Alienation and isolation, yes, but martyrdom and exile are not major themes in English poetry. With the spectacular exceptions of Byron, Shelley, and Ezra Pound, our poets have been perhaps émigrés or tourists but certainly not Dante at the table of strangers. Martyrs are even harder to find. There's James Graham, Royalist martyr, who wrote a metrical prayer on the eve of his execution, John Brown, and of course all those Irish ballad heroes in the Roddy McCorley vein. Nameless martyrs and poets without a country are largely a 20th-century bequest.

The Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish and the Iraqi socialist Saadi Youssef both write from exile, from inside the Middle East, that land where knowledge of the other goes just so far, and no farther. Darwish is exiled from an exiled nation; Youssef's Iraq is, for all its scars and ruins, one of the oldest places on earth. Both poets have been recently collected in English; neither poet is comfortable to encounter.

Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, a selection of poems by Mahmoud Darwish, was translated from the Arabic by a small committee: Munir Akash, the American poet Carolyn Forché, with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein. It contains work from five of Darwish's books published since 1986 (he's published 20 as of 2000), plus three poems written earlier in his career.

I have no sense from the introduction what Darwish's poems are like in Arabic. Judging from the translations, they are classically rhetorical, singing of love and loss (the beloved often the land itself) often in several voices. The longer poems are held together with periodic repeated lines, sometimes varied. Rather than describe the formal aspects of his verse, Carolyn Forché dwells upon the poet's hugely popular espousal of the "poetry of resistance," which she characterizes as an attempt to restore the Palestinian homeland through language. She places him in a poetic class with Federico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Osip Mandelstam, Yehuda Amichai, and C.P. Cavafy—a range of voices with only the short end of the sociopolitical stick in common.

The lost homeland, the sorrow of exile, the dream of a return, the Fall of Man as experienced in the here-and-now by ethnics and nationals is the stuff of sentimental journalists and other opportunists whose beat is politics, the organized expression of hatreds. Difficult material from which to fashion a firsthand rendering of an inhabitable world—firsthand to the reader, that is.

Here's "Neighing on the Slope":

Horses' neighing on the slope. Downward or upward.
I prepare my portrait for my woman to hang on the wall
   when I die.
She says: Is there a wall to hang it on?
I say: We'll build a room for it. Where? In any house.

Horses' neighing on the slope. Downward or upward.

Does a woman in her thirties need a homeland to put a
   picture in a frame?
Can I reach the summit of this rugged mountain?
The slope is either an abyss or a place of siege.
Midway it divides. What a journey! Martyrs killing one
   another.
I prepare my portrait for my woman. When a new horse
   neighs in you, tear it up.

Horses' neighing on the slope. Upward, or upward.

The woman's question touches me, but the poet's bravura (all the "my woman" business) puts me off. This may be taken, I guess, as tough-guy talk, or maybe poem noir. The horses and mountain are figurative.

Darwish is in a difficult position. His poems are stocked with gazelles, gypsies, martyrs and prophets, the hoopoe and both testaments, the gods of Egypt and the stars. They lament the lost homeland, the thwarted hope, the consuming rage. But so much impossibility: how can there be a Palestinian nation in language, when there's no Palestinian language, only a long bill of undeniable grievances against history, and those who dispose it?

Maybe a poet whose muse is a homeland that exists only in memory, or in prospect, and who pitches his tent in language, not in the earth, is sentenced to rhetorical flourish. The opening stanza of the 1976 poem "As Fate Would Have It" reads:

On Fifth Avenue he greeted me and burst into tears.
He leaned against a wall of glass
… New York is without willows.
He made me cry, and water returned to its rivers.
We had coffee, and too soon went separate ways.

I appreciate the echoes of Psalm 137 ("By the rivers of Babylon" in the reggae song), where the exiles hang their harps upon the willows. But New York City does have willows, despite the repeated line. The song begins either with a failure of observation or with a love for its own sound at the expense of descriptive truth. It does, however, assert a willful power.

Saadi Youssef sings a different exilic tune in the third of his three "Solos on the Oud":

Land where I no longer live,
distant land
where the sky weeps,
where the women weep,
where people openly read the newspaper.
Country where I no longer live,
lonely country,
sand, date palms, and brook.
O wound and spike of wheat!
O anguish of long nights!

Country where I no longer live,
my outcast country,
from you I only gained a traveler's sails,
a banner ripped by daggers
and fugitive stars.
Algiers 16/8/1965

According to Khaled Mattawa, the translator of Without an Alphabet, Without a Face, Saadi Youssef's committed Communism has assured his alienation and exile from every regime in Baghdad since the 1950s. This collection of poems from 1955 to 1997 divides into nine sections, organized by the poet's place of residence. Of those 42 years writing and publishing, perhaps 12 years were spent in Youssef's homeland. Some of those years were spent in prison. What else can a would-be ruler do with someone who writes (in "Martyrdom," Basra, 1957),

"The informants rush away, / tripping on the head of Jesus. / And in the print shops the filthy newspapers / drink his blood between their coughs, / black, contemptuous, and prolific." And one year later, pens the little poem "To Socialism"?

Perhaps take pleasure in his work. Even in translation, an honest intelligence shines through.

Early in the last century, when the exile Pound and the émigré T.S. Eliot were inventing modernism and touting World Literature—a thing which has truly come to pass—poets began writing in a way that traveled easily from tongue to tongue. Unrhymed, vernacular, direct, sometimes elliptical and flinty, like Pound's Chinese poems in English, the international style took root where the League of Nations failed.

Behind the internationalism lay a notion that poetry was, like mathematics or music, a language unto itself, and that the language a poem actually got written in was like the instrument it was scored for. It might be argued from the other side that poetry is wedded to the material it's made in, that the poetry is what gets lost in the translation. Walt Whitman, or Emily Dickinson.

A middle position holds that poetry is a kind of speech, and there are ways that people talk to each other that can be understood from language to language, either because the poetry's at least as well written as prose, or because it speaks from the heart.

The modernist account of the source of poetry resembles the rabbinic fable of the prelapsarian tongue. One day in Eden, Adam gave names to every thing, and each name revealed the essence of the thing itself. But Eve fell, Adam fell, language fell into, as John Milton wrote, duality, knowing good and evil—or rather, good by evil.

Language fell a second time with the Tower of Babel, which Genesis ascribes to the pride of the hunter/city-builder. Babel, or Babylon, is of course in Mesopotamia (Uruk, Erech, Iraq).

Saadi Youssef's 1995 Damascus poem, "America, America," has a kinship with Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, and a sharp eye for the balance of trade. "America," he begins "let's exchange gifts. / Take your smuggled cigarettes / and give us potatoes." In the spirit of open international exchange, he continues:

Take James Bond's golden pistol
and give us vaccines.
Take your blueprints for model penitentiaries
and give us village homes.
Take the books of your missionaries
and give us paper for poems to defame you.
Take what you do not have
and give us what we have.
Take the stripes of your flag
and give us the stars.
Take the Afghan mujahideen beard
and give us Walt Whitman's beard filled with butterflies.
Take Saddam Hussein
and give us Abraham Lincoln
or give us no one.

Current events are television, maybe movies, flashy and two-dimensional and easily personal. History is an echoing hall with indirect light, and is harder to take to heart. In "The Attempt," written in Cairo a year after the America poem, Youssef fashioned a dialectical materialist's model poem in three stanzas (thesis, antithesis, synthesis), carving in marble the tension between the personal and the historical, between the domestic and the ambitious—the fields of art as well as love and war:

Philip the Macedonian
was the fastest man to answer a question.
He said: "I will remain by the sword.
And I will sleep by the sword—
even if my bones are bleached white—
so long as the sword remains."

But Alexander
did not learn what a son learns
from a father.
He said:
"I will roam the world.
My companions will be
warriors and philosophers
and I will seek answers to
the world's questions."

Alexander
wandered, burning
with the world's questions.
But he remained alone,
without a grave,
and remained distant….
He left only his image:
the face of a boy
who tried to look the world in the face.

One poetry that travels well is the voice of an honest man, talking perhaps to himself.

As for the tug-of-war between the prophets of nationality and the one-worlders, the line each side struggles to drag the other across is also drawn by poetry, which marks the place where understanding ends.

Laurance Wieder is a poet. His rendering of the complete Psalter, Words to God's Music: A New Book of Psalms, was published earlier this year by Eerdmans.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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