it in a dreamlike realm. In the translation I adopted the author’s journey on the streets of Beirut, in the present tense, as the reference point for the action.
In his attempt to make the work a perfect portrait of Palestinian experience, Darwish needed a form that could free him from the constraints imposed by form itself. He therefore combined the manner of presentation and the resources of the language in such a way that readers, in reaching for the content, were plunged into the midst of a discourse that was not chronicle, journal, history, memoir, fiction, myth, or allegory but all of them together. The prose poem can embody all of these. It allows the poet to experiment with the form of the sentence, in which the image vies with the syntax, sometimes pushing it beyond its limits. Writing of this sort makes lively reading, but is difficult to translate, and can sometimes lead to obscurity, as in the following example:
A building gulped by the earth: seized by the hands of the cosmic monster lying in ambush for a world that human beings create on an earth commanding no view except of a moon and a sun and an abyss, pushing humanity into a bottomless pit in peering over whose edge we realize we didn’t learn to walk, read, or use our hands except to reach an end that we forget, only to carry on our search for something that can justify this comedy and cut the thread connecting the beginning with the end, letting us imagine we are an exception to the only truth.
In some of Darwish’s sentences, which as we can see here are arranged in complex rhythmic patterns that may turn back upon themselves, there is constant tension between the poetics of the image and the politics of the sentence. The image here propels the sentence toward disintegration into a syntactic arabesque of pure pattern, but is held back by the syntax itself.
It is not only a question of pattern, however. When we put this sentence back in its context, where the poet is describing a large building that had been leveled by a powerful bomb, we can comprehend that the purpose of the complexity is to reach for the sublime by expressing rage through restraint. This art is classical in its impulse and modern in its practice. In my translation I have made every effort to duplicate the poetry of the original prose, even though that may sometimes have stretched the limits of comprehensibility. As Darwish himself says in the book, “On borders, war is declared on borders.” The borders here are not only those between Israel and the Arab countries, but also those of writing itself.
Although Memory for Forgetfulness belongs to Arabic (and now to world) literature, it is also a Palestinian text, rooted in the history, culture, and struggle of the Palestinian people. Darwish’s writing here is liberationist in its impulse and represents an honest attempt to free himself and the reader from all coercive practices, be they political or aesthetic, including those whose boundaries are defined by the processes of reading and writing. As I have tried to show, the domains of the political and the aesthetic are so interwoven in Darwish’s text that freedom from aesthetic coercion represents on his part a conscious act aimed at freedom from political coercion as well. I hope the translation does full justice to the original, with its playfulness, power, and depth, its music and bittersweet humor.
1. Nos. 21–22 (1986):4–96. I have used the accepted transliterated spelling for Arabic names but for other words have adopted a more accurate system, as follows: emphatic consonants are rendered in capitals; the voiced pharyngeal fricative, with a question mark; the voiceless, with H; the glottal stop, with an apostrophe; the voiced dental fricative with “dh” the voiceless palatal fricative, with “sh” the voiced uvular fricative, with “gh” the voiceless, with a “kh” and long vowels, by means of a following colon.
2. Al-Qods Al-Arabi, 17 November 1993.
3. Cf. David Gilmour, Dispossessed: The Ordeal of the Palestinians (London: Sphere Books, 1982), pp. 223–24:
The bombardment of Beirut was one of the most horrific events of recent history. Day after day Israeli gunners sat outside the city lobbing thousands of shells into the densely packed apartment blocks. From the sea the Israeli navy pounded the coastal districts while F16 aeroplanes screeched overhead terrorizing the population and levelling whole buildings. According to the Sunday Times [8 August 1982) among the targets hit by the Israelis in the two months following their arrival in Beirut were “five UN buildings, a hundred and thirty-four embassies or diplomatic residences, six hospitals or clinics, one mental institute, the Central Bank, five hotels, the Red Cross, Lebanese and foreign media outlets and innumerable private homes.” Apart from the six thousand PLO guerillas in the besieged city, there were some half million Lebanese and Palestinian civilians, and every day of the bombardment about two hundred or three hundred of them were killed. Many of them were burned to death by phosphorus bombs. The Canadian ambassador, Theodore Arcand, said [Sunday Times, 8 August 1982] that the destruction was so comprehensive it “would make Berlin of 1945 look like a tea party.”
4. Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), p. 49.
5. Quoted in Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1988), p. 66.
6. Ibid., p. 66.
7. Ibid., p. 70.
8. The ironic view of Palestinian history is not limited to Mahmoud Darwish. Emile Habiby, the major Palestinian novelist, is also ironic in his vision, as is clearly illustrated by the title of his most important work, “The Strange Events Concerning the Disappearance of Said (’The Happy One’) Son of Misfortune, the Optipessimist.” This work is available in English as The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist: A Palestinian Who Became a Citizen of Israel, trans. Salma Jayyusi and Trevor Le Gassick (New York: Vantage Press, 1982).
Edward Said reflects on Palestinian history from the same perspective. In a recent article he says, “What to many Palestinians is either an incomprehensible cruelty of fate or a measure of how appalling are the prospects for settling their claim can be clarified by seeing irony as a constitutive factor in their lives.” To speak of recent Palestinian history in the aesthetic terms of irony, he affirms, “is by no means to reduce or trivialize its force.” More specifically, Palestinian history is characterized by “irony and paradox” in its relation to the Arab states—an aspect of Palestinian existence to which Darwish devotes some of his most trenchant comments in this work. And, most significantly in terms of Darwish’s project in Memory, Palestinian history is also characterized by irony in the encounter with Israel: “Here, then, is another complex irony: how the classic victims of years of anti-semitic persecution and Holocaust have in their nation become the victimizers of another people, who have become therefore the victims of the victims.” See Said’s “Reflections on Twenty Years of Palestinian History,” Journal of Palestine Studies, no. 80 (Summer 1991): 5, 15.
9. Al Karmel, no. 47 (1993): 140; Al-Qods Al-Arabi, 12 February 1993.
Memory for Forgetfulness
August, Beirut, 1982
| | | | | | | | | |
Out of one dream, another dream is born:
—Are you well? I mean, are you alive?
—How did you know I was just this moment laying my head on your knee to sleep?
—Because you woke me up when you stirred in my belly. I knew then I was your coffin. Are you alive? Can you hear me?
—Does it happen much, that you are awakened from one dream by another, itself the interpretation of the dream?
—Here it is, happening to you and to me. Are you alive?
—Almost.
