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Category Archives: Spanish Poetry

Affordable Angst by Mercedes Cebrián Translated by Terence Dooley (Shearsman Books)

Posted on January 29, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Affordable Angst by Mercedes Cebrián Translated by Terence Dooley (Shearsman Books)

This dual-language book selects from Mercedes Cebrián’s four collections published in Spain back to the mid-2000s. They’re poems about her nation and its changes since the end of Franco’s dictatorship. Healthcare, consumerism, globalisation, the EU, the hollowing of city centres, the Church, data access, relations with other countries… There’s even a poem called ‘Brexit’:

         […] no era
         un ir y venir, era la diferencia
         entre mutuo y recíproco. […]
         (It wasn’t a to-and-fro-ing,/ it was the difference/ between mutual
         and reciprocal)

Such big social subjects are treated with a surface cuteness that dissimulates a deeper (and darker) nexus. A poem about immigration links the arrival of kiwi-fruit to Spain with the arrival of Pakistani immigrants, and does so in a way that its phrase especies de otros mundos (‘otherworld species’) and its excursus about chimpanzee smiles indicating hostility can be read as deniable, provocative or seriously unsavoury. Poems about regret for the loss of colonies, complaints about paying tax, and irritation with people blaming Franco for everything can similarly sound whimsical, ironic or quietly nasty. Ambiguity is often the strategy of the politically timorous writer, but the malestar (‘discomfort/ malaise’, rather than ‘angst’) of the Spanish title seems to be the aim here. The few poems about relationships likewise have their emotions camouflaged under elaborate, comic but disturbing fantasies:

         En esta cantimplora que acarro
         llevo un marido líquido […]
         (I have a flask I carry round with me/ with a liquid husband in)

To these ends, the book’s most frequent stylistic devices are abrupt non-sequiturs in the manner of Ashbery, and ostensibly nonsensical declarations that match an abstract noun with a highly particular image in a way familiar from surrealism:

          Los temas escabrosas están en el azucarillo
          de este descafeinado.
          (All the unsavoury gossip is in the saccharine-packet/ for this decaf.)

Its favourite joke-tone, meanwhile, is a faux naiveté

         […] Panamá. ¿A quién se le ocurrió partirlo en dos?
         (Panama […] Who on earth split it down the middle?)

shored up with plentiful references to childhood and its soft toys, dolls and felt-tip pens:

         ¿Sirve el gesto de devolver el edding y a cambio no pagar
         los euros que Hacienda me demanda?
         (What if I handed in the Edding as a gesture,/ would that mean
         I didn’t have to pay the Revenue all those euros?)

Even so, this is an adroit poet, and the grim prophecies of ‘Población Flotante’ (‘Floating Population’) 

         El futuro ya está blanco
         y está hervido, en eso se parece
         a nuestra cena
         (The future is white now/ and processed, like our supper)

with its imageries of desertification (‘hervido’ above is strictly ‘boiled’) and missile attack seemed to me among several poems whose power to unsettle reached beyond the habitual gripes.

The bold translation makes many unexpected choices: ‘recycling centre’ for vertedero (landfill site); ‘to google’ for saber más (to know more). It embellishes (‘re-tweeted’ for decía (said)), advertises (agendas negras (black notebooks) become ‘Moleskine’ ones), tones down (‘continents’ and even ‘photos’ for the thrice-repeated razas (‘races’)) and plays freely with line lengths and syntax, always valuing stylishness before strict precision. Nonetheless it works well: for the intermediate hispanophone less obvious meanings are sometimes illuminated and the exuberance is entertaining, while the genetically-modified Cebrián served up to the monoglot can be read as entirely apt for the ironies elsewhere.

Guy Russell 29th January 2023

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Trilce by César Vallejo Translated by Michael Smith & Valentino Gianuzzi (Shearsman Books)

Posted on November 5, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Trilce by César Vallejo Translated by Michael Smith & Valentino Gianuzzi (Shearsman Books)

This very timely book marks a century from the first publication of Trilce in 1922. The cover boldly hails this as a ‘masterpiece’, of a significance in Latin and Spanish letters to match The Waste Land and The Cantos of Western Europe. I find that a bit strong and unsustainable, although Trilce breaks new ground, certainly looking a lot more experimental than it would now. In many ways it must be acknowledged its significant place, perhaps in that sense of The Cantos of being just a bit difficult to read, but one of those titles it would almost be irresponsible to overlook. Vallejo was an admirer of Ruben Dario; others find certain resonances not inconsistent with Whitman.

Much of Vallejo’s interest is that he breaks with tradition. He had a fondness for neologisms such as the chosen title, the most plausible reading of this is perhaps a combining of ‘triste’ (sad) and ‘dulce’ (sweet) from the Spanish. There is that sense that the book was likely ahead of its time, and in many ways has a style of diction comparable perhaps to US writing of the ‘50s and ‘60s, rather more so than with the highly effusive if not unchained Whitman.

It should be acknowledged that this is essentially a centennial reprint of a translation that was first done in 2005, and then included in a Complete Poems of 2012; accomplished by Irish poet Michael Smith and Peruvian Valentino Gianuzzi. Probably the most significant alternative take would be that of Clayton Eshleman.

In a very informative Introduction to the poems a number of substantive observations are made. We should note that by 1922 Vallejo was just 30. Vallejo was the youngest of 12 children, some of whom he was very close to. His relationships with women were also consequential, they ‘were not few’ (pxvii) including Otilia Villaneuva, the predominant affair, and Zoila Rosa Cuadra.

These factors and his mother’s death in 1918 had a decided bearing; equally Vallejo got involved in a public dispute involving his creative friends, and ended up in jail for 112 days. After release he was soon to leave Peru, with no going back, in 1923, when he left for Paris. There is some indication that ‘Trilce’s import was not immediately recognised and would only later emerge. Vallejo may very well be the finest of Peruvian poets, land of the Incas, although in the Pacific, Peru warred with Chile, a

hospitable place for poets, in which the latter tended to prevail.

The work eschews standard poetic forms, including rhyme, as Whitman did. The work consists of some 77 poems. There is the intimation of a strong ego, the ‘I’, but it is not especially introspective. The current book, helpfully, is bilingual, Spanish to the left.

I think comparing Vallejo to Eliot and Pound is a bit strong. There is not the guidance toward construction, nor that many highly memorable coinings or phrasing. But to Vallejo’s credit he has an air of difficulty and authenticity, some darker passages (one might compare the rather unlike Chilean Neruda) and an immersion in words. It might be suggested that levelling this text up against The Waste Land is not going to be very productive, whereas a comparison with other Latin poets, like Neruda, might be.

There is almost an unsparing quality, and Vallejo’s life was perhaps not at an altogether benign spot at the time. Here for instance is a stanza from poem XXVII;-

               The surge that knows not how it’s going,

            gives me fear, terror.

            Valiant memory, I won’t go on.

            Fair and sad skeleton, hiss, hiss.    (end p61)

Vallejo is unafraid of letting the darkness in, of examining it. He, creditably, does not seem to be going out of his way to please or placate the reader.

Vallejo, as Orrego remarked in his 1922 introduction (published for the first time here in translation) ‘strips his poetic expression of all hints of rhetoric’ (p202), such was its stylistic advance at the time. Vallejo took on convention, sometimes in ways that might have affected his work;- here is poem XLV;-

                  Let us always go out. Let us taste

            the stupendous song, the song uttered

            by the lower lips of desire. 

            O prodigious maidenhood.

            The saltless breeze goes by.   (p101)

I think there is little doubt that ‘Trilce’ amounts to being one of the most important Latin poems of the 20th Century. Yet he is that bit inimitable. The ego does come to be asserted, probably less so than in the prodigious Whitman, although it’s to cite American context, rather more out of the New American poets, and certainly very far off Language and conceptual poetry. I’m inclined to place him for Latin relevance alongside Neruda, Paz, Huidobro and Mistral and very likely Dario and perhaps de Rokha. Ironically Vallejo’s trailblazing innovations have by now seemed quite absorbed, used and recognised. But the book is a landmark and certainly essential to Latin poetry, rendered here in a very attentive and capable translation.

Clark Allison 5th November 2022

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Paris 1925: Ordinary Autumn & All of a Sudden by Vicente Huidobro Translated by Tony Frazer (Shearsman Books)

Posted on October 21, 2020 by tearsinthefence
Paris 1925: Ordinary Autumn & All of a Sudden by Vicente Huidobro Translated by Tony Frazer (Shearsman Books)

In these days when surrealism has become a staple of breakfast cereal adverts, it’s hard imagining the original impact of, say, Paul Éluard’s ‘la terre est bleue comme une orange’ (the earth is blue like an orange), or Robert Desnos’ ‘je suis le bûcheron de la forêt d’acier’ (I am the woodcutter in the steel forest). Vicente Huidobro never signed up officially to the programme, a mishap that’s led to his absence from most surrealist anthologies then and now, but this bilingual volume brings together two small collections from the mid-twenties, the period when he was most influenced by them. 

Reading this kind of work from a century’s distance takes some getting used to. The stuff about capital-W Woman can feel embarrassingly archaic, and the love-poems evince a paramour too scatterbrained to generate any intensity, let alone be reciprocated. Those about the seasons, the sky and nature manage better, refreshing these ultra-traditional subjects through their sheer oddity. The ocean, shipwreck and drowning feature heavily, not only as Symbolist allusions, but also perhaps because, as a Chilean in Paris, Huidobro must have spent quite a while on the Atlantic. There are openings rich in promise

Je possède la clef de l’Automne   (I possess the key to Autumn)

Maintenant écoutez le grincement des paupières   (Now listen to the eyelids creaking)

Parmi les grands figues de l’espace   (Among the great figs of space)

albeit they’re quickly overwhelmed by whimsy. Structure is, naturally, one of the things being kicked against, but there’s the perennial problem of how else the readers are to be kept engaged. Perhaps, like the compliant beloved, they have to think, Well, at least the writer’s having a good time. And how artistic his dreams are!

One interesting feature is that while most avant-garde poetry of the time embraced vers libre, these frequently use rhymes. Some are of the coeur/fleur type that is the French equivalent of breeze/trees or moon/June. But others exploit less common rhymes as a way to link unrelated lines or, as here, to tease with a sonic false-reasoning:

Le Printemps est relative comme l’arc-en-ciel

Il pourrait aussi bien être une ombrelle

(Spring is relative like the rainbow/ It might as well be a parasol)

The book also includes Huidobro’s Spanish versions, which give a glimpse into his ongoing editing:

Dans tes cheveux il y a une musique

(In your hair there’s a kind of music)

becomes

Hay una música silvestre 

En tus cabellos leves

(There’s a wild music/ in your light hair)

where the supplementary adjectives suggest a poet not yet quite certain of his effects. 

All that said, there’s a certain charm here. It might be the sheer insouciance, the sheer eccentricity, or the fresh resonance for our times of lines like ‘le ciel est gratuit’ (the sky is free of charge). In whatever case, it’s definitely helped by a marvellously self-effacing translation which chooses the clearest word rather than showing off the translator’s verbal agility, doesn’t move lines about, and doesn’t privilege rhyme over other poetic effects, as often happens. It’s also unafraid of leaving a nonsense line as nonsense rather than killing by interpretation, a particular danger with this kind of poetry. The book’s appearance finally extends access to Huidobro’s less famous work beyond completists and specialists, which is surely a good thing. 

Guy Russell 21st October 2020

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We Were Not There by Jordi Doce Translated by Lawrence Schimel (Shearsman Books)

Posted on July 18, 2020 by tearsinthefence
We Were Not There by Jordi Doce Translated by Lawrence Schimel (Shearsman Books)

When Jordi Doce considered the poems of Charles Tomlinson for an Agenda International Issue some twenty-five years ago he noted the voice behind the poems as being ‘wholly unique in its ambition’ before going on to say that the English poet’s ambition and ability was ‘to match and express preoccupations which have remained largely consistent through the years, always expanding and expounding themselves through the workings of an alert, intelligent mind.’ Let me be bold enough to say that similar words may be used about the Spanish poet who wrote that and suggest that his volume We Were Not There, published last year by Shearsman Books , plots an ambitious journey of discovery in which we are challenged to examine not only our changing world but also those senses ‘the air interrogated questioned by a blank page’ (‘Guest’).

The blank page offers an invitation to the writer to pursue a horizon of discovery as in ‘Exploration’:

‘To go there where no one has ever been.
The place of all places, they said.
A fire burned me from within and there was no respite.
Wastelands, wandering clouds, some trees.
I kept on traveling toward my own borders.’

As William Blake’s Infernal Proverb had put it ‘No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings’ and to travel towards one’s own borders suggests a journey that has no predetermined conclusion. Journeys begin with the opening of doors but anticipation is more like an imaginative fiction, a glance through the glass, and as Louis Zukofsky put it ‘To see is to inform all speech’. Doce’s ‘Fiction’ opens with sight:

‘I didn’t want to open the door
nor for it to open before me:

the keyhole was all I needed
to pass through to the other side

and see the house where time
was buzzing in the kitchen

and we heard, in the distance,
the sea’s obstinacy,

the obedient crunch of the sand –’

One of the most striking elements of this collection of poems is that feeling of collaborative concern, that awareness of commonality, the record of experiences that permits us to recognise our common humanity. Doce brings into focus ‘Then’, that awareness that ‘When the world became the world / the light shone like always / upon an indifferent clock’. That world possessed an air that ‘was full of beginnings’:

‘and a thousand times in a thousand different streets
someone tripped on a stone
and this stone opened their eyes;
it was the moment we all waited for
to make the same decisions,
to again kiss the same ground,
to say the goodbyes of the day before;
and that beloved everyday face
that pretended to listen
or invited a distracted caress
once again pulled away too soon.’

Writing about Tomlinson, Jordi Doce quoted the English poet as explaining in an interview with a Spanish newspaper that ‘Europe has been built by its poets, and not by its politicians. Homer, Dante, Rilke have done more for Europe than all bureaucratic dispositions and governments.’ It seems entirely appropriate that Doce’s own ‘Una página, un jardin’ (‘A Page, A Garden’) should have as epigraph Tomlinson’s own lines:

‘A sudden blossoming of each character,
Of living letters, sprung from nowhere…’

The movement from Spanish to French in the title of Doce’s poem is given gentle force as we then read that ‘You step upon the humble tiles / and another floor gives way, neither here nor there, between two worlds that intermingle / at the tips of the toes.’

It is those toe-tips that set out on the journey in a manner not dissimilar to the way a pen’s mark on a page commences a new determination and Doce’s use of an extract from Goethe’s Diaries as an epigraph to his volume alerts the reader to the connections between movement and stillness: in a world of restricted journeying we are NOW and in a world of LOCK-DOWN we are aware of liberty:

‘Now that half of my life has passed I find that I have made but little progress, and I stand here like one who has barely escaped drowning and who is drying himself in the grateful rays of the sun’
J.W. Goethe, 1779

Ian Brinton 18th July 2020

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Sur(rendering) by Mario Martín Gijón Translated by Terence Dooley (Shearsman Books)

Posted on June 8, 2020 by tearsinthefence
Sur(rendering) by Mario Martín Gijón Translated by Terence Dooley (Shearsman Books)

In an attempt to show that ‘absence’ is more important than ‘presence’ the Elizabethan poet Fulke Greville suggested that ‘like dainty clouds, / On glorious bright’ absence can protect Nature’s ‘weak senses’ from ‘harming light’. However, by the end of ‘Absence and Presence’ the realisation that absence and loss cannot be discussed in these terms compels the poet to say

‘The absence which you glory,
Is that which makes you sorry,
And burn in vain:
For thought is not the weapon,
Wherewith thought’s ease men cheapen,
Absence is pain.’

Threading its path through this deeply moving sequence of lyrics by the Spanish poet Mario Martín Gijón there is what Terence Dooley, the translator, calls ‘a love lost and found’:

‘This might sound like nothing new in the history of poetry, but the poet immerses us in his story by a complex process of linguistic recreation: recreation in the sense of re-invention and recreation also as play, or playfulness.’

These poems are remarkable in the way that they offer the reader a tangible sense of the abstract. Words, fleeting sounds, do not possess the concrete presence of physical reality but in the mouth of a sophisticated poet and brought to our attention by the sympathetic and imaginative skills of the translator they convey the very presence of that which is no longer there. In an introduction provided for us by Dooley and given the title ‘Love Games’ we are offered Eduardo Moga’s words concerning the way in which Gijón works:

‘Words become lexical clay in the hands of the poet, or articulated entities into which other words may be telescoped. Words break, unscrew, crumble onto the page like sand.’

And perhaps a little like sand in an hourglass words pour from mind to page so that the reader can reflect upon what has been sifted and in an early poem in the sequence, ‘the promise of (as)saying you’, we can see the articulation at work:

‘s(u/e)rv(ey)ing you gave
me hope and strength to
cont(ai)n(yo)ue
giving my word ploughed
ground
following the furrows
of your abs(c)ent
body
sowing seed
on barren land’

The idea of casting an overall glance or survey over the barren land of loss is merged with the anger of possibly suing the lost one and eyeing her absence. Hope, as a seed that might promote future presence, is given to the mourner in terms of both containing and continuing and the scent of loss itself retains the presence of the body. This may feel like ‘sowing seed / on barren land’ but the subtle movement of the poem, brought to life in this admirable translation, allows the vividness of ‘furrows’ to retain a sense of what is lying below the surface.
That tangible sense of presence at the time of absence is presented to us with a meditative tone in the poem ‘burnt offering’:

‘terrified by terrain untrodden
by you I
wandered through the suburbs
of your name’

That inability of one person to inhabit the world of another, that awareness that the other possesses a different landscape, is subtly transfixed in the use of the word ‘suburbs’ for the Spanish word ‘afueras’. The sense of having lost someone, their movement from a centre into an outskirt, is caught with the subterranean echo of what might rest in a furrow, a ‘sub/urb’.
This short review is not an essay about this important Spanish poet but is offered as a ‘taster’ of what readers might expect within these pages. Gijón dives ever deeper into ‘the memory of your / eyes’ and concludes with the enduring reality of absence:

‘I am
as landless as possessed’

Having started these brief comments with a reference to an Elizabethan poet it will not perhaps be inappropriate to conclude with some words from another, albeit written in a play from the Jacobean age. As Leontes confronts what appears to be the irredeemable loss of his wife and child in The Winter’s Tale he vows to spend time at their grave in the hope that ‘tears shed there / Shall be my re/creation.’

Ian Brinton 8th June 2020

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Lunarium by Josep Lluís Aguiló translated by Anna Crowe (Arc Publications)

Posted on January 23, 2017 by tearsinthefence
Lunarium by Josep Lluís Aguiló translated by Anna Crowe (Arc Publications)

John Berger’s fictional account of a doctor in the Forest of Dean, Dr Sassall in A Fortunate Man, presents the reader with that reality pointed to by Charles Tomlinson in his poem ‘A Meditation on John Constable’:

“…The artist lies
For the improvement of truth.”

Berger’s country doctor “exaggerates when he tells stories about himself. In these stories he is nearly always in an absurd position: trying to take a film on deck when the waves break over him; getting lost in a city he doesn’t know; letting a pneumatic drill run away with him. He stresses the disenchantment and deliberately makes himself a comic little man. Disguised in this way and forearmed against disappointment, he can then re-approach reality once more with the entirely un-comic purposes of mastering it, of understanding further.” Anna Crowe’s Preface to her convincing translations of the contemporary Mallorcan poet Aguiló highlights some similar ideas concerning the imagination of this tale-weaving poet:

“Already there is a sense that the reader may expect the unexpected. Reading these poems, what is striking is the power of the imagination at work, and the multiplicity of voices that speak through the poems. The power of the imagination might be said to be the underlying argument or leitmotif of Aguiló’s poetry.”

Aguiló creates worlds which can be visited secretly and we can begin “to search for the truth / by finding where the ink is hidden that tattoos us / in the world”. This is a poetry of doors and as they open, one by one, they invite the reader into the next stanza:

“The first stanza is the one that welcomes
you and drags you inside,
grabbing you by the arm and frowning at you;
the one that speaks to you with warmth and trust
while it makes you sit down in the armchair of the second stanza.”

These are magical poems which create a magical world of Mallorca in which “green and yellow words”, written by a botanical god, can be deciphered “every day on the pages of / the thicket of writing”.
This is a Mallorca known to the Americans of the 1950s from which Robert Creeley published his Divers Press books and Black Mountain Review and from which Robert Duncan could write to Denise Levertov in June 1955 about “the desire to have imagination freed again”. This is a world which exists with a perception of exact detail and an understanding that ouvertures are created through which we see another world:

“You had to walk stealthily. Every footstep echoed,
disturbing emptiness and time. The smells of food
from the kitchen did not reach this high and I scrabbled
among lumber and old clothes, savouring the smells
of chicken bran and the dung and damp walls
of this corner of Santanyí and bad Mallorcan cement.”

The importance of Tomlinson’s assertion about imagination and truth informs this whole collection and the emphasis noted in Anna Crowe’s introduction stands sentinel to a landscape which invites further exploration:

“There is a sense of a poet pushing the boundaries of the possible further and further out, of exploring what it means to live on the edge of whatever world he has invented, as well as, at the same time, going further and further in, exploring what it means to be human.”

Ian Brinton 23rd January 2017

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A Quick Note on César Vallejo

Posted on July 15, 2015 by tearsinthefence
A Quick Note on César Vallejo

Selected Writings of César Vallejo, ed. Joseph Mulligan, various trans. (Wesleyan University Press, 2015) is a badly formulated publication, in contrast, for example, to the same publisher’s magnificent handling of Victor Segalen’s Stèles (2007). It has to be said that it is not infrequent that seemingly all-embracing selected volumes make uncomfortable reading. The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto (University of Chicago Press, 2007) is another case in point. This is not to say that one should not buy this Vallejo. Probably one should because some eighty percent of its contents have never been translated into English before. The problem is that the wonderful wealth of decently translated and annotated prose, extracted from a great deal more: articles, chronicles, stories, plays, letters, has, interspersed among it, selections from Vallejo’s poetry, some in previously published translations, all anyway previously translated many times. This makes for irritating intrusion, not the helpful context the editor or publisher presumably intended. And that space could have been taken up with more of the prose. Two other points, just for example. Firstly, the earliest Vallejo prose includes quotations from poems by two other poets, which are not translated. Why? This book is offered as a translation. Doubtless many of its readers will be unable to read Spanish well or at all. So why is it assumed that these quotations do not also need to be translated? Secondly, that part of the bibliography, while described as selected, devoted to “Works by Vallejo in English Translation”, is nevertheless grossly negligent in important omissions, including Shearsman’s The Complete Poems, Allardyce Book’s The Black Heralds, and others.

Anthony Barnett 15th July 2015

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Solitudes & Other Early Poems by Antonio Machado trans. Michael Smith & Luis Ingelmo (Shearsman Books)

Posted on January 25, 2015 by tearsinthefence
Solitudes & Other Early Poems by Antonio Machado trans. Michael Smith & Luis Ingelmo (Shearsman Books)

In 1983 Charles Tomlinson published his Translations, a selection of poems which he had worked on with Henry Gifford from the University of Bristol. At the end of the introduction he asserted that the freedoms he had taken with the originals had been ‘to ensure a living result’. The selection includes some pieces from Antonio Machado, the Spanish poet whose life and work ranged over the turn of the nineteenth century up until the time of the Spanish Civil War. In the excellent Foreword to this fine new Shearsman publication of Machado’s early work the translators, Michael Smith and Luis Ingelmo, give us a clear picture of this great poet:

‘In the ’20s and ’30s Machado spent his time schoolmastering in provincial towns, travelling round Spain and writing his poems. By the time the Civil War took place, his reputation was made. That catastrophe, however, put an end to more than Machado’s poetry; it also killed him. Machado, along with the majority of Spanish intellectuals, supported the Republic and the new Spain it was hopefully and painfully ushering in; and he stayed in Spain to the bitter end, despite an offer from England of a lucrative position as a teacher of Spanish literature. At the fall of Madrid, Antonio, with his mother, his youngest brother José and José’s family, made his way in the most appalling circumstances and with thousands of other starving and destitute refugees, to the small French border town of Collioure.’

Tomlinson’s introduction had mapped out a path for the reader of poetry-in- translation in which each poem ‘starts from a given ground’ and ‘carries the reader to an unforeseen vantage-point, whence he views differently the landscape over which he has passed’. The landscape of Machado is one of fountains, roads, pine groves, poplars, light and shadow, sounds of water, deserted town squares and paths which, as pointed out by the translators of this new edition, lead ‘into that spiritual order where the soul enjoys its own profound and redemptive freedom.’

Emotion for Machado is placed within the context of objects in a landscape such as with poem XXXI:

‘The moss grows in the shady
square and on the church’s old
and holy stone. In the porch, a beggar…
His soul is older than the church.

In the cold mornings he climbs very slowly
along the marble steps
till he reaches a stone nook…There his withered
hand appears within the folds of his cloak.

With the hollow sockets of his eyes
he has seen how, on clear days,
the white shadows pass,
the white shadows of holy hours.’

When Tomlinson translated a little of Machado’s work he was tempted to move the lines into the structure of William Carlos William’s three-ply step forward and I can see how this might work with the Spanish poet’s emphasis upon objects and the emotions which can burst from within things. But these new translations by Smith and Ingelmo keep more closely to the structure of the original language and capture a frieze-like intensity in which movement and stasis are held as in a block of stone. The ‘white shadows’ that pass are themselves a shade of passing time as ‘cold mornings’ move to ‘marble steps’ to conclude in a ‘stone nook’ which is itself translated into the ‘hollow sockets of his eyes.’

These new translations are monumental and hard-edged, delicate and moving, conveying Machado’s intent on ‘discovering and appreciating that mysterious transcendence which gives life its depth and meaning.’

Ian Brinton 25th January 2015

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Panic Cure, Poetry from Spain for the 21st Century

Posted on March 29, 2014 by tearsinthefence
Panic Cure, Poetry from Spain for the 21st Century

Edited and translated by Forrest Gander (Shearsman Books 2014).

On Monday 24th March I attended the book launch of this terrific collection; it was held in the Auditorio del Instituto Cervantes de Londres and two of the poets, Pilar Fraile Amador and Esther Ramón read in Spanish from the volume. They were accompanied by Forrest Gander who read from his translations.

 

Well, when it was suggested that ‘genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood’ Mr Eliot was absolutely spot on the mark. I don’t know very much Spanish: I was deeply moved. The readings communicated an urgency that mattered and I was quite spell-bound.

 

The book itself contains poems by ten contemporary poets and it is prefaced by a fine introduction written by Daniel Aguirre-Orteiza of Harvard University. As he says about this selection: it ‘justifies itself by its peculiar foreignness’ and its guiding principle is the translator’s ‘understanding of innovation, as defined by his acute ear as an American translator who seeks out the restless, inquiring voices now proliferating that unbounded linguistic space many Mexican and US poets are creating as we speak’.

 

From Hedge by Amador:

 

a shadow lingers behind the door. sour as those lemons we drip with

honey to eat.

we are a lump growling under the sheets. soaked purple. the source of

our pain unclear.

 

From Cattle by Ramón:

 

In the horse dump everything’s ready for rendering.

 

They flicked on the emergency lights and no one knew if they were

running to get there or to get away.

 

Ian Brinton 29th March 2014

 

 

 

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