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Authors: Mahmoud Darwish Catherine Cobham

A River Dies of Thirst

BOOK: A River Dies of Thirst
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M
AHMOUD
D
ARWISH

A River Dies of Thirst

journals

Translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham

archipelago books

Originally published as
Athar al-Farâsha
, by Riad El-Rayyes Books, Ltd. in Beirut in 2008

Copyright © Mahmoud Darwish/Actes Sud, 2009

English translation copyright © Catherine Cobham, 2009

First Archipelago Books Edition, 2009

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without prior written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Darwish, Mahmud.

[Athar al-farashah. English]

A river dies of thirst : journals = Athar al-farasha : yawmiyyat / Mahmoud Darwish ; translated by Catherine Cobham.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-9357446-7-2

I. Cobham, Catherine. II. Title. III. Title: Athar al-farasha.

PJ7820.A7A8713 2009

892.71'6--dc22
2009012083

Archipelago Books

232 Third Street, Suite A111

Brooklyn, NY 11215

www.archipelagobooks.org

Distributed by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
www.cbsd.com

Cover art: “Les hiboux et les courbeaux” from the
Kalila wa Dimna
reproduced with the permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France

This publication was made possible with support from Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

Contents

The girl/The scream

Green flies

Like a prose poem

If only I were a stone

Beyond identification

The enemy

Nero

The forest

Doves

The house as casualty

The cunning of the metaphor

The mosquito

An eagle flying low

A personal duty

A common enemy

The rest of a life

The colour yellow

If only the young were trees

We arrived too late

Two strangers

What’s it all for?

A talent for hope

I am only him

I did not dream

The pretty girls’ neighbour

How far is far?

He sees himself as absent

He said: ‘I’m afraid’

The roar of silence

A person chasing himself

A longing to forget

A river dies of thirst

The wall

The law of fear

I walked on my heart

Routine

A gun and a shroud

If we want to

Cheated time

Perfection

One, two, three

Empty boxes

On nothingness

My imagination . . . a faithful hunting dog

If I were someone else

Assassination

Rustling

A metaphor

In the company of things

A shawl made of silk

A sort of loss

A shameful land

Summer and winter

A coloured cloud

A spring passing quickly

Life to the last drop

The butterfly effect

I was not with me

The faces of truth

As if he were asleep

Visible music

The road to where

The humour of eternity

The indifferent one

The picture and the frame

Snow

An infectious disease

A bed of lavender

Most and least

I am jealous of everything around you

Lose one of your stars

Private meetings

She said to him

A sneeze

In praise of wine

At the top of the cypress trees

Point of view

The mercy bullet

Shyness

Perfection is the same as imperfection

Prickly pear

In the empty square

A short holiday

Fame

If I were a hunter

Nightmare

Iraq’s night is long

In Cordoba

In Madrid

High is the mountain

I don’t notice

That word

Echo

The second olive tree

Willow tree

Right of return to paradise

If it were not for sin

Italian autumn

Two travellers to a river

A killer and innocent

As if she is a song

My poet/my other

A clear sky and a green garden

A single word

The essence of the poem

Satire

On oratory and orators

Half and half

I think

The second line

Higher and further

The canary

On a boat on the Nile

The lonely man’s addiction

In Rabat

Description

In Skogås

The exile finds his way

Boulevard St Germain

Things would be different

A life beginning

The hand of the statue

In Beirut

The return of June

If only people envied us

From now on you are somebody else

From now on you are you

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Sabry Hafez for his invaluable help with the meanings and cultural contexts of a number of words and phrases. I would also like to thank John Burnside, Maudemarie Clark, David Cobham, Dina Frangi, Ronak Husni, Javier Letrán, and Tetz Rooke for their useful comments on specific linguistic, literary, or other cultural issues.

Responsibility for any mistakes and infelicities rests with me.

Catherine Cobham

St Andrews, 2009

A River Dies of Thirst
The girl/The scream

On the seashore is a girl, and the girl has a family

and the family has a house. And the house has two windows and a door

And in the sea is a warship having fun

catching promenaders on the seashore:

Four, five, seven

fall down on the sand. And the girl is saved for a while

because a hazy hand

a divine hand of some sort helps her, so she calls out: ‘Father

Father! Let’s go home, the sea is not for people like us!’

Her father doesn’t answer, laid out on his shadow

windward of the sunset

blood in the palm trees, blood in the clouds

Her voice carries her higher and further than

the seashore. She screams at night over the land

The echo has no echo

so she becomes the endless scream in the breaking news

which was no longer breaking news

when

the aircraft returned to bomb a house with two windows and a door.

Green flies

The scene is the same as ever. Summer and sweat, and an imagination incapable of seeing beyond the horizon. And today is better than tomorrow. But the dead are what’s new. They’re born every day and when they’re trying to sleep death takes them away from their drowsiness into a sleep without dreams. It’s not worth counting them. None of them asks for help from anyone. Voices search for words in the open country, and the echo comes back clearly, woundingly: ‘There’s nobody here.’ But there’s somebody who says: ‘It’s the killer’s right to defend the killer instinct,’ while the dead say belatedly: ‘It’s the victim’s right to defend his right to scream.’ The call to prayer rises to accompany the indistinguishable funerals: coffins hastily raised in the air, hastily buried – no time to carry out the rites, more dead are arriving at speed from other raids, individually or in groups, or a whole family with no orphans or grieving parents left behind. The sky is leaden grey and the sea blue grey, but the colour of blood is hidden from the camera by swarms of green flies.

Like a prose poem

An autumnal summer on the hills is like a prose poem. The breeze is a gentle rhythm I feel but do not hear in the modest little trees, and the yellowish plants are peeling images, and eloquence provokes similes with its cunning verbs. The only celebration on these mountain paths is provided by the lively sparrows, who flit between sense and nonsense. Nature is a body divesting itself of trivial adornment until the figs, grapes and pomegranates ripen and the rain awakens forgotten desires. ‘If it weren’t for my mysterious need for poetry, I wouldn’t need anything,’ says the poet, whose enthusiasm has waned so his mistakes have become less frequent. He walks because the doctors have advised him to walk, with no particular goal, to train the heart in a kind of indifference necessary for good health. Any idea that occurs to him will be purely gratuitous. The summer only rarely lends itself to verse. The summer is a prose poem which takes no interest in the eagles circling high above.

If only I were a stone

I would yearn for nothing

no yesterday passing, no tomorrow to come

and my present neither advancing nor retreating

Nothing happening to me!

If only I were a stone – I said – Oh if only I were

some stone so that water would burnish me

green, yellow – I would be placed in a room

like a sculpture, or exercises in sculpture

or material for the eruption of the necessary

from the folly of the unnecessary

If only I were a stone

so that I could yearn for something!

Beyond identification

I sit in front of the television, since I can’t do anything else. There, in front of the television, I discover my feelings and see what’s happening to me. Smoke is rising from me and I reach out my severed hand to pick up my scattered limbs from many bodies, and I don’t find them but I don’t run away from them either because pain has such an attraction. I am besieged by land and air and sea and language. The last aircraft has taken off from Beirut airport and put me in front of the television to witness the rest of my death with millions of other viewers. Nothing proves that I exist when I think, as Descartes says, but rather when I am offered up in sacrifice, now, in Lebanon. I enter the television, I and the beast. I know the beast is stronger than me in the struggle between aircraft and bird. But I have become addicted, perhaps more than I should have, to the heroism of the metaphor: the beast has swallowed me but has not digested me. I have emerged unscathed more than once. My soul, which was confused in the belly of the beast, has inhabited another body, lighter and stronger. But now I don’t know where I am: in front of the television or inside it. Whereas I can see my heart, rolling like a pine cone from a Lebanese mountain to Rafah!

BOOK: A River Dies of Thirst
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