An Apple of the Mind

Notes

During our translation session, we delved into Haifa Aljabri's poetry and explored her focus on the human experience and her personal views on the world, including political and social issues. Her poems often narrate stories that seek to blend with nature and the landscapes she has lived in.

We specifically discussed her poem, which was initially titled "An Apple in the Imagination." Still, we eventually agreed on changing it to "An Apple of the Mind" to connect it to the themes of shadows and spectres that appeared throughout the poem. The repetition of "There remains" at the beginning of each stanza added a sense of rhyme, rhythm, and music, which the poet maintained throughout the poem she wrote in Modern Standard Arabic.

We had fruitful discussions about the poem's keywords and concepts. For instance, we changed "quarrel" to "struggle" to convey a more political connotation and "abandoned from occupation" to "surrenders its occupation" to highlight the link to land and place. We also decided to change "female peasant" to "farmer" to reveal the character's gender only in the third line of the final stanza, allowing for an open reading that aligned with the poem's spirit and the poet's intention.

-Leo Boix