Probably the foremost Palestinian poet of the late 20th century, Mahmud Darwish (born 1942) was one of the leading poets of the Arab world.

Mahmud Darwish was born in al Birwah, a village that lies to the east of Acca (Acre), now in Israel, in 1942. In the 1948 war when he was a boy, Darwish fled with his family and walked across the mountains and forests to southern Lebanon. But when he returned with his family two years later, he found that his village had been completely razed by the Israeli forces and the land ploughed.

Darwish's impressions of this period of his life--the military government and the police harassment--remained with him and influenced much of his poetry, which he began to write at a young age. Darwish, who worked as a journalist in Haifa, became a victim of Israeli authorities as his poetry became more popular and widely read...