Egypt

Ah, Cleopatra.

On 23 July Egypt celebrates Revolution Day. We all need a bit of revolution from time to time, right? Yes, it’s all very well to have sphinxes and pyramids and hieroglyphs, an amazing history and a canal. But sometimes you need to shake things up, too.

We know that there have been people living in Egypt for millennia. That about 8000 years ago agriculture and construction emerged. We know about Pharaohs. We know that Cleopatra was a quite a lady, captivating first Julius Caesar and then Marc Antony. We know that later on Egypt became part of the Byzantine empire—right?

Oh, and I guess for those of us who have watched The Ten Commandments every year at Easter growing up, we know that Moses had a few things to accomplish in Egypt before leading the Jews through the Red Sea and across the Sinai Desert. (My Old English teacher used to talk about this, expressing his disbelief at this part—the Sinai is a small desert, he said. Walk a straight line in any direction, it’s not going to take you 40 days to cross. Try three. Still, it’s easy to get turned around in deserts…)

Let’s skip ahead, because I’m not seeing much about pirates in the history in front of me. The Suez Canal. Good stuff. I visited the Panama Canal a few months ago, so obviously the Suez Canal goes on my list of things to see in the future. I’ve become a canal fan.

And then there’s Revolution Day. In 1962 the Free Officers Movement led a military coup that removed the Egyptian monarchy and established the country as a republic. The future president Gamal Abdul Nasser was part of the movement that brought about this change of power structure. (The first president of Egypt was Muhammad Naguib—he lasted about a year.)

And for a poem? Why, I thought you’d never ask. Today I have a poem for you by Amal Dunqul, “The City of Wrecked Ships.” I need to take better notes, because I can’t remember where in all my many library trips and web searches I found this one. Hopefully I’ll update that later.


The City of Wrecked Ships

I feel I am alone tonight;
and the city, with its ghosts and tall
buildings, is a wrecked ship
that pirates looted long ago
and sent to the oceans’ bottom.
At that time the captain leaned his head
against the railing. Beneath his feet
lay a broken wine bottle, shards
of a precious metal. And the sailors
clung to the silent masts,
and through their ragged clothes
swan sad fish of memory.
Silent daggers, growing moss, baskets
of dead cats… Nothing pulses
in this acquiescent world.

—Amal Dunqul
translated from Arabic by Sharif S. Elmusa and Thomas G Ezzy

Algeria

So, while America is recovering from their fourth of July celebrations Algerians (as well as Venezualans, and the citizens of Cape Verde and the Isle of Mann) are ramping up their own celebrations. 5 July: Algerian Independence Day. 1962.

Hey—I’ve heard of the Berbers for years, but ignorance strikes again. For some reason I had no idea they inhabited what is now Algeria since at least 10,000 BCE. How was that? I need to ask more questions. Of course, I knew about the Cathaginians, who started establishing settlements along the coast from 1000 BCE. With the advent of the Punic Wars, the Berbers became independent of Carthage (I wonder if they had a day?) before being taken over by Rome. When the Roman Empire collapsed, the Berbers became independent again—though the Vandals took over some parts of their territory. Then the Byzantine Empire came and took over for a while, until the Arabs arrived in the 8th century. Musical chairs? Yes, it’s the way it goes.

When Algeria became part of the Ottoman Empire, its modern boundaries were established, and its coast became a base for corsairs. (A word forever linked in my mind with Byron.) And, of course, lets not forget the privateering. Piracy directed toward American vessels caused the first and second Barbary Wars. (Yet another term I’ve heard of, and yet I never knew the details. War cause by pirates! How could I not know?) The Barbary pirates continued their wicked ways until 1816 when a raid by Britain’s Royal Navy, assisted by the Dutch, destroyed the port of Algiers and its Barbary ships.

And then came the French. In 1830 they invaded Algiers, and over time conquered Algeria. This, apparently, was a long and bloody process, and about a third of the Algerian population “disappeared”—I presume this means that there was a combination of large-scale killing, and flight. From the end of the nineteenth century, people of European descent and native Algerian Jews became full French citizens. And—here’s something poetic—after independence these citizens were called Pieds-Noirs, or black feet, because the Europeans wore black shoes. Meanwhile, most Muslim Algerians did not receive citizenship.

1954 was the start of the Algerian War of Independence. (Like good films? See The Battle of Algiers.) When a plebiscite was eventually held, there was a landslide vote for independence, and most of the Pieds-Noirs (over a million) fled the country. More recently, with tensions arising from a large youth population that couldn’t relate to the previous generations’ preoccupation with the war years led to protest movements and civil war. By 2002, most guerrilla groups had either surrendered, or been stamped out. Now Algeria is in recovery, and with the high price oil fetches these days, the new government is improving Algeria’s infrastructure.

While searching for housing in DC last year a met a self-proclaimed Algerian epic poet. Interesting experience. Today’s poem, however, is not by the epic poet of Glover Park, but by Mohammad Dib, an Algerian poet who now lives in France, writing in French. It comes from A Crack in the Wall: New Arab Poetry.


The moment

That very moment
And the moment after,
No war, no dead.

When people open
Their eyes and fall asleep.
Wherever flowers grow.

However much they’re loved,
However lovely, near or far.
Their look never changed


—Mohammad Dib.
from A Crack in the Wall: New Arab Poetry
translated from the French by James Kirkup

Italy

2 June is Italy’s national day—the anniversary of the day on which it became a republic (Repubblica Italiana) in 1946. Everyone remembers that Italy is “the boot” and also includes Sicily, but—please folk!—lets not forget Sardinia. (When I was on the southern tip of Corsica a few years ago, I saw Sardinia—less than 20 kilometres across the water.) Italy—ancient Rome! The Renaissance! So much art, so much music.

I hardly know how to approach Italy’s history—I mean, I suppose I could give the highlights. (These are subjective, and mostly artistic for someone like me. Ie. Me.) This is based partly on the fact that I was living in Firenze (Florence) for a few months a few years ago. So, perhaps instead of the usual format, a tour.

Roma: now I finally got down to Rome one weekend, but I saw a very odd selection of things, because I needed to get to the Vietnamese embassy to organise a visa, and the Vietnamese embassy is not in a particularly historic part of town. I had very little time, so I stuck to the following: the Colosseum; the Vatican and St Peters; the Trevi fountain. There were other things thrown in, but that was what I really go to. Yes. I know how much I missed. I at least got to drive past a lot of things.

Assisi: St Francis. Also, the best meal I ate while I was in Italy. Spectacular ravioli with a creamy tomato and mushroom sauce.

Napoli: Herculaneum and Mount Vesuvius. I was struck by how brown everything was for miles around Mt Vesuvius.

Lucca, Pisa, Siena, San Gimignano: beautiful, beautiful towns. The head of Saint Catherine of Siena. The whole body of Saint Zita of Lucca.

Venezia: running through the fountain outside the station. Soaking. Absolutely soaking. Oh, and Venezia. The whole place is gorgeous.

Padua and Verona: wandering. St Anthony related things. The fake-out that is the Juliet balcony.

Firenze: oh, Firenze! The art. Reading Henry James in various spots around the city. Escaping into the Duomo when the sun got to be too overpowering. Living in a weird suburb northwest of the Cascine gardens, asking directions to the discount supermarket on the first day of my Italian classes. Watching the French open final and The Simpsons in Italian. So many memories…

Livorno: this crazy, crazy pensione about ten miles out of town on Easter Saturday, that was like something out of Fawlty Towers. Sharing a room with a pre-teen boys tennis squad.

Self-indulgence aside. The ancient Romans gave us more than a wariness about the Ides of March. Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Juvenal, Persius… The Renaissance gave us the great artists. And let’s not forget Boccaccio and Dante. Is The Decameron the greatest thing to emerge from the Black Death pandemic?

And, yes, we’re all glad fascism and Mussolini had a use-by date, though it would have been nice if we didn’t have to have them in the first place. Dictatorships are so passé.

Literature in Italy still has its spectacular proponents. My earliest readings (aside from high school translations of Caesar, Ovid, Tacitus and Virgil) were Italo Calvino and Luigi Pirandello. I fell in love with Six Characters in Search of an Author as a teenager. More recently, I love Montale, Andrea Zanzotto and Salvatore Quasimodo—I struggled through the latter in the original with an English crib.

I’ve chosen Montale as today’s poet. I’m going to read him in the original one day. In the mean time, I’m grateful to Jonathon Galassi and Charles Wright for their translations. Wright is the translator for today’s poem, which I found here.

The Dead

The sea that breaks on the opposite shore
throws up a cloud that spumes
until the sand flats reabsorb it. There,
one day, we jettisoned, on the iron coast,
our hope, more gasping than
the open sea—and the fertile abyss turns green
as in the days that saw us among the living.

Now that the north wind has flattened out the cloudy tangle
of gravy-colored currents and headed them back
to where they started, all around someone has hung
on the limbs of the tree thicket fish nets that string
along the path that goes down
out of sight;
faded nets that. dry in the late
and cold touch of the light; and over them
the thick blue crystal of the sky winks
and slides toward a wave-lashed arc
of horizon.

                More than seawrack dragged
from the seething that uncovers us, our life
moves against such stasis: and still it seethes
in us, that one thing which one day stopped, resigned
to its limits; among the strands that bind
one branch to another, the heart struggles
like a young marsh hen
caught in the net's meshes;
and motionless and migratory it holds us,
an icy steadfastness.
                               Thus
maybe the dead too have an rest taken away from them
in the ground; a force more pitiless
than life itself pulls them away from there, and all around
(shadows gnawed and swallowed by human memories)
drives them to these shores, breaths
without body or voice
betrayed by the darkness;
and their thwarted flights brush by us even now,
so recently separated from us, so close still,
and back in the sea's sieve go down...

—Eugene Montale
translated from the Italian by Charles Wright

Greece

I’m guessing most people my age don’t think a great deal about Greece having struggled for independence. Greece? Isn’t that the country of Sophocles, Socrates and Homer? Well, yes—but empires do fall, get taken over and then have to go through a lot to become their own entities again. The Hellenic Republic is no exception, and so on 25 March in 1821 Greece declared independence from the Ottoman Empire.

Greece fell to the Ottomans in 1453, and nearly four centuries on, their War of Independence continued from 1821 until 1829, with their 1821 declaration of independence officially recognised under the London Protocol in 1830.

Independence wasn’t the end of the story—in World War I the country fell to German forces, and then, after liberation, experienced a long-lasting civil war. In 1967, there was a coup d’etat, and from 1967 until 1974 Greece was under the control of a military junta. After the fall of this junta, Greece moved transitioned into democracy. In 1981 they became the tenth member of the European Union.

As a brief aside, looking at their current population estimate (a little over 11 million) I understand by Melbourne has the third largest Greek population in the world—after Athens and Thessoloniki. In my imagination, all European nations have large populations, probably because the countries have loomed large in my mind since childhood.

Choosing a poem to represent Greece was difficult solely from the point of view of asking myself the question: Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians,” or not Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians?” There are many other fine Greek poets, and many other wonderful Greek poems available in translation. I’m a big fan of Yannis Ritsos and Odysseas Elytis… but Cavafy is the poet who moves me most, and “Waiting for the Barbarians” is a monument not just of modern Greek poetry, but of 20th century poetry in general. Cavafy died in 1933, but his influence is still felt today. I still remember discovering this poem almost 10 years ago, and it still has the same effect on me. I found the text online here, but almost any anthology of modern poetry that includes translations will include this poem. Cavafy’s Collected Poems is really very easy to find—I’ve bought it twice.


Waiting for the Barbarians

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city's main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

—Constantine Cavafy
translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley