POETRY exercises a special power for Arabs. To a people of desert origins, it takes the partial place of icons and cathedrals, stage drama and political oratory. Yet the Arab canon extends far wider, linking the tribal bards of pre-Islamic Arabia to Sufi mystics, bawdy medieval jesters and angst-ridden modernists. Poetry also carries a special meaning for exiles, who must sustain themselves with what they can carry, their lightest but most precious burdens being memory and language.

Exile was certainly personal to Mahmoud Darwish. His first forced flight came in 1948, when he was seven. Fearing the advance of Israeli forces, his family abandoned their ancestral wheat fields in Western Galilee and walked, destitute, to the apple orchards of Lebanon. Sneaking back across the border later, they found their village razed to make way for Jewish settlement. His father became a laborer; his family, having missed a census, were classed as "present-absent aliens".

But exile was also an experience that Mr Darwish shared with his entire people, the Palestinians. Sixty years after the creation of Israel, more than half of them remain in physical exile from their homeeland, while the rest, partitioned into enclaves under various forms of Israeli control, remain exiled from each other and from the wider Arab world. Mr Darwish was their voice and their consciousness.

It was a role that often bothered him. Rightly, he felt it belittled his devotion to the poetic craft and made him over-solemn. He sometimes berated his huge audiences when they clamored for nationalist odes rather than the subtler, metaphysical verse of his later years. He fretted that some would recall only lines such as "Go! You will not be buried among us," and forget those praising a Jewish lover or commiserating with an enemy soldier. Yet it was inescapable that he should be lauded as Palestine's poet laureate, and not merely because his words were made into popular songs and splashed as headlines to sell newspapers. His own life was entwined with the tragic Palestinian national narrative. When he was barely in his teens, the village schoolmaster tasked him with writing a speech to mark Israel's independence day. He wrote it as a letter to a Jewish boy, explaining that he could not be happy on this day until he was given the same things that the Jewish boy enjoyed. This earned him a summons before the Israeli military governor, who warned him that such behavior could get his father's pass revoked, making him unable to work.

A few years later Mr. Darwish took the bus to a poetry festival in Nazareth, the largest Arab town in Israel. He read one long poem, and was asked to recite more. All he had was a crumpled paper on which he had jotted some rough verse inspired by a visit to the Israeli police, to renew his travel pass. The poem included these lines:

Write down!
I am an Arab
You have stolen
the orchards of my ancestors
And the land which I cultivated
Along with my children
And you left nothing for us
Except for these rocks ... 

The result was electric. The crowd demanded three encores, and Mr Darwish's fame was born. By the mid-1980s, his 20 volumes of verse had sold well over a million copies.
For all that time he had no country of his own. Though a citizen of Israel, he was too often jailed there for his activism, and eventually had his citizenship revoked. He tried living in Moscow, then Cairo, then Beirut, where Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization had been allowed to build a proto-state in exile. When Israel invaded in 1982, Mr Darwish sailed for Tunis and later lived in Paris. Not until 1996, after the Oslo peace agreement made it possible, did he return to Palestine.
But Palestine was a shambles. Arafat's dictatorial style repulsed him; the drift towards the second intifada of 2000, and the vicious schisms that followed, reduced him to despair. Much of his later verse avoided overtly political themes. After a heart attack in 1998, he wrote:

One day I shall become what I want.
One day I shall become a thought,
Which no sword will carry
To the wasteland, nor no book; 

as if it were rain falling on a mountain
split by a burgeoning blade of grass,
where neither has power won
nor fugitive justice.
One day I shall become a bird,
And wrest my being from my non-being.
The longer my wings will burn,
The closer I am to the truth,
Risen from the ashes. 

Yet he could never fully escape the duty to help his people sustain their sense of destiny. In his last poem, Mr Darwish described Palestinians and Israelis as two men trapped in a hole:

He said: Will you bargain with me now?
I said: For what would you bargain
In this grave?
He said: Over my share and your share of
this common grave
I said: Of what use is that?
Time has passed us by,
Our fate is an exception to the rule
Here lie a killer and the killed, asleep in
one hole
And it remains for another poet to write the end of the script. •

Dương Thu Hương
Những Tác phẩm: Bên kia bờ ảo vọng, Những Thiên Đường Mù, Tiểu thuyết vô đề, Chốn Vắng.
Phan Huy Đường dịch, Nhà xuất bản Robert Laffont, 1056 trang. 36E. 

Năm 2006, đại chúng biết đến Dương Thu Hương khi bà cho xuất bản Chốn Vắng (Giải Thưởng của nữ độc giả báo Elle, năm 2007), một quyển tiểu thuyết bậc thầy nói về cuộc đấu tranh của cá nhân chống lại chế độ toàn trị. Đây không phải là cuốn sách đầu tiên của bà, chúng ta biết điều này khi nhà xuất bản Robert Laffont cho xuất bản tuyển tập đầu tiên những tác phẩm của bà, và ngoài Chốn Vắng ra, còn ba quyển tiểu thuyết “hải đăng”, thứ tiểu thuyết dẫn lối chỉ đường khác.
Trong các câu chuyện kể này, công khai nói về chính trị, và đây là tầm vóc của chúng, những yếu tố chủ chốt, mang tính xây dựng đều có mặt, và ở đúng vị trí ở trong một cuốn sách bậc thầy, bắt đầu bằng một vài hình ảnh: người lính ma với nhân vật kể chuyện trong Tiểu Thuyết Không Đề, hay người phụ nữ bị xâu xé bởi hai người đàn ông trong Bên kia bờ Ảo vọng. Hoặc liên minh giữa đạo Khổng xưa cũ với kỷ luật Đảng Cộng Sản Việt Nam để chà đạp tự do cá nhân. Trong lời nói đầu tuyệt vời của Antoine Andouard, ông nhắc tới điều, tất cả các nhân vật của Dương Thu Hương đều có chung một số phận: “Họ bị chiến tranh và lịch sử nghiền nát.”. Cho nghĩa cả. Sự nghiệp văn chương của nữ sĩ này luôn luôn đứng sau cuộc đấu tranh chính trị, đến mức bà thường coi mình, chỉ là một “văn sĩ nghiệp dư”, một “tài tử”. Nữ anh hùng thời chiến, cựu đảng viên Cộng Sản, từ lâu người phụ nữ này đã trả giá tự do của mình để đấu tranh cho dân chủ và cho quyền làm người. Tác phẩm của bà đẫm mình ở trong cuộc chiến đấu đó, và đây là điều Antoine Andouard vinh danh bà, thật nhiều, trong phần giới thiệu. Nhưng ông nói thêm: “Người ta có thể đọc các tác phẩm, mà chẳng cần biết đến đời tư của bà, và kinh nghiệm này, thì thật khó quên.” Tam Van Thi

Chuyện cái hồ nước hiện ra chỉ sau một đêm,
và những chuyện cổ tích Việt Nam khác.
do Minh Huy Tran trình bầy, và kể

Hài nhẹ khôn kham

Đế Quốc Đỏ phản công [Time]
Sự trả thù của Nga [Người Quan Sát Mới]
Nga trỗi dậy [Người Kinh Tế]
Đảng ta không biết vui hay buồn!

Dọn