An Interview with Wadih Saadeh

An interview with the expatriate Lebanese poet Wadih Saadeh

Headlines:

I believe the reader of poetry is dying out, that the gap between the reader and poetry keeps deepening, and that it has become
difficult to close.
…

Wherever he is, the poet must remain a critic of everything that deserves criticism, and must submit neither to power nor to temptation.
…
The margin is also the main text, and a person's small concerns are the great universal ones, for a human being is a set of small concerns.
…
The taboo is the first idol that must be smashed in poetry.
…
I do not believe poetry can change anything in this world, but the most important thing in it is the illusion of change. Without that illusion the world becomes more wretched and more painful.
…

Introduction:

Let him write; let the trace lead us to him!

That is the motto of the ”Butterfly Effect initiative”, launched by a group of young ”writers and poets” from across the Arab world.
It is a cultural movement that seeks to build poetic and literary ties between inside and outside, between the visible
and the hidden, between the essential and the sensory.
It regards distance as one of the offences of maps; literature came to correct those hypothetical errors, for borders are nothing but a geographical lapse that the world ought to reconsider.

The aim of the initiative is to carry the poetic and literary voice to the furthest point inside
the Arab mind, and from there to the other reader, who knows little of the Arab literary heritage.
The initiative is not only a literary project; it is first and foremost a human one, created to redraw the map of helplessness and put in its place an alternative plan called challenge and change of course.
The Butterfly Effect is a literary crossing between the shores of cultures; it is the signal within the movement of the enlightening text.

These young people hope to leave their trace through this initiative, and to find others who will one day carry the torch for them with all its flame and its fires, for the effect of serious work is not visible at once, and no one expects to harvest the fruit of dreams from the first planting in the soil of ideas.

The initiative's members run many activities to introduce writers to the Arab public, including press interviews with writers and poets, or live broadcasts with them, and then documenting everything they do.
Among the most important of these is an interview with the Lebanese poet Wadih Saadeh, a distinctive and singular poetic voice and winner of this year's international “Argana” Poetry Prize.
The interview was conducted by the initiative's team, and as a further contribution comments were received from writers, poets and critics from across the Arab world.

The interview:

Astonishment will keep you company as you read him. You will say to yourself: what a poet, what a man, what a human being.
How was he able to write for us of the evening's brothers, and to describe water as water? How could this man sitting in used air think about animals, leave us a seat for a departing passenger, and describe for us the dust, the mending of the air and the text of absence?
In An Attempt to Join Two Banks with a Voice, and in another arrangement of Wadih Saadeh's life, he tells us:
Tell the passer-by to come back, he left his shadow here. And then he asks: who took the look I left in front of the door?
How do we come to see these questions in the luminous titles of great collections, titles that are themselves poems? All of it, most likely, because of a cloud; a cloud named Wadih Saadeh.

Twelve collections, twelve titles, twelve moments of wonder, twelve stories and twelve surprises.
Mr Wadih Saadeh: welcome to the Butterfly Effect initiative. Allow me to convey the pride of every one of our members that you are hosting us rather than the other way round. Welcoming you:
– Ahmed Issa, Palestine
– Samar Lasheen, Egypt
– Onfowan Fouad, Algeria
– Fayez El-Abbas, Syria
– Rita El-Hakim, Syria
– Hassan Kantar, Syria
– Samar Maatouk, Syria
– Basma El-Obeid, Iraq
– Ghofran Tahhan, Syria

• Mr Wadih, where did Wadih Saadeh's poetic gift come from? When did you realise you had to write,
and why writing in particular, rather than any other form of self-expression?
When you began to write, where did you see yourself, and have you achieved today what you hoped for?

Wadih Saadeh:
– No poet can say precisely where his poetic gift came from. That gift is the child of many things,
visible and invisible, and the child of experiences and other things that cannot be pinned down.
Nor can one say precisely why a writer chooses writing, a painter painting, a film-maker cinema, and so on…
As for fulfilling one's ambition, the road is very long, and however far a writer walks he never reaches its end.

• Did your environment and early upbringing shape your literary and cultural formation? Please shed some light
on that.

Wadih Saadeh:
– My environment and upbringing certainly influenced my literary formation, as did all the life experiences
I have been through.

• You have lived a real exile from your country (Lebanon) and from the Arab world in general, on top of the exile
of the intellectual who seeks to create a world he cannot find in reality. What effect have these two exiles had on your poetry?

Wadih Saadeh:
– I believe every poet lives two exiles at once: a geographical exile and an inner one.
And there is no place of which he can say: this is my real place.

Comment from the poet Meftah El-Alwani, Libya:

First, congratulations on winning this year's Argana International Poetry Prize. We regard you as one of the pioneers of the prose poem, who opened it onto wider horizons across half a century of creative work.

Dear sir, poetry is at times a harsh twinning of pain and dreams, and perhaps it sets memory alight with the flame of the poem, quite apart from its ability to close many of the spiritual gaps in an attentive reader.
My question: do you believe, sir, that poetry is always able to bring about tangible change in this chaotic world? Or is it merely an open space we rush into with our imagination to escape a sorry reality?
And should a poet always make sure his texts will still hold for any future moment?
Or does the poem die with its poet?

Wadih Saadeh:
My friend, I do not believe poetry can change anything in this world, but the most important thing in it is the illusion of change. Without that illusion the world becomes more wretched and more painful.
Real poetry, my friend, is poetry that holds for any moment, present or future alike.

• You have your own philosophy of what a homeland means. How can we read the homeland in your poetry?

Wadih Saadeh:
– A homeland is not only a geographical space, nor is it simply the identity you carry or the place you live in.
My homeland is inside me. My language is my homeland and my homeland is my language.

• Your work is always occupied with the human being, his torments and his suffering, at a time when
many have insisted that the great universal causes are in retreat. It seems to me, as a reader of your work, that you have made the human being the greatest universal cause.
How far do you agree with this reading? And do you really think the notion that the great universal causes are in retreat is a suitable choice for poetry today?

Wadih Saadeh:
– The human being, in his small details, is the great universal cause. There is no great cause other than this
human being.

Comment from the poet Osama Haddad, Egypt:

Since your first collection, The Evening Has No Brothers, which you wrote out by hand and distributed to your friends, you have gone on widening your project, offering many proposals for writing the poem through varied forms that together make up a plural, open, human text.
And your winning of the Argana Prize belongs not to you alone but to the prose poem, and to its resistance to the criticism and the wars waged against it; here you are now vindicating what you were faithful to.

– I would like to ask you about the future of the poem and its role in shaping both aesthetic and cognitive awareness.
– And are we suffering from an over-production of texts?

Wadih Saadeh:
Poetry must have a role in shaping both aesthetic and cognitive awareness.
Without poetry, aesthetic and cognitive awareness will remain incomplete.
And there is no harm, my friend, in an abundance of poetry; whatever it is, poetry carries some beauty.

• Your work carries signs of being and nothingness. Is that because of the losses that struck you at
every stage of your life?

Wadih Saadeh:
– The question of being and nothingness is not the result of loss alone, but also of all the evil that happens on this
earth, and of many other things.

• What are – in your view – the dividing lines between the poem and the other narrative arts?

Wadih Saadeh:
– Today the poem carries, or should carry, all the narrative arts, so that it erases the boundaries
between the different literary forms.

• To what extent do you think a poem needs a dramatic plot, especially since your own texts turn
to the dramatic?

Wadih Saadeh:
– Dramatic plot in poetry is one part among others that make up the body and the soul of the poem.

Comment from the critic and poet Mourad Sassi, Tunisia:

Wadih Saadeh: ”a poet who breathes poetry with the mysticism of a lover, the vision of the Buddha and the perplexity of Rilke”
Mourad Sassi – Tunisia

Wadih Saadeh's poetic world rises out of a lavish blending of artistic and natural beauty. Like an expert weaver he draws on the worlds of artistic narrative, or of distilled prose, woven from the magic of poetry, the short story, the novel and the folk tale. In this abundance and richness he reaches for the lexicons of nature, the vocabulary of living creatures and an awareness of what surrounds him, because his vision of all this is deep, being the very material that supplies the poetic structure with the foundations and the engineering of this poetic architecture, so that the imagined edifice of the poem may stand. Alongside this he uses symbols and elements that lend meaning and a semiotic quality to the poetic structure, giving him a glowing, fertile moment of poetic capture for his poetic wisdom, above all in his strange interrogation of the poetry of things, which resembles to some degree the work of ”René Char” in its dissolving into the details of existence, life, the universe and the human being.

That is why I say this poet gives what cannot be given (exactly like the Buddha) as he carves the ribs of the prose poem, writing it with the nail of eternity in the hand of the gods, a strange act of creation, breathing the glass of the universe into its chest
(like dervishes in their dance of ascent to the wide heavens – in him there is a flutter of the spirit of Ibn al-Farid, the master of lovers), and the perplexity of Rilke

In this he vindicates the modernist prose poem and proves it to be the vital aesthetic alternative, able to take shape in colour, art, language, creation and invention -because poetry is a language inside language-
Wadih Saadeh's texts have a rebellious mystical taste, a flavour of their own, sour with longing yet unique. He is an expert weaver, weaving and blending the poetic text with different aesthetic texts drawn from the worlds of artistic narrative or distilled prose left behind by the prose of poetry, the novel, the short story and poetic tales, and by Bedouin folk narration, all of which lean on the lexicons of nature and of living creatures and on a shrewd sense of the poetic wisdom sleeping in the details of the universe, of existence and of life.

He has mastered the blending of artistic beauties in this art like the creator of a “utopia”, a maker of worlds that join a winged, overflowing imagination to an astonishing, unsettling metaphor and a clear language that he breathes with such command that he turns it into a moving body, abolishing stasis in order to unsettle the reader's imagination, along with scenic images that set everything in motion like a real scene that holds you with an irresistible secret.
And here he answers Hegel, who asked: “What is poetry doing in this floating age?”

– So is the poetic moment, for Wadih Saadeh, a promise that can be grasped?
Especially since for the poet the moment of birth is the great moment of coming into the world: when he pushes the poem out, is he casting off his own death?

Wadih Saadeh:
Yes, the poem is a promise of a better world, but the fulfilment of that promise is an illusion, though a beautiful one.
And the moment a poem is born is a moment of momentary personal salvation.
After that, nothing remains but to cling to that illusion.

• Does your poetic philosophy intersect with your philosophy of life? At what points do they meet?

Wadih Saadeh:
– There is no dividing line between a poet's poetic philosophy and his philosophy of life; no split between the two
whatsoever.

• What is the most important vehicle for poetry, especially now that the prose poem prevails?

Wadih Saadeh:
– The prose poem, which I call the modern poetic text, is not the final destination of poetic
writing. History must not freeze in one place; it must keep moving and evolving.

Comment from the critic and poet Ali Sarmad, Iraq:

My interest in reading Wadih Saadeh's poetry began when I started reading poetry that is open to the world
and that shapes its poetics outside the centres and the transcendentals, moving deep towards the question of a different existence

the question that builds a horizontal world marked by complicity, and that in turn opens onto questions rather than answers.
As a reader and a researcher I see this act powerfully embodied in your poetry,
particularly in the following collections:
“Tell the Passer-by to Come Back, He Left His Shadow Here”, “Feathers in the Wind” and ”An Attempt to Join Two Banks with a Voice”

– How deeply can poetry embody the experience of an existence dangling on the back of a blind butterfly?
Or how do you reach, in poetry, an existence open to the different other?

Wadih Saadeh:
I believe poetry is the question of a different existence; poetry is the illusion of creating a different existence, and so on.
It is, as you say, ”the embodiment of the experience of an existence dangling on the back of a blind butterfly”

• In your work, elements of form and rhythm interlock, and the language of cinema is strongly present,
alongside a poetics with its own distinct law. How do you see the mutual influences between poetry and the other arts?

Wadih Saadeh:
– Today the poem carries, or should carry, all the narrative arts, so that it erases the boundaries
between the different literary forms.

• You are not among those who created sharp confrontations with power, so much as creative aesthetic confrontations
for the sake of poetry, and an elevation of the authority of the text (if that expression is permissible).
In your view, what is the right distance between the poet and poetry on one side, and power, whether political, social or religious, on the other?

Wadih Saadeh:
– The poet, and the intellectual in general, must be the first monitor and the first critic of power. When he is not,
the value of his poetry and of his culture falls away.

Comment from the poet and translator Mohamed Eid Ibrahim, Egypt:

What distinguishes Wadih Saadeh's poetry above all is its narration, transparent as a spirit with nothing to bind it,
taking you into new worlds we had not known in poetry before.
A poetics of the margin that takes possession of you, so that you drift in it, or with it, to another space parallel to the one we live in; realistic, yes, but another realism, the realism of a drifting language with no place to settle.
A language that carries slender beings in slender scenes, as though he were matching, or writing across, Giacometti's figures.
As if he were saying: in his blood there is a flood
searching his veins for wood to build a ship.
– Many people wore themselves out trying to define the term prose poem, from the handful of writers in the 1950s
to the dozens in the 1960s, until it settled into a recognised form, with a fine generation coming forward in texts
that had become entirely different from what preceded them.
“Suzanne Bernard” is no longer the guide in this matter; instead there have been various attempts at writing the prose poem, developing here and there: the narrative poem, the storytelling poem, the screenplay poem, the poem of… every literary genre can now enter the prose poem
So I object to the attempt to delete this term and put something else in its place,
because many people laboured until it settled in people's minds, and it is through it that we should create.
Be as creative as you have the right to be, or write as you wish, but within this term, which has room for every kind of literature inside it.
– That is my question to Mr Wadih, who is trying to change the meaning of this term even though it may
already contain everything he wants to embrace.

Wadih Saadeh:
The margin is also the main text, and a person's small concerns are the great universal ones, for a human being is a set of small concerns.
As for the prose poem, I call it ”the modern poetic text” because it is no longer merely a poem; it has become a text that carries poetry, philosophy and every other literary genre, and it can no longer properly be confined to the words prose poem.

• How far are you occupied with the idea of smashing the taboo?

Wadih Saadeh:
– The taboo is the first idol that must be smashed in poetry.

Comment from the critic and poet Abeer Yahya, Syria:

Our great poet Wadih Saadeh, I am delighted to meet one of the foremost early pioneers of the prose poem, those who led the way in producing it. In the West originally, and in Arabic literature, it is the child of two legitimate parents, poetry and prose; it is not the foundling some accuse it of being.
My question:
Do you think the Arabic prose poem has surpassed the Western prose poem? And if not, why?

Wadih Saadeh:
In poetry, my friend, no one surpasses anyone else, ”West or East“,
for we rise exactly as far as we descend into human depth.
There is Western poetry that has gone deep, and there is Arabic poetry that has gone deep too.

• We often notice in your work a translucent dialogue between the personal and the general, which can grow until it seems a tangle
in which we can no longer tell the personal from the general. Could you shed light on this feature?

Wadih Saadeh:
– The personal in my poetry is also the general, and the general is the personal: when I speak about myself I am
speaking about the other as well, and when I speak about the other I am speaking about myself.

Comment from the poet Serajeddin El-Werfalli, Libya:

Anyone who begins his poem with (the story is that there is no story) makes the world rub its hands together to listen to the non-story.
Anyone who says (I am without a name.. so that I may be all names) must have a single, infinite name.
The poet who cracks the bones of exile, and makes distances for friends who have grown old, faces in every direction at once.
The poet and philosopher Wadih Saadeh is genuinely unsettling: his images are dense and successive, without pity or mercy, as though they spilled from a womb outside the two dimensions of being and nothingness.
He carries a vast exile, fenced in by sharp awareness, on his shoulders, and walks off with it towards the far, the very far, as though he enjoyed the company of his shadow, having thrown arrival behind him from the very first step,
and I do not know what question I should put to the question!
For only the one who masters the art of erasure and tearing deserves (to swim in a sea that drowns).

Wadih Saadeh:
There is no story, my friend, and no name: a human being is all the stories and all the names, and at the same time has no name and no story.
And yes, poetry must widen the distances. But whatever it does, the human being will remain in exile.

– Poetry and the poet have played many roles in our Arab history. How do you see the role of the poet
and of poetry in today's world?

Wadih Saadeh:
– Wherever he is, the poet must remain a critic of everything that deserves criticism, and must submit neither to power nor
to temptation.

Comment from the poet Mohamed El-Jubouri, Syria:

Greetings to you and to your distinguished guest, the poet Wadih Saadeh. Frankly, when Wadih Saadeh is mentioned, the first questions or comments that come to mind concern the prose poem, or the modern poetic text as he prefers to call it.

– Mr Wadih, can the prose poem be framed and measured against a standard?
By which I mean: poetry is measured against poetry and the poem against the poem; poetry has its own maturity and its own tools, and so does the novel, and so does the short story…
– Does this apply to the prose poem?
– Also, can we trust the intellectual project that produced the prose text?
We forced a standard term, poetry, onto unframed prose; so can we trust the intellectual project that produced that?
– And my last question:
How does a poetic prose text differ from a less poetic prose text?

Wadih Saadeh:
The modern poetic text has room for every literary genre and erases the boundaries between them, provided it is a text that goes deep, that carries what is distinctive and different, and that reveals something new.
In the end what matters is not the labels but the text.

• What accounts for the gap that has long existed between poetry and its audience? How can
this gap between poetry and the audience be closed, or at least narrowed?

Wadih Saadeh:
– I believe the reader of poetry is dying out, that the gap between the reader and poetry keeps deepening, and that it has become
difficult to close.

• What do you think of classifying literature as feminine and masculine? Does the law of literature allow this
separation?

Wadih Saadeh:
– Feminine literature and masculine literature: this is a backward label for a backward society.
Literature is literature, neither feminine nor masculine, but human, whether written by a man or a woman.

• Criticism: what has it given the poet, poetry and the reader?
And what should the new criticism be working on?

Wadih Saadeh:
– I believe poetry has outpaced criticism in the Arab world, and that criticism must adopt concepts different
from the traditional ones, because the poetry it addresses is itself different.

• (Good literature imposes itself.) To what extent can this phrase save both reader and writer from injustice in an age of the information revolution and of social media that no conditions restrain? And is it enough for a generation of writers and poets trying to prove themselves through a free virtual space that reality never gave them, dominated as it is by corrupt cultural institutions that kill talent?

Wadih Saadeh:
– Yes, I believe good literature imposes itself, even if it takes time, and I do not think good literature will suffer any
injustice, either for the writer or for the reader.
– No, the information revolution is not enough for a writer to prove himself; literature has conditions other than
how widely it circulates.

• Translating poetry: how far does it benefit the poet and poetry?

Wadih Saadeh:
– Translating poetry makes the poet multilingual and builds a bridge between him and his readers in other languages.

• The prose poem now holds a high place despite some who oppose it. It carries many messages for readers,
far from metre and rhyme. Do you think it comes closer to the reader's level of understanding, so that the reader finds himself in it?

Wadih Saadeh:
– The prose poem must come closer to the reader, just as the reader must come closer to it.

Comment from the poet Mohamed Harbi, Egypt:

Wadih Saadeh's shadow.. a look that no longer sleeps / Mohamed Harbi

***
He is an atheist and I am a believer;
but a shadow managed to bridge the gulf between us, and we climbed one mountain together, singing for the human being.
He is the master and I am the dervish circling a shadow (which was a sleeping look), as the master Wadih Saadeh once said. The title tempted me into silence, and silence into writing, and I set about unravelling that sleeping look, imagining and turning images onto their shadows, grilling poems in the plundered sun, my eye always on an evening without brothers, or on dust that mends the air, in the company of the poet who taught the poem to dance with him, barefoot and bare, in a wide field; or on shadows of images leaping about on their own like my mother's hens, and the gazelles of a village I only ever saw as pictures in his poems.

Was I a shadow of Wadih's shadow?
No, I was not, and I do not think I ever will be.
For the true master of the path wants your freedom and your willing desire to circle, so that you may discover the secret for yourself.
My weapon in reading him, and in reading poetry, was the ancient Pharaonic motto:
“Be a scribe, that you may be master of yourself”.. Then I was stopped by Hegazi's images, with their loud rural rhythm, entering a city without a heart alongside the tram wheels and surrendering to the green flies of the graveyards; and I was held up by Salah Abdel Sabour's tears as he waited for a prophet carrying a sword to save a defeated prophet carrying a pen..
But prophets seldom come once the divine mail has stopped. And I was caught by Afifi Matar's images, which resemble windmills, breaking out like an earthly hell in my head, and I see them as villages fleeing their own mud and their own people; nor did Adonis set me free with his game of language and the temptation of dancing with Al-Niffari…
Wadih's shadow was gentle: it tempts and frees at once; you accept it and dance with it, then you refuse it and leap over the wall between you.

He claims no prophecy.. and waits for no prophets,
He goes to the sea alone like an old fisherman, sipping the wine of metaphor as aged images, then flees to a strange sea, planting his shadow there, in an evening that renews itself with no brothers but that dust which mends the air; and whenever he sees a shadow he plants a sapling of light.
I came to know Wadih Saadeh online.. and never had the honour of meeting him except on paper, in that wretched edition published for him by the General Authority for Cultural Palaces in Egypt, full of errors, from which I was rescued by the more accurate and complete edition our great poet published on his own website. Facebook opened between us a single road with two directions, on which we took off our masks and were content with poetry as sun and shadow, like a look trying to fall asleep.

When I read his wonderful sentence “Do not step on a shadow, it is a sleeping look”, which he once posted on his “Facebook” page, I was not troubled by the grammatical licence in “step on” (in Arabic the verb to tread is one of those harsh verbs that crush their object directly, like a runaway cart) and I thought perhaps he wanted to soften the weight of the tread, deliberately breaking the rule to serve the image and enrich the merciful metaphor. That image unsettled me with the astonishment of a dervish who, in a crowded festival, stumbles on his own secret and discovers the path in a single sentence, until every shadow seemed to me an eye that never sleeps,
and I began to play with the shadow like an old child trying to touch the flavour of memories
I did not ask Saadeh about the identity of the shadow here, just as I did not ask him about the identity of the dust, or the meaning of absence and presence, the meanings critics have long chased as they felt their way towards his text, which is simple and deep at once. The captivating sentence had taken hold of me and given me my path, so I borrowed from it its remarkable capacity for simple, suggestive, provocative metaphorical imagery. And I went back and read it again, and read Saadeh more than once, helped by the great critic Khalida Said's critical reading of his poetic journey, which began in 1968 –
I was seven years old at the time – and continues to this day.

I began to know him as a man who does not stray far from his poem: an old fisherman of seventy who grinds memories with a relish for life, a farmer who insists on planting shoots without waiting for his own resurrection, even though he admits that readers of poetry are dying out. And despite all these years, I feel in his poem, as in his interviews, that the body of this seventy-year-old poet looks out on the world with the eyes of a child who is good at play and at evasion.

Perhaps because he published his first collection, “The Evening Has No Brothers”, when he was twenty, the age at which both the body and the dream grow. But a childhood that has fled to the edges of memory deceives body and dream and settles in the heart; it writes poetry, shapes spaces and makes wings for the poet who is still using them at seventy.

A collection out of a sleeping look
In a sly moment I decided to play with Wadih Saadeh's text. I said I would answer it back, as poets once did with the masters of their order, and out of poetic mischief I wrote.. “I stepped on a shadow”..
Then I stopped, because nothing came to my rescue and no images were born from the womb of the spectacle. Then I repeated the sentence more than seventy times, and here I noticed how empty the game was, so I abandoned it. And no sooner had I decided to stop than it cried out.. “and I woke”, so I wrote
“I stepped on a shadow.. and I woke”!

And for two whole months I did not stop writing exercises for the shadow, until it should rise from its resting place and from the measure of images
At first I would try out my own shadow one way and imitate Wadih Saadeh's shadow another way, differing from his poetics, which rely on simple metaphorical sentences that press deep into joining presence and absence together in the “uncertainty” of dust. Then I began to delete the imitation and to fix the shadow that was mine. And when a whole collection was complete I was glad, because with the look of a single shadow I had rid myself of the traces of my many fathers in the poem:
Darwish, who is good at singing, which I am not,
and Afifi, that great builder who constructs the architecture of his poem out of music, while I long for incomplete sounds and love inscriptions on walls,
and Saadi Youssef, sharp as glass, cutting as a hawk, the communist who tamed argument into a braid in a poem,
and Hegazi, the jurist who lost his way between two cities,
and Abdel Sabour, who makes a well out of his tears to weep for the loss of his own Andalusia…
I will remain indebted to Saadeh for that sleeping look which I borrowed from his shadow and out of which I made myself two wings.. and so I woke to my faith in God, in the poem and in the human being, and I came to know my own shadow.

***
A single image
***
To Wadih Saadeh
***
Origin:
Between Wadih Saadeh's shapes, swift as lightning
and the words of Paul Klee, who in dreams mostly wears black and red
shadows and ghosts take the shape of: Lorca, Paul Gauguin and Afifi Matar
and the concerns of Marx and Al-Niffari together at Plato's table
shadows stretching out in their thrilling dance before the mirrors
to reveal the image of a wandering poet singing naked in the street and the square
and forgetting a tree as a free dessert for an obscure greenness
so everyone forgets him.
***
Image:
Lorca's stupid woodcutter fails to translate
Wadih Saadeh and his shadow, asleep like a bewildered look*
so Osiris flees the disintegration of the body and returns to
Khnum, whose stone machine grinds memories in the water wheels
There is silt that has curdled since Afifi was absent from the wedding
and a shadow that stretched out whenever a “sun that drinks the sea in order to die” was absent **
and an echo that does not last long in the nearby threshing floor
and I have no shape
and my shadow denies me
three times before an old dog barks in the yard
and I have a single image
and there is no woodcutter here to cut off the trace
****
* The sentence is Wadih Saadeh's: “Do not step on a shadow, it is a sleeping look”
** The sentence is Afifi Matar's

***
Simultaneous translation for the shadow
***
To Wadih Saadeh

I stepped on a shadow and the rain stopped suckling the light
from the street lamp, and the tremor of confused footsteps
and I woke to a drop planting a shadow “like a sleeping look”
to echo a short-skirted poem between the light and the book
and lay bare a drowsy thirst in the roots
so I closed the shadow of “Wadih Saadeh ” on two fleeing streets
to catch the train of departure with a passing look and a resident shadow”

***

Wadih Saadeh:
Mohamed Harbi, thank you for this comment,
My friend, I believe everything is nothing but shadows, and we must respect these shadows, which are ourselves.
As for my phrase “do not step on a shadow”, you said that in Arabic one says:
“do not tread a shadow” and not “do not step on a shadow”.
I said ”do not step on a shadow” deliberately, meaning: do not even touch it. I deliberately lightened the force of the treading, so I added the word 'on' so that the tread would be light, no more than a touch.

• A final word as a message to the Arab writer, and to the writer of the prose poem in particular: when he writes, what
should he do to be singular and to offer something new and different from others?

Wadih Saadeh:
– Every writer, poet or not, must carry within himself literary depth
and human depth, so that his writing carries that depth; then, when he writes himself, he is writing the human being in general.
…

We thank our guest Wadih Saadeh for accepting the invitation of the “Butterfly Effect initiative” and producing this rich and generous conversation about everything to do with poetry and the prose poem, or the modern poetic text as he chose to call it.
We also thank the poets and writers, each by name and with all due titles, who contributed their valuable comments to enrich this cultural dialogue.
Our sincere thanks and gratitude to all.

With the sincere greetings of the members of
the Butterfly Effect initiative.