Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?

by Mahmoud Darwish

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  INTRODUCTION

  I See My Ghost Coming from Afar…

  I. ICONS OF LOCAL CRYSTAL

  A Cloud in My Hand

  Villagers, Without Evil…

  Night of the Owl

  The Eternity of the Prickly Pear

  How Many Times Shall Things Be Over?

  To My End And to Its End…

  II. ABEL’S SPACE

  The Oud of Isma’il

  The Strangers’ Walk

  Raven’s Ink

  The Tatars’ Swallow

  The Train Went by

  III. CHAOS AT THE ENTRANCE OF JUDGMENT DAY

  The Well

  Like the ‘Nūn; in Surrat ‘al-Rahman’

  Houriyyah’s Teachings

  Ivory Combs

  Phases of Anat

  The Death of the Phoenix

  IV. A ROOM FOR TALKING TO THE SELF

  Poetic Steps

  From the Rumiyyat of Abu Firas al-Hamadani

  From Sky to her Sister Dreamers Pass

  Said the Traveller to the Traveller: We Shall not Return as…

  Rhyme for the Mu’allaqat

  The Sparrow, As It Is, As It Is…

  V. RAIN OVER THE CHURCH TOWER

  Helen, What Rain

  A Night Which Flows from the Body

  For the Gypsy, an Experienced Sky

  First Exercises on a Spanish Guitar

  Seven Days of Love

  VI. RING THE CURTAIN DOWN…

  The Testimony of Bertolt Brecht before a Military Court

  A Disagreement, Non-Linguistic, with Imru’ al-Qais

  Successions for Another Time

  …When He Walks Away

  BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  On a visit to Mahmoud Darwish at his flat in Amman I carried with me a small tape recorder with the intention of recording him reading two poems: ‘How Many Times Shall Things Be Over?’ and ‘To My End and to Its End’. Mahmoud was courteous enough to acquiesce to my demand, which I had thought perhaps too much to ask, simply because he used to recite his poetry before a large audience (sometimes thousands) and at a spacious place! The first poem expresses the sense of betrayal caused by the agents of the 1948 war, which consequently forced the poet and his family to leave their home and take shelter in the neighbouring country, Lebanon. Mahmoud renders his father’s recollection of the experience not ‘in tranquility’ but from the most upsetting situation in which he and his family suddenly found themselves caught. It was a harsh summer for the Darwish family to live as refugees in Lebanon, scanning their eyes across the border to their deserted home with ‘the horse left alone’ and ripe crops of the summer season left uncollected for the first time. The other poem is an account of the horrible trip they decided to take back during the night, stealing across the borders towards their home. The trip is obviously very dangerous, as it would cost them their life if they were spotted by the border police, but luckily they made it. On various occasions later in life, Mahmoud declared that the experience of crossing the borders on foot in the heart of darkness had been deeply carved in his memory. The title of this volume is derived from this experience of interpersonality included in the two poems mentioned above.

  Listening to Mahmoud Darwish reciting the two poems one might assume that the poems were written by the six-year-old child rather than by the mature poet, for the eloquence of the poems makes you visualize the event of lyricism as evidence rather than lyricism contrived in abstract by words. In Pound’s comment on poetry and poets (in a letter to Kate Buss 9th March 1916) ‘The poem is not so much the expression of a lyrical state as evidence for such a state. The poet is out to avoid at all costs the poetry that is an “asylum for [the] affections”.’ In Age of Iron Coetze similarly tells us that the purpose of his narrative is not to solicit pity but to help us see things as they happen. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry falls into the realm of this kind of objectivity, presumably articulated by Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’.

  After I had translated the two poems into English, I showed them to Mahmoud. It seemed he had just received a translation of Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? His response was: ‘the horse left alone has not been fortunate enough to receive a translation I favour, despite the fact that it is my most favourable collection of poetry’. He continued to say that he was not even sent a proof copy to read! I was not in a position to make any comment, simply because I did not know the edition he was talking about, not having seen the translation to which he was referring. In the course of our conversation he suggested that I could try to translate the volume in question, and I considered the offer a privilege, adding to the previous privilege I had of translating Almond Blossoms and Beyond and Absent Presence. He actually read those proofs word by word, and I still have his handwritten remarks made on the rough copy he used to read the texts.

  * * *

  Here I am then, with this translation created as a homage to Mahmoud Darwish, rather than as an attempt to be an improvement on any other translation available. Needless to say that all translations are defective in one way or another. The redeeming feature of any new translation is that it forms an open invitation for a further different translation advanced to the reader.

  It may be worthwhile remembering that Mahmoud Darwish was never keen on having his poetry translated and he simply prided himself on writing in Arabic with no eye on a non-Arab reader. Once he was asked whether he would like to read his poetry in translation before an audience who didn’t know Arabic. His answer was ‘I only read my own poetry.’ Somehow Mahmoud felt that reciting his poetry in translation himself would be an act of betrayal to the identity of his poetry. In March 2008 Mariam, Edward Said’s widow, came to Amman bearing a message for Mahmoud from the organizing committee of the annual lecture in memory of Said. Mahmoud was happy to accept the invitation (Mahmoud and Edward were good friends) and to read the obituary poem he had written in Arabic (titled ‘Counterpoint’) on that sad occasion in 2003. When Mariam Said suggested to him that he might be asked to recite the poem in English he turned to me and said that it ought to be read by the translator (the poem is included in Almond Blossoms and Beyond).

  Ironically Mahmoud had to go to Houston to have his voice silenced instead of going to New York to make his voice heard in recital of ‘Counterpoint’ (the other title of the poem is ‘Contrapuntal’: a term Said favoured). The poem itself with the two versions of the title is ironical. There is consolation, however, in Roland Barthes’s most popular ‘The Death of the Author’ theory with its implication that texts in all languages survive their author.

  No doubt Mahmoud’s poetry will survive the poet’s death and challenge time and place.

  On a visit to his family, Mahmoud was asked by his fellow-Palestinians living in Galilee to recite ‘Identity Card’, a very popular poem he wrote relatively early in his life which has become almost a national anthem not only for Palestinians, but also for Arabs as well. His answer was that the poem was written to address a different audience!

  Yet the other reason for avoiding reciting that poem in public (and I heard him turn down the same offer on various occasions) was his desire to draw the attention of the public to the fact that his poetry developed a great deal after writing that poem. The straightforward impact on his Arab audience in particular made some people identify Mahmoud Darwish with that poem, as if he were to become the poet of ‘The Identity Card’.

  While Mahmoud Darwish had no objection to any translation found reasonably satisfactory, a translation falling short of his expectation would make him outraged. I never wanted to expre
ss my views about the translations of his poetry already submitted to him and then passed over to me afterwards, as I believed that any translation, whatever its limitations, is in itself a good gesture and it can probably help in widening the circle of his readership. I kept some of those rejected translations and I still remember how some of them provoked his deep anger.

  The several sessions held together at his flat to discuss my translation of Almond Blossoms and Beyond and Absent Presence assured me of Mahmoud’s remarkable command of language and his profound sense of literary judgement. In the long discussions we had, Mahmoud demonstrated particular appreciation for the task of translation. He never insisted on advancing what he believed to be a better or best alternative to the translation made available to him. On one occasion I complained to him about a poem included in Almond Blossoms and Beyond. The poem is ‘Tuesday, A Bright Day’ where I was unable to identify the person affectionately celebrated in the poem. His immediate response was that he should have done something to make it less ambiguous. He even went as far as suggesting adding some clue to the poem to make it more intelligible! The poet in question turned out to be Nizar Qabbani.

  Mahmoud Darwish was seriously engaged in Arabic tradition: classical and modern; from Al-Mutanabbi (his guru) to Nizar Qabbani. Besides this, he was well-versed in European modernism and postmodernism; and this perhaps gave his poetry a complex ‘structure of feeling’, which the reader and translator both find taxing.

  What Mahmoud Darwish would have liked to say to his people and to others, beside his response to their invitation to read ‘The Identity Card’, is that he had travelled with his poetry beyond the borders. All great poetry ‘travels’, to borrow Edward Said’s popular title of ‘Theory Travels’, and it travels in ‘a finer tone’ to help it survive freely in exile instead of finding shelter in ‘asylum’. For Mahmoud, poetry is a global project which aspires to transcend the local limitations. The serious poet is in Mahmoud’s own words ‘always on the move’. He is nomadic. The following example is an example of this phenomena.

  * * *

  In her brilliant book Proust Among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East (2008), Jacqueline Rose puts Mahmoud Darwish among the great figures of world literature and thought: Seamus Heaney, Marcel Proust and Sigmund Freud. First she makes a comparison between Mahmoud Darwish and Heaney in terms of their common practice of seeing poetry and politics as inseparable:

  In The Redress of Poetry, Seamus Heaney talks of those poets for whom the struggle of an individual consciousness toward affirmation merges with a collective straining for self-definition. Mahmoud Darwish is the very model of such a poet whose poetry yearns toward an identity that is never achieved or complete (‘struggle’, ‘towards’ and ‘straining’ being key to Heaney’s description). Not only or always a political poet, yet Darwish saw the link between poetry and politics as unbreakable.

  Rose goes on to quote Darwish:

  ‘No Palestinian poet or writer,’ he stated in an interview in 2000, ‘can enjoy the luxury of severing ties with this level of national work, which is politics.’ Uncompromising in his political vision, Darwish’s crafting of a homeland in language has been one of the strongest rejoinders to dispossession. He is also at every level a poet who crosses borders. This was true literally in that originary flight and return that left his status so eloquent of a people’s predicament:

  absence piling up its chosen objects

  and pitching its eternal tent around us.

  (‘The Owl’s Night’)

  In her quest for Darwish’s poetics Rose examines thoroughly the different translations of the poems. She even turns to native Arabs to help her see more in the problematic matters of rendering the text in English. Rose chooses the ‘Rita Poems’ and ‘A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies’ to demonstrate the sense of connectedness of poetry and politics in Mahmoud’s poetry. With great insight, Rose proceeds to deconstruct the poems in question and comes out with unprecedented perceptive analysis of Mahmoud’s poetry. The result is that ambiguity in Mahmoud’s poetry is largely illuminated (for details see pp. 103–5 of Proust Among the Nations).

  Here, for example, what Rose says about the soldier poem:

  In ‘A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies’, Darwish performs an act of extraordinary poetic and political generosity by granting this one soldier an unusual, unprecedented knowledge of the grave damage that his nation, in the throes of victory, was doing and would go on doing, both to the Palestinians and to itself.

  Rose goes on to read Mahmoud’s poetry in Freudian terms to further demonstrate the soldier predicament:

  ‘She was in the peculiar situation of knowing and at the same time not knowing,’ Freud writes of Fräulein Elizabeth von R in Studies on Hysteria, ‘a situation, that is, in which a psychical group [of ideas] was cut off [from her conscious thoughts].’

  Rose concludes the chapter in which Mahmoud Darwish features largely with a question which I believe would be quite appropriate for a United Nations poster. Here are the words: ‘Why is it so hard for nations and for people to remember what they have done?’

  Jacqueline Rose continues her serious engagement with Mahmoud Darwish further to explore his poetics. In a seminar held in Vienna last January, Jacqueline Rose began and ended her paper with a reference to Mahmoud Darwish (Rose was so kind as to provide me with the script of her paper). What Jacqueline Rose says about Mahmoud Darwish in her book and paper mentioned above, obliquely answers Mahmoud’s friends and people with reference to ‘The Identity Card’: poetry should address (or redress) others rather than locals.

  Using a popular Post-colonial term Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry is an act of ‘writing back’, an act particularly favoured by Darwish’s friend Edward Said. Evidently Mahmoud Darwish is fortunate to have a scholar like Jacqueline Rose to offer us a critique which admirably articulates the poet’s development.

  In ‘A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies’, Jacqueline Rose indirectly, I would like to suggest, reminds us how Mahmoud Darwish ‘writes back’ quite effectively, by shifting the voice of the speaker from the Galilee identity card to a much wider scope of identity, engulfing the whole question of Palestine and endorsed by a humane level of consciousness. The two poems have the common theme of identity, but they approach it from different directions. Yet out of the simultaneity of the narrative emerges a different identity with a new perspective which reaches beyond the official Israeli identity challenged by the Arab speaker, and the Israeli identity itself defied by the Israeli soldier who is disillusioned about an identity tailored for him through a state of war. Jacqueline Rose perceptively captures the voice of the poet who wishes to tell us that identity cannot be forced by the state even on its own citizens who are supposed to be undertaking the mission, believed to be divine by the state. Jacqueline Rose is in full agreement with the poet that any identity based on excluding a portion of its citizens remains, in the long run at least, more of a threat to the state itself than to its individual citizens.

  Instead of writing back to the people of Galilee and reciting to them the repressed identity card of their own, Darwish makes the Israeli soldier write back freely to his own state, to hopefully make it remember as a nation in the world where it stands from its citizens’ point of view!

  It is regrettable that Mahmoud Darwish is not with us to realise how translation can help in promoting his perspective of poetry and to see that translation is itself a powerful aspect of writing back. Would Jacqueline Rose’s critique be possible without an English translation being accessible?

  – Mohammad Shaheen, 2014

  I See My Ghost Coming from Afar…

  Like the balcony of a house, I look at whatever I will

  I look at my friends as they bring the evening post:

  Wine and bread,

  And some novels and records…

  I look at a seagull, and Army lorries

  Which change the trees of this place

  I look at the dog belonging t
o my immigrant neighbour, who came

  From Canada a year and a half ago…

  I look at the name; Abu al-Tayyib al-Mutanabbi’,

  Who travelled from Tiberias to Egypt

  On the horse of song

  I look at the Persian rosebush which climbs

  Over the iron fence

  Like the balcony of a house, I look at whatever I will

  *

  I look at trees which keep night from itself

  And keep the sleep of those who love me dead…

  I look at the wind, which seeks the land of wind

  In itself…

  I look at a woman sunning in herself…

  I look at a procession of ancient prophets

  Who are going up barefoot to Jerusalem

  And I ask: ‘Is there a new prophet

  For this new age?’

  *

  Like the balcony of a house, I look at whatever I will

  I look at my picture, as it flees from itself

  To the stone stairs, carrying my Mother’s handkerchief

  And shaking in the wind: what would happen if I were to become

  A child again? And I returned to you… and you returned to me

  I look at an olive bole which hid Zachariah

  I look at words that are extinct in ‘Lisan al-‘Arab’

  I look at the Persians, the Romans, the Sumerians,

  And the new refugees…

  I look at the necklace of one of Tagore’s poor women

  Ground under the wheels of the handsome prince’s carriage…

  I look at a hoopoe exhausted by the King’s reproaches

  I look at what is beyond Nature: