He said to me:
‘If the sea were ink for the Words of my Lord,
the sea would still run out
before the Words.’1
Is it becoming of me
– I who have run completely out of words –
to covet the Words of my Lord?
He said to me:
The serpent that bit me,
its fangs alone
contain my antidote,
that’s why it sees me waiting
at the entrance to its burrow.
He said to me:
Love led me
to pity my own self,
to grieve it
with a vertical grief.
That’s what war failed to achieve,
along with all my enemies.
Translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid
translator’s note: These poems, which are called mukhatabat (‘discourses’) in Arabic, are modeled after a genre of text called mukhatabat, probably the most famous of which were written by the Sufi mystic Al-Niffari (died c.965 ce). Those texts by Al-Niffari are spiritual discourses of sorts, with each text beginning with the words ‘He said to me’; the ‘He’ referring to God or the spiritual presence or the higher Self of Al-Niffari himself. Najwan Darwish is playing with that genre here, and diversifying its themes.
1 The Glorious Quran, 18:109.
Image © British Museum
