"Carmine 2026" is drawing to a close after transforming Cagliari's Piazza del Carmine into an open-air stage from June to September, bringing music, theater, literature, contemporary circus, and the performing arts. And poetry: fresh from a David di Donatello award for Best Supporting Actor for Valerio Mastandrea's "Nonostante," Lino Musella, a Neapolitan actor born in 1980 and one of the most intense and versatile figures in Italian cinema and theater, will read "State of Siege" by Mahmoud Darwish, the greatest contemporary Palestinian poet, tomorrow at 7:30 p.m.

Musella, how did this text come into your hands?

"In 2023, I came across it in a newspaper, and I was very struck by the title. I researched the author; there are people very close to me—aside from my partner—who are experts in Arabic literature, and they explained to me that Darwish was the most important contemporary Palestinian poet in Arabic. I found a way to obtain the text, and the translation was done by Wasim Dahmash, whom I also met because he co-founded the Gazzella Onlus association, to which the proceeds from this evening are often donated."

It is not the classic poetic anthology.

We can consider it a collection of poems, but already in the preface the author explains that he considers it a text, as if it were a single composition made up of fragments. And indeed, reading it leads us to experience this very pattern: we can't pick out or extrapolate every single fragment; it's as if it had a beginning and an end, and all these fragments intertwine at a certain point.

Dar wi s h was a civil poet, a man forced into a long exile. What did he discover of this civil streak , and what did he bring to the stage?

"In other words, both a little and a lot: I bring a body and a voice. There's nothing simpler, but there's no more daring challenge than trying to recite poetry in public; so I also bring a request to be heard. Poetry craves an ear to listen to it, says Gualtieri, and in this case, I believe poetry suggests a method to the performer. It's not you who bends the author; you have to sense how to convey the breath of that text."

What is the scope of “State of Siege”?

I think it's a very solid poem, at times austere and at times with a hint of irony when he manages to allow it. It has a classical feel, referring to a contemporary dimension, which he experiences: that of being besieged. But the classical feel makes the siege he refers to a universal siege, and therefore a poem in which we can find not only the voice of all oppressed peoples, but also the same feeling of solitude you can experience when besieged by anything, even by the news, if you like. When he says, "Poetry must be stronger than the siege," he's essentially saying poetry is free.

In one passage Darwish says that nothing there echoes Homer.

It's as if each fragment had a theme, but when the fragments are all laid out and begin to recur, we sense that it's a recurring theme. One of these is precisely the metaphor between the siege his people are experiencing and that of the city of Troy. In another verse, he says that this siege will continue until the lords of Olympus have rewritten the drafts of the eternal Iliad: he calls it the eternal Iliad as if he felt that this, too, history was destined to repeat itself.

This text somehow brings her back to Sardinia: Wasim Dahmash, its translator and editor, taught for a decade at the University of Cagliari.

Yes, it's definitely a return. The first film I starred in, "Happy Days Motel" by Francesca Staasch, was shot in Sardinia. I returned three years later for "The Stuff of Dreams" by Cabiddu, and more recently for "Portobello." And then a few years ago I brought "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men," based on David Foster Wallace, to the Teatro Massimo... well, I come here often, and I confess that, beyond all the rhetoric, I've always been struck by the humanity of the people, a sincere gaze that is still, on average, highly widespread.

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