A provocative collection of Afghan folk poems

I Am the Beggar of the World

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Translated by Eliza Griswold

Photographs by Seamus Murphy

Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 160 pp. $24

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Reviewed by John Timpane

A book like this is a potent reminder that poetry can change the world.

In the United States of America, that seems a ridiculous thing to say. If poetry cannot make money, win the Super Bowl, swing elections, or cure cancer, one will be (or so folks assume) hard put to defend it, much less to claim it changes the world. But for those who have been changed, and by poetry, the claim is too obvious to argue - even if it's not always easy to say exactly what poetry does.

But if any poem has ever changed anything in any person, poetry changes the world. And poems do it all the time: They teach people, comfort people, change their minds, reorient them, remind them, deject and delight them, challenge them, give them a voice. If none of these things has ever happened to you . . . start reading.

Here is a book that collects and translates poems from Afghanistan, in a folk form called the landay. Eliza Griswold, one of the few U.S. writers who really knows the Muslim world, takes a free hand in transforming the original poems into contemporary English, with results that are piquant and telling. More than a poetry book, I Am the Beggar of the World also contains photographs by Seamus Murphy, whose images reveal life in Afghanistan in ways that resonate with the poems. Griswold studs the book with explanatory essays about the poems, the culture, and sometimes (tragically) the poets.

The landay is very old, possibly reaching Afghanistan via caravans from Anatolia or beyond. A two-line, usually sung form, it is usually anonymous and associated with women. It lets something be expressed that traditional Afghan culture tends to suppress: The gritty, wry, worldly female voice, speaking of life and its hardships, ironies, and pleasures:

My body belongs to me;

to others its mastery.

Which changes the world.

It changes the Western world because thousands of readers (I hope) are now seeing life through different eyes, the eyes of women in a faraway country where we have done much in the past decade, much baleful, some good. That might change the way you feel about Afghanistan (because you'll know more about it), women (ditto), and poetry:

My love is a suicide bomber who stalks

the home of my heart and waits to

attack.

These vigorous voices sing of the same world (although a different corner of it) we live in. You can feel a connection building across time, culture, and space. Your world, and the reach of theirs, is enlarged.

It could change the way you see things. You might feel (because these women do) what culture, there and here, all too often is: largely an organization of men bent on thwarting female desire and aspiration. These women know it, and say so, with various degrees of spite, humor, resignation, and pity:

You sold me to an old man, father.

May God destroy your home, I was your daughter.

This is very close to the 9/13 syllable count in the original form, and it ends with a rhyme, as the landay sometimes will. Not knowing the language of origin (Pashtun), I can't assess the accuracy of the translations. My guess is that Griswold, wonderful poet, essayist, and journalist, is making English versions that work as contemporary poetry. (That's important. If translations can't stand on their own as excellent poems, they're not good translations.) And having a good degree of fun in the process.

That's what a good translator should do. Griswold, who won a MacArthur grant in 2012, has Philadelphia roots, having spent part of her childhood in Chestnut Hill, where her father, the Rev. Frank T. Griswold 3d, was rector for more than a decade at St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church.

Griswold notes that women regularly adapt and tweak ancient themes and lines from landays that are immemorial, mashing up and sampling much like hip-hop DJs. And they make landays about right now. Here is a particularly startling one:

Because my love's American,

blisters blossom on my heart.

Some recent landays are versions of older ones that concerned previous occupying armies from Britain or Russia. Take this one:

My lover is as fair as an American soldier can be.

To him I looked dark as a talib, so he murdered me.

This is a version of a much older landay, in which the treacherous soldier was British. The female authors are brilliant at twining the political and the intimate:

My darling, you are just like America!

You are guilty; I apologize.

Murphy and Griswold went to considerable effort, and not a little risk, to observe the secret world in which women compose and share these poems: They were led into "camps of startled nomads, rural barnyards to private homes, a muddy one-horse farm, a stark refugee wedding, and a glitzy one in a neon-lit Kabul hall."

This book is a pleasure to read for its moving poems, enlightening essays, and striking photography. You come away feeling as if you know more about more of the world. In other words, changed.

215-854-4406 @jtimpane