Mahmoud Darwish

Quotes

When you prepare your breakfast, think upon others
Do not forget to feed the pigeons.
When you engage in your wars, think upon others
Do not forget those who demand peace.
As you pay your water bill, think upon others
Who seek sustenance from the clouds, not a tap.
And when you return home – to your house – think upon others
Such as those who live in tents.
When you fall asleep counting planets, think upon others
Who cannot find a place to sleep.
And as you search for meaning with fancy metaphors, think upon others
Who have lost their right to speak.
And when you think of others, far away, think of yourself
And say: I am a candle in the darkness.
- Think upon others, Translation by Hamish Kinnear edinburgharabicinitiative.wordpress.com, aldiwan.net (Arabic)

Quotes about Mahmoud Darwish

Whatever her or his social identity, the writer is, by the nature of the act of writing, someone who strives for communication and connection, someone who searches, through language, to keep alive the conversation with what Octavio Paz has called "the lost community." Even if what's written feels like a note thrust into a bottle to be thrown into the sea. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish writes of the incapacity of poetry to find a linguistic equivalent to conditions such as the 1982 Israeli shelling of Beirut: We are now not to describe, as much as we are to be described. We're being born totally, or else dying totally. In his remarkable prose-meditation on that war, he also says, Yet I want to break into song.... I want to find a language that transforms language itself into steel for the spirit-a language to use against these sparkling silver insects, these jets. I want to sing. I want a language that I can lean on and that can lean on me, that asks me to bear witness and that I can ask to bear witness, to what power there is in us to overcome this cosmic isolation.
- Adrienne Rich, Arts of the Possible (2001)

(Are there any Palestinian poets who inspire your work?) My father would read Darwish to me when I was a child and translate it because, in those days, there were not many translations of him. My father would read other poetry and translate it for me, and I just loved it. I loved everything about it: the metaphors, the passion, the care, the tenderness, the flowing quality of the lines. I eventually met Darwish, and he would ask me to read his poems in English; he didn’t like to read his poems in English at all. He read in Arabic, and just getting to be with him was such a landmark in my lifetime’s experience...I felt them [poets] as a wellspring of the spirit of Palestine, and the love and the care for Palestine—that is something that the media often finds easy to overlook. It’s just so insulting—versus the poetry which is so respectful, passionate, loving, and nostalgic.
- Naomi Shihab Nye Interview (2024)

Quotes