“One or Two Things / This Summer / Marrakesh” is taken from Tahar Ben Jelloun’s debut collection, Sun Scars, originally published in 1972. The majority of these poems were written during forced military confinement.

In 1965, Tahar Ben Jelloun was a student in Rabat, when protests erupted across Morocco. The government’s response was swift and brutal. Protestors were beaten, shot at, arrested, and disappeared. Ben Jelloun was one of many arrested and, in 1966, sent, without due process, to a “military disciplinary camp”—effectively a concentration camp for dissidents.

He would spend a total of 19 months there, subjected to abhorrent violence, humiliation, and starvation. There was little hope. But there was poetry. Under such conditions, poetry became both survival and subversion. Ben Jelloun composed verses in his head, scrawled them on whatever scraps of paper he could find, and sewed them into the lining of his clothes for safekeeping. These were not literary exercises—they were coded lifelines. Direct speech was dangerous, so metaphor became his only available language. This necessity shaped his Surrealism: not a stylistic pose, but a method of camouflage, compression, and resistance.

I have been enjoying, studying, and translating Surrealism for years now, and find myself increasingly drawn to Surrealist poetics that arose outside allegiance to Breton or any peripheral ideologies. Ben Jelloun’s language was forged in extremity, born out of the need to say what could not safely be said. While most Western artists pursued Surrealism for artistic liberation—and rightly so—Ben Jelloun reached for Surrealism as a shield, a strategy for survival, a code by which to endure. It was an absolute necessity: a way of transfiguring personal and collective trauma into speech without being silenced for it.

I have long been a proponent of the coda, “if you know why you are translating something, you will know how to translate something.” The America of today has taught me all I need to know about translating Tahar Beh Jelloun’s poetry.