{"id":9634,"date":"2022-08-08T13:07:08","date_gmt":"2022-08-08T11:07:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/?p=9634"},"modified":"2022-12-25T11:22:35","modified_gmt":"2022-12-25T09:22:35","slug":"who-is-poet-translator-mbarek-sryfi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/who-is-poet-translator-mbarek-sryfi\/","title":{"rendered":"Who is Poet-Translator Mbarek Sryfi?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
Merzouga, Morocco ( courtesy Louise Drouin).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/h4>\n

Jordan Elgrably<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

The question seems to answer itself, but does it? Are we what we do?<\/em> And if so, how did a Moroccan who grew up near the Sahara become an Arabic-language professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with more than a dozen books in English to his credit?<\/p>\n

In his latest collection of poems, Chasing a Moving Landscape<\/em> (Lavender Ink, 2022), Mbarek Sryfi<\/a> waxes at length on his journey, which has not been without pain. In \u201cAt Home\u201d he writes:<\/p>\n

Through the drapes
\nI contemplate the snowflakes falling
\nDance as they catch the light
\nProviding me relief<\/p>\n

In the moment,
\nLost for words,
\nI marvel at the sight
\nLingering on the memory of all I have lost.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Mbarek Sryfi’s Chasing a Moving Landscape<\/em> is published by Lavender Ink<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The poet, married with a daughter and son (twins), has become an American, but Morocco is in his soul. \u201cHow quiet my world is,\u201d he goes on in \u201cAt Home.\u201d \u201cOne must subdue exile or otherwise by stifled by it.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in his American exile, Sryfi has been anything but stifled. He has translated into English (with Eric Sellin) one of Morocco\u2019s greatest novelists and thinkers, Abdelfatto Kilito, in Arabs and the Art of Storytelling<\/em>: <\/em>A Strange Familiarity<\/em> (Syracuse University Press, 2014). He has brought into English from Darija the prolific Moroccan poet Hassan Najmi, in The Blueness of the Evening<\/em> (University of Arkansas Press, 2018). And he has introduced to English-language readers the poetry of Aicha Bassry, in With Urgency, A Selection of Poems<\/em> (Di\u00e1logos, 2021). In her eponymous poem \u201cWith Urgency,\u201d Bassry could be describing the life of Mbarek Syrifi himself:<\/p>\n

\nNo one has desired me
\nWith such urgency as has death.
\nI have lived many lives in my metaphors.
\nThat is how I extended life
\nAnd forged a small eternity for myself.<\/p>\n

\nThroughout the poems in With Urgency<\/em>, Bassry \u2014 a feminist and a prolific poet and novelist \u2014 ponders life with sorrow, morbidity and pessimism, because death is her subject, and yet Mbarek Sryfi, her translator and champion, celebrates her work, as if Bassry is an exemplar not of the philosophy that life is about dying and death, but about existence as an in-between state. We exist between life and death all along, and poetry reminds us both of our mortality and our vitality.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In \u201cThat Which Suits Death,\u201d Bassry reveals:<\/p>\n

A part of me had died.
\nAnd what remains has not yet understood
\nThe meaning of life\u2026
\nDid my father not realize
\n\u2014When he named me Aicha\u2014
\nThat we do not live,
\nBut spend life yearning,
\nSeeking a place to die?<\/p>\n

At a glance, Bassry\u2019s poem seems bleak, but in between death and life is where she finds sustenance, as does Mbarek Sryfi as he glides between Arabic, French and English. Without a doubt, Sryfi found sustenance in translating Bassry\u2019s \u201cOath of Love\u201d:<\/p>\n

I promise you and swear on it that:
\nIf you were the beat, I would be the heart.
\nIf you were the teardrop,
\nI would be the eyes.
\nIf you were the pain,
\nI would be the body.
\nEven if you were a death
\nI would be the tomb\u2026<\/p>\n

I can truly swear to you a now,
\nAnd not promise you a tomorrow.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
City Poems<\/em> from Mbarek Sryfi was published by L’Harmattan<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Again, who is Mbarek Syrfi? In the preface to City Poems<\/em> (L\u2019Harmattan, 2020), his friend and co-translator, the late Eric Sellin, described him as \u201ca translingual poet,\u201d raised \u201cin a region where diglossia and heteroglossia had already prevailed due to such historical events as colonialism, trade-route contact, diasporic flight, and catastrophic natural or man-made disasters.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sellin pointed out that Mbarek Sryfi\u2019s poems are composed \u201cin a direct and unpretentious style\u201d with \u201can egalitarian outlook and a concise, fully committed limning of characters, landscapes, and various objective correlatives or relics of the human condition.\u201d Yet, often the character Sryfi returns to is himself \u2014 the Moroccan, the Saharan, the American, the Pennsylvanian, the husband and father. In \u201cThe Stranger Under the Cold Sky\u201d he writes:<\/p>\n

A quiet morning
\nWindless
\nYou could hear the snowflakes falling
\nOn the trees
\nSnow white
\nCovering the land<\/p>\n

In the cold
\nHe was not the person he used to be
\nHe never knew how to behave at the moment of departure
\nHe never thought about exile
\nLet alone the concept of exile<\/p>\n

He drew his strength from his suffering<\/p>\n

\"\"
Mbarek Sryfi is lecturer and coordinator of the Arabic Program at the University of Pennsylvania, scholar, poet, and translator. He holds a MA in education, a BA in English language and literature, and a PhD in Arabic literature and Islamic studies, UPenn. Sryfi\u2019s research focuses on modern Arabic literature, space and memory, and migrant literature. His works have appeared in CELAAN Review, Metamorphoses, World Literature Today, Banipal, The Markaz Review, Translation Review, Middle Eastern Literatures, the Journal of North African Studies, and Al-\u2018Arabiyya, as well as The Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic, and the anthologies Poetry Ink<\/em>, Poetry & Resistance<\/em>, and Philadelphia Says: Struggle for Freedom<\/em>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To return to Sellin\u2019s preface for a moment, we learn something more about Sryfi, who for years now, \u201chas been exploring and mapping the physical and emotional highways and byways of global migratory and diasporic psycholinguistics in nuanced confessional poems, whose candid observations manage to weave together the memories and impressions of Sryfi\u2019s two main formative cultures into one coherent existential tapestry.\u201d<\/p>\n

In several of his poems, Mbarek Sryfi laments the loss of something, perhaps a desertic North African landscape, a community of family and friends who are Darija or Tamazight speakers, or a past that bottles memories that are vastly different from the memories produced during his decades in North America. And, at the same time, per Sellin, Sryfi lives \u201cthe excitement of having the opportunity to re-invent oneself.\u201d<\/p>\n

We might well wonder how Mbarek Sryfi eased into writing in English. Did he go from classical Arabic to Darija, and then French, then English? What was his linguistic journey, and how does he now feel, as an American-Moroccan and English language writer?<\/p>\n

I wrote to Sryfi, and waited patiently for a reply, which came weeks later:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I received your question about my relationship with the English language, I was in the process of preparing a testimony about Jack Kerouac, which raised more or less the same questions.<\/p>\n

\u201cGrowing up in Morocco, I spent most of my time feasting on Arabic, French, and later English books. As a teenager, I was a bookworm looking for books at the school libraries and\/or at neighborhood bookstores (small shops where dedicated people would buy used books and rent them to students for pennies), browsing over them, collecting them, and more often than not trading them with friends.<\/p>\n

\u201cSuch a linguistic journey left a long-lasting impact on my intellectual life. Reading in Arabic and French, and later in English, redefined my awareness of my own place in the world. In addition to Alf Layla wa-Layla<\/em> (A Thousand and One Nights)<\/em>, Ibn Khaldun\u2019s al-Muqaddimah<\/em>, Taha Husayn, al-Manfaluti, Jules Verne\u2019s Le tour du monde en 80 jours<\/em>, Tolstoy\u2019s Guerre et Paix<\/em>, Dostoevsky\u2019s Crime et ch\u00e2timent<\/em>, Emile Zola\u2019s Germinal<\/em> et L\u2019assomoir<\/em>, just to name a few, I happened to encounter Jack Kerouac\u2019s On the Road<\/em>, which set my future and the American dream began for me.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Mbarek Sryfi translated Yemeni novelist Ali Al-Muqri’s prize-winning novel The Handsome Jew<\/em> into English in 2022.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cBorges has said in an interview, \u2018I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.\u2019 As a teenager, my perspective on life changed and I felt that I was a citizen of a greater world. The result was that it inspired confidence in me, and I embarked on an endless journey of reading in English that shifted my early academic interests. After high school, I enrolled in the Department of English at the University of Sidi Mohammed ben Abdellah in Fez, and that further revealed English literature to the young student I was. I never expected that after earning a BA in English Language and Literature that I would teach English and later in 2001 move to the United States, nor did I foresee (aspiring to) becoming an American-Moroccan and English language author.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus, as a translingual poet and translator, Mbarek Sryfi is a diplomat of language, a builder of linguistic and literary bridges, a friend to Moroccans and Americans*, a go-between when it comes to Arab-Western relations \u2014 see his latest translation, The Handsome Jew<\/em>, by Yemeni novelist Ali Al-Muqri (Dar Arab, 2022) \u2014 and a friend to many of his own compatriots, among them, of course, Aicha Bassry, Abdelfatto Kilito and Hassan Najmi, but also the essential Moroccan storyteller, Muhammad Zafzaf<\/a> and many others he has championed since he journeyed to the United States and became a new citizen.<\/p>\n

Exile, as the prime in-between state, has its rewards.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cOn the Road\u201d by Mbarek Sryfi<\/p>\n

Like a tormented soul, like a leaf in the wind,<\/p>\n

I am restless
\nLike a fraught heart. I am on edge
\nLike the throbbing of new words \u2014 as they
\nStroke the page \u2014 as they
\nBreathe the air of so many places \u2014 as they
\nImpart a new life \u2014 as they
\nBecome a journey
\nInto the blue sky, the horizon, the clear nights
\nWhere the stars \u2014 like a lonely lighthouse \u2014
\nWill you to scour the self.
\nI remind myself of how I longed to take a flight \u2014
\nLike a warbler \u2014
\nTo flit about in the clouds,
\nTo belie my unquiet spirit
\nI am restless<\/p>\n

Like a sprout seed
\nIn the soughing wind
\nFrom which shall grow a penstemon<\/p>\n

I will always be solitary,
\nBut free.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

* The Kingdom of Morocco was the first country in the world<\/a> to recognize the new United States, on December 20, 1777.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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