by Nathalie Handal

excerpt from Seven Stars in Sevilla

December ‘27

1. Rafael Alberti

¿Adónde el Paraíso, sombra, tú que has estado? Pregunta con sílencio?

You rest your voice on the white roofs.
I rest my eyes on the ports where I saw
my grandmother once. She thought
it was Tripoli. We are in Cádiz.
You stand at the bottom of the night
with the rain. I stand under the lightning
not too far away. You dismantle summer
to find your feet. I take the day apart
to find a compass. You tell me
we must accept the sun now.
So I stay behind. I keep the heat.
You pass the streets, the cars, the women,
you even pass your heart.
The sailors prepare to float away,
and you ask them to describe water,
look at the roofs,
and the time you touched
the tears on your face
and kept them from falling —
the ground wants everything.
That was then. Now, there is only
one sentence in your head —
where is that place?

6. José Bergamín

No tengo más realidad que la irrealidad del tiempo.

This last drum. This last train.
This last hour. Last warning.
This is history.
A thousand feet pacing a country,
voices ripping up the winter sky,
an obsession at the edge of a world
and there, a decision —
you either believe in it or you don’t.
That’s the trouble with time —
the only way out of it is in.

*In December 1927, a tribute was held in the Ateneo de Sevilla to mark the 300th anniversary of the death of the Baroque poet Luis de Góngora y Argote. Rafael Alberti, Gerardo Diego, Juan Chabas, Dámaso Alonso, Jorge Guillén, Jose Bergamin, and Federico García Lorca traveled together by train to Sevilla. They became known as el siete de la fama, otherwise known at the generation of ‘27. There were two poets missing on the trip: Pedro Salinas and Vicente Aleixandre. The other poets who joined the seven poets in the Ateneo and also considered part of the generation of ‘27 were Luis Cernuda, Fernando Villalón, Rafael Laffón, Adriano del Valle, and Joaquín Romero Murube. The patron of the trip and of this celebration of Góngora was the famous bullfighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (elegized by Lorca in “Llanto por la muerte de Ignacio Sánchez Mejías” / “Lament for the Death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías”). These poets were not the only ones considered as the generation of ’27; among many others were Manuel Altolaguirre and Emilio Prados.

10 Qit’as

Acitara

Can the sky recover after a bombing,
can a house break into two cities,
and secrets hold the wall
between two bodies?
Tell me, what are borders?

acitara: wall, from the Arabic sitarah, which means curtain.

~

Alfanje

History is nothing more
than the smell of dew in our bones
but even dew hurts
when it enters the heart,
even dragonflies know
what’s unholy,
even a child scatters his hurt
to keep what’s dead
alive in the mirror —
yes, somewhere
another crime is being committed.

alfanje: backsword with curved blade, from Arabic, al-khinjar, which means dagger.

~

Ajimez

We hesitated to
see the bent,
maybe we divided
our windows
to have a clearer view,
we gave birth
in languages not our own,
we wanted to hang
their photos
but
there were
no walls.

ajimez: mullioned window, from Arabic samis. One of the distinctive features of Islamic buildings in Spain, especially noticeable on minarets.

~

Ajaraca

Every loop a memory:
a field of lavender mist,
an ebony door,
an attic of white marbles,
wearing identical shoes,
suddenly, a house comes back.

ajaraca: ornamental loop in Andalusian and Arabic architecture, from Andalusi Arabic Ash-sharakah.

~

Zaga

Don’t be distracted
by the young boy
you once were—
look,
something is moving
in the opposite direction.

zaga: rear, from Arabic saqah.

~

Aduar

If shadows crowd
only one side of the road,
they say, the street is broken
and death
can’t cross
a broken street.

aduar: Bedouin or gypsy settlement, from Bedouin Arabic duwwar.

~

Adafina

He said:
A heart that contains ash
contains only ash.

adafina: stew which the Spanish Jews used to place on glowing embers on Friday evening to eat on the Sabbath, from Arabic dafina, which means buried or covered.

~

Ahorría

When we hesitate
salt rises from the water

ahorría: barrenness or freedom, from Arabic al-hurriya.

~

Noria

It’s better to drown
than to miss water—
confessions can’t handle thirst.

noria: water wheel or ferris wheel, from Arabic na’urah.

~

Alafia

The doors are shut now—
the ghosts sit upright.

alafia: pardon or mercy, from Andalusi Arabic al afya, from Classical Arabic afiyah, health.

*Qit’a means fragment. It is a short poem in the Arabic tradition, up to ten or twenty lines in English, which tends to concentrate on a single subject or theme. It is thought to have “broken off” from a longer poetic form, the qasida.

Statistics vary concerning the percentage of Spanish words that derive from the Arabic—anywhere between 5 to 20 percent.

Convivencia
Two Ghazals Two Tzvis

Ghazal /1

Sometimes music presses its ache against the mirrors
so that a thousand windows can find a heart.

On the terrace of wild jasmines, we see a sky cut into pieces,
and we bow to keep the small clouds in the heart.

The fog hides one hundred violins in the groves of our childhood,
but under the palm tree, our breath continues to grow the heart.

In the withering garden of daybreak, we starve to translate grief,
at the end of a well, ghosts sculpt water into hearts.

Night comes so that you can come so that the wet jasmines can stay wet
and the voice can bend to listen to the soft wave at the bottom of the cup.

Tzvi /1

The light covers the stairs
she sees her reflection

on the wet floor
she sees his

they stare at each other
and their shadows tell them

get out fast, leave, forget
this is forbidden

and then a bucket of water
washes their faces from the tiles

he sees her nipples under her shirt
and she the ripples of water

moving over his feet —
a country never ends.

Ghazal /2

Under the secret part of desire, an albérchigo—
It’s there I see the opening of a scarf of concerto

He starts with cero
and ends with solo

I saw his face once, he stood inside, outside an algarazo,
now diwans are piled up in front of the window to keep his last echo

On the balcony, one forgotten azulejo —
when I look closer, I see our faces trapped, yes, it’s that photo

At the dark corner of the zoco
we hide letters in the back of a radio

Tzvi / 2

Eight hundred years of love —
we can’t be strangers now.

We are here to allow
the other to be here.

There is a sea beyond the sea.
But who is watching us when we make love?

If your heart is not mine,
the kiss you placed on my neck is mine,

the word you drew on the palm of my hand is mine,
your touch, that afternoon on the banks, is mine,

the continents you placed by the chariot is mine,
but what about this paradise, who is it for?

We knew we were both in it. We also knew,
we can’t lose a paradise we’ve seen.

*Convivencia in Spanish means coexistence. The Spanish convivencia describes the time when Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived in relative harmony in Islamic Spain. There are numerous debates surrounding notions of tolerance in al-Andalus during the Middle Ages. However, one cannot deny the rich and prosperous cultural and artistic life that existed during that period—a life that these communities created together. As I was writing this section, Mahmoud Darwish’s words kept echoing: “Andalus… might be here or there, or anywhere… a meeting place of strangers in the project of building human culture… It is not only that there was a Jewish-Muslim coexistence, but that the fates of the two people were similar… Al-Andalus for me is the realization of the dream of the poem.”

In Arabic, ghazal refers to a poem dealing with the theme of love, whether long, medium, short, verse, prose, etc. The Hebrew equivalent of the ghazal is the tzvi / tzviyah, ya’ala or ofer, also means a roe/gazelle (Song of Songs 4:5 – Thy two breasts [are] like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies). The proper Hebrew term would be shirei heshek (which literally means poems of desire).

Ghazal 2: This ghazal is inspired by Lorca’s “Ghazal VII—Ghazal of the Memory of Love,” were all lines end with o. Additionally, I wanted to alternate between a Spanish and an English word that ends with o.

Albérchigo means a clingstone apricot or peach, from the Andalusi Arabic albershiq; Cero or zero, from sifr of the same meaning; Algarazo means a short rainstorm, from the Arabic algazeer or heavy rain; Diwan is a collection of poetry (Arabic, Persian or Urdu); Azulejo means bluish, from the Arabic word zullayj; is a form of Portuguese or Spanish painted, glazed, tilework; Zoco or azogue means market, from the Arabic souk with the same meaning.

Abásho

Tell me what I should do
so when I awake
I see only the strands of your hair.
Tell me what I should do
so the songs don’t break
the cellar in the room.
Tell me what I should do
to keep silence out of our way.
Tell me what I should do
to keep the sun out of your coat,
to find a way to obey the wind
to find the pomegranate on
the other side of the revolution
There is a moth, there is a flame too —
desire is just another illusion.
Tell me, below —
is there a cathedral in the sea?
I turn on the only straight street
in my body and discover,
when we depart, a confession
rises in the bottom drawer.

*Abásho means what’s below or the departed in Ladino. Ladino, also called Judeo-Spanish, is a Romance language derived from late medieval Spanish with elements of Hebrew, Turkish, Arabic, Aramaic, French, Italian, and Greek (written using the Hebrew alphabet). It was spoken by Sephardic Jews in the former Ottoman Empire. Today, Ladino is nearly extinct and those who speak it are mostly in Israel. Only one high school in Jerusalem has a Ladino language program, and there is little new literature being produced in the language. It is similar to modern Spanish in the same way that Yiddish is similar to modern German.