MAHMOUD DARWISH
A River Dies of Thirst
journals
Translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham
archipelago books
Originally published as Athar al-Farâsha, by Riad El-Rayyes Books, Ltd. in Beirut in 2008
Copyright © Mahmoud Darwish/Actes Sud, 2009
English translation copyright © Catherine Cobham, 2009
First Archipelago Books Edition, 2009
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without prior written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Darwish, Mahmud.
[Athar al-farashah. English]
A river dies of thirst : journals = Athar al-farasha : yawmiyyat / Mahmoud Darwish ; translated by Catherine Cobham.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-9357446-7-2
I. Cobham, Catherine. II. Title. III. Title: Athar al-farasha.
PJ7820.A7A8713 2009
892.71'6--dc222009012083
Archipelago Books
232 Third Street, Suite A111
Brooklyn, NY 11215
www.archipelagobooks.org
Distributed by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
www.cbsd.com
Cover art: “Les hiboux et les courbeaux” from the Kalila wa Dimna reproduced with the permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France
This publication was made possible with support from Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.
Contents
The girl/The scream
Green flies
Like a prose poem
If only I were a stone
Beyond identification
The enemy
Nero
The forest
Doves
The house as casualty
The cunning of the metaphor
The mosquito
An eagle flying low
A personal duty
A common enemy
The rest of a life
The colour yellow
If only the young were trees
We arrived too late
Two strangers
What’s it all for?
A talent for hope
I am only him
I did not dream
The pretty girls’ neighbour
How far is far?
He sees himself as absent
He said: ‘I’m afraid’
The roar of silence
A person chasing himself
A longing to forget
A river dies of thirst
The wall
I walked on my heart
Routine
A gun and a shroud
If we want to
Cheated time
Perfection
One, two, three
Empty boxes
On nothingness
My imagination . . . a faithful hunting dog
If I were someone else
Assassination
Rustling
A metaphor
In the company of things
A shawl made of silk
A sort of loss
A shameful land
Summer and winter
A coloured cloud
A spring passing quickly
Life to the last drop
The butterfly effect
I was not with me
The faces of truth
As if he were asleep
Visible music
The road to where
The humour of eternity
The indifferent one
The picture and the frame
Snow
An infectious disease
A bed of lavender
Most and least
I am jealous of everything around you
Lose one of your stars
Private meetings
She said to him
A sneeze
In praise of wine
At the top of the cypress trees
Point of view
The mercy bullet
Shyness
Perfection is the same as imperfection
Prickly pear
In the empty square
A short holiday
Fame
If I were a hunter
Nightmare
Iraq’s night is long
In Cordoba
In Madrid
High is the mountain
I don’t notice
That word
Echo
The second olive tree
Willow tree
Right of return to paradise
If it were not for sin
Italian autumn
Two travellers to a river
A killer and innocent
As if she is a song
My poet/my other
A clear sky and a green garden
A single word
The essence of the poem
Satire
On oratory and orators
Half and half
I think
The second line
Higher and further
The canary
On a boat on the Nile
The lonely man’s addiction
In Rabat
Description
In Skogås
The exile finds his way
Boulevard St Germain
Things would be different
A life beginning
The hand of the statue
In Beirut
The return of June
If only people envied us
From now on you are somebody else
From now on you are you
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Sabry Hafez for his invaluable help with the meanings and cultural contexts of a number of words and phrases. I would also like to thank John Burnside, Maudemarie Clark, David Cobham, Dina Frangi, Ronak Husni, Javier Letrán, and Tetz Rooke for their useful comments on specific linguistic, literary, or other cultural issues.
Responsibility for any mistakes and infelicities rests with me.
Catherine Cobham
St Andrews, 2009
A River Dies of Thirst
The girl/The scream
On the seashore is a girl, and the girl has a family
and the family has a house. And the house has two windows and a door
And in the sea is a warship having fun
catching promenaders on the seashore:
Four, five, seven
fall down on the sand. And the girl is saved for a while
because a hazy hand
a divine hand of some sort helps her, so she calls out: ‘Father
Father! Let’s go home, the sea is not for people like us!’
Her father doesn’t answer, laid out on his shadow
windward of the sunset
blood in the palm trees, blood in the clouds
Her voice carries her higher and further than
the seashore. She screams at night over the land
The echo has no echo
so she becomes the endless scream in the breaking news
which was no longer breaking news
when
the aircraft returned to bomb a house with two windows and a door.
Green flies
The scene is the same as ever. Summer and sweat, and an imagination incapable of seeing beyond the horizon. And today is better than tomorrow. But the dead are what’s new. They’re born every day and when they’re trying to sleep death takes them away from
their drowsiness into a sleep without dreams. It’s not worth counting them. None of them asks for help from anyone. Voices search for words in the open country, and the echo comes back clearly, woundingly: ‘There’s nobody here.’ But there’s somebody who says: ‘It’s the killer’s right to defend the killer instinct,’ while the dead say belatedly: ‘It’s the victim’s right to defend his right to scream.’ The call to prayer rises to accompany the indistinguishable funerals: coffins hastily raised in the air, hastily buried – no time to carry out the rites, more dead are arriving at speed from other raids, individually or in groups, or a whole family with no orphans or grieving parents left behind. The sky is leaden grey and the sea blue grey, but the colour of blood is hidden from the camera by swarms of green flies.
Like a prose poem
An autumnal summer on the hills is like a prose poem. The breeze is a gentle rhythm I feel but do not hear in the modest little trees, and the yellowish plants are peeling images, and eloquence provokes similes with its cunning verbs. The only celebration on these mountain paths is provided by the lively sparrows, who flit between sense and nonsense. Nature is a body divesting itself of trivial adornment until the figs, grapes and pomegranates ripen and the rain awakens forgotten desires. ‘If it weren’t for my mysterious need for poetry, I wouldn’t need anything,’ says the poet, whose enthusiasm has waned so his mistakes have become less frequent. He walks because the doctors have advised him to walk, with no particular goal, to train the heart in a kind of indifference necessary for good health. Any idea that occurs to him will be purely gratuitous. The summer only rarely lends itself to verse. The summer is a prose poem which takes no interest in the eagles circling high above.
If only I were a stone
I would yearn for nothing
no yesterday passing, no tomorrow to come
and my present neither advancing nor retreating
Nothing happening to me!
If only I were a stone – I said – Oh if only I were
some stone so that water would burnish me
green, yellow – I would be placed in a room
like a sculpture, or exercises in sculpture
or material for the eruption of the necessary
from the folly of the unnecessary
If only I were a stone
so that I could yearn for something!
Beyond identification
I sit in front of the television, since I can’t do anything else. There, in front of the television, I discover my feelings and see what’s happening to me. Smoke is rising from me and I reach out my severed hand to pick up my scattered limbs from many bodies, and I don’t find them but I don’t run away from them either because pain has such an attraction. I am besieged by land and air and sea and language. The last aircraft has taken off from Beirut airport and put me in front of the television to witness the rest of my death with millions of other viewers. Nothing proves that I exist when I think, as Descartes says, but rather when I am offered up in sacrifice, now, in Lebanon. I enter the television, I and the beast. I know the beast is stronger than me in the struggle between aircraft and bird. But I have become addicted, perhaps more than I should have, to the heroism of the metaphor: the beast has swallowed me but has not digested me. I have emerged unscathed more than once. My soul, which was confused in the belly of the beast, has inhabited another body, lighter and stronger. But now I don’t know where I am: in front of the television or inside it. Whereas I can see my heart, rolling like a pine cone from a Lebanese mountain to Rafah!
The enemy
I was there a month ago. I was there a year ago. I was always there as if I was never anywhere else. In 1982 the same thing happened to us as is happening now. We were besieged and killed and fought against the hell we encountered. The casualties/martyrs don’t resemble one another. Each of them has a distinctive physique and distinctive features, different eyes and a different name and age. The killers are the ones who all look the same. They are one being, distributed over different pieces of hardware, pressing electronic buttons, killing and vanishing. He sees us but we don’t see him, not because he’s a ghost but because he’s a steel mask on an idea – he is featureless, eyeless, ageless and nameless. It is he who has chosen to have a single name: the enemy.
Nero
What’s going on in Nero’s mind as he watches Lebanon burn? His eyes wander ecstatically and he walks like someone dancing at a wedding: This madness is my madness, I know best, so let them set light to everything beyond my control. And the children have to learn to behave themselves and stop shouting when I’m playing my tunes!
And what’s going on in Nero’s mind as he watches Iraq burn? Does it please him that he awakens a memory in the history of the jungle that preserves his name as an enemy of Hamurabbi and Gilgamesh and Abu Nuwas: My law is the mother of all laws, the flower of eternity grows in my fields, and poetry – what does that mean?
And what goes on in Nero’s mind as he watches Palestine burn? Does it delight him that his name is recorded in the roll of prophets as a prophet that nobody’s ever believed in before? As a prophet of killing who God entrusted with correcting the countless mistakes in the heavenly books: I too am God’s mouthpiece!
And what goes on in Nero’s mind as he watches the world burn? I am master of the Day of Judgement. Then he orders the camera to stop rolling, because he doesn’t want anyone to see that his fingers are on fire at the end of this long American movie!
The forest
I couldn’t hear my voice in the forest, even if
the forest were free of the beast’s hunger
and the army defeated or victorious – there’s no difference – had returned
over the severed limbs of the unknown dead to the barracks or
the throne
And I couldn’t hear my voice in the forest, even if
the wind carried it to me, and said to me:
‘This is your voice,’ I couldn’t hear it
I couldn’t hear my voice in the forest, even if
the wolf stood on his hind legs and applauded me:
‘I can hear your voice, so give me your orders!’
And I said: ‘The forest is not in the forest
Father wolf, my son!’
I couldn’t hear my voice unless
the forest were free of me, and I were free of
the silence of the forest.
Doves
A flight of doves scatters suddenly from a break in the smoke, shining like a gleam of heavenly peace, circling between the grey and the fragments of blue above a city of rubble and reminding us that beauty still exists and that non-existence is not making complete fools of us since it promises us, or so we like to think, a revelation of how it is different from nothingness. In war none of us feels that he is dead if he feels pain. Death pre-empts pain, pain is the one blessing in war. It moves from quarter to quarter bringing a stay of execution. And if someone is befriended by luck he forgets his long-term plans and waits for the non-existent which already exists circling in a flight of doves. I see many doves in the skies of Lebanon playing with the smoke which rises from the nothingness.
The house as casualty
In one minute the entire life of a house is ended. The house as casualty is also mass murder, even if it is empty of its inhabitants. A mass grave of raw materials intended to build a structure with meaning, or a poem with no importance in time of war. The house as casualty is the severance of things from their relationships and from the names of feelings, and from the need of tragedy to direct its eloquence at seeing into the life of the object. In every object there is a being in pain – a memory of fingers, of a smell, an image. And houses are killed just like their inhabitants. And the memory of objects is killed: stone, wood, glass, iron, cement are scattered in broken fragments like living beings. And cotton, silk, linen, papers, books are torn to pieces like proscribed words. Plates, spoons, toys, records, taps, pipes, door handles, fridges, washing machines, flower v
ases, jars of olives and pickles, tinned food all break just like their owners. Salt, sugar, spices, boxes of matches, pills, contraceptives, antidepressants, strings of garlic, onions, tomatoes, dried okra, rice and lentils are crushed to pieces just like their owners. Rent agreements, marriage documents, birth certificates, water and electricity bills, identity cards, passports, love letters are torn to shreds like their owners’ hearts. Photographs, toothbrushes, combs, cosmetics, shoes, underwear, sheets, towels fly in every direction like family secrets broadcast aloud in the devastation. All these things are a memory of the people who no longer have them and of the objects that no longer have the people – destroyed in a minute. Our things die like us, but they aren’t buried with us.
The cunning of the metaphor
Metaphorically I say: ‘I won’
Metaphorically I say: ‘I lost’
And a bottomless valley stretches in front of me
and I lie in what remains of the holm oak
And there are two olive trees
surrounding me on three sides
and two birds carry me
to the side which is empty
of the peak and the abyss
so that I don’t say: ‘I won’
so that I don’t say: ‘I lost the bet.’
The mosquito
The mosquito, and I don’t know what the masculine form of the word is in Arabic, is more destructive than slander. Not content with sucking your blood, it forces you into a fruitless battle. It only visits in darkness like al-Mutanabbi’s fever. It buzzes and hums like a warplane which you don’t hear until it has hit its target: your blood. You switch on the light to see it and it disappears into some secret corner of the room, then settles on the wall – safe, peaceful, as if it has surrendered. You try to kill it with one of your shoes, but it dodges you and escapes and reappears with an air of malicious satisfaction. You curse it loudly but it pays no heed. You negotiate a truce with it in a friendly voice: ‘Sleep so that I can sleep!’ You think you’ve convinced it and switch off the light and go to sleep. But having sucked most of your blood it starts humming again, threatening a new attack. And forces you into a subsidiary battle with your perspiration. You turn on the light again and resist the two of them, the mosquito and the sweat, by reading. But the mosquito lands on the page you are reading, and you say happily to yourself: ‘It’s fallen into the trap.’ And you snap the book shut: ‘I’ve killed it . . . I’ve killed it!’ And when you open the book, to glory in your victory, there’s no sign of the mosquito or the words. Your book is blank. The mosquito, and I don’t know what the masculine form of the word is in Arabic, is not a metaphor, an allusion or a play on words. It’s an insect which likes your blood and can smell it from twenty miles away. There’s only one way you can bargain with it to make a truce: by changing your blood type.