Carolyn Forché Reads Mahmoud Darwish

Kevin Young (0:04)

Hi, you're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I'm Kevin Young, Poetry Editor of The New Yorker Magazine.

On this program, we invite a poet to select a poem from the New Yorker Archive to read and discuss. Then, they read one of their own poems that's been published in the magazine. My guest today is Carolyn Forché, a poet, translator, editor and activist. She is the author of six poetry collections, including most recently, Other Where, New and Selected Poems, 1976 to 2026, and a memoir, What You Have Heard Is True. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Windham-Campbell Prize, and the Academy of American Poets Fellowship for Distinguished Literary Achievement.

Carolyn, welcome. Thanks for joining me.

Carolyn Forché (0:59)

Thank you very much for having me.

Kevin Young (1:02)

The first poem you've chosen to read is The Owl's Night by Mahmoud Darwish, translated from the Arabic by Jeffrey Sacks. What was it about this poem that caught your eye when you were looking through the archives?

Carolyn Forché (1:13)

The archive is wonderful and quite extensive. And then I saw Mahmoud's name. I knew him at the end of his life. We were at the Struga Festival together in 2007 and he died the following year. And I was also one of his translators. I worked with a team of Arabic speakers to translate a volume called Unfortunately, It Was Paradise. And my role on that team was to translate English into English, you know, to make an English language poem out of a literal translation. And we got to know each other that way. He was very concerned that his work read in English like a poem. So I saw this poem published in The New Yorker.

And I chose it because, perhaps partly because his voice could be heard in this moment. And also because he was very dear to me.

And the poem is large in its spiritual dimension. It is a poem of exile and exilic being, absence and the condition of absence and living in absence. And so I thought there would be a lot to talk about with it.

Kevin Young (2:39)

There is already a. Let's take a listen. Here is Carolyn Forché reading The Owl's Night by Mahmoud Darwish.

Carolyn Forché (2:49)

The Owl's Night. Here is a present that yesterday doesn't touch. When we reached the last of the trees, we noticed that we were no longer able to notice. When we looked at the trucks, we saw absence heaping up its selected things and pouring out its eternal tent around us.

Here is a present that yesterday doesn't touch. Silk thread slips between the mulberry trees, letters on the night's notebook. Only moths light our boldness, descending to the hollow of strange words. Was this miserable man my father?

Perhaps I'll consider my situation here. Perhaps I'll give birth now to myself, with myself, and choose for my name vertical letters. Here is a present sitting in time's emptiness, staring at the trace of those who pass on the river's stalk, polishing their flutes with air. Perhaps speech will become transparent, so we'll see windows in it open. Perhaps time will hurry with us, carrying our tomorrow in its luggage. Here is a present without time. He didn't find anyone here, anyone who remembered how we left the door, a gust of wind, anyone who remembered when we fell off yesterday. Yesterday broke over the floor, shrapnel gathered together by others like mirrors for their image after us.

Here is a present without place. Perhaps I'll consider my situation and scream at the Owl's Night. Was that miserable man my father, who makes me carry the burden of his history? Perhaps I'll change my name and choose my mother's expressions and her customs as they ought to be. This way she'll be able to joke with me whenever salt touches my blood. This way she'll be able to take care of me whenever a nightingale bites my mouth.

Here is a present fleeting. Here strangers hang their guns on the branches of an olive tree, prepare dinner quickly from tin cans, and leave quickly for their trucks.

Kevin Young (5:44)

That was The Owl's Night by Mahmoud Darwish, translated from the Arabic by Jeffrey Sacks, which was originally published in the November 14th, 2005 issue of The New Yorker.

Thank you so much for that terrific reading of this poem. You really brought out the sounds and I was really struck hearing it about this refrain of here is a present, which of course changes, but kind of both reinforcing yesterday or the present that yesterday doesn't touch, but in a way it's, I don't know, repeating its absence, the present, or maybe it's the absence of a future. How do you see the repetition working?