In the Presence of Absence
Mahmoud Darwish
Darwish's late self-elegy — a prose-poetic autobiography in which the poet addresses his younger self across a life of exile and return.
Written in 2006, two years before his death, In the Presence of Absence is Mahmoud Darwish’s farewell to himself: a self-elegy in which the aging poet addresses his younger self, “you who are not you,” across twenty movements of incantatory prose. The book retraces the stations of his life — childhood in the Galilee village of al-Birwa, the flight of 1948, the return to a homeland made unrecognizable, the years of prison, exile, and fame — while meditating on language, love, and mortality.
Neither poem nor memoir but something between, it is among the summits of Darwish’s art, and Sinan Antoon’s English translation, published by Archipelago Books in 2011, was awarded the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.
About the author
Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008), born in al-Birwa in the Galilee, was the national poet of Palestine and one of the greatest Arab poets of the modern era. His many collections, including Memory for Forgetfulness and Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?, made him the voice of Palestinian dispossession and longing worldwide.
Details
- Published in Arabic as Fi Hadrat al-Ghiyab, 2006
- English translation by Sinan Antoon, Archipelago Books, 2011
The edition
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