Visual Music

As I listen to music, gardens open up around me, the melody becomes a flower, I hear her with my eyes. To the sound pictures and to the picture sounds gradual wavy… far from literary metaphors. Cloves come out of their pots and disperse on tables of classy restaurants to compensate the stranger for a forgotten loss or to carefully train those who await the surprises of those who are coming and Daffodil is not ashamed to listen long to a happy song in the water and think it was a song praising him. As for the White Lily, if the salon fits it’s for his vast pungent smell, that misleads my recollections, contrary to it is Violet that stops me at the intersection of two intertwining and melting sounds akin to tears between a wedding and a funeral… and contrary to the Windflowers that are satisfied to sing the spacious margins on the pastoral slopes. All this is to say: that the red rose is visual music. And Jasmine is a nostalgic letter from no one to no one.

               The Butterfly’s Burden 
2006-2007

Written by Mahmoud Darwish
Translated by Rachel Shamsie

Translation Collection: The Self, the Sea, and Shabjdeed