To read Tengour

In his essay on transparency and opacity in Poétique de la relation [Poetics of Relation] (1990), Édouard Glissant draws a striking analogy between language learning and translation. He characterizes translation as an attempt to instill transparency between two series of opacities, as seeking the possibility of passage or transference from one text into another:

But what happens, I ask, when the original ‘texte aventuré’ already takes the risk of translation? Habib Tengour broke new ground as an innovative interpretative, translational rewriter of jāhilī (pre-Islamic) classical Arabic lyric (the qaṣāʾid, the mu'allaqāt) and their histories with the publication of his chapbook Césure [Cæsura] (2006). Up until that point, his oeuvre resounded with the voice of a major contemporary poet of the diasporic and nomadic conditions of the languages of postmodernity. It has been the subject of illumination by insightful commentary in which critics showcased the intertextual and transhistorical place-specificity of the linguistic and the writerly in Tengour, through analyses of the multifaceted aspects of exilic circulation in his work. Studies have demonstrated how the scope of Tengour's writing spans from the Odyssean underpinnings of a still unfolding ‘trajectory’ (Gr. periplous, Ar. riḥla), to a nomadic poetics of biblical wandering. The generic elasticity of Tengour's writing, in which he assumes the roles of the ‘eternal poet’ of exile and an ‘artisanal craftsman’ of language, traverses the most poignant ‘interstices’ of language and identity questions.