The Butterfly's Burden - Softcover

Mahmoud Darwish

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852247886 ISBN 13: 9781852247881

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2007

Synopsis

Butterfly's Burden

About this title

Review:

The land that Palestinians and Israelis uneasily share has produced work to counter the propaganda on both sides. Mahmoud Darwish's poetry pays eloquent testimony to the world his family lost in 1948. (The Butterfly's Burden, 2007, is in facing-page translation.) --Sameer Rahim, Literary Guide to the Middle East, The Sunday Telegraph

Mahmoud Darwish is one of the two or three most admired, and widely read poets from the Arab world... While unequivocally anchored in the present, his poems draw on the traditions of Al-Andalus, the near-mythical site of flowering Arab, European and Sephardic Jewish art and science - as much in Darwish's re-creation and renewal of Arabic prosody and inweaving of legend as in his fraternal openness to and exchange with poets like Ritsos and Neruda. In the brilliant, bilingual poet Fady Joudah, Darwish has found a translator capable of rendering in English his unflinching, questing, and above all loving poems. --Marilyn Hacker

Like a kind of scientist, Mahmoud Darwish spent his life concocting Palestinian national identity, though its links to the land, and to the Arabic language and culture, were established long before him. In his poetry he tried to link that identity to a humanist global culture, to pre-Arab and pre-Islamic cultures of the Middle East, and to those details of human life that are beautiful in any culture or place. --Mourid Barghouti, Guardian

About the Author:

MAHMOUD DARWISH (1942-2008) 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, returning secretly to the newly created state of Israel after a year. From 1970 to 1996 he lived in Moscow, Cairo, Beirut, Cyprus and Paris, finally settling in Ramallah. A member of the PLO's Executive Council, he wrote the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence, resigning in opposition to the Oslo accords. His many honours include the Lenin Peace Prize, the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom, the French medal for Knight of Arts and Letters and the Prinz Claus Award from the Netherlands. He has published over 20 books of poetry. Bloodaxe published translations of three later works in The Butterfly's Burden (2007), translated by Fady Joudah. This was awarded the Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation in 2008. Mahmoud Darwish died in Houston, Texas, in August 2008, from complications following heart surgery. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas immediately declared three days of national mourning to honour the great Arab writer.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1852247886
• ISBN 13: 9781852247881
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 344
• Editor: Fady Joudah (translator)