If I Were Another

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If I Were Another Pub. Date: 3/1/2011 Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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If I Were Another Pub. Date: 10/27/2009 Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Overview

Winner of the PEN USA Literary Award for Translation

Mahmoud Darwish was that rare literary phenomenon: a poet both acclaimed by critics as one of the most important poets in the Arab world and beloved by his readers. His language—lyrical and tender—helped to transform modern Arabic poetry into a living metaphor for the universal experiences of exile, loss, and identity. The poems in this collection, constructed from the cadence and imagery of the Palestinian struggle, shift between the most intimate individual experience and the burdens of history and collective memory.

Brilliantly translated by Fady Joudah, If I Were Another—which collects the greatest epic works of Darwish’s mature years—is a powerful yet elegant work by a master poet that demonstrates why Darwish was one of the most celebrated poets of his time and was hailed as the voice and conscience of an entire people.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

This second volume by the late, great Palestinian poet Darwish (1941–2008) to be translated by Palestinian-American doctor/poet Joudah comprises four nonconsecutive books of longer poems spanning 1990 to 2005. These works follow Darwish's poetic development from a historically focused middle period to the devastatingly personal lyric-epic of his late style. Formally varied—Rubaiyats alternate with sprawling free-form poems, in which prose paragraphs meet both long and short verse lines—Darwish's Sufi-inspired poetry probes, admires, describes, longs for and questions. His subjects are often broad: the inheritance and disinheritance of lands, languages and histories. Sometimes, though, he turns to concrete need, confessing, for example, in “Mural,” his book-length poem about a brush with death: “I want to walk to the bathroom/ on my own.” But Darwish's poems are at their most singular and powerful when he collapses the boundaries between great and small concerns, as when he articulates, “Wars teach us to love detail: the shape of our door keys,/ how to comb our wheat with eyelashes and walk lightly on our land.” The stakes of this work—for Darwish and for his readers—are clear: “O my language,/ help me to adapt and embrace the universe.” (Nov.)

Library Journal

Steeped in the tradition and values of classical Arabian poetry and yet contemporary, fluid, and conversational, Darwish's work has enjoyed both critical acclaim and widespread popularity. His poems are couched in imagery and cadences that evoke the Palestinian struggle, touching on such universal experiences as exile, loss, and identity ("Water, be a string to my guitar. The new conquerors have arrived/ and the old ones have gone. It is difficult to remember my face/ in mirrors. Be my memory that I may see what I have lost"). While writing from under the burden of history and collective memory, Darwish also details the personal and everyday in an individual's life. His language is powerful, memorable: "Rita cracks the walnut of my days, and the fields expand/ and this small earth becomes mine." Arguably the voice and conscience of the Palestinian people, Darwish died in 2008 and at the time was considered one of poetry's few international superstars. VERDICT Highly recommended for all world literature collections, this will also appeal to those interested in the Middle East.—Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780374532475
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date: 3/1/2011
Pages: 240
Sales rank: 1,225,093
Product dimensions: 6.00 (w) x 8.20 (h) x 0.80 (d)

Meet the Author

Mahmoud Darwish was born in the village of al-Birweh in what was then Western Galilee, Palestine. He published more than twenty volumes of poetry and ten volumes of prose. He was the recipient of numerous awards for both his poetry and his political activism.

Fady Joudah is a physician, poet, and translator. His translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden was a finalist for the 2008 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

Introduction: Mahmoud Darwish's Lyric Epic vii

I See What I Want (1990)

Rubaiyat 4

Take Care of the Stags, Father 9

Truce with the Mongols by the Holm Oak Forest 16

A Music Sentence 21

The Tragedy of Narcissus the Comedy of Silver 23

The Hoopoe 42

Eleven Planets (1992)

Eleven Planets at the End of the Andalusian Scene 57

I On the last evening on this earth

II How do I write above the clouds?

III I have behind the sky a sky

IV And I am one of the kings of the end

V One day, I will sit on the sidewalk

VI Truth has two faces and the snow is black

VII Who am I after the stranger's night?

VIII Water, be a string to my guitar

XI In exodus I love you more

X I want from love only the beginning

XI The violins

The "Red Indian's" Penultimate Speech to the White Man 69

A Canaanite Rock in the Dead Sea 78

We will Choose Sophocles 83

Rita's Winter 88

A Horse for the Stranger 94

Mural (2000) 99

Exile (2005)

I Tuesday and the Weather is Clear 149

II Dense Fog over the Bridge 160

III Like a Hand Tattoo in the Jahili Poet's Ode 171

IV Counterpoint 183

Notes 195

Glossary 197

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If I Were Another

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