Skip Navigation  A Tribute to Mahmoud Darwish's Lyric Epic  A
lecture by Dr. Fady Joudah  Please install flash or upgrade to a
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Duration: 31:25  It is necessary to read Darwish’s
transformation of the long poem: the shift in diction from a
gnomic and highly metaphoric drive to a stroll of mixed and
conversational speech; the paradox between private and public,
presence and absence; the bond between the individual and the
earth, place, and nature; the illumination of the contemporary
Sufi aesthetic method as the essence of poetic knowledge, on the
interface of reason and the sensory, imagination and the real,
the real and its vanishing where the “I” is interchangeable with
(and not split from) its other; and his affair with dialogue,
and theatre (tragic, absurd, or otherwise) to produce a lyric
epic sui generis. If I Were Another is a tribute to Darwish’s
lyric epic, and to the essence of his “late style,” the
culmination of an entire life in dialog