Mahmoud Darwish

Don’t write history as poetry, because the weapon is
the historian. And the historian doesn’t get fever
chills when he names his victims, and doesn’t listen
to the guitar’s rendition…

—Mahmoud Darwish, from “Don’t Write History as Poetry”

From his web page biography:

Darwish is considered to be the most important contemporary Arab poet working today. He was born in 1942 in the village of Barweh in the Galilee, which was razed to the ground by the Israelis in 1948. …Darwish was a member of the Executive Committee of the PLO and lived in exile between Beirut and Paris until his return in 1996 to Palestine. His poems are known throughout the Arab world, and several of them have been put to music. …Muhamoud Darwish is the winner of 2001 Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom. The prize recognizes people whose extraordinary and courageous work celebrates the human right to freedom of imagination, inquiry, and expression.

From the article “A Poet’s Palestine as Metaphor:”

A Darwish reading in Cairo or Damascus draws thousands of people, from college professors to taxi drivers. Despite his scathing criticisms of Arab governments – “prison cells,” he calls them – he has met privately with virtually every leader in the Arab world.

…In the Arab imagination, Palestine is not simply a plot of land any more than Israel is a plot of land in the Jewish imagination. As the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish has observed, Palestine is also a metaphor – for the loss of Eden, for the sorrows of dispossession and exile, for the declining power of the Arab world in its dealings with the West.
Mr. Darwish, 59, who is widely considered the Palestinian national poet has developed this metaphor to richly lyrical effect.

…”Poetry requires a margin, a siesta,” he said. “The situation in Ramallah doesn’t give me this luxury. To be under occupation, to be under siege, is not a good inspiration for poetry. Still, I can’t choose my reality. And this is the whole problem of Palestinian literature: we can’t free ourselves of the historical moment.”

You can read a selection of Darwish poems from his Copper Canyon collection The Butterfly’s Burden, translated by Fady Joudah, at the New Voices International Project, under the title A Mask …for Majnoon Lailah

Other barbarians will come along.
The emperor’s wife will be abducted.
Drums will roll.
Drums will roll and horses will trample a sea of corpses
all the way from the Ægean to the Dardanelles.
And why should we care?
What on earth have our wives got to do with horse races?

—Mahmoud Darwish, from “Other barbarians will come along,” in 100 poets against the war