(untitled)
hasan atiya al nassar
Nakedness
The pallor is worn
by naked Bedouins.
At their backs
chains of sand
and furrows in the sky
carry
every evening mandolins
of Indian wood.
Sumerian salt
and spears of stone
cover the sand like a mirage.
They have written
on their right arm,
before dawn,
nostalgia
and Koranic verses.
Every evening the pallor,
that pallor,
is city light,
light from the house hidden
beneath the soldiers’ flag.
Mound of coal,
the stature of man bends
and lengthens
and breaks,
once again,
between the mud and the grass of light.
(No one asked for it
in that morning hour
awakened).
There is no hat of evil
that can defend the virginity
of their women.
Between dreams and journeys
the messages
have disappeared,
torn up on the sidewalks
of cities.
In that hour
I saw forests lengthening
out of desert lands,
I did not see wolves ...
I found instead mummified
the body
of a bandit:
like ashes upon ashes,
like water upon water:
there is nothing.
translated by Brenda Porster
Hasan Atiya Al Nassar was born in 1954 in Dicar, Iraq. He published his first fiction and poetry in Baghdad, where he as a journalist for various magazines. He is currently a member of the consulting committee of the magazine "Al Mefiyon" (Exiles), published in Lebanon. He has lived in exile in Florence for many years, where he took a degree in the History of Islamic Countries at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy. After this degree, he received a Doctorate from the Istituto Orientale of Naples University. His is a member of the Lega degli Scrittori, Giornalisti e Artisti democratici Iracheni (League of Democratic Iraqi Writers, Journalists and Artists), for which he has published a book of stories in Arabic, Il massagro delle oche selvatiche (The Massacre of the Holy Geese) (Florence, 1986). He collaborates with the magazine "Testimonianze" and is the editor of the Arabic poetry section of the comparative poetry journal “Semicerchio". His writings in Italian have appeared in the magazines "Eleusis", "Varia", "D.E.A", "Plurale", and in the Quaderno Mediorientale I of the series "Cittadini della poesia" (Loggia de' Lanzi, 1998). He has also published Letteratura dell'esilio: il caso iracheno – The Literature of Exile: the Case of Iraq (CUSL, Milano 1996), and the poetry collections Poesie dell'esilio – Poems of Exile (D.E.A, 1991), and Immigrati siamo tutti – We are All Immigrants (D.E.A 2000, in the series "Geografia sommersa", ed. by Prof. P.Baldelli).