{"id":13957,"date":"2023-04-09T08:24:20","date_gmt":"2023-04-09T13:24:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lavenderink.org\/site\/?post_type=product&p=13957"},"modified":"2023-06-01T00:01:21","modified_gmt":"2023-06-01T05:01:21","slug":"soaring-and-the-burst","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/www.lavenderink.org\/site\/shop\/soaring-and-the-burst\/","title":{"rendered":"Soaring and the Burst"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rachid Khaless<\/a><\/h1>\n

Translated by Peter Thompson<\/a><\/h2>\n

Soaring and the Burst (Vols, l\u2019\u00e9clat)\u00a0<\/h3>\n

ISBN:978-1-956921-15-1\u00a0<\/span>(pbk.)<\/p>\n

(May, 2023) (Pre-order pricing through May 31.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

First full-length publication in English of the award-winning Moroccan poet,\u00a0Soaring and the Burst (Vols, l\u2019\u00e9clat)<\/i> was awarded the<\/span>\u00a0Prix du Maroc du Livre<\/i>, one of Morocco’s most prestigious prizes, in 2019.<\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

Translator\u2019s Preface<\/b><\/h2>\n

Rachid Khaless, as we\u2019ve said in another space, bears watching. In his early fifties he is not just a literature professor at the prestigious Mohamed V, in Rabat, but he seems to be everywhere else: a poet, novelist, publisher, painter and translator. He is not necessarily typical of the new voice in Morocco, but his various resonances are the heart of that new voice: polymodal, transgressive, ironic and humane.<\/p>\n

All this shows in his work as a publisher: Abdelhak Serhane\u2019s Eros maudit ou<\/i> le sexe des Arabes<\/i>, Mohamed Loakira\u2019s poetry of Arab Spring \u2026and the spring is veiled over<\/i>, and Mohamed Nedali\u2019s achingly humane (while sharply critical of society) La Bouteille au cafard<\/i>. As a novelist the psychological study within his Absolut Hob<\/i> balances the broad societal view of a jihadi-bomber in Quand Adam a d\u00e9cid\u00e9 de vivre<\/i>. As a translator, Khaless takes on Hassan Najmi, one of Morocco\u2019s most deceptively metaphorical and analogic poets and one who has both embodied traditional influences and developed a contemporary voice. As a poet, there is Khaless\u2019s present work (published together with Dans le d\u00e9sir de durer<\/i> in one volume, 2014): a book which indeed \u201csoars\u201d into abstraction and distance-from-self while constantly fueled by intensity of personal feeling. [Of all the titles cited only the Loakira has been translated into English (Di\u00e1logos Books, 2017); Khaless has not been translated; Najmi\u2019s The Blueness of The Evening<\/i> has been translated.]\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This book, Vols, L\u2019\u00e9clat<\/i>, was first been published by the Maison de la Po\u00e9sie au Maroc\u2014itself an honor\u2014and also won the Prix du Maroc du Livre (2019). And its soaring does, at first, take us out of a strictly literary comfort zone\u2014that is, what we expect from poetry in terms of tone. Tone is a broad word, and the first distraction, the use of the first person \u201cI,\u201d certainly invites a broad discussion of tastes. In the English-speaking West, we tend to feel the discussion is settled, and we\u2019re a bit averse to this pronoun in poetry. There was probably a wave of reaction, among us, to the \u201cconfessional poets,\u201d then there was the influence of the Language poets, and no doubt other and occult vibrations in the zeitgeist have brought us to this standard. So we might, at first struggle with images such as:<\/p>\n

\n

A thousand metamorphoses<\/p>\n

Tear me free from absence when<\/p>\n

To cast up rainbows<\/p>\n

In the skies I spill<\/p>\n

My precious blood<\/p>\n

In so many colors\u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A sense of airy abstraction, the use of upper case letters, the personal pronoun (all present, by the way, in the work of contemporary Moroccan poets such as Abdelkhaleq Jayed, the Loakira of Confidences d\u2019automne<\/i>, and others) might lead us astray. The soaring might not be fully recognized as escape, transcendence and revelation\u2014just as we might not be alert to its mirror: plummeting, plumbing, delving. We have to remind ourselves that there is something concrete about revelation, about the violence of \u201cthe burst.\u201d For this translator, the tip comes with these lines:<\/p>\n

\n

Rifts in the wind<\/p>\n

For my future resurrections<\/p>\n

In stupendous towns<\/p>\n

And for improbable\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Republics\u2014<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A metaphysics. And perhaps we thought we were done (Donne) with that, as done as was Ayer (Alfred Jules) when he wrote the classic assault Language, Truth and Logic<\/i>. Certainly, we feel that some of the abstraction inherent in metaphysics had been bled out of our (poetic) system with the advent and lasting influence of Surrealism and Imagism. Then why does the above remind us of Rimbaud? That is the key here: Rimbaud, the progenitor of an eerie blending of the abstract (metaphysical, at least with him) and the concrete\u2014the progenitor of that synthesis which still influences our writing, especially our sense of metaphor\u2014is echoed in this soaring.<\/p>\n

This, from Rimbaud\u2019s \u201cMystique\u201d (Les<\/i> Illuminations<\/i>), is typical:<\/p>\n

\n

The flowery softness of the stars and sky and all the rest, it lowers opposite the hillside, like a basket facing our slope, and births the abyss, blossoming and blue, below. (PT, translation<\/i>)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The \u201cslope\u201d is a geometric notation and the stars, after all, are pretty distant, but the sense of their bodies and of a real hillside rescues this from pure abstraction. At the same time the \u201cabyss,\u201d the \u201cbelow\u201d and perhaps the \u201cflowery softness\u201d (a noetic stumbling block for us, pertaining impossibly to stars) ring metaphysical. Why is this combination so powerful\u2014and why, as this translator assumes, so attractive to Khaless?<\/p>\n

It starts, oddly enough, with Rimbaud\u2019s personal pronoun \u201cI.\u201d It is a very particular operation with this \u201cje\u201d (\u201cI\u201d) that invokes the metaphysics commented by Alice Coleno, Philippe Sollers, Esa Hartmann and others. This is the operation hinted at in the seventeen-year-old Rimbaud\u2019s dictum \u201cCar je est un autre\u201d (\u201cbecause I is another,\u201d Letter to Paul Demeny<\/i>, 1871). And if \u201cI\u201d is (third person) someone else, we (modern, Western readers) don\u2019t take the first person pronoun in the same slightly irritating way we might have at first glance. Removing yourself from your being is also a distancing from all being\u2014a removal to a new vantage point, a stance taken in confrontation with all that is familiar. That is the metaphysical glint that we constantly see in even the most abjectly, crudely concrete of Rimbaud\u2019s images.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Khaless\u2019s \u201csoaring\u201d is metaphysical in this sense. Even putting aside the great influence of Rimbaud on North African writers in French (see Dominique Poncelet, H\u00e9di Abdel Jaouad and others), we have this same sense in Soaring and the Burst<\/i>, and through this sense we recognize the \u201cI\u201d as \u201can other\u201d\u2014rather than an \u201cI\u201d with its everyday luggage of familiar self. While this poet seems<\/i> to insist on revealing, he instead persists in marveling: at the new altitude, the new lines of sight, the new physical laws. The new phenomena are the fragments of the \u201cburst,\u201d objectively a new physics but more profoundly a new (\u201cdisordered\u201d in Rimbaud\u2019s sense) subjectivity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The value of this work\u2014beyond its startling imagery\u2014is its extensive exploration of sense and sensibility without exploiting either the social world or a cloying introspection.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Stay with this writer in the soaring, follow the work of his Virgule Editions, plunder his own published list. His future has burst upon us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Peter Thompson<\/i><\/p>\n

Roger Williams University<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rachid Khaless
\n9781956921151
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