Wine Song

Chapter 3 takes as its focal text a beautiful colour art book by Stétié, Le vin mystique précédé de Al-Khamriya d’Omar Ibn al-Farîdh (1998). Realized in collaboration with the Iraqi calligrapher Ghani Alani, Stétié’s bilingual edition and translation of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s most celebrated mystical wine poem presents an original reading of a sacred ode to wine and god, which itself forms part of an idiosyncratic genealogy of wine in classical Arabic verse. I analyze the comparative, translational poetics and politics of Stétié’s French translation, which he appends with a long essay composed in French on the fraught relationship between alcohol and Islam, and between Islamic and Western views and representations of wine. Through his polyvalent idiomatic French translations of the key Sufi term for the ritual of rememberance, dhikr (defined by ʿĀʾishah al-Bāʿūniyyah in The Principles of Sufism), Stétié opens the translingual Franco-Arabic text to the poetics of the breath through the practice of rememoration. I show how his texts offer remarkable sites of the transference of one language and tradition into another, to the point where the translations permanently transform and transfigure the French of subsequent readings of such canonical authors as Baudelaire. I follow with a reading of Baudelaire that reveals a preoccupation with the poetics of the human breath, and an identical mystical Sufi idiom in all of his wine poetry and writings on wine and hashish. Stétié thus enacts and realizes the very ‘pacifist invasion’ that he announces elsewhere in his critical œuvre (Le français, l’autre langue, 2001). With Stétié, we hear whispers of the translational genesis-in-progress of a new Francophone lyric. I close this chapter with one illustrative example of the new Francophone lyric, through a consideration of how Franco-Arabic poetic modulations of the breath assume a performative aspect for Stétié in the context of the live ritual of his poetry readings.