that the work remain true to itself, independent of its critical or public reception. He has, as an artist, repeatedly confounded expectations, without shirking the role assigned to him by his peoples’ historical experience. Perhaps no poet in our time has borne this weight: to be the esteemed and revered voice of a people, while remaining true to poetry itself, however hermetic and interior—to be at once culturally multiple and spiritually singular. His poetry is both the linguistic fruit of an internalized collective memory and an impassioned poetic response to his long absorption of regional and international poetic movements. As much as he is the voice of the Palestinian diaspora, he is the voice of the fragmented soul.
It is the soul of Palestine that Darwish has made resonant in his work, giving it presence in the midst of suffering and hardship. Moving from city to city, exile to exile, he has written out of a distinctly Palestinian sensibility and conscience, out of the richness of Palestine’s cultural past and a belief in its common destiny. At the same time, he has become a poet and citizen of the world.
Darwish’s poetic fraternity includes Federico García Lorca’s canto hondo (deep song), Pablo Neruda’s bardic epic range, Osip Mandelstam’s elegiac poignancy, and Yehuda Amichai’s sensitive lyric responsiveness to the contemporary history of the region. As a poet of exilic being, he resembles C. P. Cavafy, and shares with other poet-exiles of the past century a certain understanding of the exilic condition of literary art. Although his later collections became more universal in outlook, they are also a powerful outcry and statement of anguish—both of the topography of the soul and the calamity of his people. They lament the degeneration of the human condition and strive to stimulate latent forces to create a new destiny. If any particular obsession is sustained throughout his oeuvre, it would be the question of subjectivity itself, not only the mutability of identity, but its otherness. It is the spiritual dimension of what was, unfortunately, paradise, that he has most sustained in his life and work.
“I have found that the land is fragile,” he said in Palestine As Metaphor:
and the sea, light; I have learned that language and metaphor are not enough to restore place to a place. . . . Not having been able to find my place on earth, I have attempted to find it in History, and History cannot be reduced to a compensation for lost geography. It is also a vantage point for shadows, for the self and the Other, apprehended in a more complex human journey. . . . Is this a simple, artistic ruse, a simple borrowing? Or is it despair taking shape? The answer has no importance. The essential thing for me is that I have found a greater lyrical capacity, a passage from the relative to the absolute, an opening for me to inscribe the national within the universal, for Palestine not to be limited to Palestine, but to establish its aesthetic legitimacy in a greater human sphere. 1
It is our hope that this volume, and the recently published collection, The Adam of Two Edens,2 will extend his readership in the English-speaking world in this time of calamity in the poet’s homeland.
Munir Akash
Carolyn Forché
Bethesda, Maryland
August 2001
1. Mahmoud Darwish, La Palestine comme métaphore Entretiens (Paris: Sindhad, Actes Sud, 1997), 25.
2. Mahmoud Darwish, The Adam of Two Edens, ed. and with introduction by Munir Akash (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000).
Foreword
Without doubt Unfortunately, It Was Paradise is the first book to effectively introduce Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry into English. Considering that Darwish’s literary magnificence had been recognized the world over for decades prior to Paradise’s publication, this is quite an accomplishment within the English language, a breakthrough that should not be overlooked or understated. Circumstance played no small part in the easing of the decades-long negligence of Darwish’s (and Palestinian) art in the English-speaking world in general, and America in particular. The doors opened wider after the Second Intifada erupted in 2000, and were thrust ajar after September 2001. The Lannan award that same year was affirmative. Darwish received it for cultural freedom, alongside Edward Said’s award for lifetime achievement. Paradise was there, at the cusp, “like a sunflower,” “between entry and exit.” I remember hearing about the Lannan award, the announcement of the book that would follow, and Carolyn Forché’s involvement with it while I was in Zambia on medical work at that time. I had taken with me two Darwish books in Arabic to further examine the possibilities of translating his work. Nothing could have energized or spurred me on more than that news did. Political disasters notwithstanding, it seemed a prominent award and an important American poet had to offer their credibility to a major world poet for English readers to take notice. It’s ironic that Darwish would thus find himself in the company of Neruda, whose poetry did not receive much meaningful attention in English before the last decade of his life.
Since Paradise was published, a lush field of fantastic translations of Darwish’s books has given new meaning to Darwish’s beautiful phrase “my absence is entirely trees.” Most of these translations are of late works that cover the last ten or fifteen years of his forty years of writing. Most of the books are translations of single volumes. Two gather several full-length collections that display varying aspects of Darwish’s aesthetic over a short period. Two are bilingual. Each is the work of a single translator. Paradise remains the only book of selected poems of Darwish’s work in English to span his whole life. Its most immediate predecessor, The Adam of Two Edens (2000), which was created in similar manner to that of Paradise, utilizing multiple translators and a unifying editorial poetic signature, is less comprehensive. Paradise begins with twenty-five poems, exactly the first half of Fewer Roses, the book Darwish rightly considered his defining shift from the local to the global in 1986. The universal for Darwish became the private state of being, of exile not as nostalgia or status quo but as some kind of roadmap for the future of the human condition. Poetry turned into a particular type of land: one in preparation to become a place of wandering, an embodiment of nonplace.
As Paradise journeys through Darwish’s poetry, it returns us in its closing section to his beginnings. “A Soldier Dreams of White Tulips” announces Darwish’s early mastery of dialogue, and its significance reaches past the aesthetic and into political and intellectual vision. That poem was reenacted in Identity of the Soul, a 2008 multimedia art project that featured the poetry of Ibsen and of Darwish himself, and the performance of Vanessa Redgrave. Originally, the poem was written overnight in 1967, after a conversation Darwish had with his Israeli friend, the now well-known scholar Shlomo Sand. Of course, Darwish’s vision of dialogue would go on to develop into an astonishing assortment over the decades, whether in dramatist (“The Hoopoe”) or narrative (“The Everlasting Indian Fig”) mode. Similarly, the 1977 elegy to his fellow Palestinian poet Rashed Hussein, “As Fate Would Have It,” would affirm a lifetime negotiation with elegy, its private and public forms, and its interchangeability with praise. The prose quartet, “Four Personal Addresses,” is the first of its kind in Darwish’s oeuvre. Its third section examines his first encounter with ailment and death, and emerged out of combined grave heartache and heart disease at barely forty years of age: “In which heart was I struck?” he asks. The poem’s opening line, “When the earth presses against me, the wind spins me around,” pays tribute to al-Khansa, the most famous of ancient Arab women poets, as well as to al-Mutanabbi in its predicate phrase. In fact, Darwish returns to al-Khansa in Fewer Roses, in “Earth Presses against Us,” a poem from which Edward Said draws the title of his 1986 book on Palestinian representation, After the Last Sky: “Where should we go after the last border? Where should birds fly after the last sky?”
Darwish’s dialectic is ultimately a linguistic meditation as well as medication, synthesis and flow, memory and forgetfulness. It’s hard not to think of Paul Celan on several levels while reading “Four Personal Addresses” or, indeed, much of Darwish’s poetry. Despite the apparent difference in lyric verdancy and agency between the two, it
