Darwish unplugged
July 3rd, 2008![[image - Mahmoud Darwish]](http://fugitivepeace.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/img_9375a-small.jpg "img_9375a-small")
The night before last I went to a public reading in Ramallah by Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet.
To get a ticket was remarkably lucky, but I couldn’t understand more than about ten words of the whole evening. I had been hoping he would read “From now on you are not yourself“, the poem he wrote after the Hamas takeover of Gaza last year, which I quoted in The Economist; that, at least, I would have recognised.
Still, just to sit and listen to it wash over me was enough. The poems sound as if they were written to be read aloud, and without meaning, the words become pure objects of sound. Sometimes they are percussive attacks, sometimes ascending spirals of rhyme, sometimes rich velvet cushions, sometimes curling thorns.
The day after, I learned that they had been giving out English translations at the door. Maybe I was better off not having one.