Vocabulary Unites Itself  Into Universal Language

Literature plays a huge role in shaping the world’s image, it has been so since the dawn of time, when Man created script. The most important literary works of particular epochs not only influenced philosophy and politics but also formed the world of values existing in human life. Well, books can be considered one of the most important tools of our reality. Reading them has a developing effect that allows us to enrich the language and look at the world from a different perspective and get to know other cultures. Thanks to people whose passions not only formulate literature itself but also the love of its translation into foreign languages.

Taghrid Bou Merhi, is a Labananian poetess, writer, and translator living in Brazil, a lawyer by education, she is fluent in several languages; Arabic, French, English, Portuguese, Italian and Spanish. She is also a teacher of Arabic for foreigners. The winner of many literary awards, author of poetry books as well as children’s books.

Taghrid began writing poetry in her early childhood and developed her talent over the years. As she matured her mind, so she created her poetry matured too. Her writings deal with humanitarian issues as well as issues related to emigration, she knows very well what longing, suffering, and nostalgia for homeland and family is, she knows what a person who has migrated from one’s own country and spent most of his life in exile what he experiences and feels. She interpreted all these concerns perfectly in one of her poems “Like Waiting”,
here’s a snippet of it:

“Since you have cut the ropes of sleep, while you are waiting for your own self, go flow from you to yourself, like a secret blood just drawn from the bank of time.

Oh displaced person to amputated places, while your eyelids shed from departure, sadness drops from the sweat of the sky sixty graves.”

Taghrid is a poet with a sensitive soul, bathed in the world of literature, she defines poetry in a very interesting way;

“Poetry is feminine with beautiful features, and the poem is an echo of inspiration and a groan of sadness, and on the slopes of its longing, words travel.
Poetry is like water, a fountain that sprouts in a green dress because it is the language of beauty and love, and the language of uniting peoples.
Vocabulary unites into a universal language, so the spaces of the soul become a cocoon, the pen is sap, and the fingers are a metaphor.”

The curiosity of cognition of the world, people, and above all, other cultures, as well as the knowledge of five languages, made Taghrid feel of need, and even more, she felt the obligation to translate literature, she has translated hundreds of poems, prose, and texts by Arab and foreign poets, published them in Arabic in many foreign journals.

As she says: “As a translator, I love very much my work. I like to immerse myself in the poem, to feel the sweet music that permeates it. I often live with its subject, thus, I do not translate literally and do not deviate from the topic, but I translate with beauty and knowledge because I own the translation tools.”

14.12.2022 Stockholm

Ewelina Maria Bugajska – Javorka