The Butterfly's Burden

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Born in a village in Galilee in 1942, at age six Darwish fled with his family to Lebanon in the 1948 war, only to return a few months later to the new state of Israel to find his village gone. Growing up in Israel, he lived under the legal status of “absent-present alien” despite having been born there. For publishing and reading his poetry, he suffered house arrests and imprisonment, until his self-imposed exile to Egypt in 1970. From there he moved to Beirut, only to be expelled with the PLO in the 1982 Israeli invasion. Finally, after the Oslo Accords, he returned to Ramallah in 1996 to live in the occupied West Bank, where he later endured the 2002 siege of the PLO headquarters. As one essayist asserts:

Post Scriptum: Mahmoud Darwish passed away on August 9, 2008. May he now rest in the peace he so longed for. Looking, in our minds, toward his grave in Palestine, we may see many butterflies there. For Darwish, this no man’s land is one in which “I cannot enter and I cannot go out.” The bitter irony is that the refugees of the Holocaust resulted in the refugees of Palestine. This reality is often at the center of Darwish’s thinking; he rejected the Oslo Accords because it would lead to the apartheid of two separate states. Unlike Hamas, which seeks the destruction of Israel, Darwish apparently advocates “Israeli and Palestinian coexistence in a binational state with equal rights and secular citizenship.” In other words, he seeks the right of return to his homeland, with the full rights of a citizen to vote and otherwise participate in self-government.This potentially discomfiting, albeit powerful, poem is framed by the work we are more used to when we think of Darwish: nostalgic and lovely—love-ly. The majority focuses on the human being, on our hopes and fears, our essence, rather than on the horrible things we can do to one another. It presents images that set our conscience and imagination free: lapis lazuli, lilac nights, olive trees, birds, moons, bodies of water. I end this review with a passage that brings together many of these images, a passage that reminds us that, despite everything that has been lost and may never be regained, Mahmoud Darwish is ultimately a poet of hope: If I had to capture the essence of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry in one brief passage, these are the verses I would choose. They are from the poem “Low Sky” in the latest collection of the wonderful Palestinian poet’s work, The Butterfly’s Burden. The translator from the Arabic, Fady Joudah, compiled three of Darwish’s books in this collection: The Stranger’s Bed, A State of Siege, and Don’t Apologize for What You’ve Done. The result is a collection of poems that reads as one would ‘read’ a butterfly’s wings; what one encounters is elusive, heart-breaking, wistful, yet hopeful. This is all the more true because The Butterfly’s Burden is a bilingual edition: the Arabic on the left, presumably illegible to many western readers, appears mysterious and lovely.

Translating writing of this ambition - its radical, willed instability as well as its beauty - requires a delicate and thoughtful ear. Fady Joudah is a Palestinian American who has himself achieved distinction with an award-winning first collection. These fine translations will consolidate his reputation. They also allow us to hear - in their fidelity to offbeat punctuation and lineation, to nuances of quotation and allusion - something of the formal innovation of the original. Darwish has not only remade a national consciousness; he has reworked language and poetic tradition to do so. Lines in which a woman's breasts become doves, or apples, remind a western audience of the Bible. For a reader with knowledge of Arabic verse, they are part of that rich tradition. Darwish's fluency in all three local Cultures of the Book, his ability to move among them, is part of his refusal of the deadly stasis of standoff. Beauty, he shows us in this indispensable collection, is a necessary, always-renewed truth: "The southerner carries his history with his hands, like a fistful of wheat, / and walks upon himself, confident of the Christ / in the grains: Life is intuitive ..."In some poems, Darwish adopts the persona of a female narrator, as in “Housework,” saying, “A rain made me wet and filled with the scent of oranges.” In “Two Stranger Birds in our Feathers,” a woman asks a stranger to slowly undo her braids, saying: Even in “State of Siege,” Darwish ultimately yearns for peace. He writes, “When the fighter planes disappear, the doves fly / white, white.” Exile is never the state of being satisfied, placid, or secure. Exile, in the words of Wallace Stevens, is “a mind of winter” in which the pathos of the summer and autumn as much as the potential of spring are nearby but unobtainable. When one has lost so much, love has no choice but to follow suit. Throughout Darwish’s work, we witness lovers torn apart by circumstance. Such passages are all the more heart-wrenching because Darwish’s language (and Joudah’s translation) is so quiet, so simple and unassuming: