Time, the latest translated collection in Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan’s nearly 50 years of challenging and nimble poetry, proves itself an excellent way into this figure’s enormous œuvre. Though one will not find here her trademark Arabic calligraphy visual work or the drawn images of The Arab Apocalypse, the choice of compiling smaller individual volumes of poetry—all written in French—gives the reader insight into a sensibility that translator Sarah Riggs calls “a poetry of the postcard.” The first volume in the book, “October 27, 2003,” was prompted by a postcard from Adnan’s friend, Tunisian poet Khaled Najar, though this extratextual information is quickly eclipsed by the poems themselves: they are impressionist and sensitive, able to be felt and made one’s own but also just as able to retain their distance and singularity.
Time is presented in a beautifully crafted book, its typography both quiet and confident, with a hint of alterity through the diamond punctuation marks that themselves often made me slow my reading. Originally published as individual collections or long poems (depending on how one reads the spare, untitled quasi-tercets), the poems bloom and recede on the page and in the ear like self-contained worlds within soap bubbles. Not only do none of the individual poems connect across the page, but rarely do the stanzas enjamb, leaving cubist frames of disjunction and montage. Instead of more traditional lyrical coherence, these poems display feints and moments of intimacy, ambiguity, exquisite detail, and global scope. The world need not be narrated because it is, in fact, just the same one for us all, yet one we inhabit so very differently, in corners and speeds of angled relation that result, in the midst of communication, in new images, or old images newly colored. I send you a letter, and a slice of this shared world is prepared and offered in ways that harrow the generality into my connection to you, or Adnan’s to Najar, or a poet’s to us. The text lives anew in these differences between sender and receiver, almost religiously.
That is, the poems are best read devotionally: slowly, allowed to connect with the absolute singularity of the reader, able to float and fluctuate from their own references—Greece, or Iraq, or Lebanon—and attach elsewhere. I am thinking about the Catholic Church’s liturgical calendar, which provides a running, seemingly inflexible textual accompaniment to one’s year. What may seem to be a rigid structure, the same texts for the same days, words that never themselves change, proves to be transformative for a practicing reader: the words, while remaining as they are, have an ability to somehow shift in meaning and affect relative to new moments, the next moment, the present. Time is a collection with a similar power. The poems come from discrete presences, they fly into registers that combine the abstract with ephemeral history, and they return to the reader able to warp and evolve alongside one’s own life. It is, I have found, difficult to run through the book and far preferable to sit with a poem or two, to keep the book on a nightstand or on a desk.
This is particularly the case across the first four volumes, “October 27, 2003,” “Friday, March 25th at 4pm,” “At 2 p.m. in the Afternoon,” and “Return from London.” Each title denotes specific moments in the poet’s own history that are now captured, time’s running stream arrested and almost memorialized. In this, Time can recall René Char’s shorter pieces that feel at once a part of and unmoored from history—not outside, nor hermetic, but mobile and modular.
Sarah Riggs’s superb translation preserves the ambiguity so crucial to this quality while making choices that are neither too formal nor too colloquial. For example, an early “leur étonnement se déplace” becomes “their astonishment moves on,” instead of “travels” or “leaves” or “gets going.” Moreover, when changes to the enjambments are necessary, Riggs recreates a representative Adnan-esque move: a line that enjambs “rassemblent leur acrimonie / le jour du marché” becomes “gather their bitterness on / market day.” The hard break mimics Adnan’s propensity for ending lines with prepositions and articles and demonstrates a generosity on Riggs’s part that avoids a more assertive role and extends a motivating quality (and activity) of the work in general. Time is, after all, a collection of lessons in deference and how to listen from all sides, the poet as well as the reader (the translator’s note, which serves also as an epilogue of sorts, is fitting for this strangely intimate book, speaking as it does of individuals and conversations).
The opening poem to “At 2 p.m. in the Afternoon” illustrates these lessons and the range of interests in this compilation. The first stanza of this three-stanza poem presents an image, slow and surreal, but somehow, despite its paradox, visible: “the sun came out at night / to go for a stroll and the divine crossed / the room. the windows / opened”. The individuality of perception here is cracked and extended, as a gift, to the reader, who can simply take it. This is to say that I find in this collection a real charity in the lyric-I. Rather than the perspective of a witness, it is offered as a role the reader can adopt—this stanza especially allows for adoption in its descriptions of a space without mention of the observing body.
After the stanza break, a meditation. Is it connected to the image? What is the relation between these two points in space?
writing comes from a dialogue
with time: it’s made
of a mirror in which thought
is stripped and no longer knows
itself
We can dwell within this stanza on its own terms. The thinking is clear, simple, yet not exhaustible. It hovers between a claim and a verse, perhaps nearest to a pensée or an aphorism. As something of a thesis for Adnan’s “poetry of the postcard,” the poet negotiates and converses with time and then again with thought—two kinds of eternal presence, the nonstop clock of the world and the prefaced I am of thought thinking. Produced from this dialectic is writing, stripped of yet marked with and bearing the traces of each presence, turning “writing” itself into a time machine, a capsule wherein you can step and gain a part of me, a utopic bridge.
In the final stanza there are two declarative sentences and a specific location, as if the synthesis of the propositions set up by the preceding stanzas: “in Palermo men are as / strictly trained as horses; or / else they have the shining violence of / flowers.” From the room at night and its double lights of spoken sun and hidden moon—its openness, its unstated breeze—to the meditation on writing as the result of dialogue and mirror, we find another double, men as horses or flowers, as strictly trained or with shining violence. Is this writing stripped of thought? Why end here, in Sicily?
I venture that this final almost-couplet is a crux of Adnan’s writing: despite so much kindness and goodwill, she acknowledges the threat and destruction of the world, such as its depiction of the fall of Baghdad. “To flee the hole in the air / created by a bomb in / a Baghdad suburb I reread / the words of Al-Sayyab,” writes Adnan at the opening of “Friday, March 25th at 4 pm.” Adnan also notes the fractures and dangers around the Mediterranean, including Lebanon, her country of childhood, and its persistent existence on the precipice of crisis (the more stunning to read this now, Lebanon fully in the throes of one of the many crises that hovered offstage). Men strictly trained as horses with the potential for shining violence of flowers are, in one light, soldiers in their formal dress. Are we not accustomed to finding a national armed guard in our major cities? Adnan notices this with the same sensitivity that she notices the bright moonlight enter her room; both belong to the raw material that thought and time must mirror and craft.
“No Sky” and “Baalbeck” work with similar tones but different forms. The former is a long poem with none of the white space of the preceding volumes, which makes it more difficult to parse, especially the first handful of its 21 sections that extend over a couple of pages. This is far from a critique, though the impulse to rest on binaries that deserve their pause—“Surprised by the persistence / of the waves the sea recedes / to the skyline // The heart sets up its equations / while history unfurls / in the bedroom”—is harder to heed. “Baalbeck” has more of a narrative spine than the rest of the collection from its focus on Lebanon, thinking through its past of temples and its present of ruins, dealing with loss that skips from personal to national and back, its lines thick with both nostalgia and sadness. Adnan ends the poem by conjuring Baalbeck-native poet Talal Haydar: “[he] is closer to the truth than I am, being of this place.” That is, the final act of the final poem is to cede space for another voice to enter in, another bit of generosity, even if this final sharing is one that notes the effects of devastation and collapse, as “These days, he bends to pick up a flower— / finds traces of blood.” Calling something “poetry of the postcard” can toe the line of preciousness, as postcards are filled with beautiful sites and views and the best of our world. But Adnan never forgets, and makes sure we do not either, that so many of these sites are ruins, that violence shadows and shares our world too.
Because of its relation to ruin and destruction, “Baalbeck” is not only an appropriate final poem to Time but also an excellent foreword to Shifting the Silence, Adnan’s 2020 collection, also published by Nightboat. Adnan composed Shifting the Silence in English and, unlike the poems comprising Time, opts for prose blocks that are arranged at roughly three per page. It is tempting to call this prose poetry, but Shifting the Silence might be better understood as a journal, a travelogue minus the usual details and narratives, or a diary. Unlike Time, Shifting the Silence is not a letter, and its communion is not between reader and writer but solely with, or even simply within, Adnan. It might also be, I’ve come to believe, the most personal work of writing I have ever read.
It does not seem it, at first. We don’t learn too many personal details—where she is, sometimes; whom she is with, occasionally—and the writing is serial and cyclical, the same themes or objects returning in different ways. Still, we discover a few ground facts, like that she spends time in Brittany, and doesn’t like Paris. She longs to return to Greece. She feels at home before a sea (any), thinks fondly of the company of a few friends that pop into this extended meditation, and enjoys Tolstoy. And she will die soon.
What did it feel like to read that sentence? Did you find it impolite? Harsh? Unnecessary? I admit that I typed it fast, as if I was frightened of lingering on the letters. Shifting the Silence was published in Etel Adnan’s 95th year (she is 96 as of this writing) and death—the deaths of others, the death of the gods and God, human death, ocean death, and her own death—is on her mind. Adnan neither celebrates nor resists death, but rather looks at it with an honesty, frankness, and clarity that is stunning, that stuns, that more than once made me stop reading and put the book aside as I waited for the sensation of being too present to pass so that I could return to a stretched, softer, vaguer me.
In this uncompromising starkness—Adnan writes that she is “not given to being satisfied by half-measures”—Shifting the Silence recalls the drawings of Vija Celmins. In the late 60s, Celmins began producing highly realistic, representational graphite drawings of landscape photographs. The landscapes at hand, however, were completely without distinction or landmark: a photograph of waves, or clouds, or the desert, or even the surface of the moon. The hyper-precision of these drawings runs up against the lack of a referent to focus on, and the experience is one of trying to grapple with pure fact. Perhaps death is, as so many Romantics might claim, a return to the natural world, but for Adnan this natural world is its own being, has its own autonomy, is resistant to some higher unification with the immaterial-us.
No surprise then that Adnan returns again and again to the same inhuman elements as Celmins—even the moon, where “we see craters relatively close to each other, and in their astonishment of facing an instrument that came from Earth, they seem to be more silent than ever”—but especially the ocean. In its sublime sameness and repetition and tides and immensity, an ocean has a life that is not ours—even if it is intimately linked to it. Indeed, one of the unexpected glories in this contemplation on death is the incursion of the political moment that Adnan allows (just as she does in Time). Here, for example, she writes that though oceans had more meaningful roles in human life in the past, “We pushed them back gradually, polluted them to the brim. We heard not a single cry.” Major powers like oceans and Greek gods (whom Adnan often returns to meditate upon) have been damaged, killed, and replaced by new powers, by pollution, by atomic weapons (“We hoped, and hoped, and ended up with the atomic bomb and the death of God”). But she isn’t fighting these new powers or accepting them. She’s only writing about them.
This too is part of Adnan’s uncompromising honesty, which regards writing itself as act and habit, another material thing. Despite its acknowledgment of political context, Shifting the Silence is far from optimistic about the power of writing, or poetry, or art. “Then why am I writing these lines which are not bringing much to the world?” asks Adnan, before answering simply and inarguably and (when taking into account her long and accomplished art and literary practice) humbly, “It’s one of those things that people do, that’s all.”
It is this account of poetry—of this highest, most stereotypically spiritual of arts—that leads to Adnan’s materialism, how death sucks dry these fields we water, that we intend will grow forever. Shakespeare’s “eternal lines” blow to dust, the ideas and arts and thoughts simply cannot substitute for or give back the fullness of the real presence of the skin. That is, instead of sublimating death with the consolation of being remembered (by others, we must note, who will die, and keep dying), Adnan focuses on the silence of death, the eventual silence after the written word is no longer read, the dignified silence of the nonhuman world, the silence that is “the preparation of things to come.”
Silence surrounds talking, which is what Adnan refers to this work as: “I am not in a hurry to live, am not in a hurry to die; I am just talking to you.” Her talk is quiet, restrained, and lovely. It is a comfortable talk occurring among the vast chill of its subject, which comes back again and again. Death, for example, is not just silence but also a real pain, one we might imagine even now: “the pain of dying is going to be the impossibility of visiting that site one more time.” The pain of not being here, in this sun, in this night, in this city, of not being here again.
Now I am worried, writing this review, by the same thing that worried me while reading Shifting the Silence. That I will again console myself away from these facts, find some pleasant way to incorporate—to bring into the body—this unpleasant future. Unpleasant because no matter what comes next—something or nothing—or how, it will not be this, this possibility of return. The book is not as dour as my review—Adnan’s narrative is looped and elusive, written, as I gestured above, in the movement of time as a nightly diary is, and perhaps that is how it is best read, bits at a time, returned to and allowed to have their own moments of warmth and coldness, reveling in simple sentences like, “I took a train and went through immense plains of a golden hue. The land looked soft, marked here and there by rows of trees.” It is lulling, strange, dreamlike, though grasping with both real hands the real disappearance to come.
But this is all still talking. Still writing, still art. You cross it out and it comes back, some yo-yo dialectic that holds us tense in the text: after all, reading is an experience. It reorders the mind and memories, affects the hairs along the body, changes the atmosphere. “I am confused,” writes Adnan, “or, rather, I am realizing that being, or not being, cannot be dealt with with thinking, but are matters of experience, experienced often in murky waters, and that their intensity creates waves that invade us, that leave us stunned. There’s no resolution to somebody’s final absence.” There is no resolution. There is the process of seeking one—in memory and experience, in even thought—though this process may, no, will end in void and lack. We do not need to hurry, though. There is, somehow, time now.