14 - 20 June 2001
Issue No.538
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 June 2001 Issue No.538 |
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Darwish on English terrain
The Adam of Two Edens: Poems, Mahmoud Darwish, Munir Akash and Daniel Moore eds.,
Syracuse: Jusoor and Syracuse University Press, 2000. pp206It would be no exaggeration to say, with Munir Akash, editor of Mahmoud Darwish's The Adam of Two Edens: Poems in his introduction to the volume, that "any consideration of world poetry in the inter-millennial era will have to take Mahmoud Darwish's poetry into account." A six-year-old child in 1948 when the Israeli army occupied Birwe -- the village in which he was born and from which he was forced to flee with his family -- Darwish in his poetry "elevates the intensification of local tragedy to the level of the universal." He is incontestably, in terms both of the judgement of literary critics and of popular appeal, one of the greatest living poets in the Arabic language, the mother tongue of hundreds of millions of Arabs, and the language of worship for many times that number of Muslims. Therefore, a Darwish anthology such as Akash's -- comprising 13 poems, worked into English by eight translators, and taken from three collections, but mostly from Why Have You Left the Horse Alone? (1995) -- is undoubtedly a welcome contribution to the world of literature.
Darwish's first collection of poetry, Leaves of Olives, was published in 1964. He has been writing prolifically and steadily since (over 20 volumes of poetry, in addition to political and literary-critical writing) -- and has been gracing refugee camps, universities and conference halls with poetry readings that have consistently been to packed houses. Darwish has never relied on "go-betweens," whether publications or critics, to bring his poetry to the public. The popularity of his poems with blue-collar worker or refugee and cosmopolitan literary critic alike is a singular achievement, probably without contemporary comparison. Yet, it is precisely this popularity, Akash argues, that has constituted the most difficult challenge for Darwish to develop as a poet. "His people love him," Akash writes, "they chant his odes in their fields, in their schools, on their marches and in their miserable tin shanty-towns. But many of his admirers think they possess him..." Having become an incarnation of the Arabic word, almost the embodiment when he reads of the language itself, or of the semantic air breathed in daily by speakers of Arabic, the poetic corpus called "Darwish" is, indeed, often viewed as public, communal property by those who have been moved and uplifted by it.
"If," Akash goes on, "one reads [Darwish's] first [1964] collection [...] and then skips to [the 1990s] Eleven Planets and Why Have You Left the Horse Alone?, one can easily note the tremendous development this poet had made in his long and passionate career." He adds, however, that "many of Darwish's first and most popular poems, more slogan- like than poetic, hardly seem to qualify as poems at all," and here it is possible to disagree. The sixties and seventies were a different universe, dictating a poetry significantly different from that produced in the nineties. To some contemporary ears, The Beatles and Bob Dylan sound like country bumpkins. Even if it does not foreground the fact in the title or in the introduction, this anthology -- the cover of which bears a lone, drooping, pinkish flower set against a starry sky -- limits itself to Darwish's post- Madrid and post-Oslo work. Limiting the scope of the anthology in this way has meant greater focus, and in his selection Akash has given us an authoritative account of Darwish's 1990s poetry, most of the poems included dealing with "lost realms" and "the oppressive disaster of exile."
Akash comments that "one of the oldest 'lost realms', one that by its nature is more permanently lost to us than any other, is Eden, the earthly paradise, the realm of primeval innocence. [However,] for Darwish, this paradise has been lost twice....and locating the physical Eden [the "real villages, real cities, real civilizations and real people" to which many of the poems refer] is only part of Darwish's quest." For Eden is as much an idea as a place, an idea of birthright in the minds of the "real people who were expelled from it ... When even the idea itself is lost, one finds oneself in a living Hell, which is one of the underlying themes of Darwish's poetic oeuvre." Indeed, the strength and importance of the poems included in this anthology, for example, "The Well," "Speech of the Red Indian" and "Eleven Planets in the Last Andalusian Sky," is that "the wretched of the earth are reflected in them and that every word of them is drawn from the memory of someone who looks back and laments" this loss of Eden.
This "someone," this poetic "I" that thus looks back, however, is more than an individual, being not so much a Hölderlin (to borrow a figure recalled in the introduction), or a Rimbaud (to borrow one used in the poems), but instead a communal "I." Indeed, Akash comments on precisely this quality of the poetic personae used in Darwish's poems when he writes that "the sense that we are actively participating in the image-making of a master forger of myths is what brings the poems of Darwish to life."
His mythopoeic imagination, articulating a sense that In the Beginning there was Palestine and challenging the programmed erasure of Palestinian memory, draws on matter from many different places and times. Darwish's newer poems, for example, those included in this anthology, contain "a wealth of evocative artifacts buried just beneath the surface. In some areas we can still see the evidence of past habitation, while in others there is nothing but a thin beam of hope and expectation."
Among such geographical or historical terrains are Hispano-Muslim culture, biblical and Qur'anic texts, pre- Islamic, matriarchal and Greater-Syrian mythology and Native-American experience. Akash emphasises the matriarchal mythological element in the poems, perhaps in order to present Darwish in an acceptable light to readers who might think nationalist struggle to be inevitably intertwined with masculinist ideology. As for the history of the Native-Americans, he comments that Darwish's encounter with "the Native-American attachment to Mother Nature" has enabled the poet "to respiritualize the Palestinian universe in a healing way, with a repatriated attachment to Mother Nature."
Where, then, are the jubilatory poems celebrating the fedayeen for which Darwish is more usually known? Akash answers this question by saying that "after the successful cloning of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Gaza, Darwish was forced to reconsider his very notion of resistance as well as that of Resistance Poetry in general." "With an endangered memory, one culture having replaced another wholesale," Akash writes,"resistance becomes existential, calling for a more sophisticated form of resistance than merely against occupation." "As with the Native Americans, with the threat of 'internal occupation,' the whole world of Darwish has changed. All things," Akash argues, "have become subject to uncertainty; memory of place is uncertain, endurance of place is uncertain, even the meaning of place is uncertain. Why did the martyrs fall? Silence. Nothing is certain." Perhaps not for Darwish's lettered admirers; perhaps not for Darwish the poet. But who knows what kind of old- fashioned certainty graces the spirit of those who have no choice but (and chose) to fall?
Translating poetry is an agonisingly difficult task, especially if the poet in question, one with a "symphonically structured sense of cadence," is also one of the grandest in a language where "recitation," and hence aural appreciation, has traditionally been related to the experience of meaning. Moreover, Darwish's tone in Arabic manages brilliantly to combine defiance with pleading, a register that is difficult to maintain in translation, his English voice often falling somewhere on either side of the divide. In order to clarify an ambiguous pronominal moment in a poem, the translators in this collection have sometimes taken liberties with stanza breaks; italics have also sometimes been used for the sake of "clarity" (where clarity may not necessarily have been called for) where there were none in the Arabic edition.
That said, the English versions of Darwish in this anthology testify to the poetic sensibility of each of the eight translators. Most difficult of all to translate perhaps, and as a result of the word's different resonance across cultures, is that tiniest of pronouns "I." Within Darwish's English "I," as that is presented here, there are French Symbolist poets, including Rimbaud, and there is mid-Eliot, early Yeats and Whitman. But there is also the Arabic Darwish, one of the most inspiring poets of the Arabic language, who, thanks to anthologies such as this one, may now be encountered on English terrain.
Reviewed by Nur Elmessiri
Be a string, water, to my guitar
Be a string, water, to my guitar,
Mahmoud Darwish
Conquerors come, conquerors go...It's getting hard to remember my face in the mirrors.
Be memory for me so I can see what I've lost.Who am I after these paths of exodus?
I own a boulder that bears my name
on a tall bluff overlooking what has come to an end.
Seven hundred years escort me beyond the city walls.
Time turns around in vain to save my
past from a moment that gives birth
to the history of my exile
in others and in myself.Be a string, water, to my guitar.
Conquerors come, conquerors go...
heading south as nations decompose
on the compost of change.I know who I was yesterday,
but who will I be tomorrow
under the Atlantic flags of Columbus?Be a string to my guitar, water, be a string.
There is no Egypt in Egypt, no
Fez in Fez, and Syria is too far away.
No hawk on the flag of my people,
no river running east of a palm trees besieged
by the Mongols' swift horses.In which Andalusia did I meet my end?
Here, in this place?
Or there?I know I've died, leaving behind what is
best of what is mine in this place: my past.I've got nothing left but my guitar.
Be a string, water, to my guitar.Conquerors come, conquerors go.
Extract from Darwish's poem "Eleven Planets in the Last Andalusian Sky", anthologized in The Adam of Two Edens, translated by Clarissa Burt.
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