INTIMACIES

The death of Mahmoud Darwish on 9 August 2008 left a tremendous void in the global literary and cultural landscape. In a career spanning nearly five decades, the Palestinian national poet published more than thirty volumes of poetry and prose, and his work was translated into more than twenty languages. His poems speak eloquently of the Palestinian catastrophe, but also of unrequited love, of the natural world, of the writing of poetry itself. When Darwish died like Edward Said, much too young at 67 a period of official mourning was declared in the West Bank and Gaza. Friends and readers across the world lamented his passing in exalted terms, describing him as ‘perhaps the single most important figure during the seminal period of the restoration of the Palestinian national imagination’ (Khalidi 2008: 75) and as ‘one of the last great world poets’ (‘Mahmoud Darwish’ 2008) whose ‘whole being, his whole life, drew its meaning only in and through the poem’ (al-Azzawi 2008: 41). The South African poet Breyten Breytenbach wrote movingly: