So I have this new translation, and maybe
because it's my sort of newest work, I'm happiest about it.
And it's called "Petra: The Concealed Rose."
It's a book-long poem about Petra by the Jordanian poet
Amjad Nasser.
And some of you may be aware of a recent piece
I had written in response to sort
of a natural sort of ongoing trend
in the sort of poetic discourse that we
have in American poetry that really doesn't pay attention
to how much it repeats the language of power,
of imperial power.
And I had-- in that piece in the Kenyon Review,
I just suggested, again, like I have been--
I guess my hope is-- in some of these poems
to begin to think of reading, quote, unquote,
"reading the Arab" in a different way
because we're capable and it's there.
It's available.
And so, this poem, again, doesn't have any tragedy, war,
or anything.
It's a poem, the Arab writing the Arab.
And I don't mean the translation,
that I am an Arab-American translating
the work of an Arab poet, but it's
the Arab poet writing about something Arab, which is Petra.
I don't think that in Western literature or consciousness,
there is this awareness--
that, you know, we think Petra belongs to us
as a tourist attraction.
And it's a really interesting book to read.
And if you ever visit Petra, this
is the travel guide you should carry with you,
and forget about Lonely Planet.
So I'm going to read a small section from the beginning
and I'm going to jump.
It's a very varied poem.
It has a lot of lyrical moments and then a lot
of prose narratives.
So I'm going to read a lyrical beginning
and then move to a prose section.
We know you're hiding there behind that rib
cage of a guard, breathing with the mountain's lungs
and watching through the rocks' sunken secret.
Comers and goers who are seduced by descriptive
talk before silence stamps its lilac seal on their lips.
Without compass, we know where you are.
We know you're writhing path like a pain in the waist.
We have often visited you, entered
the labyrinth and cave, bent this way and leaned another.
A swift light fell on us as darkness followed darkness
in the blink of an eye.
How many times were we led by step and yearning
and dry throat in a pilgrimage that resembles
wandering in your parts?
Whenever we thought we had reached your limit,
we found ourselves at the limbs of your story again.
No one is exempt from this when he sees you,
rubbing his eyes in your patient morning, you redhead Bedouin.
All who wrote about Petra imagined it as female.
A pagan goddess like the morning star, a queen in golden chariot
pulled by four horses, a young shepherdess
guiding a herd of goats, a Bedouin woman weaving
an endless mat, a queen daughter of a queen.
The feminine metaphor is ready at the tips of their pens,
just as it was when I discussed el-Siq--
that narrow path that leads to the Treasury--
Still, others, who desire to be more contemporary in expressing
a femininity that is difficult to pass through with ease,
wrote about a blonde tourist who rolls up her pants and wades
in a captivating mirage.
Or an archeologist who impersonates at night
the images of ancient queens.
Or a student of history whose name
is that of a famous Arabic lover as she
guides a team of students like a gazelle ascending to el-Deir.
Yet it is possible for the sensory metaphor
to flip into a Sufi ramble within one range.
The sensory and the abstract merge.
How wondrous in ink.
Sometimes it is difficult to tell them apart.
The abstract has a root hold in the sensory, perhaps
a drip in the urns of utmost desire, the impossible desire,
drop by drop until vanishing.
I ask myself, why isn't the masculine present
when Petra is present?
Why are womb, tenderness, fragility, bottlenecks,
rose, silk, frankincense, coal, ankle, belly,
and navel present?
While sword, spear, and muscle aren't.
If Petra were Roman, there would have
been no way to avoid the sword, shield, spear, and helmet.
This is what distinguishes Petra.
Its closeness to Athens, perhaps more than Rome.
Yet, Athens worships masculine beauty, boys' supple muscles,
the glistening warrior flesh like the rump
of a fleeting coat.
But Petra isn't Greek because its beauty is feminine,
and it isn't Bedouin.
I mean, not the work of nomads searching for some vegetation
and a water hole.
What is Petra then?
How did this branching rose sprout in an arid wadi?
How could such fragile beauty conceal itself
behind a scowling rough mountain?
Do settled dwellings rise like that without childhood?
Where is Petra's childhood?
The chisels first strike?
The stumbling gait of the entrancing young woman?
This is what we still don't know with certainty.
All that was written about Petra,
all the chisels that dug into the layers of sand,
all the experts of manuscripts and extinct worlds
who flocked to it, the old dictionaries, the probes
of space stations, all failed to reach this cocoon that
hides the secret or the piece of paper on which a poet claimed
that this was written.
Don't seek me in simile, for all who are like me are not me.
And all who resemble me are other than me.