#2 iLiso will publish a 16-set conceptual poem, Cancer, by poet Mustapha Jinadu, with a Italian translation by Elisa Della Martire.
Mustapha Jinadu and Elisa Della Martire
We met through another poem, which is completely different from Cancer and I immediately fell in love with this ease, this custom to strength.
Images are bound to each other thanks to narration, as in ancient court’s troubadours, except that in this case the topoi of the narration are not fixed, but they are constantly changing in masks. Even if the same amor is still the main reference to which everything turns around.
In some parts (parts, not separated poems), as in Gemini, the hitman who has been sent after the narrant voice is a friend, a part of him, till the end, almost cinematographic, when they start to take drugs (poetry, sonnets) together and they agree to each other, and they’re similar because of shared time and space.
The violence so present is transfigured as in William Blake’s Inferno, common creatures as men or women become hair castels (as in Post meridian lullabye), they can sing anti-ballads or they can weep, with their “tongue-shaped head” () . Everything passes the limits only to fall, falling into a cave, which is still a part of a mountain, even if it’s carved, it’s emptied. Everything really changed, really fell into pieces, but the most powerful god, pain, is ambiguous as green light.
Its ambiguity stands in the fact that cancer is painful, but even if “it’s ended now” it is not the end, the voice of poet goes on telling his song, speaking clearly about the most important things: love, pain, “even when it hurts”. And it hurts. It hurts the parents, the children, all the family, it hurts public, who’s not sensible to pain any more, it hurts people who are listening, few friends, the whole world. It hurts people who want to listen, but also if they don’t want, it still hurts.
In some points, the narrator is ready to let her go and to continue writing poems (“and i am free to write funeral songs all day”) ; in this case, the occasion (the illness of the mother of the poet, which tragically brought her to finish her life prematurely) becomes past and at the same time it starts everything.
The theme of motherhood and woman
“And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For his civility”
E.Dickinson (Because I could not stop for death, published posthumously)
When the mother suddenly came on stage during a nativity scene, in the school, which happens to be an anglican school (in the part “Anglican”) and she hugs her boy and says “ah just found god”, it isn’t only an ecstatic scream, as the woman who is singing just shortly before, the “dying angel”, like the experience of Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi or S.Teresa of Avila.
It is also an interruption.
The interruption of childhood is always made by a female figure, as later the catholic one (who leaves the boy-man bored and deceived) or the painter who dances in the forest, whose ex-boyfriend “put a hit out ” on the man and the woman is always bound to birth, ecstasy or going beyond the borders. Even the figure of the sister is bound to having “as many children as it will take to exhaust her IMF salary”, she faces her situation of orphan by giving birth.
Even a nun who can’t give birth, can nevertheless express herself through the most special and mysterious language: numbers. Numerology is as fertile as for Sufi or Jewish culture, and it is almost always connected to nourishment, to the beginning of reality. The greek philosopher Plotine (born in Egypt) wrote that “numbers are before objects” and objects remember to the soul about the concept of number. Phenomenas then were just pale images or imitations of something superior.
The poet too, at the end, becomes a birth giver, or, which is more precise, a truth giver, he has nothing more to do than giving the truth to her mother about her illness and to his grandfather about the death as end of pain.
Birth and death are then real only through this special female side of humanity: the creation decides about everything, as poet decides about his labor of words and sounds.
In “Syrian girl” the beginning represents a girl with a wig who is fighting as a man but someone discovered her true identity. At the end we have this strange change of addresses, from third to first person, and the first person (the observer) suddenly decides to enter the narration and take the defenses of the girl.
The defense of this transformation is one more time the acceptance of something new, different and mysterious.
Language
While narration and internal coherence as in philosophical systems give to the reader the lucidity he needs, in style lays the thaumaturgical fonction of Jinadu’s poetry. Drafts are endless streams without punctuation, which have been continuatively sharpened in a controlled baudelairean meticulousness.
The choice of words is various, from realism to surrealism, with a strong victory of the second one. Dreams are expressed through metaphors and sound gasps, especially with the use of internal rhymes and transfiguration of standard meaning of a word or motto, as in the end of Anglican (“your grandma’s last wind” ), or the confusion between hair and “brown smoke” of morphine in Anglican, or in the whole “Glass enclosure”, which is probably the most transfigured both in themes and language.
In all this, the poet is just a consequence, he is not the greatest Thaumaturg nor the elected one, he is just the observer of a capitalistic world wich has got no eyes, just great physical mouths and nothing to do with.
Maybe eyes are the answer, especially concerning cries and tears, to let the group first process the grief, then the individual. In tribal society, where there is no separation between dream and consciousness, a son is never really orphan, because memory is collective.
The repetition of the same word and the same sound in a line or couple of lines is constant in “Cancer” , poet is also an illusionist, the one who in ancient times tried to get easier to memorize the one who tells the truth through images and is attracted by monstrosity as a part of the internal flow of individuals. Nerves do the rest.
The use of some musical terms as “aria” or “solo” is a chance for the poet to reach the pure and detached voice of music, especially jazz music, which moves from standards and follows the actual feelings.
In this sixteen parts of a solo it happens what only with poetry is possible: music becomes human and it changes itself in religious chant, the only chants we learn since our education age: prayers and lullabies.
Italian version
I choose to start the translation with the awareness there will be always new ones, and in many different languages. Some languages are more baroque, some others are more conceptual. Italian and English are at the opposite sides.
I knew there’s always a certain importance to find the best traitor word, and I always thought about the music, but this time I preferred to keep fidelity in order to favour narration, and this kind of overwhelming realism I hopelessly fell in love with. I had some difficulties of course, for example with duplicity of meaning of the word “for” in the part “Cancer” (she's too old and too sick to be working/ but she always is/for someone/has got to pay my bills.)
For these cases I preferred to keep the rhythm and the strict semantic union between verses.
For dreaming parts Italian was just perfect, I remembered about my literature studies of middle ages and something about Nocturnes from 19th century French poetry. I preferred nevertheless to keep me in general strictly in touch with the original version, when it was possible, to assure most of its vivid and linear absurdity, as in Munch paintings or Ionesco plays.
Different language is just a variazione sul tema, to show that each meeting is a surprisingly jazz concert in the streets of Lagos.
Soul affinity is not enough to translate, nor even to appreciate art. Hard work has to be done, through patience and sharing, in order to reach truth as a good reader and lover.