There is perhaps no parallel in our modern
times to the artistic bond between Marcel
Khalife and Mahmoud Darwish. It is rare
that a celebrated musician is the twin
manifestation of a great contemporary
poet. Khalife's deep reading of Darwish's
poetry lasted over the four decades of the
poet's life. If an author's dream is to have
one true reader, Darwish found a special
one in Marcel. Marcel heard the modern
Arabic poem as sung speech in a manner
that illuminated the contemporary Arabic
song's ability to embrace rhythm and
phrase within new horizons. His music and
song are "bread for speech," as Darwish
called them, that evaporate the mirage
which often exists between modern poem
and song, in an age where the poem is
wary of public consumption. Darwish and
Marcel shared an exalted belief that, while
it can, art does not dance alone.

Two fiercely independent artists: Marcel
never asked Darwish permission to
compose his poems to music, and Darwish
never asked Marcel to put his poems into
song, nor wrote any of them with that in
mind. And just as Darwish's poem never
ceased developing over the decades, Marcel
Khalife's music kept on transforming:
from the intensely lyrical and committed
to the conversational and introspective;
from the traditional and classical Arabic
song, from the untranslatable and deeply
palpable "Tarab," to the innovative open
music of the jazzy and the cinematic. The
lyrics included here span nearly all forty
years of Darwish's poetry. The progressive
arc of the poet's transformation is easy to
recognize. Similarly the listener will easily
distinguish Khalife's multiple rebirths and
returns. And as music and song are also
an idea of translation, lyrics also are. Some
of the poems here are excerpts of their
original whole, seamlessly sliced and then
spliced by Marcel Khalife: the text becomes
music's subject, just as music becomes
subject to the text.

-Fady Joudah (a Palestinian American poet and winner of the PEN prize for his translations of Mahmoud Darwish's poetry)