“Aleppo, Aleppo” and “Without Exit”, by Maroush Yeramian

Aleppo, Aleppo

The soil wasn’t mine

  but it became mine
  when my grandfathers were buried there.
  They had come
  with the dream of the USA
  from Dikranagerd
  to here
  
  where the sky had sprinkled a glaucous dream
  in their dreamless,
  anguished souls
  
  where the crimson soil had given birth
  to wheat, to bread
  to an unrealized faith in sweet life.
  
  The soil wasn’t mine
  
  but it became mine
  
  when my hani was born here
  my grandmother
  who went by Khanum1
  
  (she was renamed
  Zvart Kasbarian)
  
  and at her wedding
  with a jaundiced smile and arms raised
  she danced ‘lemune al-lemune’ fervently.
  
  The language wasn’t mine
  but the echo reached my ear
  from distant
  Ani, from king Gagik,2
  
  and from our history’s flowing plait:
  securely woven by many hands,
  undone by the same
  nomadic
  races.
  
  But the pain was ours, mine from the beginning:
  the pain of tortured earth and spilt blood was mine
  (for both were equal, the same)
  
  upon this soil
  
  blue in blood
  and in this tongue
  
  I was this place
      and this place was mine, just as the forest
  or the heavens belong to the hind.
  
  But the fire came down;
  heaven renounced her children
  who remained landless, skyless,
  
  and who were lost
  in a place between
  reality and the evening news.
  
  The place disowned us
  along with the sky;
  we, who exalted it upon our shoulders
  and cared for it by the shade of our eyelashes.
  
  The swallows were late for their rendezvous
  (in the afternoon of every spring
  at 4 o’clock)
  with children released from school
  and the cascading blessing
  of evening.
  
  Heaven was pierced with holes
  
  and the swallows don’t understand—
  why there were no boys of the “wooden square”
  awaiting them?
  
  Or why were their no sellers of zeit and zaatar?3
  
  There was only a petrifying, pregnant silence
  —silence, as if, a female—
  ready, at any moment, to birth terror. 
  
  Under the pierced sky
  there was a pierced map
  where we had stopped,
  had found a foothold in this place.
  
  Over us,
  the blessings of swallows
  from whom we learned to sing
  during our nights around the citadel
  sweetened by the fragrance of hookahs.
  
  In those days,
  time was our friend:
  the deep blue of night
  would smoke with us
  and would sing duets, ballads of the old knights
  whose names were engraved
  on the gates
  of the citadel:
  
  “I neither forget
  nor remember the future . . .”
  (the latter, arm-in-arm with time,
  slipped out of our city,
  leaving behind dust,
  oblivion)
  
  now, a place, in a pit of the earth,
  in the presence of forgotten monasteries, we draw breath
  
  the tenderness of turtledoves warbling
  over our shoulders.

Without Exit

I kneaded the earth
  and my hands bled.
  the brooks bled
  and the verdure burned
  but still I kneaded,
  opening casks of royal,
  ancient oil,
  sifting for salt
  in a lake of tears.
  
  Look, there
  under August’s sun
  dreams are desiccated,
  furrow by furrow;
  rats gnaw on the buds.
  
  The mysterious
  subterranean tunnels of old
  have consigned the echoing cry of ya-leyl
  — oh night! — to clay jugs;
  the toothless mouths of old women
  have frozen
  in a curse toward heaven.
       Corpses fester there.
  The gurgling of ponds on the iwan
  has fallen silent in dread.
  There’s no soul left
  who might question the ruins.
  
  Our surroundings, strained from the beginning
  grow tighter,
  constricting like a noose:
  it’s impossible to draw even a half-a-breath.
  
  And we tear apart
  the Arabian courtyards of our inner-worlds:
  the red soil spills forth from the pots,
  abandoned plants wither.
  So we rip down garlands,
  destroy etchings,
  stairs,
  looking for the snake
  who, until now, has been the uğur,
  the good luck of home.
  Was he just a fairy-tale
  told after dark?
  
  We are always awake, even now.
  But—
  why does the nightmare continue on?
  The church bell-tower is gone
  there’s no ringing
  to rouse us from this longing.
  
  Why did we cast down the staff?
  it was necessary to go far:
  to seek immortality in the corners of disappearance.
  
  We, the vagrant,
  we search, wandering, for our secrets—
  why did we cast down the staff?
  we threw off our shoes
  and surrendered to oblivion
  the road to heaven
  
  the road
  that always winds through hell.
  
  the pigeons still live together:
  their numbers grow strong.

“The worst place in the world?” asks the headline of an article from The Guardian on March 12, 2015. “Aleppo in ruins after four years of civil war.” Certainly, these two poems by Maroush Yeramian draw from a poetics of destruction in which the principal characters—displaced persons, abandoned buildings, and warbling turtledoves—bring to life a cityscape that oscillates between the highly intimate and the jarringly alien.

Yeramian, who was born and lived much of her life in Aleppo, has observed the decimation of her country firsthand. However, it would be a mistake to assume these translations reductively “witness” the tragedy of the Syrian civil war to an international audience. As Yeramian asserts, the inhabitants of her poems are lost “in a place between / reality and the evening news.” By extension, these poems do something that neither “reality” nor the “evening news” can offer. To read them only for information, as though perusing a newspaper, would risk missing something essential about the representational mode that Yeramian employs.

Where is this “place between,” the place where poetry offers an alternative to the twin pitfalls of reporting and witnessing? To a limited extent, it is located in Yeramian’s language, as these poems weave Arabic and Turkish words into a Western Armenian context. This intersection of lexicons would be familiar to any Armenian living in the Middle East; it reflects not only the hybridity of a diasporic experience, but also a way of living and being in Aleppo as an Armenian. Rather than erase this lexicon, my translations do not replace Arabic and Turkish words with their English equivalents. That said, the intimacy of Yeramian’s lexicon is also reversed here: to an English reader, words like uğur and ya-leyl might now evoke a foreign quality.

We can find a similar reversal in the original language as well. These poems explore the literal translation of Aleppo’s cityscape into something unrecognizable: an intimacy inverted. It’s this uncanny interplay between familiar and foreign, interior and exterior, intimate and other that constitutes Yeramian’s poetics in Armenian. Therefore, I have sought to generate an analogous interplay here, even though our frames of reference must necessarily change.

Michael Pifer