Lines Written in Great Sorrow at Ouassane / Ayoub Skila & Rhyse Maddocks

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: This poem utilizes two famous tropes of Moroccan (Darija) poetry: the first and more common is the “expression of great and unexplained sorrow.” The other is the “poetry of coinage:” a stanza is presented as if the poet had walked himself into a linguistic or rhyming dead-end, which he must circumvent by means of a coinage. Due to the nature of translation, and my own shortcomings, I have been unable to transmit the clear necessity of the coinage except by this note.

With wild resound of donkey-bray
In low-tide’s amphitheatres of stone,
Let the feeling of my heart oppress this
Unboundment.

You women, stooped with seaweed-gathering!
You go to your labours, and rest comes to you;
But my frayed heart continues out of reason
Burging.

Let it uproot the scrub instead, and blast the dust,
And terrify all creatures in the coast,
So that they go like refugees, arms overhead and
Unwhereward.

Then would I roam gladly through, like a gust,
Or like the workless donkeys of the white women,
November-Saffron laden merely, and for that
Rindlavished.

Rhyse Maddocks was born in Cardiff, and studied Arabic at Swansea University. He moved to Morocco teaching English, where he grew to love the Darija language, and its poetry.
Ayoub Skila (1976-2014) was a well-known, self-taught Berber and Darija poet. He inherited his father’s Argan orchard, and worked it all his life. He considered poetry a noble, though secondary, pastime.