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.

The Beirut39 was recently announced–it’s a group of Arab authors that will be promoted and (hopefully) translated beyond the Arab world.

Interestingly, Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed already translates two of the Beirut39: they are poets Najwan Darwish and Samer Abou Hawwash.

You can read those, as well as a number of the (largely untranslated) next generation of Arab poets, in the special section on Palestinian poetry in Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed. It’s edited by National Book Award-winning poet Marilyn Hacker and largely translated by legendary Arabic translator Fady Joudah.

Darwish-translator and Lit&Lunch guest Fady Joudah reviews A River Dies of Thirst in The Guardian:

A River Dies of Thirst was Darwish’s last collection to be published in Arabic, eight months before his death on 9 August 2008. . . . Its subtitle is Diaries and it is at times a chaotic combination of journal entries, prose poems, poetic fragments, broken ideas, brilliant meditations and fully worked poems. Darwish deliberately blurs boundaries between prosody and prose, formalism and free verse. As a formalist, he continually renewed Arabic prosody, but always struggled with “free verse” or “prose poetry”; questioning how to write it and the ways in which it is not necessarily “free”. In the last entry of the book, after Darwish’s final return to Haifa in 2007, he writes: “All prose here is primitive poetry lacking a skilled craftsman, and all poetry here is prose accessible to passers-by.”

Joudah’s translation of Darwish’s never-before-translated, lengthy poem, “Rita’s Winter” appears in our forthcoming anthology, Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed.

In memory of Mahmoud Darwish’s passing, The Guardian has this piece by the noted activist and author Raja Shehadeh, who was Darwish’s neighbor in Ramallah. He discusses interviewing Darwish during the siege in 2002:

The opportunity to find out more about my neighbour came when we were both under curfew during the invasion of Ramallah by the Israeli army in 2002. It was then that I got a call from the aptly named Bomb magazine in the US to conduct an interview with Darwish. I readily accepted hoping that through an intimate one-to-one discussion I would get to know my famous neighbour better.

For more on Darwish, you can read his poem “State of Siege,” which he wrote during the 2002 siege. Also have a look at our past posts about Darwish and our audio with his translator, Fady Joudah.

As I mentioned here yesterday, Sunday marks the one-year anniversary of legendary Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s death. In honor of Darwish, here is his poem “We Walk on the Bridge,” as translated and read by Fady Joudah.

(3:21)

More of Joudah’s fine translations and readers can be heard on our Darwish audio page.

This Sunday will be the first anniversary of the death of legendary Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. When he died last year, The Guardian hailed his poetry, saying he “did as much as anyone to forge a Palestinian national consciousness.”

This weekend, I’ll definitely be reading some of this intriguing writer’s poetry. Much of his work is already available, although Darwish’s prodigious output includes some 30 collections of poems, and English-language publishers are still catching up with it.

Interlink has just published a collection titled Almond Blossoms and Beyond, one of his last collections, which is “composed of brief lyric poems and the magnificent sustained ‘Exile’ cycle.”

Archipelago has just published Voice Over, a sort of tribute/conversation by poet and novelist Breyten Breytenbach. Later this year they will be publishing A River Dies of Thirst, Darwish’s journals, which they call a “remarkable collection of poems, meditations, fragments, and journal entries” and was Darwish’s last book to appear in Arabic. (I’ll be looking in on both of these this weekend.)

The Center’s own anthology will publish a never-before-translated poem of Darwish’s titled “Rita’s Winter.” Translator Fady Joudah describes this substantial, eight-page work and the woman it is named for thus:

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.

Readers can also listen to the Center’s audio of Fady Joudah reading from his translations of Darwish. Joudah is an incredible reader (the audio must be heard to be believed), and to my mind his tone and rhythm matches up perfectly with these poems he knows so well.