|
|
English edition
Apr
2009
204 pp.
Hardbound
15X23 cm
$22.95
LE 90.00
ISBN
978 977 416 272 5
For sale only in the Middle East
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Butterfly’s Burden
Modern Arabic Poetry
|
E-mail to a friend
Print
|
Mahmoud Darwish
Translated by
Fady Joudah
Winner of the Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation
Mahmoud Darwish (1942–2008) was the poetic voice of the Palestinian people. One of the most acclaimed contemporary poets in the Arab world, he was also a prominent spokesman for human rights who spent most of his life in exile.
In his early work, the features of his beloved land—its flowers and birds, towns and waters—were an integral part of poems witnessing a string of political and humanitarian tragedies afflicting his people. In his later books, his writing stands at the border of earth and sky, reality and myth, poetry and prose.
Returning to Palestine in 1996, he settled in Ramallah, where he surprised his huge following in the Arab world by writing a book of love, The Stranger’s Bed (1998), singing of love as a private exile, not about exile as a public love. A State of Siege (2002) was his response to the second Intifada, his testament not only to human suffering but to art under duress, art in transmutation. The 47 short lyrics of Don’t Apologise for What You’ve Done (2003) form a transfiguring incarnation or incantation of the poet after the carnage. The Butterfly’s Burden is a translation of these three books.
Mahmoud Darwish was born in 1942 in the village of al-Birweh in Galilee, Palestine. His family fled to Lebanon in 1948 when the Israeli Army destroyed their village, returning secretly to the newly created state of Israel after a year. From 1970 to 1996 he lived in Moscow, Cairo, Beirut, Cyprus, and Paris, finally settling in Ramallah. A member of the PLO’s Executive Council, he wrote the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence, subsequently resigning in opposition to the Oslo accords. His many honors include the Lenin Peace Prize, the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom, the French medal for Knight of Arts and Letters, and the Prinz Claus Award from the Netherlands. He published over twenty books of poetry before his death in 2008.
Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American, physician and member of Doctors Without Borders. His first collection of poetry, The Earth in the Attic, won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. He was awarded the 2008 Saif Ghobash–Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for his translation of The Butterfly’s Burden.
|
|
Reviews
|
|
“Darwish has not only remade a national consciousness; he has reworked language and poetic tradition to do so.”—Fiona Sampson, The Guardian
“Darwish and his work contained multitudes and vast horizons, at the heart of which was Palestine in and of itself, but also Palestine as a metaphor for love, exile, and the injustice and pain of our contemporary moment.”—Sinan Antoon, Al-Ahram Weekly
“Mahmoud Darwish is one of the two or three most admired and widely read poets from the Arab world. While unequivocally anchored in the present, his poems draw on the traditions of al-Andalus, the near-mythical site of flowering Arab, European, and Sephardic Jewish art and science—as much in Darwish’s re-creation and renewal of Arabic prosody and inweaving of legend as in his fraternal openness to and exchange with poets like Ritsos and Neruda. In the brilliant, bilingual poet Fady Joudah, Darwish has found a translator capable of rendering in English his unflinching, questing, and above all loving poems.”—Marilyn Hacker
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
