I Don't Want This Poem to End: Early and Late Poems

by Mahmoud Darwish, Mohammad Shaheen (Translation)

First English translation of new poetry by the late Mahmoud Darwish, the most important Palestinian contemporary poet. When the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish died in 2008, his friends visited his home and retrieved poems and writings some of which are gathered together in this volume, translated into English for the first time. They include three collections from different phases in Darwishs writing career, as well as reminiscences by friends drawn from the poets final years, and a moving account of the discovery of the new poems in this collection. This volume includes: How We Found the Poems by Elias Khoury, a friend of Darwish and a distinguished novelist My Friend Mahmoud, a biographical memoir by Professor Mohammad Shaheen, translator of Darwishs poetry. The End of the Night, Its a Song, and I Dont Want this Poem to Endthree collections totaling about 80 poems, most translated into English for the first time. On Exile, a prose essay by Mahmoud Darwish. A letter from the poet to his brother, written in 1965 from an Israeli prison. Last Meeting by Faisal Darraj, a leading critic in the Arab world.

Genres: Poetry

242 pages, Paperback

Published May 15, 2017

About the author

محمود درويش
Mahmoud Darwish was a respected Palestinian poet and author who won numerous awards for his literary output and was regarded as the Palestinian national poet. In his work, Palestine became a metaphor for the loss of Eden, birth and resurrection, and the anguish of dispossession and exile.

The Lotus Prize (1969; from the Union of Afro-Asian Writers)
Lenin Peace Prize (1983; from the USSR)
The Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters (1993; from France)
The Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural Freedom (2001)
Prince Claus Awards (2004)
"Bosnian stećak" (2007)
Golden Wreath of Struga Poetry Evenings (2007)
The International Forum for Arabic Poetry prize (2007)

محمود درويش هو شاعرٌ فلسطيني وعضو المجلس الوطني الفلسطيني التابع لمنظمة التحرير الفلسطينية، وله دواوين شعرية مليئة بالمضامين الحداثية. ولد عام 1941 في قرية البروة وهي قرية فلسطينية تقع في الجليل قرب ساحل عكا, حيث كانت أسرته تملك أرضًا هناك. خرجت الأسرة برفقة اللاجئين الفلسطينيين في العام 1948 إلى لبنان، ثم عادت متسللة عام 1949 بعد توقيع اتفاقيات الهدنة، لتجد القرية مهدمة وقد أقيم على أراضيها موشاف (قرية زراعية إسرائيلية)"أحيهود". وكيبوتس يسعور فعاش مع عائلته في قرية الجديدة.

بعد إنهائه تعليمه الثانوي في مدرسة يني الثانوية في كفرياسيف انتسب إلى الحزب الشيوعي الإسرائيلي وعمل في صحافة الحزب مثل الإتحاد والجديد التي أصبح في ما بعد مشرفًا على تحريرها، كما اشترك في تحرير جريدة الفجر التي كان يصدرها مبام.

أحد أهم الشعراء الفلسطينيين والعرب الذين ارتبط اسمهم بشعر الثورة والوطن. يعتبر درويش أحد أبرز من ساهم بتطوير الشعر العربي الحديث وإدخال الرمزية فيه. في شعر درويش يمتزج الحب بالوطن بالحبيبة الأنثى. قام بكتابة وثيقة إعلان الاستقلال الفلسطيني التي تم إعلانها في الجزائر.

Tras una juventud dentro de la Palestina ocupada, años salpicados por numerosos arestos, se trasladó a Egipto y después al Líbano para realizar su sueño de renovación poética. Será en su exilio en Paris, tras tener que abandonar forzosamente el Líbano, donde logre su madurez poético y logre un reconocimiento ante los ojos occidentales.

En 1996, tras los acuerdos de Oslo para la autonomía de los territorios de Gaza y Cisjordania, dimite como ministro de Cultura de la Organización para la Liberación de Palestina y regresa a Ramallah. Allí dirige la revista literaria Al Karmel, cuytos archivos fueron destruidos por el ejército israelí durante el asedio a la ciudad en el año 2002.

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

This man is not just a poet; he breathes words, he makes rhythm part of circulation of his blood, his heart throbs with images; it is as if he were painting with rhythm, and living in the circles of Al-Khalil. […] he was my personal poet, on whose words I rely to reveal the secrets of my soul, because secrets, like love, can only be spoken of by poetry.

— Elias Khoury

Were I one day to return to what was, would I find
Anything that was or anything that will be?
It is a solo performance
A solo performance
*
Were I one day to return to what was,I would find only
What I did not find when I was
Would I were a tree that I might recall the scope
Of the narrator and prop up my horizon wherever I lean
Would I were a tree which does not grow tall in vain…
Did I trust my dream? No. I trusted what came
And it is a solo performance.
*
Were I one day to return to myself, would I find
The self that was the self that was?
*
And if there has to be a dream, let it be
Pure, barefoot, blue-colored, born of itself
As whatever was, was, but was nothing
But the form of the thing in the other-its reflection

And if there has to be a different poet
Then let it be a pastoral of longing shrinking the mountain night
And herding the gazelle at the limits of imagination
Comfortable only with his sense of space, dew, and beauty

[Mlak · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think everyone should read at least one piece by mahmoud darwish before they die

[Betty · Rating 5 out of 5]

This beautiful collection of writings by Mahmoud Darwish of previously unpublished poems and prose came to light in his home following his death. The literary pieces are lyrical, illustrating the writer's feelings of displacement in the historical Palestinian homeland. The land belonging to multigenerational households provided a livelihood, place, and way of life, whereas their displacement erased that history and recognizably changed the landscape. Darwish expresses the outer changes, the erasure of villages and placenames, and how he felt as it happened. He became a stranger there who had to present an identity card to travel and go to work. Despite assimilation into the new government, his resettlement in the West Bank, and his recognized literary popularity, he also participated in the Palestinian diaspora as a refugee in Jordan. The book is a good starting point for further readings in Darwish's oeuvre.

[Katey Flowers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Watch my review: https://youtu.be/dqPPeUrhWXc?si=X8GJz...

[alexandra ༊*·˚ · Rating 5 out of 5]

mahmoud darwish <3

[katia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I do, I want this poem to end.

[Katerina Canyon · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book contains translated poems and writings by and about Mahmoud Darwish, which were found in his home upon his death in 2008. The introduction was written by Elias Khoury and discusses the process that he went through in assembling this collection after the death of Darwish.

I Don't Want this Poem to End begins with Darwish's early poems. I enjoyed the rhythm of his early work. I am often intrigued when a translator provides a poetic rhythm and style in a translation. I hope this is more a nature of the poet than of the translator. I love how Darwish uses "stranding" and "no (know)" in the poem, "Beneath the Ancient Windows"
Standing beneath the windows
On the street, standing
The treads of the abandoned stair do not know my step
No, nor does the window know.

This poem along with many of Darwish's early poems focus on the irony of life. There are poems that are political, poems of exile, but mostly he expressed his perceptions on life, love, and death.

There are some intense poems of death in this collection. The collection finishes with 26 poems found in a notebook in Darwish's home after his death. These poems are written as if Darwish was predicting his own death. He wrote with self-mourning, as he reflected on death and the life he lived.
From "I Had Forgotten to Forget You"
I had forgotten, to forget you, the key to my house
A bench in the garden. Do not give it back to me, do
not open the door.
You will not find a ghost standing waiting for you.
You will find
Only a line on the door. The young man has returned
to stone

The collection as includes an interview with Darwish, as well as a letter he wrote while in prison.

Overall, this is a very well written collection. I highly recommend it.

[Ramona · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first impression that sprang to mind upon reading the first few pages of this collection of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry is the impossibility of quantifying the sense of nostalgia that knows its roots in love. There is no need to search for Palestine’s mention in this collection – the omniscience pervades in every word chosen by the poet to impart Palestine and love as inseparable. In the context of the poet and his poetry, to exclude one is to annihilate the other.

Read more: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/201...

[bookishlyfina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was really satisfied with this amazing book written by the late poet and translated by the translator. The poems he wrote is very detailed and has a really deep meaning which describes about his life as a poet. Eventhough it needs some understanding to really know what his poems means.

This is the kind of book with long poems that some people would like. And like the title says and i agree ,i don’t want this poem to end ..

[Yara · Rating 5 out of 5]

He wrote this as if he knew it would be his last.

[Sabo theBooklover · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an inspiring poem

[James F · Rating 4 out of 5]

This anthology, the book I read for the Goodreads World Literature group that is reading Arabic literature in translation this year, contains three collections of Mahmoud Darwish's poetry translated by Mohammed Shaheen, and some additional matter in the back, most importantly his essay "On Exile" which I think is very important for the understanding of how his poetry evolved over time. The three collections represent three different phases of his writing, although I think the subtitle is somewhat misleading. The first collection, The End of Night (1967), is from his earlier period, when he still lived as an "internal exile" in Palestine, and the earliest poetry I have read by him, but from what I have read about him it is already in a more mature poetic style than his first few collections (the earliest is from 1960) which were apparently more directly political without much poetic sophistication, although I would love to read some of them. The second collection, It is a Song, It is a Song is not really early or late, but belongs to his "middle" period when he was in exile in Lebanon, Tunis, and France, and the third collection, I Don't Want This Poem to End was put together posthumously, after the establishment of the "Palestinian Authority" when he divided his time between Ramallah in the PA and Amman (the Introduction by Elias Khoury explains how the poems were found and edited after his death.)

Darwish is widely regarded as the "National Poet of Palestine"; a young child at the time of the Nakba, his entire life was spent in internal or external exile, and his poetic work is imbued with the ideas of resistance, exile, and return, although the forms in which he envisioned them changed over time. (I should apologize for one comment I made in my review of Alshaer's anthology of writings on the Nakba, where, mislead by Alshaer's introduction and not yet knowing much about Darwish, I attributed to him the statement that the Israelis should go home and give the land back. Actually, he explained that the one poem in which he said something like that was referring to the territories seized in 1967 and not to Palestine as a whole, and because of the misunderstanding he never included that poem in any of his collections or allowed it to be anthologized.) Darwish always clearly focused his fire on the Zionist enterprise of establishing an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine, and unlike some of the dubious supporters of the Palestinian cause in the Arab world (and elsewhere) never descended into anti-Semitism or ethnic or religious hatred, which he considered the characteristics of the enemy, and refused to dehumanize Israeli Jews. He attributed his knowledge of literature to a Jewish teacher, and pointed out that his early political activity in the Israeli Communist Party was side by side with Jewish comrades. This is exemplified by two of the best poems (and the most criticized by extremists) in The End of Night. One is "Rita and the Rifle", about his Israeli Jewish lover (a comrade from that time; apparently they lived together for a couple years, but of course marriages between Jews and non-Jews were not allowed by the Zionist government, an example of their apartheid mentality.) Some critics think that much of his anonymous love poetry is actually about Rita, although he did have two short-lived marriages. The other is "A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies" about an Israeli soldier who admits to committing atrocities and just wants to go home. (The Israeli military has always had problems with soldiers who resist committing war-crimes.) In fact, the soldier was Shlomo Sand, who later became a famous historian who undermined the "historical" justification for Zionism in his book The Invention of the Jewish People.

All three collections are about exile, but the second and third collection have a somewhat wider focus; the second collection seemed a bit more disillusioned, more about coming to terms with an extended exile, and the third collection is concerned also with personal death; there is also more about poetry as such, and about love. This is some of the best poetry I have ever read.

[AM · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hope to one day be able to read Darwish’s work in the original Arabic (inshallah!)

[Gabriella Gallagher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Iconic

[مضاوي · Rating 5 out of 5]

ولا أريد لهذا النهار الخري��ي أن ينتهي

[Wen-yi Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to hand this off for a friend before I could actually finish it, but the two thirds I did read constantly took my breath away

[Samuel So · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is all so sad and i need to take breaks to take it in. I think it would’ve been better if i can read arabic

[ABEER · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am so speechless that I cannot form what I truly feel into words. It is unbelievable how painful and great his poems are.

[Chaselynn Flores · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took me a while to finish because I kept crying :’) but in a good ish way

[Egi Karafili · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful.

[World Literature Today]

"Much of the arresting artistic quality in this collection arises from the poet’s ultimate liberation from the many constraints—social, political, conventional, etc.—that had circumscribed, to one degree or another, his creative poetic imagination. This drastically altered state of Darwish’s poetic sensibility is most evident in his unprecedented treatment of the tropes of imminent death and his lifelong preoccupation with the image of the Palestinians’ national other: the Israeli." - Muhammad Siddiq

This book was reviewed in the Jan/Feb 2018 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:

https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...