In 2003 I was invited to a poetry festival in a European city. In my first extended reading I started with one of my early poems, entitled « Respecting Marx ». A bit intimidated by the large audience, I read the poem in Arabic, in a neutral voice. A beautiful blond woman followed with a very dramatic reading in English translation. She began: « In front of bright storefronts / flourishing with women’s panties / I cannot stop myself from thinking of Marx… » The hall burst into laughter. I was left completely puzzled.

The poem was published in 1992, and I’d read it for Arabic speakers before. For me the poem stemmed from anger and sadness, not humor. Afterwards I thought perhaps the word « panties » was shocking in this context, and changing it to « lingerie » might have made the irony less pronounced. But a later translation, using « lingerie » instead of « panties », brought on even louder laughter when read aloud to a 2022 audience in New York. This time, however, I was not surprised.

My Arab audience shares the common understanding that Arab intellectuals tend to be both Marxist and nationalist, to varying degrees. They are almost all men. A young female writer searching for her voice is surrounded by them, in dialogue with them — they are her mentors, literature professors at university, older poets, younger poets. Were a young female poet to fall in love, it would almost inevitably be with one of them.

The profound discovery for me is that the poem lost the seriousness of its original Arabic through the English translation — or rather, through the non-Arab audience who transfer the association between Marxism and patriarchy from anger and sadness to a new mood: playful and ironic. Maybe it’s because anger needs to be met with a good laugh.