The Butterfly’s Burden

Mahmoud Darwish was the most acclaimed poet in the Arab world. The Butterfly’s Burden presents three recent books in a single volume, each translated into English for the first time and presented side by side with the Arabic: The Stranger’s Bed (1998), Darwish’s first collection of love poems; State of Siege (2002), a terse, politically charged sequence written in Ramallah; and Don’t Apologize for What You’ve Done (2003), a song “green like the phoenix” after the daily horrors in Ramallah.

These poems provide continual contrasts, balancing old literary traditions with new, highlighting lyrical, loving reflections alongside a bitter longing for the Palestine that was lost when Israel was created. Although each work stands alone as a dialogue within and among its poems, one can see the larger conversation Darwish conducts with language, and with self, from one book to another.