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Unfortunately, It Was Paradise Unfortunately, It Was Paradise Selected Poems Mahmoud Darwish; translated and edited by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein Univ. of California Press, 2003 212 pp.; $16.95, paper

Without an Alphabet, Without a Face Without an Alphabet, Without a Face Selected Poems Saadi Youssef; translated by Khaled Mattawa Graywolf Press, 2002 216 pp; $16, paper

Alienation and isolation, yes, but martyrdom and exile are not major themes in English poetry. With the spectacular exceptions of Byron, Shelley, and Ezra Pound, our poets have been perhaps émigrés or tourists but certainly not Dante at the table of strangers. Martyrs are even harder to find. There's James Graham, Royalist martyr, who wrote a metrical prayer on the eve of his execution, John Brown, and of course all those Irish ballad heroes in the Roddy McCorley vein. Nameless martyrs and poets without a country are largely a 20th-century bequest.

The Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish and the Iraqi socialist Saadi Youssef both write from exile, from inside the Middle East, that land where knowledge of the other goes just so far, and no farther. Darwish is exiled from an exiled nation; Youssef's Iraq is, for all its scars and ruins, one of the oldest places on earth. Both poets have been recently collected in English; neither poet is comfortable to encounter.

Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, a selection of poems by Mahmoud Darwish, was translated from the Arabic by a small committee: Munir Akash, the American poet Carolyn Forché, with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein. It contains work from five of Darwish's books published since 1986 (he's published 20 as of 2000), plus three poems written earlier in his career.

I have no sense from the introduction what Darwish's poems are like in Arabic. Judging from the translations, they are classically rhetorical, singing of love and loss (the beloved often the land itself) often in several voices. The longer poems are held together with periodic repeated lines, sometimes varied. Rather than describe the formal aspects of his verse, Carolyn Forché dwells upon the poet's hugely popular espousal of the "poetry of resistance," which she characterizes as an attempt to restore the Palestinian homeland through language. She places him in a poetic class with Federico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Osip Mandelstam, Yehuda Amichai, and C.P. Cavafy—a range of voices with only the short end of the sociopolitical stick in common.

The lost homeland, the sorrow of exile, the dream of a return, the Fall of Man as experienced in the here-and-now by ethnics and nationals is the stuff of sentimental journalists and other opportunists whose beat is politics, the organized expression of hatreds. Difficult material from which to fashion a firsthand rendering of an inhabitable world—firsthand to the reader, that is.

Here's "Neighing on the Slope":

Horses' neighing on the slope. Downward or upward.
I prepare my portrait for my woman to hang on the wall
   when I die.
She says: Is there a wall to hang it on?
I say: We'll build a room for it. Where? In any house.

Horses' neighing on the slope. Downward or upward.

Does a woman in her thirties need a homeland to put a
   picture in a frame?
Can I reach the summit of this rugged mountain?
The slope is either an abyss or a place of siege.
Midway it divides. What a journey! Martyrs killing one
   another.
I prepare my portrait for my woman. When a new horse
   neighs in you, tear it up.

Horses' neighing on the slope. Upward, or upward.

The woman's question touches me, but the poet's bravura (all the "my woman" business) puts me off. This may be taken, I guess, as tough-guy talk, or maybe poem noir. The horses and mountain are figurative.

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