Nazik Al-Malaika is, not only the most celebrated female Arab poet of the past century, but also one of the pioneers of modern Arabic poetry. She was among the first poets, in the history of Arabic literature, to use free verse. She was born into a literary family in Baghdad in 1923, and she received a master’s degree in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1959. She worked as a professor at several universities in Iraq and Kuwait.

In 1990, she went into self-imposed isolation in Cairo and died of low blood pressure in 2007 at the age of 83. In honor of Al-Malaika’s literature, The Arab American News translates this poem by her.

 

Dim days have passed.

We did not meet.

We were not united, not even by mirage.

And I am alone. I feed off the steps of darkness.

Behind the glass of the boor window, behind the door,

I am alone…

Cold days have passed,

dragging my anxious boredom,

and I listen and count its nervous minutes.

Did time really pass? Or did we experience timelessness?

Days have passed,

Days weighed down by my longing. Where am I?

I am still staring at the stairwell.

And the stairwell starts, but where is its end?

It starts in my heart, where loss and darkness lay.

It starts… Where’s the obscured door?

The door to the stairwell.

 

Days have passed,

and we did not meet.

And you are there, beyond the reach of dreams.

In a horizon bordered by the unknown.

And I walk and see and sleep.

I exhaust my days and drag my sweetened tomorrow.

So the lost past escapes to me.

My days are eaten by sighs. When will you return?

 

Days have passed.

Didn’t you remember that

there’s an abandoned love in the corner of your heart?

The thorns have crowded its feet.

A frightened love begging.

Give it some light.

 

Come for a meeting

that would give us wing to cross the night.

There is space.

Behind the forests,

there are seas with no limits,

that produce waves from the foam of dreams,

kissed by hands of light.

 

Return,

or my voice in your ears would die,

behind a hated cliff.

And I would remain lost in the heart of forgetfulness.

Nothing but expanding silence

above the sadness.

Nothing but tired sounds

whisper in my ear: He won’t return.

No, he won’t return.

 

— Translated from Arabic by Ali Harb