The Adam of Two Edens: Poems.

• Author: Bayoumi, Moustafa
• Position: Book Reviews

Mabmoud Darwish. The Adam of Two Edens: Poems. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press and Jusoor, 2000. 206 pages. Paper$16.95.

This essential collection could not have appeared at a more crucial time. As the Aqsa intifada rages on against the Israeli occupation, and the brutal assault against Palestinian life bulldozes forward--claiming hundreds of lives and thousands of causalities--the need for representing the shattered rhythms, broken cadences, and tragic realities of Palestinian life in English mounts. In Arabic, the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish has long done just that. For thirty years, his legendary verse has articulated the ache of exile with an uncompromising iconoclasm that breathes his own unique vision into the collective traumas of Palestinian existence. Amazingly popular (especially considering the density of his poetry), Darwish is frequently recognized as the national poet of Palestine. In English, however, his verse, like Palestinian representations of themselves in that language, is marked more by its absence than its presence (Darwish himself knows the absurdities of living in the absent present: after his family was driven from the Galilee village of Birweh in 1948, taking refuge in Lebanon, they reentered Israel "illegally" in 1949, behind the official Israeli census, and their legal status, like thousands of other Palestinians, was reduced to the Orwellian doublespeak of "present-absentee-alien."). It is not that Darwish's name is not known in English-language circles but that his poetry largely is not. Except for a few shorter and direct poems ("Passport" say, or "Identity Card"), the availability of his oeuvre in English has remained thin. This anthology, edited by Munir Akash of Jusoor, an Arab American magazine, begins to rectify this imbalance.

Darwish's poetry has been translated in over twenty-two languages, and he remains a major public figure not just in the Arab world but also in France, where he received the Knight of Arts and Belles Letters in 1997. This collection, comprising poems previously published in Jusoor, is significant for English language readers however, for the demands that Darwish placed on their appearance. Akash tells us that Darwish readily agreed to the anthology with the proviso that an American poet be brought in who could "give the translation a single, consistent tone" and give to the poems "the right spirit as modem American poems" (p. 9). The American poet Daniel Moore was...