A Song by the Aegean Sea

Mohamed Metwalli’s A Song by the Aegean Sea transports us to Turkey’s Aegean coast where a tourist described as an “Egyptian poet” observes scenes of city life from his “6th floor balcony / [i]n the Izmir Palace Hotel.” Told in three sections spanning a year (each poem is dated from three trips taken in June 2013, January 2014, and June 2014), a mostly omniscient narrator paints scenes based on the poet’s travels.

A title like “Jump Cut” alludes to the collection’s cinematic framework with local characters reappearing and storylines carrying through across several poems, and we learn that the tourist had wished for “stronger lighting / For scenes unworthy of filming / In his life.” In the final poem, “Farewell,” the speaker observes “the carcass of a dove / Struck by lightning in front of my very eyes.”

Gretchen McCullough’s collaborative translation with Metwalli is full of remarkable phrases, from winter’s “skittish sun” to

[…] ships seeping their light
From afar
Silver and gold on the surface of dark waters

In her introduction, McCullough notes that Metwalli composed his original text, first published in 2015, in “formal standard Arabic, not colloquial,” which made me wonder whether the translation is reaching for a slightly archaic register of English. Many poems land on an emphatic exclamation point reminiscent of older poetry, moves that feel akin to making a black-and-white film in homage to the classics. 

In “A Raven, a Moon,” the speaker enters into conversation with the city itself and considers what to do with “a drunken, orange half moon,” musing about whether to send it skipping “on the surface of the water … [o]r puncture it until it lands on the bed of the sea.” Metwalli delights in metaphor; in “Strange Language,” the speaker observes how a date “primped herself, / her mirror, the page of the sea,” before they board a “boat with no intention to depart.”

REVIEWED BY LAYLA BENITEZ-JAMES

-- LAYLA BENITEZ-JAMES * Poetry Foundati