# Mahmoud Darwish

Mahmoud Darwish (13 March 1941 – 9 August 2008) was a Palestinian poet and author who was regarded as the Palestinian national poet. He won numerous awards for his works. Darwish used Palestine as a metaphor for the loss of Eden, birth and resurrection, and the anguish of dispossession and exile. He also served as an editor for several literary magazines in Palestine.

## Quotes

* لو يذكرُ الزيتون غارسَهُ لصار الزيت دمعا
** If the olive trees knew the hands that planted them, their oils would become tears.
*** As quoted in In Gaza, The Olive Trees Resist, 16 Dec 2024, Hend Salama Abo Helow, Institute for Palestine Studies. Arabic text from
* My poems do not deliver mere images and metaphors; but deliver landscapes, villages and fields, deliver a place. It makes that which is absent from geography present in its form, that is, able to reside in the poetic text, as if residing on his land. I don’t think that a poet is entitled to a greater happiness than that some people seek refuge in his lines of poetry, as if they were real houses. Indeed, in Arabic, there is a nice and unusual homonymy. Both the poetic verse and the house are said “bayt.” As if a man can reside there.
** Mahmoud Darwish: Writing as an Artistic Sanctuary, Sazzad, R. (2015), Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 17(1), 1-18. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/575879.
* The sea is the obsession of the poet, because the first poetic rhythm, or the first sense of poetic rhythm, was born of the motion of the waves.
** In this quotation Darwish "reveals that he learned to write by imitating the rhythm of the sea’s waves." -Mahmoud Darwish: Writing as an Artistic Sanctuary, Sazzad, R. (2015), Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 17(1), 1-18. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/575879.

### Think upon others

The poem Think upon others as translated by Hamish Kinnear edinburgharabicinitiative.wordpress.com Arabic text: aldiwan.net
When you prepare your breakfast, think upon others Do not forget to feed the pigeons When you engage in your wars, think upon others Do not forget those who demand peace
As you pay your water bill, think upon others Who seek sustenance from the clouds, not a tap And when you return home – to your house – think upon others Such as those who live in tents When you fall asleep counting planets, think upon others Who cannot find a place to sleep And as you search for meaning with fancy metaphors, think upon others Who have lost their right to speak
And when you think of others, far away, think of yourself And say: I am a candle in the darkness

## Quotes about Mahmoud Darwish

* Whatever her or his social identity, the writer is, by the nature of the act of writing, someone who strives for communication and connection, someone who searches, through language, to keep alive the conversation with what Octavio Paz has called "the lost community." Even if what's written feels like a note thrust into a bottle to be thrown into the sea. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish writes of the incapacity of poetry to find a linguistic equivalent to conditions such as the 1982 Israeli shelling of Beirut: We are now not to describe, as much as we are to be described. We're being born totally, or else dying totally. In his remarkable prose-meditation on that war, he also says, Yet I want to break into song.... I want to find a language that transforms language itself into steel for the spirit-a language to use against these sparkling silver insects, these jets. I want to sing. I want a language that I can lean on and that can lean on me, that asks me to bear witness and that I can ask to bear witness, to what power there is in us to overcome this cosmic isolation.
** Adrienne Rich, Arts of the Possible (2001)
* (Are there any Palestinian poets who inspire your work?) My father would read Darwish to me when I was a child and translate it because, in those days, there were not many translations of him. My father would read other poetry and translate it for me, and I just loved it. I loved everything about it: the metaphors, the passion, the care, the tenderness, the flowing quality of the lines. I eventually met Darwish, and he would ask me to read his poems in English; he didn’t like to read his poems in English at all. He read in Arabic, and just getting to be with him was such a landmark in my lifetime’s experience...I felt them [poets] as a wellspring of the spirit of Palestine, and the love and the care for Palestine—that is something that the media often finds easy to overlook. It’s just so insulting—versus the poetry which is so respectful, passionate, loving, and nostalgic.
** Naomi Shihab Nye Interview (2024)