There’s a really lovely article in the last issue of Harper’s on Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (thanks for the tip, Matt). It’s not available to non-subscribers, so I’m cutting and pasting. And honestly, Harper’s is a great magazine and this article is just one more reason to
Unbeliever in the impossible:
The poetry of Mahmoud Darwish
By Robyn Creswell
He died of a broken heart, far from home. That is the sentimental version, not entirely untrue. Mahmoud Darwish, widely acknowledged as the national poet of Palestine, died last August following open-heart surgery at a hospital in Houston, Texas. After three days of official mourning in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority organized a state funeral in Ramallah, where the body was laid to rest. The ceremonies were carried live on Al Jazeera and included eulogies by PA President Mahmoud Abbas and fellow poet Samih al-Qasim. Listening to those speeches—conventionally bombastic and anodyne—one couldn’t help remembering Darwish’s more mischievous imagining of his own funeral in his memoirMemory for Forgetfulness. Written in 1986, the book recounts a single day in Beirut during the summer of 1982, when the Israeli bombardment was especially heavy and death was very much on the poet’s mind. “I want a funeral with an elegant coffin, so I can peek out at the mourners,” Darwish thinks, listening to the bombs drop and savoring the anticipated pleasures of life after death: wreaths of red and yellow roses, a smooth-voiced master of ceremonies, broadcast recordings of his poems. But then, lying in the coffin, he hears the whispers of the bereaved:
“He was a womanizer.” “His clothes were much too fancy.” “The carpets in his house—you’d sink into them up to your knees!” “He had a mansion on the Côte d’Azur, a villa in Spain, and a secret bank account in Zurich.”… “We don’t know if he had a yacht in Greece, but he had enough seashells in his house to build a refugee camp.” “He lied to women.” “The poet is dead and his poems died with him. What’s left of him? His days are over. We’re through with his legend.”11. The titles above are the best and most recent translations of Darwish into English. He has had many different translators, and the quality of these texts is uneven. In the interest of consistency, I have provided my own translations.
Darwish was indeed a legend. He became famous while still very young as “the poet of the resistance”; later on, his books sold in the millions and were translated into dozens of languages; his public readings filled soccer stadiums and his poems were set to music by the Arab world’s greatest performers. But all legends end in gossip. In Darwish’s vignette, the rumormongers strike before the body is even in the ground. Their reproaches are in fact a collection of lies and cruel half-truths. Darwish did not own mansions or yachts, but he was for a long time associated with the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose corruption, by the time Darwish wrote his memoir, was already apparent. He was not a European playboy but was by all accounts, including his own, very fond of women. He left Israel for good in 1971—living in Moscow, Cairo, and Beirut before settling for a long stay in Paris—a departure that some Palestinians, especially those who remained behind, considered a betrayal. He wrote for more than forty years from the heart of a conflict that never left the headlines, and he could escape neither the eulogies nor the resentments, nor his own unsparing self-criticism. What’s left of him, beyond the legends and the gossip, is the poetry.
Continue reading Mahmoud Darwish, “Unbeliever in the Impossible”