It no longer matters that no one loves us
A poem by the Palestinian poet
Samer Abu Hawwash
Translation by María Luisa Prieto
It no longer matters
that no one loves us.
It is enough that the great Archangel loves us
in his shining sky.
Our children see him standing tall in the distance
with his hands joined to form a heart
and they smile.
Our wives see him waving a white jasmine
and they squint their eyes forever.
Our men see his blue wings
clear as the sky
and with rapturous hearts
they travel towards him.
It no longer matters that no one loves us.
The bombs have freed us from our ears
with which we used to hear words of love,
the missiles have freed us from our eyes
with which we saw looks of love
and the black words have freed us from our hearts
in which we kept spells of love.
It no longer matters that no one loves us
in this world.
"Anyway, it seems that it was a one-sided love".
say our elders, tired of the idea of land
and our poet 1, standing on the distant horizon
exclaims, "Deliver us from this cruel love!"
then whispers, excusing himself
of the fleeting childish optimism:
"On this earth there is nothing
worth living for "2.
It no longer matters that no one loves us.
We are tired of words that are said and not said,
of hands that are stretched out and not stretched out
and of eyes that see and do not see.
We are tired of ourselves
in this long night,
we are tired of our mothers clinging on
to what is left of us
and of the rock we carry on our backs
like an eternal curse,
to go with her from abyss to abyss
and from death to death
and never arrive.
It no longer matters that no one loves us
or that no one accompanies us at our funeral.
We walk in silence towards a final wandering,
we hold hands
and walk alone in the desert of the world.
At some point
a child looks back,
takes one last look at the debris
and says, shedding a tear:
It no longer matters that no one loves us.
1- He is referring to the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
2- Here Samer Abu Hawwash quotes the first lines of Mahmoud Darwish's poem 'Ala hadhihi al-ard' (In this land), from the collection of poems Wardun aqallu (Fewer roses), but adds laysa to give it a negative form, thus suppressing any hint of hope.
Samer Abu Hawwash is a Palestinian refugee writer, born in Beirut in 1972. He has published since 1991 in several Lebanese magazines and newspapers. He graduated in Journalism and Communication from the Lebanese University in 1996. He published his first collection of poems, entitled Life is Printed in New York, in 1977, followed by nine others, among them: This Is Not the Way to Make Pizza, in 2016. He has lived and worked since 2004 in the United Arab Emirates, translating American poetry and English-language fiction. He currently lives in Barcelona. He has translated more than twenty American poets into Arabic, including Charles Buckowski, Langston Hughes, Kim Addonizio, Robert Bly, as well as more than forty works by major American writers, including Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Yann Martel's Life of Pi, and Hanif Kureishi's Buddha of Suburbia. In 2009 he was one of the 39 Arab authors chosen for the Beirut39 project, which took place in Beirut in 2009-2010 to mark the World Book Capital.
María Luisa Prieto holds a degree and doctorate in Arabic Philology from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where she was awarded an extraordinary prize for her degree and doctorate. She is currently a lecturer in Arabic Language and Literature at the Complutense University of Madrid. She has carried out numerous research projects in the field of contemporary Arabic literature and has published more than thirty literary works translated from Arabic, most of them by Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfuz, and also by other authors such as Mahmoud Darwish, Nizar Qabbani, Adonis, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Gassan Kanafani and Hanan al-Shaykh. She has also translated poems by Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Fadwa Tuqan, Muhammad al-Magut, Muin Basisu, Nazik al-Malaika, Samih al-Qasim, Wadih Saadeh, Abu l-Qasim al-Shabbi, Sargon Boulus, and classical poets, including al-Khansa, Abu Firas al-Hamdani, Ibn Zaydun, Ibn Hani, Ibn Hazm, Ibn Khafaya, Ibn Arabi and Ibn Zamrak. She is the editor of the Arabic poetry website poesiaarabe.