Selections

“Translated poetry develops the capacity of every language”

I rarely read prefaces by poets, and if I do, it is mainly to celebrate the beautiful disparity between what the poet says about his poem and what the poem says.

But then how do I respond today to the insistent request put to me, namely to present this anthology? Especially since to my mind every anthology amounts to a ruse, to the extent that the person compiling it can do as he thinks fit with his poet: he can preserve the work’s luminous source, leaving aside its shadow, isolate one poem to the detriment of its place within the body of work, keep of a poem only its prosodic path toward poetry, stress images, metaphors, or an atmosphere that favours a particular approach, and, at the end of this subjective process, make an average poet into an exceptional one, or the other way around . . .
An anthology can only reinforce doubts. Is it possible to really know a poet’s universe by his choice of poems? Is it possible to apprehend his world through an anthology, especially one that’s been translated?
Each language has its own system of signs, its own style and structure. The translator is not a ferryman for the meaning of the words but the author of their web of new relations. And he is not the painter of the light part of the meaning, but the watcher of the shadow, and what it suggests.
So the translator of poetry finds himself in the position of parallel poet, freed from the source language and making the host language suffer an identical fate to the one the poem’s author has put his own language through.
It is within this space of liberation from the original work that the translator commits that beautiful and inevitable betrayal which protects the poet’s language from the weight of its own nationality, but also from its dissolution in the language of the translation. And the translated poetry finds itself obliged to preserve as much the universal attributes of the work as the features that point to its specific origins, already expressed in another language structure and a system of its own references.
It is this duality that creates the particular charm of poetry in translation. Whether from a taste for the dialogue between what is common to all languages and what distinguishes each, or a thirst to discover the immense richness and variety of the poetic experience, translated poetry develops the capacity of every language to renew its styles and constructions when listening to the experience of another language.
So we see how an original and creative translator possesses the power to build or to demolish. The translated poem is no longer its author’s sole property but also belongs to the translator, who equally becomes its poet. And from that point on it hardly matters whether the translated piece is superior or inferior to the original.
How then can we trust translated poetry? By stopping at that which it does not unveil, which proceeds behind a mask. By retaining only the shadow which looms behind the words, and perhaps, that distance which betrays its own presence for an instant and then becomes blurred.
How can we trust an anthology in translation? Above all, how can we trust an anthology, like this one, compiled by the poet himself?
In other words: Reader, how can you trust me?

This collection, which is presented as a personal anthology, is in fact not quite that. And had it been entirely up to me, had my freedom been total, I would probably have kept in only the yield of the last two decades. The reason for this is simple. Each of my collections tends to a certain break in the continuity, a demolition of the preceding collection, to the extent that, with each of my new undertakings, I invariably feel the need to develop what until then seemed secondary and marginal, and bring it closer to the centre.
Perhaps this need derives from the fact that I do not live in the river but on its banks, that time teaches me wisdom while history teaches me irony. Unless it is because, as I grow older, I come closer to metaphysical questioning more appropriate to the perplexity of existence and to the desire to protect my language from the rush of present time.

Nevertheless, my public image remains stronger than my anxiety. I am the one designated “the Poet of Palestine”, and I am required to fix my place within the language, to protect my reality from the myth and be the master of each, so as to be both part of history and witness to what it has put me through. This is why my right to a tomorrow demands a revolt against the present as well as a defence of the legitimacy of my existence in the past. So my poem finds itself changed into evidence of existence or nothingness.   
When I began to write, I was consumed with an obsession to tell of my loss, my senses, the limits of my existence – in short, my self, located in its particular environment and geography. I paid scant attention to the fact that my being comprised a collective being. I wished to express myself, dreaming of changing only myself.
But what could I do confronted with the fact that my individual story, the great uprooting of my place, was merged with that of a people? So my readers quite naturally found in my personal voice their personal and collective voices. But when, in prison, I sang of my nostalgia for my mother’s coffee and bread, I was not striving to reach beyond the frontiers of my family environment. And when I sang of exile, the miseries of existence and my thirst for freedom, my intention was not to write “resistance poetry”, as the Arab critic stated at the time, and I did not imagine readers finding in my work an outsize poetic palliative to go on hoping, after the defeat of what was called “the Six Day War”.
When I think of those years again, I see again poetry’s formidable capacity to spread, though it seeks neither solitude nor high fashion, and neither are valid criteria for judging its beauty. But when I think of those people who denigrate “political poetry”, I also know that there are worse things than the latter: the excessive scorn for the political, the deafness to the questions posed by reality and history, and the refusal to participate implicitly in the enterprise of hope.

So this anthology, not intending to deceive either reader or author, will not leave aside my beginnings in favour of my present poetic experience. Equally, I am quite incapable of locating the moment when that wholly relative break occurred in the continuity. I followed an evolution made up of intermingling phases, each carrying the seed of the change to come.
In my poetry I aspire to qualitative breaks. But is it possible to disregard the effects of the accumulation? I do not know. But I see, for example, my period of “exile poems” as the extension of the one that preceded it. As if my personal-collective voice were extending into another territory, one that is larger and more culturally varied. As if my voice, become richer, were bringing its conception of poetry back into question and attempting to draw still closer to the universal poetic experience.
The patience of distance, the view from a certain margin, provide poetry with the chance to lighten the load placed on language by heroic poetry, allowing it to look at itself more innocently and serenely and entrusting it with the heavy responsibility of reviving memory and the elements of a place rid of dust and routine.
I am very sensitive to the changing of the times, to the cadences of the universal poetic language. And I strive restlessly to reach the poem within in its personal life and history and, conjointly, released from them. And I strive restlessly to draw the poem nearer its mythological genealogy, but attempt too to build it a contemporary mythology from its intrinsic components.
But how to realise the journey from the poet’s interiority to his exteriority, then from his exteriority to his interiority? How not to drown in one’s “ego” nor lose it by changing into a spokesman and representative of one’s people?

The origins of poetry are doubtless one: man’s identity, from the exile of his past to his exiled present. Poetry is born of the first astonishments at life, when nascent humanity wondered at the first mysteries of existence. In this way, the universal is, from the very beginning, local.
In this journey which everyone undertakes, between being and universe, in this journey composed of a multitude of tongues, places and levels of evolution, mankind’s poetic experience is unified and achieves a universality freed from the domination of a “metropolis” and the submission of the “provinces”.
But it seems the compass points cannot do without labels.
What does it mean then if I say, for example, that my poetry comes from the South, that it is born of an historical reality in which individual freedom and collective freedom have not been achieved?
What does it mean if I say that my poetry comes from a country where the relation between time and place has been ruptured, from a fatherland whose children have been turned into ghosts?
No more than a way of stating the difficulties of Arab modernity on the move, of the tribe whose tents have vanished toward a city not yet born.
Poetry’s target is not its obscure part, but it is born of the tension between the poem’s movement and the thought that sets it in motion, the tension between its prose state and its rhythmic state. And this obscure part, like the summoning of the shades, is one of the forms of the struggle between the poetic language and the reality that poetry, seeking its essence, is no longer content to describe. Perhaps this obscure part is precisely the space open to the reader who, released from a definitive message, endowed with the ability to read and interpret, can then give the poem a second life.
However, it is neither the clarity nor the obscure part which has saved my poetry from breaking with a reader who renews me and whom I renew.
One of the paradoxes of my poetic experience is that each time I have advanced my style and modes of expression, I have prepared my reader for yet more renewal, and noticed that our respective poetic tastes have drawn still closer.
The explanation perhaps lies in the fact that my poetic proposals always spring from the long history of Arab poetry, its cadences and aesthetic canons.

Every poet has his habits. I am among those who compose their poems twice. The first time, I let myself go with my unconscious inspiration; the second, I give priority to my perception of the imperatives of construction. And it seldom happens that the second draft in no way reflects the first.
One of the tests to which I submit my poems consists in writing them and then forgetting them for a long period. And when I come back to visit them, my criterion for poetic judgment is how closely they resemble me. If I recognise the poem, if I see it is imitating me or that I am, I abandon it. But if I have the feeling that the piece is the work of another poet, who has overtaken the poet I was, I then declare it a new poem.
But in the end, whom does this secret concern?

Few are the poets born poetically only once. I myself was born gradually and by contractions, and I continue to learn the hard march on the long path of the poem I have not yet written.



Translated from French
by Lulu Norman

Mahmoud Darwish wrote this Preface to the new French anthology of his work ‘Poesie: La Terre nous est Ètroite’ (Gallimard, March 2000).  
It is published in translation here with his agreement.