Joel
William Vaughan was good enough to provide the first review of Hawad’s Furigraphic Horizons, translated by Jake Syersak (2019) over at Broken Pencil.
Thanks so much!
Translator Jake Syersak selects three poems from Hawad’s
Furigraphic collection for this English language chapbook. The poet,
Hawad, belongs to the nomadic Saharan Tuareg people, and the poems were
composed in Tamazight dialect using Tifinagh script. However, Hawad alters the
already obscure characters with an invented method of furigraphy, a wild
calligraphic brushwork. These were subsequently translated into French by the
author and his wife, Hélène Claudot-Hawad. Thus, conceptually, the project is a
marvel: Hawad’s Tuared-Tamazight tongue, written in Tifinagh, collaboratively
rewritten into French with the Roman alphabet and again into English by Syersak.
Then, of course, these were printed and bound by rob mclennan on his trademark
coloured copy paper and sent, most likely, to your mailbox. Following so far?
The
poems themselves are compelling, meant to achieve a “literary transcendence of
the self to encompass ubiquity and escape the superficial physical and mental
constrains of time and space,” Hawad’s subject matter appropriately returns
again and again to a search for solid, extrasensory truth.
His
verse is punctuated by galloping images and grammatical puzzles. One is never
sure where he is headed, because one is never sure where he’s situated to begin
with. Just try reading “The Swell of the Horizons” – “Iron hoof horse,” /
Inside the brain head pebble / brain pebble head / horse inside the hoof / The
fatal march toward utopia / forces the rider to drunk / the swell vertigo
tempestuous urine / of his horse inside the head.”
To
read Hawad is disorienting, to say the least, but any determined search for
immaterial truth should be. Hawad’s poems are fascinating on their own, but the
implications brought to the fore a dogpile of languages make these social poems
sedimentary, worthy of study.
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