Doctor, translator and award-winning poet Fady Joudah read his poetry and shared stories about his global experiences in medicine and the humanities Wednesday night at the Phoenix Art Museum.
Joudah is a Guggenheim Fellow whose work has a humanitarian focus. Most of the pieces he read to an audience of about 30 Wednesday were based on his experiences with Doctors Without Borders, political conflict and the theme of displacement.
“We do ourselves an injustice if we don’t think about the humanity and those who suffer displacement,” he said.
Joudah read a few poems from each of his works, focusing on “Petra,” his translation of Amjad Nasser’s Arabic travel poem, and “Textu,” a book of poems each written in exactly 160 characters to mimic early text messaging limits on cell phones.
He said the idea behind “Textu” was to highlight common yet arbitrary forms and units surrounding people each day. Poems that were longer than 160 characters were divided into sections, so each poem had a number of characters that was a multiple of 160.
Joudah spent about a year working in this format.
“The notion for me was that the character-count itself can serve as a new meter,” he said. “I assure you that if I was PET scanning myself, there was a part of my brain that was lighting up to … sound bites.”
Joudah has won prizes from PEN USA and The Griffin Trust for his poetry translations. He said poetry translation should aim at foreignness to honor the host language while opening different sensibilities to the host language.
“Capturing the spirit of the original poem is paramount to making the poem sound like it is written in the host language,” he said.
He said it is chauvinistic to think something is untranslatable, and people exhibit boundaries of resistance when they want their language to be limited to time and place. To hold something as untranslatable is to hold it as divine, which leads to problems, he said.
Joudah’s poetry reading was part of a reading series through the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Tyler Meier, executive director of the Poetry Center, said the series started in 1963, and the center recently partnered with the museum to offer four readings each year.
“It’s been a hallmark of the Poetry Center’s effort for more than half a century now to bring in writers working across the aesthetic range of poetry, but at the highest levels,” he said.
He said that though the organization is Tucson-based, the Poetry Center aims to serve a statewide audience. Over 900 clips from the literary readings are available on the Poetry Center’s website, Meier said.
Jake Friedman, founder and editor-in-chief of Four Chambers Press, attended the reading. He said it’s important for downtown Phoenix to have specific events like this to both create community engagement and to combat criticisms that Phoenix is disconnected from other art communities.
“To have opportunities in Phoenix where we can host other people I think is really important to our personal development as artists, to personal meanings as people and also for the city as a whole,” Friedman said.
He said it is more difficult for literature and language to be marketable as art forms compared to media like music. Four Chambers has made most of its sales at events like poetry readings, he said.
Friedman said the Poetry Center is doing a great job with its Phoenix programming.
“A lot of times in Phoenix we talk about how our own scene can be sort of fragmented or scattered … I think Arizona has this very complicated notion of identity,” he said. “The Poetry Center has done a really great job of trying to create opportunities for people to simply be with each other in different communities.”
The next literary programming event in the series is an Artist’s Talk by poet and visual artist Jen Bervin on May 1 at the museum.
Contact the reporter at sajarvis@asu.edu
