Cooing

Your cooing wears me out at night-

so wear me out. Like wine in the odes, you go on cooing

and leave me what moves horses

to tears,

what weighs birds down with more wings,

what singing follows

Your coo is a cradle

kept from rocking

cornered by absence.

Is the tree of the heart enough

If our wind was shattered and we too were shattered with the wind?

Is the tree of the heart made of our blood,

or mirage? A question seduces me shooting star by shooting star

a flower a flower or two numb upon my arm

as dawn steals blue to bathe the dew

so I see it. And for this question, the gazelle,

and what binds us in the nets of the answer

-and so the sky won't be confined-

I'll release a flock of stray doves and open the towers of my spirit for

the day to come- So if your cooing drowns me,

let me drown-

and if you wake me up I'll leave a crack of dream open

and sleep

A cell in the Palestine division, 1987


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Poetry From the June 2005 issue: The Road To Damascus

Faraj BayraqdarFaraj Bayraqdar

Faraj Bayraqdar was born in 1951 in Tir, a village near Homs in central Syria. He began publishing poetry while still in high school. At the University of Damascus, he and a group of friends started a literary journal, but certain texts published in it led to his arrest and imprisonment for three months. His first collection, You Are Not Alone, came out in 1979 and was quickly followed by two more. He stopped writing in the early 1980s due to commitments in the Syrian Communist Labor Party; his wife, also a party member, was arrested and spent four years in prison. In 1987, Bayraqdar was arrested again and remained in prison without trial until 1993, when he was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor for belonging to an unauthorized political association. His imprisonment lasted more than thirteen years, in three different prisons (the Palestine Division, Tadmor, and Saydnaya). Without his knowledge, a group of friends in Beirut published Dove in Free Flight, a collection of his poems that was used, Elias Khoury writes, as "one of the instruments of pressure on the Syrian authorities to mobilize international, intellectual opinion, particularly in France, in order to set the poet free." After an international campaign was mounted on his behalf, Bayraqdar was released from prison during the brief political respite known as "Damascus Spring" in 2000.

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Translated from ArabicArabic by The New York Translation CollectiveThe New York Translation Collective

The New York Translation Collective is a loosely based group whose members include Ammiel Alcalay, Sinan Antoon, Rebecca Carol Johnson, Elias Khoury, Tsolin Nalbantian, Jeffrey Sacks, and Shareah Taleghani for this project. The goal of the Collective is to create a network that can come together on joint projects while developing a new approach to the translation of Arabic texts, emphasizing works that challenge writers in the United States. A volume of Faraj Bayrakdar's poetry, translated by the Collective, will be published by Beyond Baroque Press in Los Angeles in the Fall-Winter 2005-6 season.

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