How swift the blaze

In the 400-line The Bagh­dad Train that opens Maps of De­sire, the poet rides from Aleppo through the desert. In third class, the seats are iron, car­riages have no doors, toi­lets are rusted and no glass cov­ers the win­dows. “The wind roar­ing in... lashed us with sand” (p.23). The pas­sen­gers stand and sweat silently, eyes shut.

In the car­riage at night, the poet has sex with a stranger:

What lit­tle space for lips

among the kisses. How swift

the blaze. (p.33)

For­cano is re­mem­ber­ing de­sire, the im­pulse, the sex­ual plea­sure that sadly lasts mo­ments only or at most one night. It slips away, but then can be long re­mem­bered.

All I have left of you now is im­ages.

Im­ages of plea­sure. (p.99)

At the end of The Bagh­dad Train, the poet comes up from the Barcelona metro. On the trip home to Vall­carca through the un­der­ground tun­nels, he was re­liv­ing the days-long jour­ney across the desert that the reader has been im­mersed in. De­sire is in this book’s title and is its theme, sex­ual de­sire, but also for travel and other worlds, es­pe­cially the Arab world: the slow, hot train re­called under win­try Barcelona.

In one poem he tells us:

How use­less lan­guages are:

De­sire knows how to say it all.(p.65)

Of course the poet, the man of words, does not be­lieve this con­ceit, but at the time, in the mo­ment of de­sire: “We didn’t speak the same lan­guage” (p.65). Hands and eyes ex­pressed all that needed to be ex­pressed.

These are very vi­sual poems, full of palm trees, sand and bright sun, the lust for water in the desert. Over and be­yond these ex­pected, yet beau­ti­fully writ­ten, im­ages, the poems are en­riched by mun­dane de­tail: the scent of red dates, socks sold from the bon­net of a car, “nights with the mat­tress on the ter­race” (p.89).

One of the plea­sures of a dual-lan­guage edi­tion is to weigh the trans­la­tor’s words and think of al­ter­na­tives: it’s a good way to read more deeply the orig­i­nal poem. There is no sin­gle, cor­rect trans­la­tion. Anna Crowe’s rises to meet the sen­su­al­ity of For­cano’s im­agery.

As well as lyri­cal, For­cano is play­ful and eru­dite, with fre­quent ref­er­ences to events in his­tory. This un­der­lines the pas­sage of time and, thus, the im­por­tance of liv­ing fully the pre­sent mo­ment. Yet the pre­sent al­ways slips away. What re­mains is mem­ory of the past. And this, poignantly, es­capes too:

Lots of things about you

and about us to­gether

have faded: the days go by

like hands which have ceased their

ca­ress­ing. (p.71)

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