The Poet Is Dead: Elias Khoury Remembers His Friend Mahmoud Darwish

Never will lover reach lover Except as martyr or fugitive. *** The challenge for Darwish was the same as that posed in the mu'allaqat, which asked: "Have the poets let go of the clichés?" As if the Arab poet stood amazed before the muse who dictated new language to him at a point when his predecessors had already said everything. [...] Darwish did not just rely on this inspiration, his marvelous poetic intuition, the softness of lemon flowers in the music of his poetry and the water that attenuated his words, but added to these his conscious ability to sum up modern Arabic poetry in its entirety, before setting sail to travel to all poetry, from the ancient Greeks to Neruda.