Free A River Dies of Thirst by Mahmoud Darwish Catherine Cobham Page A

off
    to someone else
    In the morning he says: ‘It’s as if I dreamt of it,
    of the poem. Where is it now?’
    He drinks his coffee distractedly, envious of someone else
    then in the end he says: ‘Good health to him, my poet/my other!’
A clear sky and a green garden
    A clear sky is a thought without an idea, like a garden that is completely green. A poem whose only fault is its excessive clarity. The sky lacks even a passing cloud to arouse the imagination from the stupor of blue, and the green garden lacks a different colour, red or yellow or lilac, and jackals, to create some inner confusion. For the ready-made is the enemy of initiative. A poem needs some kind of cunning flaw so that we believe the poet when he lies and writes about the spiritual confusion provoked by a clear sky and a green garden. For why do we need poetry if the poet says the sky is clear and the garden is green?
A single word
    The whisper of a word in the unseen is the music of meaning made new in a poem whose reader thinks, because it is so private, that he wrote it.
    One word only, shining like a diamond or a firefly in the night of many species, is what makes prose into poetry.
    An ordinary word that one person says casually to another, at the corner of the street or in the shops, is what makes a poem possible.
    A sentence of prose, without metre or rhythm, if the poet accommodates it skilfully in the right context, helps him determine the rhythm, and lights the way to meaning through the murkiness of words.
The essence of the poem
    The thing missing from the poem – and I don’t know what it is – is its glowing secret, what I call the essence of the poem.
    ·
    When the poem is clear in the poet’s mind before he writes it, from the first line to the last, he becomes a postman, and the imagination a bicycle!
    ·
    The road to meaning, however long and branching, is the poet’s journey. When the shadows lead him astray, he finds his way back.
    ·
    What is meaning? I don’t know, but I may know what its opposite is: thinking that nothingness is easy to bear.
    ·
    Suffering is not a talent. It is a test of talent, and it either defeats talent or is defeated by it.
    ·
    All beautiful poetry is an act of resistance.
    ·
    A living heritage is what is written today, and tomorrow.
    ·
    A great poet is one who makes me small when I write, and great when I read.
    ·
    I walk among the verses of Homer, al-Mutanabbi and Shakespeare, and stumble like a trainee waiter at a royal feast.
    ·
    A cloud in a poet’s imagination is an idea.
    ·
    Poetry – what is it? It is the words we say when we hear it or read it. This is poetry! We don’t need any proof.
Satire
    The only proper way to eulogise a sultan’s wife is in a poem of two hemistichs throughout: the first one devoted to her breasts and the second to her bottom.
    The sultan’s elegy is a eulogy delayed for reasons of protocol: the gatekeeper would not allow the poet to enter the palace and carry out his job, but he allowed him to visit the grave.
    I do not hate a poet who hates me, but apologise for the pain I have caused him.
On oratory and orators
    Oratory, or most oratory these days, is the art of trivialising the skill. A drum confiding with another drum in a public square and filling the echoing space, regardless of its size, with empty noise, an emptiness which the orator seizes on to fill with more insignificance. The voice, not the words, is master, raised high on an echo which applauding hands protect from the danger of stumbling upon the truth. Oratory is not a question of what the orator-clown wants to say, since the voice precedes the absent content, and the speech itself is the object of the exercise, fired by an instinctive desire to destroy the opponent, the thrusts of a gutless picador to delight sadistic spectators at a bullfight. Oratory is the execution of meaning in a public square. The subject comes after the voice has a short break for a mouthful of water, but the deferred