Mourid Barghouti

Mourid Barghouti
مريد البرغوثي
Personal details
Born (1944-07-08) July 8, 1944
Deir Ghassana, Mandatory Palestine[1]
Nationality Palestinian

Mourid Barghouti (Arabic: مريد البرغوثي‎, Murīd al-Barghūti) (born July 8, 1944, in Deir Ghassana, near Ramallah, on the West Bank) is a Palestinian poet and writer.

Biography

Barghouti grew up in Ramallah as one of four brothers. In the mid-1960s, he studied at Cairo University in Cairo, Egypt. He was in his last year when the Six-Day War of 1967 started. By the end of the war, Israel had captured Gaza and the West Bank, and Barghouti, like many Palestinians living abroad, was prevented from returning to his homeland.

After the war Barghouti taught at the Industrial College in Kuwait. At the same time, he began to pursue his interest in literature and poetry, and his writings were soon published in the journals al-Adab, Mawaqif, in Beirut and al-Katib, "attaleea" and "Al Ahram" in Cairo. In 1968, he became acquainted with the Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali, who was also working in Kuwait.

In 1970, Barghouti married Radwa Ashour, an Egyptian novelist and academic. The two had met years earlier, when they were both students of the English Department at Cairo University. They have one child, a son, Tamim Al Barghouti, born in 1977 in Egypt, who is now a poet.

The couple left Kuwait for Egypt less than a year after marrying. In 1972, Barghouti published his first book of poetry in 1972. He has since published 12 books of poetry, the last of which is Muntasaf al-Lail (Midnight, Beirut, 2005, Riad El Rayes Publishers). His Collected Works appeared in Beirut in 1997.

A Small Sun, his first poetry book in English translation, was published by the Aldeburgh Poetry Trust in 2003. He was awarded the Palestine Award for Poetry in 2000.

In the autumn of 1977, Barghouti was deported from Egypt on the eve of Anwar Sadat's controversial visit to Israel and was allowed to come back only after 17 years. Barghouti, his wife and their son had to spend most of the next 17 years apart; Radwa lived in Cairo as a professor of English at Ain Shams University, and he lived in Budapest as a PLO representative in the World Federation of Democratic Youth and a cultural attache.

The Oslo Accords finally allowed Barghouti to return to the West Bank, and in 1996 he returned to Ramallah after 30 years of exile. This event inspired his autobiographical novel Ra'aytu Ram Allah (I Saw Ramallah), published by Dar Al Hilal (Cairo, 1997), which won him the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in the same year.

In an interview with Maya Jaggi in The Guardian, Barghouti was quoted as saying: "I learn from trees. Just as many fruits drop before they're ripe, when I write a poem I treat it with healthy cruelty, deleting images to take care of the right ones."[2]

Bibliography

English translations:

  • Midnight and Other Poems, , translated by Radwa Ashour, ARC Publications, UK, October 2008, ISBN 1-904614-68-X, ISBN 978-1-904614-68-5
  • I Was Born There, I Was Born Here, Bloomsbury, 2011
  • I Saw Ramallah , Random House, Anchor Books, 2003-05-13 ISBN 1-4000-3266-0 and Bloomsbury, UK, ISBN 0-7475-7470-7 and the American University in Cairo Press (January 2003), ISBN 978-977-424-755-2
  • A Small Sun , Poems translated by Radwa Ashour and W. S. Merwin, Aldeburgh Poetry Trust, 2003 paperback, Suffolk, UK, ISBN 0-9535422-2-X

Spanish translations:

  • Medianoche (poetry), translated by Luis Miguel Canada, published by Fundacion Antonio Perez. UCLM, Cuenca, Spain, 2006, ISBN 84-8427-494-2 and ISBN 978-84-8427-494-0
  • He visto Ramala, translated by Iñaki Gutierrez de Teran, published by Ediciones del oriente y del mediterraneo, Guadarrama, Spain, 2002, ISBN 84-87198-83-X and ISBN 978-84-87198-83-0

References

  1. ↑ Tonkin, Boyd (23 January 2009). "Midnight, By Mourid Barghouti, trans Radwa Ashour". The Independent. London.
  2. ↑ Interview by Maya Jaggi (2008-12-13). "Interview: Mourid Barghouti | Books". London: The Guardian. Retrieved 2011-11-12.
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