IF I WERE ANOTHER Work by a Master Poet and Demonstrates Why Dai W Wish Was One of the Most Celebrated Poets of Hi Time and Was Hailed As the Voice and Conscience O
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S2B.OD mabmou&DAflwis was that rare literary phenomenon: a poet both a claimed by critics as one of the most in the Arab wor S3 . I! . '"! I '. dence and imagery of the Palestinian struggle, shi: between the most intimate individual experienc marjmou* DARWISH and the burdens of history and collective memory. Brilliantly translated by Fady Joudah, If I Wer Another—which collects the greatest epic works c Darwish's mature years —is a powerful yet elegari IF I WERE ANOTHER work by a master poet and demonstrates why Dai w wish was one of the most celebrated poets of hi time and was hailed as the voice and conscience o an entire people. > Z • H I i m TJ FADY JOUDAH ALSO BY MAHMOUD DARWI SH A River Dies of Thirst: Jo urnals Almond Blossoms and J?eyond The Butterfly's Burden Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems Memory fo r Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, i982 IF I WERE ANOTHER FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX 18 West 18th Street, New York 10011 Copyright© 2009 by the M�hmoud Darwish Estate Translation copyright© 2009 by Fady Joudah All rights reserved Distributed in Canada by D&M Publishers, Inc. Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2009 Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications, in which some of these poems originally appeared: Callaloo: "A Horse for the Stranger"; Harvard Review: "The 'Red Indian's' Penultimate Speech to the White Man"; Modern Poetry in Translation: "Like a Hand Tattoo in the Jahili Poet's Ode"; New American Writing: "Counterpoi�t"; PN Review: "Rubaiyat;' "Truce with the Mongols by the Holm Oak Forest;' and "A Music Sentence"; Poetry Review: "Tuesday and the Weather Is Clear"; A Public Space: "On the last evening on this earth"; The Threepenny Review: "Take Care of the Stags, Father"; Tin House: "A Canaanite Rock in the Dead Sea"; Two Lines: "Rita's Winter." A portion of the introduction was originally published in The Threepenny Review. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Darwish, Mahmud. [Poems. English. Selections] If I were another I Mahmoud Darwish; translated by Fady Joudah. - 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-374-17429-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-374-17429-6(hardcover : alk. paper) I. Joudah, Fady, i971- II. Title. PJ7820.A7 A215 2009 892. 7' 16-dc22 Designed and typeset by Quemadura www.fsgbooks.com 13579108642 The translator would like to thank Jonathan Galassi, Louise Gluck, Marilyn Hacker, and the editors of the journals in which the above poems first appeared. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: Mahmoud Darwish's Lyric Epic v11 I SEE WHAT I WANT (1990) Rubaiyat 4 Ta ke Care of the Stags, Father s Tr uce with the Mongols by the Holm Oak Forest 1 s A Music Sentence 21 The Tragedy of Narcissus the Comedy of Silver 2s The Hoopoe 4 2 ELEVEN PLANETS (1992) Eleven Planets at the End of the Andalusian Scene 5 7 I. On the last evening on this earth II. How do I write above the clouds? III. I have behind the sky a sky IV. And I am one of the kings of the end v. One day, I will sit on the sidewalk VI. Truth has two facesand the snow is black VII. Who am I afterthe stranger's night? VIII. Water, be a string to my guitar IX. In exodus I love you more x. I want fromlove only the beginning XI. The violins The "Red Indian's" Penultimate Speech to the White Man s9 A Canaanite Rock in the Dead Sea 7 s We Will Choose Sophocles ss Rita's Winter s s A Horse fo r the.Stranger s4 MURAL (2000) 99 EXILE (2005) I. Tuesday and the Weather Is Clear 14 9 II. Dense Fog overthe Bridge 1 so III. Like a Hand Tattoo in the Jahili Poet's Ode 171 IV. Counterpoint 1 s s NOTES 195 GLOSSARY 197 1 NTR O o u CTI 0 N Mahmoud Danvish's Lyric Epic hen Mahmoud Darwish and I met on August 4, 2008, fivedays be tu forehe underwent the surgery that would end his life, he reiterated the centrality and importance Mural holds forthis collection. In Mural he grasped what he fearedwould be his last chance to write aftersurviving cardiovascular death for the second time in 1999. The poem was a song of praise that affirms life and the humanity not only of the marginalized Palestinian but also of the individual on this earth, and of Mahmoud Darwish himself. Mural was made into a play by the Palestinian National Theatre shortly afterits publication in 2000 without any prompting from Darwish (his poetry has oftenbeen set to film, music, and song). The staged poem has continued to tour the world to as tounding acclaim, in Paris, Edinburgh, Tunisia, Ramallah, Haifa,and elsewhere. A consummate poet at the acme of innermost experience, simultaneously per sonal and universal, between the death of language and physical death, Darwish created something uniquely his: the treatise of a private speech become collec tive. Mural was the one magnum opus of which he was certain, a rare conviction fora poet who reflectson his completed works with harsh doubt equal only to his ecstatic embrace when on the threshold of new poems. His first experience of death, in 1984, was peaceful and painless, filledwith VII "whiteness." The secon� was more traumatic and was packed with intense visions. Mural gathered Darwish's experiences oflife,art, and death, in their white seren ity and violent awakening, and accelerated his "late style" into prolific, progres sively experimental output in search of new possibilities in language and form, under the shadow of absence and a third and finaldeath. "Who am I to disappoint the void /who am I;' ask the final lines of The Dice Player, Darwish's last uncol lected lyric epic, written weeks beforehis death on August 9, 2008. But I still re member his boyish, triumphant laugh when I said to him: "The Dice Player is a distilled Mural in entirely new diction;' and his reply: "Some friendseven call it _ the anti-Mural." He had overcome his own art (and death) forone last time, held it apart from himself so that it would indisputably and singularly belong to him and he to it. If I Were Another is a tribute to Darwish's lyric epic, and to the essence of his "late style," the culmination of an entire lifein dialogue that merges the self with its stranger, its other, in continuous renewal within the widening periphery of hu man grace. The two collections of long poems that begin this book, I See What I Want (1990) and Eleven Planets (1992), mark the completion of Darwish's middle period. In them he wove a "space forthe jasmine" and (super)imposed it on the oppressive exclusivity of historical and antinomian narrative. In 1990, between the personal and the collective, "birth [was] a riddle," but in 1996 birth became "a cloud in [Darwish's] hand." And by Mural's end (2000), there was "no cloud in [his] hand I no eleven planets I on [his] temple." Instead there was the vowel in his name, the letter Waw, "loyal to birth wherever possible." By 2005, Darwish would return, through the medium or vision of almond blossoms, the flowerof his birth in March, to revisit the memory and meaning of place, and the "I" in place, through several other selves, in Exile, his last collected long poem. Dialectic, lyric, and drama opened up a new space fortime in his poetry, a "lateness" infusedwith age and survival while it does not "go gentle into that g�)Odnight:' VIII - It is necessary to read Darwish's transformationof the long poem over the most ac complished fifteen years of his life: the shift in diction froma gnomic and highly metaphoric drive to a stroll of mixed and conversational speech; the paradoxes be tween private and public, presence and absence; the bond between the individual and the earth, place, and nature; the illumination of the contemporary Sufiaes thetic method as the essence of poetic knowledge, on the interfaceof reason and the sensory, imagination and the real, the real and its vanishing where the "I" is interchangeable with (and not split from) its other; and his affair with dialogue and theater (tragic, absurd, or otherwise) to produce a lyric epic sui generis. If Dar wish's friendthe great critic Edward Said had a leaning toward the novel, Darwish was undoubtedly a playwright at heart. This had been evident since his youth, whether in poems like A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies (written in 1967 and now a part of the Norwegian live-film-performance Identity of the Soul [2008], in which Darwish is featured)or Writing to the Light of a Rifie(1970), or in his bril liant early prose book and its title piece, Diaries of Ordinary Sorrow (1973). Yet Darwish was never comfortablewith looking back at his glorious past. He was an embodiment of exile, as both existential and metaphysical state, beyond the merely external, and beyond metaphor, in his interior relations with self and art. Naturally, and perhaps reflexively,Darwish expressed a fleetingreservation at my desire to include here the two older volumes I See What I Wa nt and Eleven Planets. True, the two are linked to a larger historical reel than is Mural or Exile, since the former volumes were written during the firstPalestinian Intifada, which began in 1987, a major definingevent in the identity and hopes of a dispossessed people, and in response to the spectacle of the peace accords Darwish knew would follow.