Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (Literature of the Middle East) - Softcover

Darwish, Mahmoud

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520087682 ISBN 13: 9780520087682

Publisher: University of California Press, 1995

Synopsis

One of the Arab world's greatest living poets uses the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the shelling of Beirut as the setting for this sequence of prose poems. Mahmoud Darwish vividly recreates the sights and sounds of a city under terrible siege. As fighter jets scream overhead, he explores the war-ravaged streets of Beirut on August 6th (Hiroshima Day).

Memory for Forgetfulness is an extended reflection on the invasion and its political and historical dimensions. It is also a journey into personal and collective memory. What is the meaning of exile? What is the role of the writer in time of war? What is the relationship of writing (memory) to history (forgetfulness)? In raising these questions, Darwish implicitly connects writing, homeland, meaning, and resistance in an ironic, condensed work that combines wit with rage.

Ibrahim Muhawi's translation beautifully renders Darwish's testament to the heroism of a people under siege, and to Palestinian creativity and continuity.

About this title

About the Author:

Mahmoud Darwish has lived most of his life in Lebanon and Palestine. The author of fourteen volumes of poetry and numerous prose works, he now lives in Paris. Ibrahim Muhawi is coauthor and translator of Speak Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales (California, 1988) and Journal of an Ordinary Grief (Archipelago Books, 2010), for which he won the PEN Translation Prize. He is currently a Visiting Professor of Folklore and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.

Language Notes:

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Arabic

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0520087682
• ISBN 13: 9780520087682
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 182