Unfortunately, It Was Paradise. Mahmoud Darwish
poems in his anthology Modern Poetry of the Arab World. In fact, the four translated Darwish poems featured in Forché’s anthology Against Forgetting were originally published before 1986. The translations belong to al-Udhari and Denys Johnson-Davies.
Sand and Other Poems, a well-chosen, pithy overview of Darwish’s first twenty years of poetry, translated by Rana Kabbani, was published in 1986. Stephen Kessler republished “From Beirut” as a chapbook in 1992. In the winter of 1994, Grand Street magazine published Edward Said’s essay “On Mahmoud Darwish,” accompanied by Agha Shahid Ali’s poetic conversion of Darwish’s long masterpiece (yet another evolution of his lyric epic) “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia.” Shahid would later republish the poem in his final collection, Rooms Are Never Finished (2001), while Said’s essay remains the most important of primers on Darwish’s art. In 1995, Psalms, Bennani’s second attempt at a selected early poems, tried its luck. But the monumental event that would take place in the same year was Ibrahim Muhawi’s iconic translation of Darwish’s prose tour de force Memory for Forgetfulness. Similar to the Journal, Forgetfulness is essential reading for an understanding of Darwish’s development during the 1980s and well after. Other efforts include Banipal magazine’s feature on Darwish’s work in 1999, with an interview translated from the Arabic as the centerpiece: “There Is No Meaning to My Life outside Poetry.” Of course, the Oslo Accords had been signed in 1993 and a partial lifting of the implicit embargo on Palestinian literature in English had taken place; a new and expanded “permission to narrate,” and thus to listen, was granted, so to speak.
Naturally, it is in Arabic that Darwish’s poetry is most deeply and complexly rooted. “Rimbaud is ours,” he quipped in a poem in 1992. Darwish always bridged his glorious literary past with the brilliant literary present, away from antecedence or origins and closer to simultaneity and transposition. Dispersive plurality was his aesthetic. Understandably, however, the mention of Darwish in English brings to mind many great poets and writers, mostly European. Occasionally these parallels are reflections of the politics of balance. A proliferative reading remains necessary. If Aragon why not Auden? If Mayakovsky why not Whitman? If Donne why not Hopkins? If Yeats why not Ginsberg? If Milosz then Szymborska, et cetera. Yannis Ritsos was the first person to describe Darwish’s long poems as lyric epics, when Ritsos introduced Darwish to a large crowd in an amphitheater in Athens in 1983. There is also the case of Cavafy, whose importance to many Arab poets runs deep (is he not, in one way, also Arab?). “Other Barbarians Will Come” in Paradise is a direct example, but “the road home is more beautiful than home” is a phrase Darwish repeats and reshapes throughout his poetry. It can also be said that Darwish was in search of the Trojan poet. Does such a poet exist? Can a defeated people write great poetry, without being part of political triumph, attainment of, or adoption by, power? “Is the impossible far?” as Darwish asks in “Counterpoint,” his elegy for Edward Said. This is also the question Darwish asks in Jean-Luc Goddard’s film Notre Musique (2004), and answers earlier in “The Red Indian’s Penultimate Speech”: “Will you not memorize a bit of poetry to halt the slaughter?” And in “Mural”: “There is no nation smaller than its poem.” Or as Paradise would have it: “A nation is as great as its ode.” It’s hard not to think of Kafka writing in his Diaries: “A small nation’s memory is not smaller than the memory of a large one and so can digest the existing material more thoroughly.” It’s also difficult to imagine a poet who, in Judith Butler’s words, “gave voice more clearly to the condition of unwilled proximity”: “Darwish is thus let loose with the nameless stranger in a wilderness of uncharted lands.”
New visions of Darwish’s poetry in translation can only illuminate deeper aspects of his craft, reclaim language through the field of power that is translation. Darwish’s enduring expansion of, and experimentation in, Arabic prosody demands attention. His playful language can also serve, as nidus and nexus, to lead translation into a new expanse. Paradise also deserves credit for experimentation as a high form of tribute. Most notably, it released the circular or the folding Darwish lines into an English drive. In the unfolding, the Darwish poem in Paradise is far from domesticated. In part this is due to Darwish’s inescapable aesthetic singularity, but it is exactly the effect of this singularity that Paradise reconfigures into a beautiful vision of what a Darwish poem can achieve in and for English. Darwish himself was keen on translation as the creation of a new poem. He was keen on the translator’s freedom to “redistribute the lines” to what one deems suitable for the birth of new music. The untranslatable in poetry is more than a given, it is a precondition of translation, a vital creation of discontinuity. In Darwish’s poetry it is also a long road home. It is what translators
bestow upon the phoenix
a little of his secret’s fire
so she may kindle the lights
in the temple after him.
Fady Joudah
Houston, November 2012
from
Fewer Roses
1986
Translated by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché
I Will Slog over This Road
I will slog over this endless road to its end.
Until my heart stops, I will slog over this endless, endless road
with nothing to lose but the dust, what has died in me, and a row of palms
pointing toward what vanishes. I will pass the row of palms.
The wound does not need its poet to paint the blood of death like a pomegranate!
On the roof of neighing, I will cut thirty openings for meaning
so that you may end one trail only so as to begin another.
Whether this earth comes to an end or not, we’ll slog over this endless road.
More tense than a bow. Our steps, be arrows. Where were we a moment ago?
Shall we join, in a while, the first arrow? The spinning wind whirled us.
So, what do you say?
I say: I will slog over this endless road to its end and my own.
Another Road in the Road
There is yet another road in the road, another chance for migration.
To cross over we will throw many roses in the river.
No widow wants to return to us, there we have to go, north of the neighing horses.
Have yet we forgotten something, both simple and worthy of our new ideas?
When you talk about yesterday, friend, I see my face reflected in the song of doves.
I touch the dove’s ring and hear flute-song in the abandoned fig tree.
My longing weeps for everything. My longing shoots back at me, to kill or be killed.
Yet there is another road in the road, and on and on. So where are the questions taking me?
I am from here, I am from there, yet am neither here nor there.
I will have to throw many roses before I reach a rose in Galilee.
Were It Up to Me to Begin Again
Were it up to me to begin again, I would make the same choice. Roses on the fence.
I would travel the same roads that might or might not lead to Cordoba.
I would lay my shadow down on two rocks, so that birds could nest on one of the boughs.
I would break open my shadow for the scent of almond to float in a cloud of dust
and grow tired on the slopes. Come closer, and listen.
Share my bread, drink my wine, don’t leave me alone like a tired willow.
I love lands not trod over by songs of migration, or become subject to passions of blood and desire.
I love women whose hidden desires make horses put an end