Trying Again to Stop Time

Selected Poems

Jalal Barzanji, Sabah A. Salih

• Publisher: The University of Alberta Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781772120721
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

"It's a losing battle: my words have no chance against time.Sometimes, unable to catch up with imagination, I leave the battle, candle in hand, in complete darkness."— from "Trying Again to Stop Time"Jalal Barzanji chronicles the path of exile and estrangement from his beloved native Kurdistan to his chosen home in Canada. His poems speak of the tension that exists between the place of one's birth and an adoptive land, of that delicate dance that happens in the face of censorship and oppression. In defiance of Saddam Hussein's call for sycophantic political verse, he turns to the natural world to reference a mournful state of loss, longing, alienation, and melancholy. Barzanji's poetry is infused with the richness of the Middle East, but underlying it all is a close affinity to Western Modernists. In those moments where language and culture collide and co-operate, Barzanji carves out a strong voice of opposition to political oppression. Readers will return to his work again and again, just as viewers return to a favourite painting."Like contemporary poets Taslima Nasrin, Adonis, Yehuda Amichai, and Shuntaro Tanikawa, Barzanji's is a voice in which the native willingly mutates into the global."— Sabah A. Salih, Translator"The Kurdish question stands tall in our age as yet another emblematic paradigm of the violence enacted on a people in the name of the nation-state. Barzanji's poetry is lovely, with frequent piercing tender moments and visions of the daily and the ordinary. The translation reads smoothly and naturally, highlighting the spoken quality of the poems, the loving and wounded quality of their speaker." — Fady Joudah, translator of Ghassan Zaqtan's Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems, winner of the 2013 International Griffin Poetry Prize

Trying Again to Stop Time 2009

Trying Again to Stop Time

At sunrise

time begins to depart;

at sundown

time turns into intense darkness.

When I travel,

I can’t wait to arrive,

but when I arrive,

I see that time is there already.

Sometimes,

no more than a quick look toward the east is needed

for my past to turn into present;

in a flash time takes me back to reality—

it resembles a wooden stretcher,

like the one leaning against a mosque wall.

With the hours of love coming to an end,

time becomes my biggest obstacle,

even as my wife and I reach ecstasy.

It’s a losing battle:

my words have no chance against time.

Sometimes,

unable to catch up with imagination,

I leave the battle, candle in hand,

in complete darkness.

Sometimes,

nature, too, is like that:

grass is unstoppable in the spring,

but in autumn it is in full retreat.

Often I see my words sinking in time’s depth.

Often I see some of these words resurfacing,

the little waves they create fleeing away sheepishly.

It’s a battle I can never win.

A Soulful Sunshine

1

The middle stream

pours into a different life;

you have yet to experience it,

but it’s no stranger to you.

2

Since childhood,

my imagination had been pulling me to the north,

into the heart of winter.

Once there,

it abandoned me

for good.

3

One morning,

long ago,

juice from an apple

dripped onto my words,

leaving them stained forever.

4

Ever since imagination has become my guide,

it’s been trying to conquer shame

in the hope of going everywhere naked.

…

7

Don’t throw stones:

sunshine is all around you—

you may hit its soul.

8

At the burial site of his legs,

the youth turned to God:

“God, how can I manage without legs?

You could surely have given my legs a second chance,

let them grow like grass.

You could surely have rendered the mine harmless.

You knew Saddam Hussein

had planted it in the meadow

near our house,

but you let it go off

while I was studying!”

9

Every evening in exile,

I try to paint the clouds,

but I always fail:

they’re way too fast for my brush.

10

My wife,

on my fifty-fifth birthday,

gave me a walking stick

from a tree

known not for strength but weakness.

11

Look what they’re doing to me:

they say they have no time,

they’re too exhausted.

Yet somehow they always find the time and energy

to be cruel to me.

Beauty’s Fault

We drove to the sea,

so that water and earth

could reunite us with the sky.

On the way,

even the mountains

and sunset

had been taken over by trees;

animals were too eager to welcome vis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Trying Again to Stop Time (2009)
• I Want To Be Named Home (2007)
• In Memory of a Person Swept By the Wind (2006)
• The Rain of Compassion (2002)
• No Warmth (1985)
• The Evening Snow Dance (1979)
• New Poems (2012–)
• Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Other Titles from The University of Alberta Press