Six year old Mahmoud Darwish (13 March 1941 – 9 August 2008) was one of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled the Israeli army in the Nakba of 1948. Although his family secretly returned to Galilee the following year, he lined in exile from 1970 to 1996, in both the Middle East and Europe, before returning to Ramallah. His poems had already achieved a huge following in the Arab-speaking world, cemented when he turned his literary and humanitarian talents to writing the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence.
As deeply committed to Arabic literary heritage as he is to Palestinian human rights, Darwish is also a world literary citizen, inspired by poets of emerging national identities such as Pablo Neruda and Yannis Ritsos. What he draws forth from these writers is a commitment to the transfigurative power of art even, or especially, in the most extreme circumstances. He combines the rich, intercultural traditions of al-Andalus with a trenchant, loving eye for present crises and suffering.
His work was widely-loved in the Arabic-speaking world and beyond, and translated into dozen's of languages, including Hebrew as of 2000, when Andalus, an Israeli press that translates Arabic literature into Hebrew, published Muhammed Hamza Ghaneim's translation of Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?.
.jpeg)
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/Hide comments
Show/Hide comment form
