Translators’ Preface
When different refugees and immigrants fled the crumbling Ottoman Empire for a multitude of reasons in the early 20th century, they brought their entangled musical cultures with them to their new homes in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. Many of these established and emerging diasporic communities settled in Metro Detroit, drawn not only by promises of labor at Ford factories, but also by an infrastructure that ranged from coffee shops— where post-Ottoman immigrants gathered, smoking and drinking until the wee hours of the morning—to newly established churches, synagogues, and mosques, and to the seemingly neutral territory of Greektown, where something like a post-Ottoman musical culture thrived in a variety of tongues. So, too, did diverse performers circulate through the nightclubs, concert halls, and coffee shops of Metro Detroit, on their way westward to Chicago or eastward to New Jersey and New York. Other performers came from farther abroad, from the newly established Republic of Turkey or the Middle East, stopping in Detroit while on international tours. Material culture also circulated between these diasporic communities—pamphlets, records, lyrics, catalogs—moving sometimes not only within the United States but also between Detroit and the formerly Ottoman territories.
The following three songs all had different presences in the multilingual performance cultures and nightlife scene of Metro Detroit. The first, “Gondola on the Nile,” was recorded by Louis Wardini as the second single on his label, Wardatone. Having migrated from Beirut to New York as a child around 1904, Wardini lived in numerous cities with Syrian Lebanese communities before moving to Detroit in the late 1920s. Even when he relocated to Indiana in 1938, Detroit remained an important place of reference for Wardini throughout his many travels across the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. In addition to performing in Detroit establishments such as Saint Maron Hall in the 1940s, Wardini also founded Wardatone as a Detroit-based recording label in 1951. Replete with references to wine and the oud, “Gondola on the Nile” evokes a sense of conviviality typical of Islamicate poetry, while its emphasis on both love and abandonment plays on the key themes of the ghazal’s poetic form. Words such as شوق (shawq, meaning longing or yearning), بعد (buʿd, meaning distance and translated here as “absence”), هجران (hijrān, meaning abandonment or separation), and أسحار (asḥār, meaning sorceries or, in this context, the charms of a beloved, translated in the lyrics as “enchantment”) demonstrate a connection between love and separation but also distance and travel, allowing for a metaphorical connection between the beloved and longing for home. With its Egyptian willows and titular reference to the Nile, the song is clearly located in the Islamicate world, even as the image of the gondola introduces a more generic cosmopolitan reference to Venice as a symbol of romance. Wardini’s song thus captures a number of tropes central to the experience of diaspora, all while creating a unique blend of sounds, themes, and worlds that were listened to in Detroit.
The second song, “I Went into the Garden,” in dialectal Armenian, is quite different. According to a pamphlet printed in Detroit, it was performed by a local vocalist in Palmer Park on Sunday, July 22, 1928. Unlike the recording by Wardini, which reaches for a kind of cosmopolitanism that stretches from the recording studios of Metro Detroit to the lagoons of Venice and the Nile of Egypt, the cosmopolitanism of “I Went into the Garden” is harder to read. Like many Armenian (and, more broadly, Middle Eastern) songs and poetry, the song also evokes the searing agony of being separated from one’s beloved. Armenians, of course, have long participated in shaping Islamicate and Persianate musical cultures, drawing on the available constellations of themes, styles, tropes, and sometimes even plain words across many languages, and recasting them for an Armenian (and sometimes Christian) sensibility. This song is no different. It describes the quintessential meeting place for the lovestruck—the garden (or, Palmer Park, if one prefers)—as a forlorn lover wanders bereft of his/her beloved, haunted by an absent rose. The words s/he uses to describe the beloved (yar, aziz yar), common to many Armenian songs from the period, are not Armenian at all; rather, they formed a stock vocabulary in other Islamicate musical cultures, such as Persian and Turkish, for talking about love. In short, even in places where only one ethnic community might gather to hear and appreciate music, the subtle presence of other communities, cultures, and languages can often still be sensed, even in audible ways.
The last song, “Why Have I Come to America?,” is a particular testament to this entangled nature of musical performance and production in Detroit. It was originally written in the Turkish language by a Greek musician named Achilleas Poulos, then lightly adapted by an Armenian musician named Jimmy Nazarethian. The portion of lyrics printed here come from a slim pamphlet sold at Paros Book Store, Phonographs & Records, on 806 South Solvey Avenue in Detroit, which advertised recent releases by Pharos (P’aros) Record Company. These lyrics are printed with the Armenian alphabet, but in the Turkish language, using a widely common mixed language and script form known as Armeno-Turkish. Here, another kind of psychic torment is on display. The absent beloved, the yar from “I Went into the Garden,” has been replaced by America itself, whose charms have beguiled and ensnared the hapless lover, who is now doomed to wander far from hearth and kin. The song is significant then, in part because it offers a cogent demonstration of how post-Ottoman musical cultures continued to change and evolve in America, and it did not simply remain frozen in time and lifeless once transplanted in alien soil. To help readers visualize the way that the script and language itself cross many different territories, we have included here the original Armeno-Turkish (in the Armenian script), a rendering in the modern Turkish script, and finally our English translation.
These three songs paint but a small portrait of the lives of once-Ottoman musical cultures replanted in Metro Detroit, which then, of course, also became American musical cultures. Collectively, these and other materials form the online collaborative public humanities project “The Middle East in Metro Detroit: (Post) Ottoman Migrations,” which explores different spaces where these heterogeneous communities came into contact with one another; relied on one another; and, sometimes, erupted together in uneasy tensions and conflict. For more, the project can be found at https://translatingmichigan.org/the-middle-east-in-metro-detroit.
“Gondola on the Nile”
Translated from Arabic by Graham Liddell1
SIDE ONE
I adore you, I am pleased with you, O loveliest of all God’s people I delight in our rendezvous [My heart is enthralled]2
Your beauty is captivating [It transforms] all my sadness [to joy]
The birds sing to your beauty, perched on the branches of the Egyptian willow
I adore you, I am pleased with you, O loveliest of all God’s people
Come, let’s take a gondola out on the Nile to thank the Lord with longing and kissing Blissful love, effortless serenity, a castle being swayed from side to side
[O bearer] of the oud: Play on the strings sing to me, sing the music of enchantment
O, my gondola, O my companion, fill the cups of wine Come back [through the corridors] of serenity Come back to the Nile
SIDE TWO
Call my name, cure me Sing to me, [nurture] me Love scorches me and your absence wears me down
O my love, O artist, you’ve abandoned me once more
O my Lord, O Provider bring me your beneficence
Call my name, cure me Sing to me, [nurture] me
Come, let’s take a gondola out on the Nile to praise the Lord with longing and kissing Blissful love, effortless serenity, a castle being swayed from side to side
O [bearer] of the oud: Play on the strings sing to me, sing the music of enchantment
O, my gondola, O my companion, fill the cups of wine Come back [through the corridors] of serenity Come back to the Nile
“I Went into the Garden”
Performed at Palmer Park, Sunday, July 22, 19283 Translated from Armenian by Michael Pifer
I went into the garden, my heart was burned, wounded, From the dear beloved [aziz yar], my wounded heart was bereft, bereft.
I called to my dear beloved [aziz yar], there was no reply; Amidst the flowers, my sweet rose was gone.
My pitiless beloved toyed with my heart, Scorched my liver, and left me, left.4
“Why Have I Come to America?”
Original Turkish by Achilleas Poulos; Armeno-Turkish variant lightly adapted by Jimmy Nazarethian
Booklet of Record Lyrics, sold at Paros Book Store, Phonographs & Records, 806 South Solvey Ave., Detroit
Translated by Kristin Dickinson and Michael Pifer
The published Armeno-Turkish: Նէտէն կէլտիմ Ամէրիգայա Թութուլտըմ գալտըմ ավարայ, Շիմտի պին քէրրէ փիւշմանըմ, Ֆագաթ կէչտի, ահ նէ՜ չարէ, Ա՜հ կէլմէզ օլայտըմ, կէօրմէզ օլայտըմ Թէք սէնի շիրին Ամէրիգա, Կէօրմէզ օլայտըմ կէլմէզ օլայտըմ.
Rendering in Modern Turkish: Neden geldim Amerika’ya? Tutuldum kaldım avare, Şimdi bin kere pişmanım. Fakat geçti, ah ne çare, Ah gelmez olaydım, Görmez olaydım Tek seni şirin Amerika, Görmez olaydım Gelmez olaydım.
Why have I come to America? I became ensnared, a wanderer I remained, A thousand times over do I regret it.
But it’s too late, O what’s the use? O, I wish I hadn’t come, I wish I hadn’t seen You alone, sweet America, I wish I hadn’t seen you, I wish I hadn’t come to you.
Notes
- The translator wishes to thank Yousri Alghoul, Ali Harb, and Ammar Owaineh for their help in transcribing the Arabic lyrics. ⮭
- Brackets indicate Arabic words that could not be identified for certain while listening to the septuagenarian recording. These parts of the translation are based on best guesses. ⮭
- Multiple versions of the song can be found in print; this translation reflects the pamphlet’s lyrics but has substituted “khagh” for the pamphlet’s more unusual “khash” in the penultimate line, as the former is a relatively standard reading for this song. ⮭
- This is a rather literal translation of an originally Persian-derived phrase meaning, figuratively, to strike with inconsolable grief. The liver, and not only the heart, is an organ of affect in many traditions. ⮭
Graham Liddell completed a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan in 2023, where he studied contemporary Arab and Afghan narratives of refugeehood. Before graduate school, he worked in Middle East journalism and was based in the West Bank. His translations of Palestinian literature have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Banipal, ArabLit Quarterly, and The Stinging Fly. His journalistic work has been published in USA Today, The Detroit News, and Middle East Eye, among other publications.
Kristin Dickinson is an Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Michigan. Her research on the intersections of German and (Ottoman) Turkish literature examines the potential of translation, as both a formal and a social medium, to intervene in nationalist ideologies and nationally structured areas of study. Her book, DisOrientations: German-Turkish Cultural Contact in Translation (1811– 1946), examines literary translations as a complex mode of cultural, political, and linguistic orientation. Through a unique multilingual archive, it reveals the omnidirectional and transtemporal movements of translations, which harbor the productively disorienting potential to reconfigure the relationships of “original” to “translation,” “past” to “present,” “West” to “East,” and “German” to “Turkish.”
Michael Pifer is Marie Manoogian Assistant Professor of Armenian Language and Literature in the Department of Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan. He has previously published translations from dialectal and Western Armenian in Absinthe and Dibur. His research revolves around questions of multilingualism, mixed-script writing, and cultural exchange in the premodern period. In particular, his work focuses on how Armenian literature developed alongside neighboring literary traditions within shared spaces. He is the author of Kindred Voices: A Literary History of Medieval Anatolia (Yale University Press, 2021) and a co-editor of An Armenian Mediterranean: Words and Worlds In Motion (Paglrave Macmillan, 2018). Currently he is a team member of "Armenia Entangled: Connectivity and Cultural Encounters in Medieval Eurasia," funded by a grant from the European Research Council. This project seeks to establish a framework for studying the Armenian plateau as a space of cultural entanglements from the ninth to the 14th centuries.