Safaa Fathy: April 19, 2024

Safaa Fathy introduces then screens her 2007 cine-poem, Hidden Valley (color video, 28 min.), shot primarily in Joshua Tree National Park in southern California. (The audio file incorporates the film soundtrack with spoken narration, by Fathy reading in French; English-language subtitles are included within the video.)

Following her film's screening, Fathy speaks of that work and the book of poetry Al Haschisch, lines from which are spoken by her, in French, in the film, and of her philosopher friend Jean-Luc Nancy, before turning to a reading of her poetry. 

She introduces then reads, in English, from the newly published volume Where Not to Be Born, which, in Rawad Wehbe's translation selects from four early books written in Arabic. From the latest of these books, Name to the Sea (2010), Fathy reads three poems: "[The Voice of Song Wanders, Now Write, Virgin Mary]," "[Oh cupbearer!]," and the untitled poem "[...]," with the poems incorporating lines from 9th and 10th century Sufi mystics al-Hallaj and al-Niffari.

Asking for questions or comments from her audience, Fathy, on request, reads one of her poems in Arabic, from Name to the Sea, and another in French: "...et Une Nuit," inspired by the story of Sheherazade. The latter poem then she reads in English translation ("...and One Night"), then follows this with another poem, "Seasons," from the same work, ...and One Night (1996).

From Little Wooden Dolls... (1998) she then reads "Don Quixote and the Flour Mills," the title poem, written for German playwright Heiner Müller, and "Negativities." She reads a very early poem, "First and Last," from her first book, Poems (1989). Poems read in English are from Where Not to Be Born, in Rawad Wehbe's translation.

In response to a question (mostly inaudible) from the audience, Safaa Fathy speaks to an "essential affinity" between film and poetry, and being able to "wander about" among different media and languages. "We are multiple, we are more than one person." She tells of an encounter with a Tibetan singer at a festival of sacred art in Spain, and eventually bringing that woman's voice into the film Hidden Valley.

She says that her "conceptual sense" came from Ph.D. study in French, and that she focused on English-language literature, with further study in German while living in East Germany. Regarding her early experience of writing poetry in Arabic, she speaks to her own and others' "heretical" practice, breaking the rules of metrics, etc., when writing Arabic verse, and of an Egyptian Communist publisher rejecting her early poems as too dark.

Of the experience of moving across languages, she says: "We are all translated beings."

Asked about influences, she says she is "always coming back to Paul Celan," while "in Arabic, it's al-Niffari," noting British Arabist and translator A. J. Arberry's re-surfacing of that body of work. She speaks of early tragic loss of a sister and an eventual recognition that "there is no safety of being" and that there is a "relation with the beyond."