Mural

Mahmoud Darwish, John Berger, Rema Hammami

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786630582
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Poesia mediorientale

Mahmoud Darwish was the Palestinian national poet. One of the greatest poets of the last half-century, his work evokes the loss of his homeland and is suffused with the pain of dispossession, exile and loss. His poems also display a brilliant acuity, a passion for and openness to the world and, above all, a deep and abiding humanity. Here, his close friends John Berger and Rema Hammami present a beautiful new translation of two of Darwish's later works, his long masterpiece Mural, a contemplation of his life and work written following life-threatening surgery, and his last poem, "The Dice Player, " which Darwish read in Ramallah a month before his death. Illustrated with original drawings by John Berger, Mural is a testimony to one of the most important and powerful poets of our age.

Mural

Here is your name

said the woman

and vanished in the corridor

A hand’s reach away I see heaven

a dove’s white wing transporting me to another childhood

and I don’t dream that I’m dreaming

Everything is real

I meet myself at my side

And fly

I will become what will be in the final circuit

Everything is white

The sea hanging above a roof of white clouds

in the sky of the absolute white nothingness

I was and was not

Here alone at the white frontier of eternity.

I came before my hour so no angel approaches to ask:

what did you do over there in the world?

I don’t hear the chorus of the righteous or wailing of sinners

I’m alone in whiteness

alone …

At the gate of resurrection nothing hurts

neither time past nor any feeling

I don’t sense the lightness of things nor the weight of apprehension

There’s no one to ask:

where now is my where?

Where is the city of death

Where am I?

In this no-here …

no-time

and nothingness

As if I had died already

I know this story

I know that I go towards what I don’t know

Perhaps I’m still alive somewhere

Aware of what I want …

One day I’ll become what I want

One day I will become a thought

that no sword or book can dispatch to the wasteland

A thought equal to rain on the mountain split open by a blade of grass

where power will not triumph

and justice is not fugitive

One day I’ll become what I want

One day I’ll become a bird

that plucks my being from nothingness.

As my wings burn I approach the truth

and rise from the ashes

I am the dialogue of dreamers

I shunned body and self to complete the first journey towards meaning

but it consumed me then vanished

I am that absence

The fugitive from heaven

One day I’ll become what I want

One day I’ll become a poet

Water obedient to my vision

My language a metaphor for metaphors

I don’t speak or indicate a place

Place is my sin and subterfuge

I am from there

My here leaps from my footstep to my imagination …

I am from what was or will be

I was created and destroyed in the expanse of the endless void

One day I’ll become what I want

One day I’ll become a vine

Let summer distil from me now

so passers-by beneath the chandeliers of this most sugared place

may drink my wine!

I am the message and the messenger

The small addresses and the post

One day I’ll become what I want

Here is your name

said the woman

and vanished in the corridor of her whiteness

Here is your name, memorize it well!

Don’t quibble over a letter of the alphabet

Ignore the tribal banners

Be friendly to your name which doesn’t stand but lies across the page

Test it out with the living and the dead

Train it in its proper pronunciation with strangers

Write it on a rock in the empty cave

O my name: you will grow as I do

You will carry me as I carry you

for strangers are brothers to strangers

We’ll entice the feminine with a vowel devoted to flutes

Oh my name: where are we now?

Speak out: what is now what is tomorrow?

What is time and place?

What’s old what’s new?

One day we’ll become what we want

The journey hasn’t begun and the path hasn’t ended

The wise haven’t reached their exile

nor the exiles their wisdom

The only flower we know is the red anemone

Come let’s go towards the highest mural:

The land of my poem is green and high

God’s words at dawn are the land of my poem

and I’m the faraway

far away

In every breeze a woman mocks her poet:

Collect the woman you saw in me

who was shattered

and give me back my femininity

for I have nothing left to do but contemplate the lake’s wrinkles

Get rid of my tomorrow

Return my yesterday

and leave us alone together

After you

nothing leaves and nothing returns

Take back the poem if you want

for me there’s only you in it

Take back your “I”

The exile will be complete with what’s left of handwriting written for the carrier pigeons

At the end which me am I in us?

Of the two of us

let me be the last

A star will fall between the written and the said

A memory will lay out its thoughts: we were born in the time of the sword and the trumpet

between the fig and the cactus

Death was slower then more clear there was a truce across the mouth of the river

Now the electronic button works alone

the killer doesn’t hear his victims

and the martyrs don’t read out a testament

What breeze brought you here?

Tell me the name of your wound and I’ll tell you the road where we’ll lose ourselves twice!

Your heartbeats hurt me for they lead to the time of legends

My blood hurts me

Salt hurts me …

and my jugular vein

In the broken jug the women of the Syrian plains lament the length of the journey

and are scorched by the August sun

I saw them on the road to the well before my birth

and I heard the water in the clay weeping for them:

Return to the clouds and bring the carefree days

An echo said:

Nothing returns save the mighty past of the strong on their obelisks …

their traces in gold

and the prayers of the weak addressed to tomorrow

Give us our daily bread

and a stronger now

for there’s neither reincarnation nor home nor eternity for us

An echo said:

I’m fed up with my incurable hope

sick of aesthetic traps: what is there after Babel?

The more the road clears to heaven

and the unknown reveals a final goal

the more the prose becomes prayer-like

and the song shatters

Green

The land of my poem is green and high

coming to me from the bed of my precipice

Strange you are

It’s enough that you alone are there

to become a tribe …

I sang in order to feel the wasted horizon in the pain of a dove

not to explain what God says to man

I’m no prophet

I don’t proclaim that my fall is an ascent

I am the stranger from all I was given by my language

And if I’ve given my affections to Arabic

They have surrendered me to the feminine participle

And the words when far

are a land bordering a distant star

And the words when near

are an exile

And writing is not enough for me to declare:

I found my presence filling in absence

and whenever I searched for myself I found others

and whenever I searched for them I found only myself

the stranger

Am I a crowd of one?

I am the stranger

Obliged to cross the Milky Way seeking the beloved

Condemned by his gifts

that rui...