Something the Colour of Pines on Fire, Vahid Davar
Matecznik Press, 2022 £5.00
Who knows?
The first incarnation of the first poem in ‘Something the Colour of Pines’, travelled from Vahid Davar’s mind to the page in Persian, Vahid Davar’s first language. The poem’s given name is ‘Ahd-e Nassim’.
Time passes. Then ‘Ahd-e Nassim’ is translated by Vahid Davar into English, Vahid Davar’s second language. Its new given name is ‘Nassim’s Testament’. In English, the poem says:
1.The Bright salt
[…] The people smuggler was picking pairs from every herd
to place in the shipping container two by two.
There were two who were mateless: Nassim and I.
[…]
***
In fleeing we were born
knowing that only brains
flee abroad on aeroplanes.
But we were ghosts
who fled at midnight in a shipping container.
My father sold our house and I
was the first bordernaut of my tribe to discover the north of the earth.
But is the poem reborn? Or is it a sibling of the original poem, sharing DNA and at the same time being its own distinctive self?
I don’t speak Persian so I can only be intrigued by how discovering the ‘north of the earth’ and looking back on this discovery might shape the way Vahid Davar translates his own poem, his own remembered and at the same-time lived experience; his own perilous journey, literal and linguistic; his relationship with himself and others. Maybe the poems aren’t siblings but ghosts of each other.
Vahid Davar made a deliberate choice to learn English, so I am also intrigued by how much the language of the English-incarnation is saturated with the all the things learned since the choice was made to flee and the original poem was written. In English, the poem says
I, who am both Nassim and Vahid,
was a mateless stag
frenetic
Vahid Davar is now both Nassim and Vahid; author and translator of himself, master of ceremonies, censor, keeper of truth and secrets, voice for a friend no longer alive. I was going to add ‘omnipotent presence’, but in English the poem says:
Of life’s many vanities
one was poetry
and Nassim was relieved of vanity.
But why did I not say, ‘He fell young’?
There are some tragedies we can’t fix. To die is to be relieved of vanity, certainly. And poetry too.
But why did Vahid not say Nassim fell young? Perhaps neither of them, and none of Vahid’s selves, can know the answer.
Sue Butler
Poetry that cleaves
This is poetry that seems to me to cleave — in both contradictory senses of the word. It clings to tradition, using rhyme, repetition and reference to religious texts; while splitting off to create new and unexpected juxtapositions. For example, from ‘The Sole and the Salmon’:
On Judgement Day, the six-winged Seraphim exclaimed:
‘Brexit! Brexit!’
and the Cherubim banged on their drums: ‘Trump! Trump!’
and then, later in the poem:
Fortify your heart for the present twists the past.
The pamphlet contains nine poems and three pages of notes plus a note of explanation running to over 14 lines under ‘Acknowledgements’. This note states: ‘If there is one fact that holds equally true for the few poems that appear in this pamphlet, it is that they are all my semi-self-translated exodus poems. With one exception, all the pieces have already been published either in Persian or in English’.
What I found interesting is that — in an apparent attempt to add clarity — that note includes certain phrases (‘semi-self-translated’ and ‘with the exception of one’) which, for me, simply beg further questions.
That fragmentation is part of the project is obvious from the ‘Contents’ page on. For instance, although only two pastorals are included in the pamphlet, the note to ‘Pastoral 1’ tells us that they come from a sequence of eleven poems and that, ‘When read in sequence, the pastorals present themselves as a quasi-biblical conduit through which the youthful responses of the speakers to their out-of-placeness are articulated.’ Perhaps the repetition of phrases and use of rhyme are designed to balance some of this inevitable uncertainty?
The blurb says that, ‘several poems have appeared at exhibitions of image and text in Liverpool, Munich and Abu Dhabi’, and in the notes Davar states that ‘From Sea to Dawn’ was, ‘written in response to two ‘moving paintings’ by Rokni and Ramin Haerizadeh and Hessam Rahmanian, consisting of short bricolages of footage of the refugee crisis’.
I’m reminded of my first encounter with The Waste Land: the weight of supporting material both counters and extends my uncertainties. I’m left cleaving to and from a poetry of fragmentation, transition and displacement.
Peter Wallis
An eternal stage
Several of these poems are extracts from a longer epic sequence, ‘Nassim’s Testament’, but the theme of exile is apparent immediately:
We said, ‘We don’t, we don’t want to die.’
They said, ‘Then if you don’t
Allah’s earth is spacious enough.’
Less than two nights later we sold our house
and bought shoes and caps thick enough
to kill the cold and biting winds of Dunkirk and Bruges.
[‘The Bright Salt’]
The reader may anticipate a horrific small boat experience, the sort of thing the media has so vividly reported, but Davar touches lightly on the journey itself, which almost erases the travellers (‘we were ghosts / who fled at midnight in a shipping container’). The poems from the sequence go on to tell a bigger story through surprising frames: huge metaphors, images of gods and heroes. There are references to Seraphim and Cherubim; Golgotha, Shiraz, Liverpool and London; even Rembrandt and Lorca. Imagination is enormous and the myths of exile are timeless. It feels biblical.
The author has real-life experience as an asylum seeker (his native country is Iran) and uses his own name for one of the central characters in the ‘Nassim’s Testament’ poems. The other protagonist (Nassim) takes his name from a real-life friend of the poet’s, someone who did not escape. Or perhaps he did in another sense (he took his own life). But from the rolling biblical style, it is clear that both characters are voices on a symbolic stage, an epic and eternal theatre.
The publisher’s website links to a video of the poet talking about his work. It’s helpful in beginning to understand his unusual approach, and also gives insight into his habit of thinking like a painter, and writing in direct response to paintings. He’s an illustrator as well as a poet, and the beautiful part-man-part-fish image on the jacket is his.
The ‘Testament’ poems are big, in scope and content. They made me want to read the whole set from which they are drawn.
However, in this unusual pamphlet, it was one of the short poems, ‘Pastoral 1’, that struck me as most moving. Happily it is also on the publisher’s website and can be read it there in full. For me, it poignantly brings together myth and reality, rhetoric and plain speech. In this way, it delivers an eternal freight from and to the heart.