Two Poems: Juan Gelman (RIP)

Juan Gelman, the politically committed and supremely inventive and talented Argentinian poet and winner of the Cervantes Prize, one of the highest for Spanish-language literature, passed away yesterday in Mexico City at the age of 83. Here are two poems by him, the first in translation, the second in Spanish and, according to the Spanish newspaper El país, the last poem he wrote. RIP.

Juan Gelman (from Coffee and
Saturday: Cultura y arte)

SAINT THERESA

and with many birds and their songs in the /
highest part of the mind or head / and rumblings
in it like the sea / or laments /
or winds or movements / suns

that clash / go out / then burn again / or powers
like thousands of animals that track        
up the suburbs of the soul / suffering
terrible ordeals i mean / even so

the soul goes on whole in its quiet state /
or desire / or clear light untouched
by sorrow / scorn / misery /
suffering or ruin / so

what is this peace without vengeance / or memory
of a future heaven / or tenderness
coming down from your hands / spring water
where birds in the highest part of the mind

rally to drink / sing sweetly / or are silent
like light issuing from you / wing
flying softly above war and fatigue
like the flight of passion itself?

Copyright © "Saint Theresa" by Juan Gelman (2014), translated by Hardie St. Martin, from Exquisite Corpse, 2014. All rights reserved.

and

according to Coffee and Saturday: Cultura y arte, the last poem Gelman wrote, by hand:

VERDAD ES

Cada día
me acerco más a mi esqueleto.
Se está asomando con razón.
Lo metí en buenas y en feas sin preguntarle nada,
él siempre preguntándome, sin ver
cómo era la dicha o la desdicha,
sin quejarse, sin
distancias efímeras de mí.

Copyright © Juan Gelman, 2014. All rights reserved.

Poem: Juan Diego Tamayo

Juan Diego Tamayo Ochoa (1968-) has begun to make his name in Colombian and Hispanophone poetry on the strength of his graceful language and visionary themes, and the poem below, "Del escriba," translated by Nicolas Suescún, gives a sense of what Tamayo is up to in his work. There is a metaphysical and spiritual element in his poetry, and the poem below shifts quickly from what reflections on the importance power of the poet's poetry for his being to something deeper, a series of analogies and figures that both enchant and provoke interpretation, for he is, essentially, telling us that he's a medium, a vessel, a stylus, for forces beyond the human: what he pens comes not from his heart or mind alone, but from worlds hidden to most but not, as this designated medium, to him.

Yet we may have questions. Why and how is he the "stellar sign"? Where is this "assembly" where "men" conspire against each other for power--or rather, where isn't that? And why and how is the poet "wrenched from the mauve sunset?" One danger of such poetry is that it spins off into, as I noted above, a network of enchanting figures and abstractions, but may press our patience, leading us to ask, even if we accept the poetic conceit and symbolism, what ultimately does it all mean and how does it connect? On the other hand, isn't every poet who's deeply into her or his work wrenched from and into something beyond simple description or requiring a figurative one, and doesn't this also with certain poems happen to the reader as well? And doesn't and shouldn't the reader, like the "scribe," ask even with the most transparent poem, what's going on?

A native of Medellín, Tamayo has published one highly regarded book of poetry, Los elementos perdidos [The Lost Elements] (Medellín: Ediciones Fábula, 2005), and has several unpublished manuscripts still waiting to be put into print.  If you enjoy the poem below and read Spanish, you can find more of his poems in Spanish on the website of the Medellín International Poetry Festival, which he co-founded.


ON THE SCRIBE

As I write, I write myself. I am the one who has spent endless hours with the night ink, committing men’s memories to paper each day. I have written on the desert and every period is a grain of the same. Letters on the sea have been liquid and every word is anguish when it concerns oblivion. Sometimes I am the distant sign that judges. Other times, the letter that extols love. Almost never the one talking about what is just. In me are all the alphabets and I have tried complex calligraphies brought to me from unknown peoples hour upon hour. I have written in blood about gory battles. I have celebrated the triumph of death. I have celebrated the consecration of life with the sap of trees. I am the stellar sign. The sign of so many times that I am lost in it. I have written epistles of pain, of rejection, of sentences. Most times my hand shakes. At some moments my hand enjoys what I write and I feel as if I were caressed by a lost dove. I have brought order to obtuse thoughts. I have reordered the stars and their movements. I have attended the assembly where men conspire against others for power. Death also dictates its judgements to me. I am the celebrant of ancient alphabets in this half-lit room. Only the candelabra keeps me company and with its light I write a better horizon for the future generations. I write now, possessed by the syllables, I write on the stone of sacrifice. Hence the writing. The letter that accompanies me polishes my blood as if it were a diamond. I write with blood, with the same I have seen shed, like rivers of ink, in battles, with the same blood I have wrenched from the mauve sunset, I shall use the same blood to add the full stop to these folios on which I write my life.

And the original Spanish:

DEL ESCRIBA

Mientras escribo me escribo. Soy el que ha gastado horas eternas con la tinta de la noche para dejar en el papel del día la memoria de los hombres. He escrito sobre el desierto y cada punto final es un grano del mismo. Líquidas han sido las letras que del mar hablan y de angustia cada vocablo cuando del olvido se trata. Algunas veces soy la grafía distante que juzga. Otras la letra que enaltece el amor. Casi nunca la que al hablar de lo justo se trata. En mí están todos los alfabetos y he ensayado horas enteras complejas caligrafías que me traen de incógnitos pueblos. Con sangre he escrito sobre cruentas batallas. He celebrado el triunfo de la muerte. He celebrado con la savia de los árboles de primavera la consagración de la vida. Soy la grafía estelar. La grafía de tantos y tantos tiempos que ya en ella me pierdo. He escrito epístolas de dolor, de rechazo, de sentencias. La más de las veces mi mano tiembla. En algunos momentos mi mano se solaza con lo que escribo y me siento como si acariciara una paloma perdida. He dado orden a obtusos pensamientos. He reordenado los astros y sus movimientos. He asistido a la asamblea donde hombres confabulan contra otros por el poder. La muerte me dicta también sus arbitrios. Oficiante de antiguos alfabetos soy en esta habitación en penumbra. Sólo el candelabro me acompaña y con su luz escribo un horizonte mejor para las generaciones futuras. Escribo ahora, poseso de las sílabas, escribo sobre la piedra del sacrificio. Así la escritura. La letra que me acompaña pule mi sangre como si de un diamante se tratara. Escribo con sangre, con la misma que he visto correr, como ríos de tinta, en las batallas, con la misma sangre que le he arrebatado al ocaso malva, con la misma con la que pondré punto final a estos folios con los que escribo mi vida.

Copyright © Juan Diego Tamayo, "Del escriba," from Oscura ceniza, first published by PIW, 2009. Translated by Nicolás Suescún, Copyright © 2009.

Poem: Nicanor Parra

One of the living greats, Nicanor Parra (1914-), whom I posted about last December on the occasion of his receipt of the Cervantes Prize, has among his delectable trove the following gem, a poem written to young (and all) poets, that could serve as a distillation of his entire approach to poetry, and a guide for any poet--or writer, for that matter--who thinks that she must follow one school or style or method. The ultimate challenge is always the one Parra, in his witty way, identifies. Here goes:

YOUNG POETS

Write as you will
In whatever style you like
Too much blood has run under the bridge
To go on believing 
That only one road is right.
In poetry everything is permitted.

With only this condition of course,
You have to improve the blank page.

Copyright © Nicanor Parra, translated by Miller Williams, from Poems and antipoems, Edited by Miller Williams. Translators: Fernando Alegría and others. New York: New Directions Pub. Corp., 1967. All rights reserved.

Nicanor Parra Wins Cervantes Prize

What is an antipoet? That answer I'll leave to someone else, but a self-styled holder of that moniker, the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra (1914-), a trained mathematician and physicist who has been publishing since the 1930s and whose 1954 collection Poemas y Antipoemas electrified readers across the globe, yesterday received the 2011 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, widely considered the highest honor in Spanish-language literature.

Parra has famously rejected what he considered the pomp and formality of the poetry business, as well as the elaborate style of Spanish-language poetry, choosing instead a more colloquial, often humorous approach.  He has written poems with titles like "Chistes para disorientar la polícia/poesía" ("Tricks to disorient the police/poetry") "Toda la poesía es mierda" ("All poetry is shit"); "¡Silencio mierda!" ("Shut the hell up!"); "La muerte supersónica" ("Supersonic death"); and Like other writers who step outside the mainstream he has not received the sort of acclaim due him, though he did receive Chile's National Prize for Literature in 1969 (following in the footsteps of Nobel Laureates Pablo Neruda and Gabriel Mistral), and he is rumored to have been nominated several times for the Nobel itself.

There are several English translations of his work, including Antipoems, translated by Jorge Elliott (City Lights, Pocket Poets Series No. 12, 1960); Poems and Antipoems, edited by Miller Williams and translated by Fernando Alegría (New Directions, 1967); Poems and Antipoems, edited by David Unger (New Directions, 1985); Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great, translated by Liz Werner (New Directions, 2004), and After-Dinner Declarations, translated by Dave Oliphant (Host Publications, 2009).

EPITAFIO

De estatura mediana,
Con una voz ni delgada ni gruesa,
Hijo mayor de profesor primario
Y de una modista de trastienda;
Flaco de nacimiento
Aunque devoto de la buena mesa;
De mejillas escuálidas
Y de más bien abundantes orejas;
Con un rostro cuadrado
En que los ojos se abren apenas
Y una nariz de boxeador mulato
Baja a la boca de ídolo azteca
-Todo esto bañado
Por una luz entre irónica y pérfida-
Ni muy listo ni tonto de remate
Fui lo que fui: una mezcla
De vinagre y aceite de comer
¡Un embutido de ángel y bestia!

EPITAPH
 
Of medium height,
With a voice neither shrill nor low,
The oldest son of an elementary school teacher
And a piecework seamstress,
Naturally thin
Though fond of good eating,
With drawn cheeks
And oversize ears,
A square face,
And slits for eyes,
And the nose of a mulatto boxer
Over an Aztec idol's mouth
-All this bathed
In a light halfway between irony and perfidy -
Neither too bright nor totally stupid,
I was what I was: a mixture
Of vinegar and olive oil,
A sausage of angel and beast!

Copyright © Nicanor Parra, translated by Jorge Elliot, from Antipoems (translated by Jorge Elliott), San Francisco, City Lights Books, The Pocket Poets Series, Nº12, 1960. All rights reserved.

 

Raúl Zurita @ Northwestern

Earlier this evening, the university's Poetry and Poetics Colloquium and Workshop held its first event of the fall, a reading by Raúl Zurita, accompanied by one of his many fine translators, Anna Deeny.  A number of units within the university, as well as the Poetry Foundation, sponsored Zurita's visit, and for their generosity I offer deep thinks. I have previously written a little about Zurita's work on this blog, noting his former compatriot Robert Bolaño's imaginative (mis-)treatment of his life in the former's novels, especially Distant Star (Estrella distante), and even translating (a very tiny example of) one of his works, "[Zurita]," myself. When Zurita came through Chicago several years back, I was away, so I didn't get to see him, but I was determined not to miss tonight's event. And he did not disappoint. I won't try to recap the reading, which lasted a little under an hour, but I will say that I felt moved in a way I haven't by hearing poetry in a while, at least since last spring.

One of the things that Zurita's poetry offers is an sublime gravity, a dizzying weightiness masked by humor, breeziness, riduculousness, absurdity--the absurdity of a world in which people are disappeared or dropped out of planes or tortured for disagreeing with a political dictatorship, and the society for the most part looks in the other direction, closes its eyes, talks in circles, and enjoys the "economic successes" the murderous regime touts, which primarily benefit those at the top of the social, political and financial pyramid. Zurita read from several of his books, including Purgatorio (1979), Sueños para Kurosawa (2009), and the often astonishingly beautiful La vida nueva (1994), which plays with Dante's legendary title in rethinking what a new life might mean under the circumstances in which Zurita and his fellow countrypeople were living before and at the time he wrote the book. It forms the final title in a trilogy that includes Purgatorio and Anteparaíso (1982), the first of Zurita's works I ever came across, and itself a rethinking, in so many ways, of Dante's worldview, while also drawing on the aesthetic daring of that great poetic ancestor.

After the reading, Zurita answered questions from the audience, including responding to a fine one, I believe by my colleague Jorge Coronado, in which he noted off the cuff that it was only the desert, the mountains, and the sea that showed "compassion" to those who were killed or dropped onto or over these natural sites. I am still thinking about that one.


Jorge Coronado introducing Anna Deeny (translator) and Raúl Zurita


Anna Deeny and Raúl Zurita, reading his poetry

Borges' Birthday + Poem/Translation: Borges

Today would be the 112th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), the poet, fiction writer, essayist, and aesthete, who was without a doubt one of Argentina's and Latin America's greatest gifts to the world of arts and letters.  I tend to think of Borges as a fiction writer, since it was through the genre that I first encountered his work, and it was as an innovator in the short fictional form that his global reputation took hold, but he began his writing career in his native country and, I think it's fair to say, thought of himself primarily as a poet. He was a very good one, sometimes an exceptional one. As he wrote in his poem "Inscripcíon" (Inscription), in the posthumous collection "Los conjurados" (The conjured ones), "Escribir un poema es ensayar una magia menor" (To write a poem is to attempt a minor magic.)  I should note that Borges is one of those writers (like Wallace Stevens, for example) whose politics and personal beliefs I disagree with, but whose work I nevertheless have a great affinity for.  His poetry in particular has grown on me as I have gotten older.  In honor of Borges' birthday, I am posting a few links to articles on him, and one of his late poems that I love, as it captures the simplicity, rhetorical skill, and evocative power that at his best he would often pack into the shorter poems he wrote towards the end of his life.

The links:
Christian Science Monitor: "Jorge Luis Borges: What Made Him So Good?"
Guardian Online: "Jorge Luis Borges' Google doodle celebrates the master of magical realism"
El Clarín (One of Argentina's major newspapers): "Hoy Borges cumpliría 112 y se los festejan"

The poem:
"El cómplice" (The Accomplice), from La cifra (The Limit) (1981) needs little explanation. It is also simple enough for me to translate, and all the faults in the English are mine, but if you can read it aloud in the Spanish, you also will get more of Borges' original music, the repetition of the "c" sounds in the first line, for example, or the sustained grammatical and syntactic repetitions of the first four lines, which he reverses in the fifth, shifting the speaker's agency from response to the head of the sentence, after he has endured a series of trials, including hell/the inferno.

EL CÓMPLICE

Me crucifican y yo debo ser la cruz y los clavos.
Me tienden la copa y yo debo ser la cicuta.
Me engañan y y debo ser la mentira.
Me inciendan y yo debo ser el infierno.
Debo alabar y agradecer cada instante del tiempo.
Mi alimento es todas las cosas.
El peso preciso del universo, la humillación, el júbilo.
Debo justificar lo que hiere.
No importa mi ventura o mi desventura.
Soy el poeta.

THE ACCOMPLICE

They crucify me and I must be the cross and the nails.
They hand me the cup and I must be the hemlock.
They fool me and I must be the lie.
They set me on fire and I must be the inferno.
I have to praise and thank every instant of time.
Everything nourishes me.
The precise weight of the universe, humiliation, jubilation.
I must justify what wounds me.
My fortune or misfortune is of no importance.
I am the poet.

Copyright © Jorge Luis Borges, from La cifra (1981; Emece Editores, 1993). Translation © John Keene, 2011.

Pulitzer Prizes + Poem: Roberto Bolaño

Congratulations to this year's winners of the Pulitzer Prizes for Letters, Drama and Music! I was especially gladdened by three of the winners in these areas. Kay Ryan, for long an unacknowledged stylist of the first rank, received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Grove Press).  Jennifer Egan, a consistently outstanding writer, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, Welcome to the Goon Squad (Alfred A. Knopf), which includes the inventive use of MS  PowerPoint slides. And Eric Foner, whom I met personally many years ago when a good friend was a post-doctoral student at the university, received the Pulitzer Prize for History for his nuanced portrait of Abraham Lincoln's affective and political evolution on the issue of race and racism, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (W. W. Norton & Co.). Other winners include the provocative Chicago-area playwright Bruce Norris, who received the drama prize for his playful take on Lorraine Hansberry's (1930-1965) landmark 1959 work A Raisin in the Sun; the New York Times's Dave Leonhardt, easily one of their best writers, who has provided some of the soundest commentary on the unfolding financial crisis; and Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein of ProPublica, a New York-based non-profit research and investigative journalism organization that has, since its founding several years ago, demonstrated the best of what journalism can do. It also becomes the first online journalistic organ to win 2 Pulitzer prizes, having won the first by any online publication last year.

***

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003). A name anyone even modestly knowledgeable about contemporary global literature would be passingly familiar with.  Chilean native Bolaño's fame was already waxing, his esteem as a writer in the Hispanophone literary world among the highest of his peers, when he passed away just 8 years ago. During 10-year period from 1993 to 2003, when he published some 14 or so books in just 10 years (8 novels, 3 collections of stories, 2 collections of poetry, and 1 collaboration), recognition of his genius built and approached its apogee. The year he died, US publisher New Directions published one of his masterpieces, the strange and remarkable novel By Night in Chile (Nocturno de Chile, 2000), translated by Chris Andrews, and his American acclaim began; since then, it has continued to ascend.

Between New Directions and Farrar Straus & Giroux, nearly all of his work in prose, large and small, has or will be translated; a number of the stories, collected in Last Evenings on Earth (selected from Putas Asesinas [Killer Whores], 2001 and Llamadas Telefónicas [Telephone Calls] 1997), and two novels in addition to By Night in Chile, The Savage Detectives (Los Detectives Salvajes, 1998) and 2666 (2004), have anchored his reputation as one of the most extraordinary and inventive fiction writers in any language, and the latter novel is astonishing in its vision and aesthetic daring, offering writers of today new possibilities for what a novel might do, and how it might do so.  In all of these works, a constant is the character of the poet; in each of the novels I've mentioned, poets are central to the plot; often they're protagonists, sometimes villains. Even when not overtly depicted or only casually so, poets are frequently the source, in part, of the fiction's thematic core, its aesthetic self-regard, its narrative drive. This was not a random element of Bolaño's work, but derives from the writer's own history and story, as a poet early in his career. Such has been the case for many a great fiction writer: immediately William Faulkner, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and José Saramago come to mind. All wrote poetry early on, but came to great fame as fiction writers (in Beckett's case it was also his dramaturgy).

Recently I was listening to a podcast with one of his translators, Natasha Wimmer, who beautifully brought 2666 into English, and I believe she stated that he was not a very good poet. Or perhaps that was Hector Hoyos in conversation with Robert Pogue Harrison, on the latter's intellectual chatfest, Entitled Opinions. Maybe they both expressed this opinion, that Bolaño was not a very good poet, perhaps even a bad poet. I beg to differ. His poems often seem like seeds for later works, but they have tremendous energy, more metaphorical richness and inventiveness than a good deal of contemporary American poetry, and are often quite funny and provocative, in multiple ways. I sometimes wonder if critics say such things just to say them--especially if they are not creative writers themselves--or if they truly believe them. I have read a lot of poetry, and Bolaño's is "bad." I think his fiction is better, and both are better than his essays, one of which, "Exiles," containing incorrect statements and problematic assumptions, is now available for reading on the New York Review of Books' website. Few can do it all, but Bolaño was and died a poet, even if his greatest and most sustained achievements are in prose fiction. The heart and ear and eye of the poet, this particular poet named Roberto Bolaño, is evident in all of his finest work.  Here is a poem from the collection The Romantic Dogs (Los Perros Románticos: Poemas 1980-1998, 2000), translated by Laura Healy and published in the US in 2008.

First the Spanish, with its particular rhyme scheme, then the English, which, though quite different approximates something nevertheless lyrical.

BÓLIDO

El automóvil negro desaperece
en la curva del ser. Yo
aparezco en la explanada:
todos van a fallecer, dice el viejo
que se apoyo en la fachada.
No me cuentes más historias:
mi camino es el camino
de la nieve, no del parecer
más alto, más guapo, mejor.
Murió Beltrán Morales,
o eso dicen, murió
Juan Luís Martínez.
Rodrigo Lira se suicidó.
Murió Philip K. Dick
y ya sólo necesitamos
lo estrictamente necesario.
Ven, métete en mi cama.
Acariciémos toda la noche
del ser y de su negro coche.

ROADSTER

The black automobile vanishes
around the curve of being. I
appear on the esplanade:
everyone will die, says the old guy
leaning against the façade.
Stop telling me stories:
my path is the path
of snow, not of seeming
taller, handsomer, better.
Beltrán Morales died,
or so they say,
Juan Luís Martínez died,
Rodrigo Lira killed himself.
Philip K. Dick died
and now we only need
what is strictly necessary.
Come, slip into my bed.
Let's caress all through the night
of being and its black car.

From The Romantic Dogs, New Directions, Roberto Bolano © 2008. Translated by Laura Healy. All rights reserved.