Refaat Sallam is a prominent figure in the 1970s literary generation. A prolific poet and translator, he earned his living as the cultural editor at the Middle East News Agency (MENA). Last year, the General Egyptian Book Organisation (GEBO) published the first volume of his complete works. The 300-page book brings together three of his best collections. The second volume, with four collections, will be published next month. Significantly, it includes some of his earliest, uncollected work in a separate chapter dated before 1987 and entitled “Crawling”. “I was one year old when the 1952 revolution broke out. However, my first real shock was in the aftermath of 1967 defeat. I was 12. Back then, Gamal Abdel Nasser was our sacred icon, an eternal father. The patriotic songs by Abdel Halim Hafez aired on the radio were our sole source entertainment in the late sixties. Television was not yet available in small villages. And ,as a child, it was a shock that an idol like Nasser should lead us into such defeat. In 1970, Abdel Nasser passed away, and it was another blow that ended this cycle of sadness and refraction.” Born in Minyal Qamh, Sharqiya, in 1951, his father worked as a policeman. “Our house overlooked spacious fields. It was a beautiful view, but also a source of scary stories about ghosts living in the fields and appearing in the night,” he smiled. “The ceiling was made of wicker and reeds, a perfect nesting place. So you could hear the birds singing almost all day long. My father was both very caring and very tough. He was barely educated, and that's why he insisted on putting all his children through university. This was actually very unusual for a villager. I can see now why he had to be a little violent with his seven children,” Sallam murmured. “I remember the day, when I was 13 years old, that I ran away from home, because I had committed some trivial mistake and I knew when my father came back he would beat me. But I eventually managed to make him stop. One day he was up to beat up my younger brother and I stepped in and held back his arm. It was a crucial moment in my life, and after that day he no longer treated us with violence. Anyway we only saw him on weekends because he worked in a separate village. Most of the time my mother was in charge, dealing with all kinds of issues, major and minor ones alike.” In 1977 Sallam graduated from the journalism department at Faculty of Arts, Cairo University. He was keen on learning enough English and French to read the great poets, and that was how he became a celebrated translator in a matter of years. After many years with MENA, in 2010, he was to establish the agency's cultural section, retiring only two years later. He has issued nine collections of poems. “In my first year at the university, I was introduced to the late great poet Salah Abdel-Sabour by a common friend. He was a wonderful man. Already on our first meeting in his house in Mohandesine, he was talking to me as if I was a close friend. I remember that he once lent me the manuscript of Ba'da an yamout al malek,” “After the King Dies”, “his last poetic play, and I was supposed to bring it back to him in a week. But I had to disappear for a month, to avoid arrest after participating in the 1972 student demonstrations. It was his only copy, and when I returned it after a month, he told me he had worried less about it than me, that's how humble he was. It was then when I started publishing poems, and he gave me a great boost. As the editor of Al Katib magazine, Abdel Sabour was generous enough to publish one of my earliest poems in the first edition. University was a complete shift in my life; it opened up new horizons for me. I became aware of new literary trends, books and newspapers.” Sallam was also active in the Student Movement, with demonstrations calling on the late president Mohammed Anwar Al-Sadat to wage war on Israel to restore Sinai. “I was not so interested in politics, though. I was chased by the Interior Ministry's State Security forces, and they came to arrest me at my village. It is strange for the police forces to chase students all the way to their villages, but it happened.” He was the first to establish literary wall magazines at Cairo University, and together with the late poet Helmy Salem and the journalist Soliman Al Hakim he wrote harshly sarcastic texts about President Al Sadat. “Such magazines were very popular among students. That's why I was eventually taken in by the police. It was then that I started to read more about politics and Marxism. My poems from this period had mainly political themes.” It was in this context that, in 1972, Sallam and Salem published a joint collection of poems, Al Ghorba wal Intizar (“Estrangement and Waiting”) — this was his book. “It was a unique experience, and it was published at our own expense with friends' donations. Salem was my colleague and he became my closest friend.” Despite his brief involvement in politics, Sallam never joined a political party or subscribed to a political trend, though his heart has remained in the same place. For Sallam, Sadat was just “a big mistake in Egypt's contemporary history”. Sadat closed down many cultural magazines such as Al Tali'a and Al Fikr Al Mu'asser, Sallam says, with negative consequences for Egyptian culture. “It was part of the reason behind establishing Eda'a 77, a non-periodic magazine specialising in poetry. The magazine helped with the emergence of the 1970s generation of poets, who made up a totally independent literary current. The magazine was described by the prominent critic Ragaa Al Naqqash as ‘a slap in the face to the deteriorating local cultural taste'. After the third issue, a kind of clash on the political policy of the magazine broke out between me and Salem, so I left the group and issued another magazine entitled Kitabat. But the unique spirit had already disappeared.” In 2001, Sallam started a four-year journalistic mission to Algeria, working as the chief correspondent of MENA. “I could not write a single word during that period,” he said. “During this time, I managed to translate the complete works of the great French poet Charles Baudelaire. The atmosphere was so tense, it was the last wave of Islamist terrorism, where terrorist attacks used to take place almost on a daily basis. “I felt very unsafe; it was not the perfect atmosphere for me to write poetry, but I enjoyed visiting Oran and other beautiful cities. Shortly after I returned home, I got a three-month scholarship to France. I was invited by the International Centre for Poetry (ICP). From the very first day, I went to a nearby bookshop where I stayed in Paris, bought papers and pencils and started writing. Within a month, the script of Hajar yatfou ‘ala al-ma',” “A stone floating on water”, “was ready for publication. And this was my first book in four years of complete silence,” he smiled. The book was translated and published in French by ICP, then reprinted in Cairo by Al Dar with a different layout including drawings in the margins. Sallam's fascination with graphics reflects his polyphonic style. In poems like “Beautiful Chaos” (1987) or “Brightening” (1992), the layout of the text on the page is integral to the way the poem works. In the later poem the language is experimental to boot. Hakadhaa takalam Al Karkaden, “Thus Spoke the Rhino”, Sallam's last book of poetry, published by GEBO in 2011, is a masterpiece. In very sensitive language it reveals the impact of the 25 January revolution on the average man, using the state, the police and women as symbols for authority. But it is women that Sallam wants to talk about. “In 1974, I was doing my army service in Sinai, five km away from Israel; I was one of four officers responsible for military surveillance. I had enough time to meditate and write. It was there that I wrote one of my dearest poems to me, a poem called ‘Men'et Shbeen', the name of my village; it was a different way to express my feelings about war and the enemy. That poem was the first to show my new style, the polyphony. It happened spontaneously, and then it became an essential aspect of my style.” Likewise women: a constant presence, perhaps his muse. Sallam dislikes the term “muse” because it has the wrong romantic connotations. “Women represent but one voice in my poetry,” he says, “but they are always there.” Who is Sallam's woman, though? “A complex entity. She is composed of imagination, dreams and actual experiences. My ideal woman is a copy of my mother, who was an extraordinarily strong woman. She knew how to treat me differently, she could see the difference between me and my brothers and sisters. My mother attended the ceremony held at the Opera House in 1993 to announce me as the winner of the Constantine P. Cavafy Award for best poet. She was there in the front row, with her simple provincial dress and her big smile. And this is one of the unforgettable moments in my life.” In his 1998 autobiographical book Ila al-nahar al-mady (“To the Past Day”), he describes his mother in this way: “The shorthand for seven thousand years of epidemics, plagues, famines and conquerors. Fields of night ghosts bordering memory, and a house of wind and sun. A camel and swaying reeds, telling me not to approach. And saying I am no ship, and then weeping in my lap.” Playing with the typography of the book, Sallam draws the reader into a world over which he has absolute control. “Out of slaughtered chicken's feathers, I make wings and dreams for my arms, to fly into distant space. Birds, hoopoes, cattle egrets flapping around me, asking me, Who are you?” Here as elsewhere history and myth from ancient Egypt history, the early years of Islam and the Mameluk period are interesting sources. “There is a kind of unity between different historical epochs. When I read history, especially Al Jabarti, I see historical incidents visually as rich dramatic scenes.” All this goes with very special writing rituals: “I still write in pencil on paper. The pencil has to be very soft, and I often do visual schemes for the manuscript on the paper before I start writing. I keep most of the manuscripts, they are very dear to me.” Now the editor of the Translation series published by the General Organisation for Cultural Palaces, Sallam opted for a certain policy aiming at translating literary masterpieces from all foreign languages into Arabic, most of which were actually translated in the 50s, and 60s, but have long been out of print. Commenting on the current political turmoil in Egypt, Sallam says that he does not have any fear of the return of military dictatorship. “The winds of change have swept the Egyptian people. Most Arab leaders are dictators, this is an obvious fact,” he winked. “But Egyptians will put an end to dictatorship.”
