Last September, our guest author Susan Morrow posted here her translations of Egyptian poetry ancient (Invocation to a Scribe) and modern (The Song of Baramhat) .
Soon thereafter the site 100 Best Poems picked up Morrow's translation of the Ancient Egyptian poem Invocation to a Scribe and presented it as a contemporary Egyptian poem by the 20th Century Egyptian poet Salah Jahin. This is a mistake and a misattribution, and as the site has not responded to our requests for a correction, we are correcting it here.
On page 276-277 of The Dawning Moon of the Mind (Susan Brind Morrow, The Dawning Moon of The Mind, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015) Morrow published her translations of these two Egyptian poems.
The first is an excerpt from her translation of Song of Baramhat by Salah Jahin, the uncle of an old friend of Morrow's, Egyptian novelist Hossam Fahr, who recently retired as head of Arabic translation at the United Nations. Hossam brought Jahin’s work to Morrow's attention in the 1980s, and she published her translation of his poem, Song(s) of Baramhat, in The Seneca Review in 1986. You can find here translations in her post here.
The second poem is Morrow's translation of the well known secular Egyptian New Kingdom poem Invocation to a Scribe. The original hieroglyphic poem is on Chester Beatty Papyrus IV in the British Museum. This hieroglyphic poem has also been translated elsewhere (by Miriam Lichtheim in Ancient Egyptian Literature V. II The New Kingdom, p.175-178, P. Chester Beatty IV = P. British Museum 10684; Sir Alan Gardiner, Hieratic Papyri, 1. p. 38-39; Schott, Liebeslieder p. 155-157; John Wilson, ANET, 431-432).
Morrow's original work on this hieroglyphic translation is with her papers in the Sowell Collection.
-- sdh
PS. I have shared this post with the editors of 100 Best Poems. Fingers crossed that this time they'll make the correction.
Dear Stacey, This is a very important message: Editors, credit your sources correctly! These are beautiful and powerful translations. Thank you for presenting them.
Posted by: Emily Fragos | July 31, 2023 at 12:23 PM