Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? Paperback – Deckle Edge, Aby Mahmoud Darwish (Author), Jeffrey Sacks (Translator) (Archipelago)

This collection of poems by Mahmood Darwish brings some of the most complex imagery wrapped in simple words. The poems are as complex and as fragile as the political situation behind the poet's exile from his own country. As a Palestinian, I was very satisfied to see that the translator managed to overcome the language barrier and to bring the English readers the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish. Mahmoud brings in this collection of poems beauty, love, and pain in impossible depiction of the Palestinian human condition of exile. The following example depicts the relationship between a father and a naive son, the pain of an uprooted father, the sarcasm of the powerless, and the beauty of landscapes in which their tragedy unfolds:

"
-Are you speaking to me my father?
-They signed a truce on the island of Rhodes,
my son!
- What about us, what about us, father?
- It's over...
-How many times will it be over, father?
-Its over. They did their duty:
They fought the enemy's airplanes with broken guns
We did our duty. We drew away from the canterberry tree
so we wouldn't tip the commander's hat
we sold our wives' rings so they could hunt birds, my son!
-Will we remain here, then, father
under the willow of the wind
between the sky and the sea? "

I loved this book, although I believe some of the best poetry of Mahomoud Darwish has not been translated yet.