from Self-misunderstood
by Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac ‘Gaariye’

I can't understand you, curious self,
nor grasp how you're both life and death,

grabbed land and peaceful settlement,

grudging milker that makes me full,

sun set at evening whilst casting

noon's shortest shadow: how can you be

two who can't marry

yet share the same house?



How can I set this riddle and

give away its answer if

I fail to understand your secret

or even what you mean by it?



Are you something separate,

a stand-alone that leans

upon no man’s shoulder,

or such a part of the people

that you can't be parted from them?



And are you that which is Gaarriye

or two opposing halves

he cannot fit together?

I call you, crooked creation:

bear witness to your character.


Gaariye's poetry was translated by W.N. Herbert in collaboration with Martin Orwin, as part of the Poetry Translation Centre’s second World Poets Tour, which recently brought to the UK leading writers from Kurdistan, Cape Verde, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Somaliland and Sudan. Almost a year earlier, each was matched with a translator and a British poet, who worked together on producing English versions of their work.

W.N. Herbert had this to say about it all on the tour blog:

"How do you convey the particular mixture of privilege and thrill which working on a gifted poet gives you? Especially when the language is as distant-seeming as Somali, and your key co-conspirator, the fluent expert Martin Orwin, is somewhere east of Aleppo? What about the fact that Somali is still principally an oral poetry, tested on the ear and transmitted more by cassettes than books; that the Somalis are poetry mad and Gaarriye is a star and public figure (with all the difficulties of responsibility versus independence that entails) on a scale Mayakovsky would have envied?

 What about the fact in the early 70s that he sat on the committee that regulated which script Somali would be written in? That he wrote influentially on the complex metres and alliterative framework Somali poetry is built from?"

You can find work by all of the poets on the Poetry Translation Centre’s site.