Yücel Kayıran
Our preconceived image of Mahmoud Darwish is that he was the poet of the Palestinian cause led by the PLO. Yet his poetry lies outside this image, and he kept his distance from being defined as a “national poet”.
Ben kimim söylemek için size
söyleyeceğim şeyleri?Ne suların cilalayıp
bir yüze dönüştürdüğü bir taşım
ne de rüzgârların delip
neye dönüştürdüğü bir kamış.
These lines are from the opening of the poem “The Dice Player” in Mahmoud Darwish’s Bu Şiirin Bitmesini İstemiyorum (I Don’t Want This Poem to End), recently published in Turkish… And these lines are from the close of the poem “The Realists”:
Belki de en bilgece davranıştır
Kadir Gecesi’nde bize gelen ve kimsenin
yardımına ihtiyaç duymayan
bir yarına kapı aralamak.
The distinguishing feature of Darwish’s poetry must be its analytical structure built on a ground of intuition, and its vision that emerges quietly. That he built his poetry on the long poem goes hand in hand with his conceiving his books not as a booklet but as a Diwan.
Issue 36 of the journal Sözcükler (March–April 2012) published a “special interview” with Darwish. Conducted by Selahattin Yıldırım in 2003, when the poet came to Istanbul to receive the International Nâzım Hikmet Poetry Award, this interview is a thoroughly valuable source on Mahmoud Darwish.
If there is a poet who has received so much attention in terms of translation but is not known to the same degree – about whom no image has yet formed of the system of images he built and of the nature of the spiritual universe that system creates – I think it must be Mahmoud Darwish. Our lack of any idea about Darwish’s system of images, to the extent that it is a problem of translation, may fundamentally also have to do with our ideological preconception of Darwish. Our preconceived image of Mahmoud Darwish is that he has been associated with the PLO and Yasser Arafat rather than with poetry. According to this preconception, Darwish is the poet of the Palestinian cause led by the PLO. Yet his poetry lies outside the image formed by this preconception, and Darwish himself kept his distance from being defined as a “national poet”. Here we should also not forget that before the PLO, Mahmoud Darwish was a member of the Israeli Communist Party.
Considering that the State of Israel was founded in 1948, we can argue that Darwish, born in 1942, represents the first generation to grow up amid the coexistence of Arab and Jewish populations. Both Darwish’s political stance and the poetics on which his poetry rests develop on this basic reality. Tuba Nur Şehirli’s master’s thesis “Filistin Şiiri ve Mahmud Derviş” (Palestinian Poetry and Mahmoud Darwish) is informative. According to Darwish, the Arabs reject the Jews not because they do not share a race or a religion, but because of the racist exploitation they practise, their occupation of the land and every kind of oppression they inflict on the Palestinian Arabs. Darwish thinks that good Jews do not have a racist mentality and that they can live together in peace and tranquillity.
One of the first poems Darwish remembered, “Arap Bir Çocuktan Yahudi Bir Çocuğa Sesleniş” (An Arab Child’s Address to a Jewish Child), points in this direction:
Ey arkadaşım! İstediğin gibi güneşin altında oynamak senin elinde
Oyuncakları yapmak da senin elinde
Fakat ben yapamıyorum
Senin sahip olduğun şeye ben sahip değilim
Senin evin var fakat benim yok, ben bir mülteciyim
Senin bayramların, sevinçlerin mutlulukların var
Ben bayramlardan da, mutluluktan da yoksunum
Neden birlikte oyun oynamıyoruz?
The poems “The Dice Player” and “A Ready-Made Scenario” in the book had been translated before; the first translations appear in the book by the poet translated into Turkish as Duvarda (On the Wall). I would especially recommend reading the two translations comparatively. I must say that I prefer Mehmet Hakkı Suçin’s translation.
Bu Şiirin Bitmesini İstemiyorum
Mahmoud Darwish
Translated by Mehmet Hakkı Suçin
Yapı Kredi, 2016
112 pages.
Source: Radikal Kitap, 20 May 2016. Translated from the Turkish for this site.