Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Munir Akash Introduction Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche FROM Fewer Roses (1986) I Will Slog over This Road Another Road in the Road Were It Up to Me to Begin Again On This Earth I Belong There Addresses for the Soul, outside This Place Earth Presses against Us We Journey towards a Home We Travel Like All People Athens Airport I Talk Too Much We Have the Right to Love Autumn The Last Train Has Stopped On the Slope, Higher Than the Sea, They Slept He Embraces His Murderer Winds Shift against Us Neighing on the Slope Other Barbarians Will Come They Would Love to See Me Dead When the Martyrs Go to Sleep The Night There We Went to Aden Another Damascus in Damascus The Flute Cried In This Hymn FROM I See What I Want to See (1993) The Hoopoe FROM Why Have You Left the Horse Alone? (1995) I See My Ghost Coming from Afar A Cloud in My Hands The Kindhearted Villagers The Owl's Night The Everlasting Indian Fig The Lute of Ismael The Strangers' Picnic The Raven's Ink Like the Letter "N" in the Qur'an Ivory Combs The Death of the Phoenix Poetic Regulations Excerpts from the Byzantine Odes of Abu Firas The Dreamers Pass from One Sky to Another A Rhyme for the Odes (Mu'allaqat) Night That Overflows My Body The Gypsy Woman Has a Tame Sky FROM A Bed for the Stranger (1999) We Were without a Present Sonnet II The Stranger Finds Himself in the Stranger The Land of the Stranger, the Serene Land Inanna's Milk Who Am I, without Exile? Lesson from the Kama Sutra Mural (2000) Mural Three Poems (before 1986) A Soldier Dreams of White Tulips As Fate Would Have It Four Personal Addresses Glossary

About the Author

Mahmoud Darwish (1941 - 2008) was the author of over thirty books of poems, including Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (California, 1995), The Adam of Two Edens (2001), and Psalms (1994). He received the 2001 Prize for Cultural Freedom from the Lannan Foundation. Munir Akash is a founding editor of Jusoor, The Arab American Journal of Cultural Exchange, and coeditor of The Adam of Two Edens (2001) and Post Gibran: Anthropology of New Arab American Writing (2000). Carolyn Forche is Professor of English at George Mason University and author of The Angel of History (1994). Sinan Antoon is coeditor of Arab Studies Journal. Amira El-Zein is the author of Bedouin of Hell (1992) and The Book of Palm Trees (1973). Fady Joudah is a prize-winning poet, translator, and physician. He is the author of The Earth in the Attic (2008) and Alight (2013), and the translator of two volumes of Mahmoud Darwish's poetry, The Butterfly's Burden (2007) and If I Were Another (2009).

Reviews

"Darwish's complex linguistic negotiations of deeply contested places, on the earth and in the mind, demand and sustain serious reading and discussion.  . . . [Forché's] fluid and precise approach to translation is everywhere apparent here."
*Publishers Weekly*

“These translations of Mahmoud Darwish’s marvelous poems reveal the lifelong development of a major world poet. The book is a gift to other poets and lovers of poetry. It’s also an important contribution to current and future discourse on culture and politics.”
*American Poet*

"This book is a beautiful rendering of beautiful verse. It is an important contribution in making accessible an important figure in modern Arab culture. Unfortunately, It Was Paradise demonstrates that Darwish is a poet of our time as well as a poet of all times."
*Journal of Palestine Studies*

"This book—perhaps the most important, available, and representative volume of Darwish to date—is really remarkable. It's striking how this poet is so much at once and as a whole: personal and political, 'experimental' yet lyrically so, informed by philosophy yet reminiscent of prayer."
*PopMatters*