If I Were Another Poems [Paperback]

Winner of the PEN USA Literary Award for Translation

Mahmoud Darwish was that rare literary phenomenon: a poet both acclaimed by critics as one of the most important poets in the Arab world and beloved by his readers. His languagelyrical and tenderhelped to transform modern Arabic poetry into a living metaphor for the universal experiences of exile, loss, and identity. The poems in this collection, constructed from the cadence and imagery of the Palestinian struggle, shift between the most intimate individual experience and the burdens of history and collective memory.

Brilliantly translated by Fady Joudah,If I Were Anotherwhich collects the greatest epic works of Darwish's mature yearsis a powerful yet elegant work by a master poet that demonstrates why Darwish was one of the most celebrated poets of his time and was hailed as the voice and conscience of an entire people.

No poet in our time has confronted the violent tides of history with greater humanity or greater artistic range than Mahmoud Darwish. This collection, masterfully edited and translated by Fady Joudah, bears witness to the unceasing development and deepening of Darwish's practice over the last two decades of his life. Here the lyric, the elegiac, and the epic conjoin in one voice encompassing self and other, desire and memory, the olive's tang and the ashes of exile. Michael Palmer, author of Company of Moths

A world-class poet . . . Darwish has not only remade a national consciousness; he has reworked language and poetic tradition to do so.  Fiona Sampson, The Guardian

Poetry for Darwish provides not simply an access of unusual insight or a distant realm of fashioned order, but a harassing amalgam of poetry and collective memory, each pressing on the other . . . The conventional and the ethereal, the historical and the transcendently aesthetic combine to provide an astonishingly concrete sense of going beyond what anyone has ever livl“„