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

and translator both find taxing.
    What Mahmoud Darwish would have liked to say to his people and to others, beside his response to their invitation to read ‘The Identity Card’, is that he had travelled with his poetry beyond the borders. All great poetry ‘travels’, to borrow Edward Said’s popular title of ‘Theory Travels’, and it travels in ‘a finer tone’ to help it survive freely in exile instead of finding shelter in ‘asylum’. For Mahmoud, poetry is a global project which aspires to transcend the local limitations. The serious poet is in Mahmoud’s own words ‘always on the move’. He is nomadic. The following example is an example of this phenomena.
    * * *
    In her brilliant book
Proust Among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East
(2008), Jacqueline Rose puts Mahmoud Darwish among the great figures of world literature and thought: Seamus Heaney, Marcel Proust and Sigmund Freud. First she makes a comparison between Mahmoud Darwish and Heaney in terms of their common practice of seeing poetry and politics as inseparable:

    In
The Redress of Poetry,
Seamus Heaney talks of those poets for whom the struggle of an individual consciousness toward affirmation merges with a collective straining for self-definition. Mahmoud Darwish is the very model of such a poet whose poetry yearns toward an identity that is never achieved or complete (‘struggle’, ‘towards’ and ‘straining’ being key to Heaney’s description). Not only or always a political poet, yet Darwish saw the link between poetry and politics as unbreakable.
    Rose goes on to quote Darwish:
    ‘No Palestinian poet or writer,’ he stated in an interview in 2000, ‘can enjoy the luxury of severing ties with this level of national work, which is politics.’ Uncompromising in his political vision, Darwish’s crafting of a homeland in language has been one of the strongest rejoinders to dispossession. He is also at every level a poet who crosses borders. This was true literally in that originary flight and return that left his status so eloquent of a people’s predicament:
    absence piling up its chosen objects
and pitching its eternal tent around us
.
(‘The Owl’s Night’)
    In her quest for Darwish’s poetics Rose examines thoroughly the different translations of the poems. She even turns to native Arabs to help her see more in the problematic matters of rendering the text in English. Rose chooses the ‘Rita Poems’ and ‘A SoldierDreams of White Lilies’ to demonstrate the sense of connectedness of poetry and politics in Mahmoud’s poetry. With great insight, Rose proceeds to deconstruct the poems in question and comes out with unprecedented perceptive analysis of Mahmoud’s poetry. The result is that ambiguity in Mahmoud’s poetry is largely illuminated (for details see pp. 103–5 of
Proust Among the Nations
).
    Here, for example, what Rose says about the soldier poem:
    In ‘A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies’, Darwish performs an act of extraordinary poetic and political generosity by granting this one soldier an unusual, unprecedented knowledge of the grave damage that his nation, in the throes of victory, was doing and would go on doing, both to the Palestinians and to itself.
    Rose goes on to read Mahmoud’s poetry in Freudian terms to further demonstrate the soldier predicament:
    ‘She was in the peculiar situation of knowing and at the same time not knowing,’ Freud writes of Fräulein Elizabeth von R in
Studies on Hysteria
, ‘a situation, that is, in which a psychical group [of ideas] was cut off [from her conscious thoughts].’
    Rose concludes the chapter in which Mahmoud Darwish features largely with a question which I believe would be quite appropriate for a United Nations poster. Here are the words: ‘Why is it so hard for nations and for people to remember what they have done?’
    Jacqueline Rose continues her serious engagement with Mahmoud Darwish further to explore his poetics. In a seminarheld in