A River Dies of Thirst (Diaries)
Mahmoud Darwish was often cited as the poetic voice of the Palestinian people. In the summer of 2006, as Israel attacked Gaza and Lebanon, Darwish recorded his observations and feelings in poems, meditations, fragments and journal entries. The result is this remarkable collection, his last to come out in Arabic.
At once lyrical and philosophical, questioning and wise, full of irony, resistance and play, Darwish’s musings on unrest and loss dwell on love and humanity. In these pages, myth and dream are inseparable from truth.
Mahmoud Darwish was born in 1942 in the village of al-Birweh in Galilee, Palestine. His family fled to Lebanon in 1948 when the Israeli Army destroyed their village. He published around thirty poetry and prose collections, which have been translated into thirty-five languages and founded and edited the prestigious literary review Al Karmel. Darwish was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom, the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and the Prince Claus Fund Award. He died in August 2008.
Reviews
"Lyrical, imagistic, plaintive, haunting, always passionate and elegant – and never anything less than free." -Naomi Shihab Nye
"These translations sway delicately between mystery and clarity, giving a rendition of the master’s voice." -Fady Joudah, The Guardian
"Rarely have the personal and the political been so plainly intertwined as in Darwish’s poetry, and this book is no exception." -The Bloomsbury Review
"Mahmoud Darwish is one of the greatest poets of our time. In his poetry Palestine becomes the map of the human soul." -Elias Khoury
"There are two maps of Palestine that politicians will never manage to forfeit: the one kept in the memories of Palestinian refugees, and that which is drawn by Darwish’s poetry." -Anton Shammas
"Darwish left behind an entire continent of poems whispering and singing inside Arabic and calling on us to reacquaint ourselves with its topography." -Sinan Antoon
"At the centre of A River Dies of Thirst is a series of exquisite love poems into which, perhaps more delicately than ever, Darwish again winds questions of identity, sexuality, language and metaphor." -Electronic Intifada
"Darwish's final poems are graced by a mood of disburdenment, a ghostly light-heartedness. It is as if the poet felt himself liberated at last from all his prior performances, or as if the long siege of history had momentarily lifted and set him free." -The National
"Like Robert Burns of Scotland, like W.B. Yeats of Ireland, Darwish was the poetic soul of his small nation." -The Tablet
"It is through the poetry of Darwish that one learns what it meant, and still means, to be a Palestinian...He speaks for his people, but like all great poets he speaks for every human being." -New York Review of Books
"Darwish’s poetry is one of the most powerful evocations of the Palestinian yearning for statehood, undogmatic but dogged in making his memories a reality." -Forward
"Darwish has given expression to his people's ordinary longings and desires." -The New York Times
"Darwish is a writer who has always astonishingly made poetry the site of actuality – the poem as a place where thinking is forged. [The poems] precisely mark enormous emotional ranges with a single, pointed image; they make short lines of long wars; and they push us, as always, towards the seeking of meaning." -Asymptote Journal
