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Hassan Cheruppa
Saudi Gazette
My dream as a poet is that the turmoil in Middle East would come to end by fostering values of love, harmony, moderation and tolerance and the world would become more stable with peaceful coexistence of all segments of the humanity, says Dr. Shihab Ghanem, the renowned Arab writer and poet. “The Arab and Muslim world should come to its senses and start a new renaissance with a focus on education and eschewing violence, terrorism and intolerance. We need a revival like what we had in our glorious past, and the Arabs can achieve economic and social growth by going back to the true principles of their religion, ethics and values.”
In an exclusive interview with Saudi Gazette and during an interaction with expatriate Indian writers and cultural figures in Riyadh recently, Ghanem spoke at length about a wide variety of topics spanning from his literary career to the role of poetry as a bridge to connect people and continents on pillars of harmony, love and compassion. Ghanem, a humanist with several poems and translation of poems whose themes cross borders and languages, says that his thrust is on humanistic nature of poetry and has devoted his life to uphold this type of poetry by penning them down or translating them from different languages into both Arabic and English.
Being human being with great faith in God, I think it is my duty to resist injustice and evil. Poetry can be used as a strong weapon to defend our faith and oppose tooth and nail those poems that incite evil and undesirable trends. The Prophet (peace be upon him) asked Hassan Bin Thabit and other poets to do the same. “In my opinion, poetry conveys the soul of a nation, and if you want to understand any nation, then the best way is to go and pick the best poets and their selected poems and introspect on them. I preferred to engage with such kind of poetry, which crosses languages and borders, as these great poems deal with humanistic values apart from the themes of love and beauty.”
“I wrote about many subjects, such as human being, children, family, love, harmony, friendship, nation, Islam etc. But the most important element was that it was humanistic. I go around the world and look for poems that make people enjoy and learn something new.”
Reemphasizing the great role of poets in the contemporary world to inspire humanity to embrace great values, he said that poets should be humanistic to understand the challenges in the modern world. “The world population witnesses rapid growth while the natural resources are the same, and thus human beings are becoming more aggressive, selfish and engage in fighting to survive. There are also evil forces who try to sell arms and control others and theydivide and rule, making people fight each other, resulting in conflicts, miseries and flooding of refugees,” he said while reemphasizing that poets should be the proponents of peace and harmony.
A great proponent of world peace, Ghanem is exerting every effort in this respect, and ‘Poetic Heart’ is the major initiative in this regard. Last month, Dubai hosted the fifth edition of “The Poetic Heart: Connecting Humanity” symposium, which is an annual event to bring poets from across the world, with an objective to promote peace, harmony, brotherhood and tolerance, as well as education and protection of environment. “Poetic Heart’ is my baby and I started it with the help of the Gulf chapter of Soka Gakkai International (value-creating society).
It was organized by SGI-Gulf in association with The Cultural and Scientific Association (Nadwa Dubai), the Knowledge Village, and Dubai International Academic City on Feb. 6-7. More than 20 world-renowned poets in 12 languages and five great musicians from various regions of the world attended the event. They included Dr Thuraya Al Arrayed, Niama Ismail, Abdullah Al-Fifi (Saudi Arabia), Dr. Akash Keiji Ouchi (Japan), Al-Hanoof Muhammad, head of UAE Cultural Affairs, Abdelqadir Al Kutayabi (Sudan), Claudio Pozzani, Donatella Vittoria Olga Bisutti (Italy), Prof. Angélica Santa Olaya (Mexico), Dr. Qais Ghanem (Canada), Ghalia Khoja (Syria), Laxmi Shanker Bajpai, Satchidanandan, Kailash Chandra, Chemmanam Chacko and Sethu (India).
“I have good relations with so many great poets from all over the world and this is one of the factors behind the success of the symposium. I used to do the poetry side and the associations do the organizational side of the event, which is largely self-funded and voluntary.”
“In the latest editions of the symposium, we started bringing talented schoolchildren from across the United Arab Emirates, and we had more than 200 student poets this year from the UAE schools. Thus the event is instrumental in grooming young poets and disseminate in them the messages of poetry of promoting peace and standing as a vanguard against injustice, fanaticism, extremism and terrorism,” he said.
What inspired me to organize such an event was a peace conference in which I attended in New Delhi. “Some eminent poets and other prominent figures who attended the conference had proposed of holding a similar event in Dubai while we were at the hotel. I told them that it is difficult to hold such an event in UAE as it may be suspected of being some sort of interference in politics.”
“I suggested that instead of this, we can organize a poetry conference. Schools are now the big supporter of the event, and among thousands of participants, half of them are youngsters from the UAE schools.”
Ghanem is a famous translator, who translated hundreds of great poems of world-renowned poets into Arabic and English. He translates poems after embracing their essence. “I do not transliterate, but instead, I feel my way around words and attempt to translate, however, difficult the ideas, imagery and feelings. Rhythm and rhyme, of course, are impossible to translate.”
Ghanem also carefully chooses the text to be translated. “I choose only that text which moves me deeply and which, I feel, will have a true impact on the reader. For me, translating is not a job; I translate because I have a great love of poetry — so I can choose what I wish to translate.”
“For a successful translation, it is important to understand the culture of the language a work is being translated into. For example, my translations are read primarily by English-speaking readers from the UK, US and India where I have lived earlier.”
He chooses to translate modern Arabic poetry because the subject is contemporary and the background easier to convey. “To translate the poetry of a 1,000 years ago, you need to put in a lot of footnotes. In any case, that poetry depended a lot on structure of the language. Modern poetry depends more on ideas and so translates better.” And a good translation, he points out, can easily be distinguished from a poor one.
“In a good translation, the reader can still sense the beauty of the original, and I don’t go to translate poems that convey the same meaning or idea that I already covered. Unless there is something new and added value, eloquence and special beauty. Poets who are able to open their windows to other cultures and, at the same time, who do not allow the winds of others to uproot them,” said Ghanem, who, however, finds it easiest to translate his own poetry because he knows exactly what he means and does not have to search for words.
Ghanem has many friends in Saudi Arabia and visited Jeddah and Abha to receive prestigious awards. He lauded the remarkable contributions extended by the late King Abdullah to art and literature. “I was a guest of King Abdullah two times at the Janadriyah festival. I was quite fascinated by him as he was very gentle and modest King. He spent a couple of minutes talking to me in the midst of hundreds of other guests.” Ghanem, who is very close to Prince Muqrin, praised the poems of Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, emir of Makkah and advisor to Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, saying that he is a good poet, painter and lover of arts. I was fascinated to listen to Prince Khaled’s speech and recitation of poem at a function in Dubai.
According to Ghanem, Abu Al-Tayyib Ahmad Bin Al-Husayn Al-Mutanabbi and Ahmed Shawqi are the greatest and most powerful poets that the Arab world has ever seen. “At present, there are not any outstanding, superstar poets in the Arab world, and there are many poets who try to imitate Western poets. There are many poets who write prose and claim that they are poetry,” he lamented. “About 60 to 50 percent of my poems are baity (which follows rhymes and rhythm with meters) and 40 to 50 percent are tafila, in which the number of feet is different and it could be one or two or three in each line and there is no regularity.
