Song by the Aegean Sea

Mohamed Metwalli was recognized as a poet in the Arab world at a young age. Shortly after his degree in 1992 from the English department of Cairo University, his volume, Once Upon a Time, won the Yussef El-Khal prize for the best first collection by a poet in the Arab-speaking world, conferred by the Lebanese publishers, Riad El-Rayyes Books. He co-founded an independent literary magazineEl-Garad, in which his second book appeared: The Story the People Tell, Here, in the Harbor and, in 1997, he was selected to represent Egypt in the International Writers' Program at the University of Iowa. The year after, he served as Poet-in-Residence at the University of Chicago. Metwalli compiled and co-edited an anthology of Off-beat Egyptian Poetry, Angry Voices, for the University of Arkansas Press in 2002. His third collection, The Lost Promenades, was published in 2010 by Al-Ketaba Al-Okhra, and A Song by the Aegean Sea came out in 2015 with Afaq Publishers. His poetry has been translated into French, German, and English, and his own translations have appeared widely in literary journals. In 2018 he was commissioned by the British Museum to render their conference publication, Asyut, Guardian City, into Arabic.After graduating from Brown University in 1984, Gretchen McCullough taught English in Egypt, Turkey, and Japan. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama and was awarded a teaching Fulbright to Syria from 1997-1999. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Barcelona Review, Archipelago, National Public Radio, Story South, Guernica, The Literary Review, and The LA Review of Books. Translations into English and Arabic with Mohamed Metwalli have been published in: Nizwa, Banipal, Brooklyn Rail in Translation, World Literature Today and Washington Square Review. Her bi-lingual book of short stories in English and Arabic, Three Stories from Cairo, also translated with Mohamed Metwalli, was published in July 2011 by Afaq Publishers, Cairo. A collection of short stories about expatriate life in Cairo, Shahrazad's Tooth, was published by Afaq as well in 2013. Her novel, Confessions of A Knight Errant is forthcoming from Cune Press, Fall 2022. Currently, she teaches writing at the American University in Cairo.

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 lightFrom afarSilver and gold on the surface of dark watersIn 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