Free Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? by Mahmoud Darwish

INTRODUCTION
    On a visit to Mahmoud Darwish at his flat in Amman I carried with me a small tape recorder with the intention of recording him reading two poems: ‘How Many Times Shall Things Be Over?’ and ‘To My End and to Its End’. Mahmoud was courteous enough to acquiesce to my demand, which I had thought perhaps too much to ask, simply because he used to recite his poetry before a large audience (sometimes thousands) and at a spacious place! The first poem expresses the sense of betrayal caused by the agents of the 1948 war, which consequently forced the poet and his family to leave their home and take shelter in the neighbouring country, Lebanon. Mahmoud renders his father’s recollection of the experience not ‘in tranquility’ but from the most upsetting situation in which he and his family suddenly found themselves caught. It was a harsh summer for the Darwish family to live as refugees in Lebanon, scanning their eyes across the border to their deserted home with ‘the horse left alone’ and ripe crops of the summer season left uncollected for the first time. The other poem is an account of the horrible trip they decided to take back during the night, stealing across the borders towards their home. The trip is obviously very dangerous, as it would cost them their life if they were spotted by the border police, but luckily they made it. On various occasions later in life, Mahmoud declared that the experience of crossing the borders on foot in the heart of darkness had been deeply carved in his memory. The title of this volume is derived from this experience of interpersonality included in the two poems mentioned above.
    Listening to Mahmoud Darwish reciting the two poems one might assume that the poems were written by the six-year-oldchild rather than by the mature poet, for the eloquence of the poems makes you visualize the event of lyricism as evidence rather than lyricism contrived in abstract by words. In Pound’s comment on poetry and poets (in a letter to Kate Buss 9th March 1916) ‘The poem is not so much the expression of a lyrical state as evidence for such a state. The poet is out to avoid at all costs the poetry that is an “asylum for [the] affections”.’ In
Age of Iron
Coetze similarly tells us that the purpose of his narrative is not to solicit pity but to help us see things as they happen. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry falls into the realm of this kind of objectivity, presumably articulated by Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’.
    After I had translated the two poems into English, I showed them to Mahmoud. It seemed he had just received a translation of
Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?
His response was: ‘the horse left alone has not been fortunate enough to receive a translation I favour, despite the fact that it is my most favourable collection of poetry’. He continued to say that he was not even sent a proof copy to read! I was not in a position to make any comment, simply because I did not know the edition he was talking about, not having seen the translation to which he was referring. In the course of our conversation he suggested that I could try to translate the volume in question, and I considered the offer a privilege, adding to the previous privilege I had of translating
Almond Blossoms and Beyond
and
Absent Presence
. He actually read those proofs word by word, and I still have his handwritten remarks made on the rough copy he used to read the texts.
    * * *
    Here I am then, with this translation created as a homage to Mahmoud Darwish, rather than as an attempt to be animprovement on any other translation available. Needless to say that all translations are defective in one way or another. The redeeming feature of any new translation is that it forms an open invitation for a further different translation advanced to the reader.
    It may be worthwhile remembering that Mahmoud Darwish was never keen on having his poetry translated and he simply prided himself on writing in