The Adam of Two Edens: Poems

Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ), Wntr, 2002 by Moustafa Bayoumi

Mabmoud Darwish. The Adam of Two Edens: Poems. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press and Jusoor, 2000. 206 pages. Paper$16.95.

This essential collection could not have appeared at a more crucial time. As the Aqsa intifada rages on against the Israeli occupation, and the brutal assault against Palestinian life bulldozes forward--claiming hundreds of lives and thousands of causalities--the need for representing the shattered rhythms, broken cadences, and tragic realities of Palestinian life in English mounts. In Arabic, the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish has long done just that. For thirty years, his legendary verse has articulated the ache of exile with an uncompromising iconoclasm that breathes his own unique vision into the collective traumas of Palestinian existence. Amazingly popular (especially considering the density of his poetry), Darwish is frequently recognized as the national poet of Palestine. In English, however, his verse, like Palestinian representations of themselves in that language, is marked more by its absence than its presence (Darwish himself knows the absurdities of living in the absent present: after his family was driven from the Galilee village of Birweh in 1948, taking refuge in Lebanon, they reentered Israel "illegally" in 1949, behind the official Israeli census, and their legal status, like thousands of other Palestinians, was reduced to the Orwellian doublespeak of "present-absentee-alien."). It is not that Darwish's name is not known in English-language circles but that his poetry largely is not. Except for a few shorter and direct poems ("Passport" say, or "Identity Card"), the availability of his oeuvre in English has remained thin. This anthology, edited by Munir Akash of Jusoor, an Arab American magazine, begins to rectify this imbalance.

Darwish's poetry has been translated in over twenty-two languages, and he remains a major public figure not just in the Arab world but also in France, where he received the Knight of Arts and Belles Letters in 1997. This collection, comprising poems previously published in Jusoor, is significant for English language readers however, for the demands that Darwish placed on their appearance. Akash tells us that Darwish readily agreed to the anthology with the proviso that an American poet be brought in who could "give the translation a single, consistent tone" and give to the poems "the right spirit as modem American poems" (p. 9). The American poet Daniel Moore was recruited for the task, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy Peters added their editorial skills. The primary translations were done by a series of talented Arabic speakers, including Sinan Antoon, Sargon Boulos, and the venerable Husain Haddawi. The result is not to make Darwish sound like Galway Kinnell but to be able to translate the quest for "los t realms" that so characterizes Darwish's tone into the particular staccato of English.

The collection succeeds. Darwish's poetry has been growing in its abstractness over the years, yet somehow it remains intimate and revelatory. Here, we get the broad palette that Darwish draws on to construct his verse. Living between East and West, his poems coexist within Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, American, Sumerian, Babylonian and other legends and pasts. All the sources are evident but none overwhelms the other. One of the defining features of Darwish's verse has always been his ability to remain a steadfastly Arab poet while absorbing freely from the myths that surround him. Every one is fitted into Darwish's own expansive, individual, and iconoclastic universe, but a general feeling of unease and loss pervades. "Since the Tatars returned on our horses, / The Babylonian moon has established a kingdom / in the trees of night / that is no longer ours" (p. 105), he writes in "A Horse For the Stranger." The vision is always distinctly his own and simultaneously that of his people, expressed in a modernist Ara bic verse of dislocated lines, where the caesuras break freely on their own logic of loss.

One of the most welcome additions to the English canon is Darwish's brilliant "Speech of the Red Indian." "You who have come from beyond the seas, bent on war, / don't cut down the tree of our names, / don't gallop your flaming horses across / the open plains" (p. 132). Here is the fiercely declamatory style made famous by Darwish, full of all the elective affinities of different histories of dispossession. The tragedies connect in tempo as well as concept, as Darwish has the Native American echo Quranic verse: "You have your god and we have ours, / you have your religion and we have ours. / Don't bury your God / in books that back up your claim of land over land"(p. 132), Darwish writes. Similarly, the fall of Granada inhabits Darwish's historical imagination out of the same feeling of empathy and kinsbip with the modernist Andalusian poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca: "The keys belong to me, as well as the minarets and lamps. / I even belong to myself. / I'm the Adam of Two Edens lost to me twice. / Expel me slowly / Kill me slowly / With Garcia Lorca / under my olive tree" (p. 154).