A milestone of Palestinian literature Don’t apologize for what you have done (Crocetti Editore), collection of the most significant verses from Mahmud Darwish’s work, published in 2004, a few months after the poet’s death.
The translator Sana Darghmouni, who brings her privileged point of view on the text on Tuesday 21 May at 6pm to the Fondazione Premio Napoli, gives us back her gaze on humanity through the description of historical, mythical and everyday places. Participating in the meeting with the translator were magistrate Alfredo Guardiano, coordinator of the technical jury of Premio Napoli, and professor of L’Orientale University Monica Ruocco. Carmen Gallo, researcher in English literature at the Sapienza University of Rome, speaks with the author. The event is organized by Campania Legge and DAAM Artistic Lab.
The book
The work of Mahmud Darwish, both artistic and political, is characterized by the transition from the revolutionary and patriotic phase of the beginning (the “poetry of resistance”) to the reworking of the Palestinian drama “through an aesthetic research that appropriates both symbolist and both epic” (Simone Sibilio). It is a gradual transition, which has distanced Darwish from the image of the poet-militant and has often attracted criticism from readers, who are finally convinced that even a “national poet” must be above all a poet. In Darwish’s latest production, the writing focuses on the complexity of existence, on the dialogue between the self and the other and on the observation of humanity through the description of historical, mythical and everyday places.
The collection Don’t apologize for what you did, published in 2004, a few years before the poet’s death, belongs to this phase. It is a work full of meditations on life and the end, on the themes that have always been central to Darwish’s writing: memory and exile, time and absence, loss and identity, belonging and nostalgia. The texts, full of scents, images, everyday objects and minimal actions, metaphors and mystery, are modulated on tones that are sometimes more meditative and tending towards prose, sometimes markedly lyrical: the rhythm from which the poet, “the undecided between prose and poetry” (In Presence d’Absence, 2006), has always felt inhabited.
