Translating the Family Feud, poem by Dan Vera

Translating the Family Feud

by Dan Vera

"That's crazy!"
"That's silly!" he said.

I tried explaining how the muslims, christians and jews have the same grandfather.
He stopped me every other sentence for the meaning of the words:
"prophet"
"messiah"
"patriarch"

Which he would type into his handheld
to find in Cantonese.
I found myself having to explain it myself,
This story half told badly in Sunday Schools
placed before the funhouse mirror of single entendre
"So, Muhammad recognized Jesus?"
"As a prophet" I told him, "not as the son of God."
"Where did the muslims live after God promised homeless Hagar and her child life?"
I didn't have all the answers.
And it began to spin outward
insanely.
"So, they're all related?"
"Yes."
"That's crazy."
"That's silly."

I realized the difficulty of translating stupidity.

I apologize Africa,
for not knowing the names of your countries on a map.
The map I tried to draw to show the trajectory of my country's armies
to the place it is now at war with.
I have to cheat and list the country along the Mediterannean,
such is the Europecenter of my ineducation.

I apologize towns and villages of Iraq,
receiving the payloads of fire and death my taxes paid for.
I do not know your names, or the kinds of buildings there,
the flowers and trees inside your gardens,
the wonders you would show me if I visited.

I only know the names my television has been cleared to tell me.
And learning them, I will forget them as soon as the dust settles,
as I have forgotten the towns of Afghanistan or the neighborhoods of Panama.
What little I know is superimposed on a dozen films of sand and camel caravans, filmed in some California backlot.

These names I do not know are your Antietams, East St. Louises and Guernicas.
You will pardon my not knowing them.
I will not know them any better than I know the immensity of Hiroshima
or the other countless battles we were prescripted to win.
Atrocities that will be buried in a sandstorm
or tricolored balloons and tickertape parades.

The blood is no longer in my hands they are on them.
They are on my limbs and face and torso.
I swim in it.
I will and cannot look away from it.
Everything else is a pretty lie that disassembles in my mouth.
There is no future in such false beauty.

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