Posted on January 28, 2010 by Scott Esposito

UCLA has made available audio from a lecture given by Fady Joudah late last year at UCLA’s Asia Institute. You can listen to it here. The lecture deals with Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, whose work Joudah has translated a great deal of, and the lecture specifically deals with his use of the long poem.

For more on Joudah and Darwish, check out our audio of his Lit&Lunch event, where he read from his translations of Darwish. Also have a look at Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed, where Joudah offers a never-before-translated long poem of Darwish’s called “Rita’s Winter.” Wherever also includes a nice introduction by Joudah, where he puts the poem into context:

Rita is a pseudonym for Darwish’s Jewish Israeli lover when he was in his twenties and he had written five or six poems to her throughout the 1960s and 70s before writing this one, his final one for her, in 1992. Rita was made an icon of contemporary Arabic culture through the Lebanese composer and musician, Marcel Khalife, who sang Darwish’s poem “Rita and the Rifle” (where love is broken because of the Israeli military service). I can say that Rita signifies an essence of Darwish’s poetry, its humanizing of the other, a daring from which Darwish never shied. I can say “Rita’s Winter” is a brilliant poem because it exhibits, among many other things, Darwish’s use of dialogue, an art he developed until he turned his later poems into plays, without calling them plays.