An encounter with a Translator Poet - Khaled Mattawa

On Thursday the 4th of October 2018, I had the pleasure of being invited to meet with Khaled Mattawa, a Libyan poet, a renowned Arab-American writer, and a leading literary translator, focusing on translating Arabic poetry into English.

Mattawa is the 2010 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the PEN American Center Poetry Translation Prize, three Pushcart Prizes, and a MacArthur Fellowship (Source).

The meeting was facilitated by the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. Khaled Mattawa was also invited to introduce the winner of THE STAN AND TOM WICK POETRY PRIZE, Michael McKee Green for his book 'Fugue Figure'


To celebrate the meeting with Khaled Mattawa, I have written two poems, in English and Arabic. These poems highlight the main ideas Mattawa shared with us. Please note that those two poems are not translations, but a creation of a bilingual mind. I hope you like them. The English Poem:

Meeting a translator poet (Khaled Mattawa)

By: Ahmad Al-Khatib

In the Wick house of poetry,

I met the Son of Libya,

The pride of America,

A face from Maghreb Arabia,

Khaled Mattawa.

He spoke of a profession,

Of poetry and translation,

And what goes in between them.

Of tales from the East,

And stories from the West,

Of the South,

And the North,

Of poets he quotes,

And poems he Wrote,

of Adonis, and Iqbal,

And Elliott, and Wittman,

And Emily Dickenson.

 He said it openly

Translation of poetry,

To me, is like playing a symphony!

Translation is an instrument,

of now and here,

Amongst the texts,

You find me there,

of an ancient script,

Rekindling the spirit.

In translating a poem,

perfection is unattainable,

There’s either beyond, Or below,

But never the identical.

And an awareness of the original,

And awareness of the text,

And the approximation amongst.

He spoke of other things significant,

Of stories from his childhood,

And the mosque of his neighborhood,

Suddenly the time ran out

But the words have not...

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