back to life?
Who will bring the people the rain?
Who will administer to them ninety lashes
who will crucify them on the trees
who will force them to live like cattle?
And die like cattle?
Every time I thought of leaving them
my tears overflowed
I trusted my fate to God
and I decided to ride this people
from now until Judgment Day.

—from “The Autobiography of an Arab Man of the Sword” 

II.

Every twenty years a narcissist comes our way
to claim that he is the
savior and the redeemer
and the pure and the devout and
the mighty
and the One and the Immortal.
Every twenty years a narcissist
mortgages the land and the believers and the heritage
and the wealth and the rivers
and the men and the women
and the waves and the sea
at a gambling table.
Every twenty years, a neurotic
man comes to us
with sticks of dynamite in
his pockets.

A former commander of British forces in Helmand has denounced the collection as enemy propaganda but publisher Hurst and Co stood by its plans to release the book.

In their introduction to Poetry of the Taliban, editors Alex Strick van Linschoten, Felix Kuehn, and Faisal Devji say they compiled the anthology not for its novelty value but "as a way of understanding who the Taliban are".

* * *

An excerpt from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/opinion/sunday/militant-ideals-captured-in-poetry.html:

Most contemporary poets are as interested in pastoral landscapes and love as in revenge and war. Abdul Hai Mutmain, who has been a Taliban spokesman, writes of the wind in the trees:

It is late afternoon and the wind speeds up and then stops;
It brushes against the pine needles and makes a low noise....
The pine tree with its strong structure bows and straightens its head back;
It hangs its branches loose down its face, and dances while standing on one leg.

These poems are not merely propagandistic; they move beyond the hard politics of the Taliban to form a bridge to the world outside the movement. And the rest of the world would do well to pay attention, because their ideals are more likely than any Taliban communiqué to survive the insurgency and to play a role in the remaking of Afghanistan. These poets criticize the idea of human rights that coalition forces are supposedly fighting to protect in their country. Instead, they voice notions of humanity that are linked to private duties like generosity, compassion and, indeed, nonviolence. In the collection of Taliban poetry, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi has this to say about what he takes to be the hypocrisy of humanitarian intervention:

The cloaked magician wanders like a beggar,
Trying to find some more forces to kill me.
The green parrots of the United Nations are mute;
Those who talk of human rights have sealed their mouths shut.
 

And here is the poet Samiullah Khalid Sahak on the way the war has dehumanized all its participants, including the Taliban themselves:

We are not animals,
I say this with certainty.
But,
Humanity has been forgotten by us,
And I don’t know when it will come back.
May Allah give it to us,
And decorate us with this jewelry.

No!

Me a sceptic (an optimist, bin about to declare, but that won`t do), so I still believe in this:

Шел господь пытать людей в любови,

Выходил он нищим на кулижку.

Старый дед на пне сухом, в дуброве,

Жамкал деснами зачерствелую пышку.

       Увидал дед нищего дорогой,

       На тропинке, с клюшкою железной,

       И подумал: "Вишь, какой убогой -

       Знать, от голода качается, болезный".

Подошел господь, скрывая скорбь и муку:

Видно, мол, сердца их не разбудишь...

И сказал старик, протягивая руку:

"На, пожуй... маленько крепче будешь..."

I believe I have already posted this here somewhere, somewhen, so moderators are welcome to remove it.