I
Do I need a virus that brings me closer to the ordinary?
O Ordinary, how strange you look when pellucid mirrors crack and time expands!
It took a deadly virus with no cure,
a virus that is not captivating but shuts doors before me
invites me to strip my exhilarating worries off its vesture woven
from a thread, repeatedly, text and textile texunt into others.
Now: alone, you are
alone, you are now: fate is here,
the spiral road is here,
and you are the path before you,
an arrival.
II
No others today.
Is this what you wished for?
No class with black board to torment your free self in a prison of intentions assembled to please authority,
no time for a boring neighbor chatting about fraudulent voting in the last breath of a fair competition,
no pithy talk for two hours with the relative who reacts to noble rumors about the steps of
Antichrist, alone in the holy land.
Neither he has others nor do you
from now on, you are alone,
no beloved to share your passion,
no companion.
No others here.
Think about the fate of poetry
or the poem’s angst:
there is no inferno, no correlative for the modernist experiment to produce the next text on top of your shelf
here: here
no vigilant reader of words’ talisman,
no blind spectators.
You are: you are
facing the glossy pages,
you urge your cave’s liber, sing arias to your guarded tablet to dispel your morbid fear when the clouds of heaven yawn,
and yearning didn’t move the Arabian East Wind,
and the oud stringing you home wilted away.
Now you are over there.
Do you feel remarkable as you pace around your shadow in a clear, singular place?
(It appears atomic: within the limits of a human being like me.)
Then you chant:
O Ordinary, awe slays me!
III
I need your face, O Ordinary:
how beautiful you look,
perhaps . . .
Let me assemble my language in love . . .
How much I yearn for your face, O Ordinary,
O “Road Not Taken” when the wanderer in me downplayed a straight line
and a fairy settled in my mind:
elation is impossible!
That impossible elation!
Do I need a virus that introduces me to Ordinary?
One that takes me gently from my tongue,
then kneels in front of me
to properly introduce me:
“Here is a youth with two eyes and a lone feather, born of Eve whose husband despised your mundane continuity on the upper floor.”
They cut firewood from the forbidden mythical trees to descend upon earth beneath their whispers and build a house . . .
But when they feared you in the mirror, they brought a daughter and two warriors to fight,
O amorphous water, to keep you away from adventure’s nascent flames.
Therefore, here is a youth with two eyes and a female’s penna trying to redraw. Forgive him,
O amorphous water, monotonous and ordinary:
a noble brother (despite what has been said) and a noble cousin!
IV
I imagine Ordinary gazes at me—
me?
I was there with her,
the hourglass whose unhurried sand has tempted you to create a fairytale about the ability of modern man to tell the genie bottle: Build a castle for our youngest daughter on the golden sand and watch over it . . .
Contemporary jinni said: It may seem useful, my friend, to build a castle for your daughter on the sandy beach by the sea.
The mirrored surface admires your reflection,
you will be your elegant wife’s sensual knight,
and your youngest daughter will cry out: Dad! My only hero!
I imagine Ordinary mocks me—
me?!
I am all that you cannot know: your dull street stroll under the sound of thunder and the tabled music disc,
all that you cannot know:
your face and dreary handshake
or people’s chatter in the café about the ball that did not enter the goal though it did.
I am the prevalent faint abject.
I imagine Ordinary carries on:
who am I?!
A boring geology class about eloquent fossils before your father approaches the forbidden mythical trees,
the grandmother’s house drenched in the honey of Southern tales,
the unintentional stingy salutatio . . .
. . . extended to the one crippled by a game of thrones between two tribes, the one to whom Mahabharata arrived and whose name it soiled.
He came to lift cigarette butts off the national emblem of your country to celebrate its day
through the night,
bursting with strident songs.
And here I am,
the ordinary,
the monotonous,
the conceited,
the content,
the deprived,
and the enchanted one.
Here I am:
your noble savage,
your masculine noble savage.
V
I need your voice, O Ordinary, so the dream of an exotic melody remains there:
O European longing for virgin names in the new land on the road to India,
O white man’s fondness for fantasy: the African heart of darkness, the tale of Sinbad
among scattered pearls on the islands near Indus,
or what is not revealed of the harem behind the door of the East, the wine of Abu Nuwas for the giddy boy under the influence of rhetorice in the goblets,
when war is ignited near the sanctuary that flows in the udder of al-basūs,
poetry about a lost kingdom that didn’t reach Caesar . . .
a house that’s sanctified by those three in the evening, not bought or sold . . .
O Ordinary: the night was long,
forgive
for the yearning to return to the compelling dream:
the slender dawn swells.
I need your voice, O Ordinary, so that the dream of an exotic melody remains there:
O flag that leads the chivalrous barbarian in Iberia behind the strait, to grant the Umayyad the lofty palace,
another moment to plant a poetic palm tree in the Levant after two minutes,
there: O gracious heavenly revelatio toward the pebbles of Mecca after the elephant’s soldiers (despite the men of the Two Villages),
come, I don’t see myself.
I need your voice, O Ordinary
or: I need my voice within you,
so the secular, industrialized king within me listens to the Supreme Natural Revelation.
He tells me: Read! So I look toward him: What do you say?!
Read! And I look again:
Me?
Well, I will do what you say.
Fine,
I will do
what
you say.
I Need the Ordinary
Hatem Al-Zahrani
translated from the Arabic by Moneera Al-Ghadeer
Listen to the original read by the poet:
Hatem Al-Zahrani’s “I Need the Ordinary,” published in March 2020, is the first Arabic poem to address the current posthumanist crisis with Covid-19, by dramatizing the pandemic on a global stage. The first challenge in the translation of this relatively long poem was tracing and understanding its references to other cultural realms. The poem assembles and rereads numerous world literary texts and includes other allusions which complicate the assumption that the speaker is looking for an origin or trying to decode a virus that can be seen only through a microscope. The minuteness of the virus affirms that the translation involves a careful examination of what is not seen in the poem’s reenactment of its comparatist space—a dialogue with world traditions that is demonstrated in its evocative references to pre-Islamic Arabia, Qur’anic stories, Al-Andalus, Mahabharata, and The Thousand and One Nights, among others places and texts. This multitude of references not only calls for a number of footnotes, but also creates a lofty poetic context that borders on the sacred and mythical as Al-Zahrani deploys a variety of poetic techniques, moving from majestic to ordinary language. The weaving of different literary and historical contexts and the allegorical force of the poem compelled me to use literary vocabulary somewhat far from everyday language. I amplified the rhetorical tone and made experimental gestures by weaving Latin words into the English translation to underscore the unspoken and spectral presence of The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, for example, in an effort to capture a rather ornate and dramatic translation. Working closely with the poet, I tried to maintain the long and sometimes convoluted narrative lines along with very dramatic short lines, a structural split that indicates the breakdown of language in the face of a global disaster.
Other translation challenges included adjusting the punctation and using capitalization to mirror a contemporary poem written in English, as I negotiated with what was deployed in the original through spacing, ellipses, and slashes. Likewise, I tried to capture the personification of “Ordinary,” the main character and the interlocutor in the poem.
In translating this poem into English, I noticed that it does not simply crystallize the reading experience as it re-embodies the other worlds invoked in the different sections; rather, it reenacts an arrival at another home in translation, despite its fragmentation and semantic complexity.
Other translation challenges included adjusting the punctation and using capitalization to mirror a contemporary poem written in English, as I negotiated with what was deployed in the original through spacing, ellipses, and slashes. Likewise, I tried to capture the personification of “Ordinary,” the main character and the interlocutor in the poem.
In translating this poem into English, I noticed that it does not simply crystallize the reading experience as it re-embodies the other worlds invoked in the different sections; rather, it reenacts an arrival at another home in translation, despite its fragmentation and semantic complexity.
Hatem Al-Zahrani is an award-winning Saudi poet, critic, and translator, and is an academic specializing in Middle Eastern culture and Arabic literature. He has an M.A. in Near Eastern studies from Yale University (2014) and a Ph.D. from Georgetown University (2019). He taught classes on Arabic culture in Saudi Arabia and the U.S. and published in internationally acclaimed journals. Al-Zahrani has published two collections of poetry: The Letter Yā’ Is Mine (2009) and Celebrating the Dual at Yale (2019). The latter quickly becoming a subject of a celebrated critical reception, with one critic declaring that “Hatem Alzahrani’s poetry represents a milestone in modern Arabic poetry.”
Moneera Al-Ghadeer was a visiting professor of comparative literature in the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies at Columbia University and was a Shawwaf Visiting Professor at Harvard University. She was a tenured professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She has published Desert Voices: Bedouin Women’s Poetry in Saudi Arabia (I.B. Tauris, 2009) as well as many articles, book chapters, and translations. Currently, she is working on a new anthology, Translating the World: 100 Contemporary Poems from Saudi Arabia.
