Born in Murcia in 1165, Ibn Arabi was a prolific Muslim philosopher and
poet. He travelled extensively before settling in Damascus, where he
died in 1240. Tarjuman al-Ashwaq, or The Interpreter of Desires, is a
cycle of sixty-one Arabic poems. They speak of loss and bewilderment, a
spiritual and sensual yearning for the divine, and a hunger for
communion in which near and far collapse. Agitated Air is a
correspondence in poems between Istanbul and Cape Town, following the
wake of The Interpreter of Desires. Collaborating at a distance, Yasmine
Seale and Robin Moger work in close counterpoint, making separate
translations of each poem, exchanging them, then writing new poems in
response to what they receive. The process continues until they are
exhausted, and then a new chain begins. Translated and retranslated,
these poems fray and eddy and, their themes of intimacy across distance
made various, sing back and forth, circling and never landing. Absence
and approach, knowing and unknowing, failure and repetition: Ibn Arabi's
cycle of ecstatic love shimmers with turbulence. Seale and Moger move
into and against these contending drifts, finding in the play of
dissatisfaction and endurance a prompt for new poetry.
