• In the Presence of Absence
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Archipelago Books

In the Presence of Absence

In the Presence of Absence

by Mahmoud Darwish, translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon

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Winner of the 2012 National Translation Award

One of the most transcendent poets of his generation, Darwish composed this remarkable elegy at the apex of his creativity, but with the full knowledge that his death was imminent. Thinking it might be his final work, he summoned all his poetic genius to create a luminous work that defies categorization. In stunning language, Darwish’s self-elegy inhabits a rare space where opposites bleed and blend into each other. Prose and poetry, life and death, home and exile are all sung by the poet and his other. On the threshold of im/mortality, the poet looks back at his own existence, intertwined with that of his people. Through these lyrical meditations on love, longing, Palestine, history, friendship, family, and the ongoing conversation between life and death, the poet bids himself and his readers a poignant farewell.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781935744016
Pages: 200
Publication Date:

Praise

(Mahmoud) Darwish's later poems are long, open-ended, traveling far in time and space, balancing many seemingly incongruous elements, moving in one line from the quotidien to the epic... His poetry is polyphonic, containing the voices of lovers, enemies, parents, former selves. The poet's own identity often gently disintegrates or splits...His humanity, (Darwish) argued, was safeguarded by acknowledging the humanity of his enemy.
—Ursula Lindsey, The New York Review of Books

Mahmoud Darwish [is] the truly great poet of the Palestinian people, their traditions and experiences. It is through the poetry of Darwish that ones learns what it meant, and still means, to be a Palestinian with cultural roots that reach far back in time...he fashioned a new literary Arabic that merged vernacular idioms with the classic language. His Arabic gave voice to the Palestinians who had been driven from their homeland, and with this voice Darwish created poetry of the highest order by any standard. He speaks for his people, but like all great poets he speaks for every human being.
—G.W. Bowersock, The New York Review of Books

In a unique hybrid of verse and prose, Mahmoud Darwish, shadowed by mortality, created an autobiography of exile and return, a lyric narrative whose every section is at once a vivid aperçu of life unfolding in history's shadows and a poem with a poem's internal logic. Sinan Antoon's careful and graceful translation re-creates the work's beauty, irony, and power for Anglophone readers.
—Marilyn Hacker

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