Between Two Frauds?
My friend writes to me perplexed.
He belongs to the left, in a way that doesn't allow any breach except for those friendships that are able to overcome the years and all distances.
He tells me in his letter: "The last great news I received was of the Venezuelan President's ratification. It seemed to me that with that act the left had gained a new and refurbished impulse.
Kerry, who should win in November, will understand this and he'll act with the prudence Bush has lacked, so as to see that Venezuela places itself once again at the vanguard of renewal and of the high leap over the conservative and retrograde walls that try to drown the Democratic candidate. But I just finished reading a long essay by Gabriel Jackson, an elegant leftist, regardless of what he writes about, a historical analyst celebrated like few are, as you know, because of his work on the Spanish civil war.
"The confusions I'm mired in are caused by that political and historical portrait that Jackson paints of the current American President, whose features are surprisingly similar to the descriptions of the Venezuelan President provided by anyone from the opposition. Let me get to the point.
Bush pulled his presidency out of the sleeve of an electoral fraud, which those responsible for denouncing, with all of its consequences, preferred to tip toe around. Because Americans would not be able to withstand such a blatant similarity to the most extreme Third World country ruled by the most stubborn of caudillos.
But no matter how you look at it, we have a President cooked up in the oven of an illegal operation of vote tallies. And now I'm reading a series of arguments about the lack of legal checks and balances in your referendum that is so long, that I'm starting to think that your President and ours might be fulfilling that saying that the biggest similarities exist between those who seem to be radically different from one another.
"But what's more, as I follow our election I realize that Bush's personality seems to coincide quite well with the deep-rooted desires of the average American, assailed as he feels by forces beyond his control and understanding. He's a President that creates out of himself an image of authority that's above the law, with a simplistic and direct discourse, that resorts to the most basic form of patriotism and to a fundamentalist religious redemption. Despite his poor performance and the fact that, according to Jackson, "he is the most incompetent President in the history if the United States," he still has an enormous chance of getting re-elected. The worst thing that could happen to us is for a fraudulent President to end up being electorally legitimized four years later, with an infamous track record but engorged with patriotism and promises for a strong hand in all matters, with no regard to what the laws or international institutions might decree. I've read the very same things about the Venezuelan President, who directs a very bad government which is nonetheless grandiloquent and patriotic in its rhetoric. Of course, I didn't pick up on these points earlier because his government had several decades of right-wing administrations behind it. But it seems to me that it's time for him to prove that a leftist government is good, not because it's on the left but because it governs better than a right-wing government. A government that does its job without sermons at the foot of statues that others topple (as I recently heard about), and without covering itself beneath the suspicious blanket of the past or beneath distinguished historical dates.
"One last thing. As you know, Bush and the entire horde of allies who sustain him use intimidation, they distill fear over all of us, they want to situate us within terror's region in order to easily subjugate us. And they don't merely disseminate and amplify the threats of terrorism. They also threaten us with trials, with laws, with applying repressions never seen before and with the surveillance of each person and each family's privacy.
I read that in Venezuela intimidation seems to be prevalent, that there are new political prisioners and exiles and that a new law curtailing free speech is about to be approved, as in any anti-democratic regime. All of this seems to be just as right-wing and reactionary as my own government's conduct. Is it true what our press is reporting about events in Venezuela, or are these lies? Because if they reflect the reality in any way, I tell you we could exchange Presidents without anyone noticing.
To end this, now Carter has denounced that in Florida, a state that could be crucial in the presidential election, they have excluded almost one hundred thousand people from the electoral registry, between Blacks and Latinos who are suspected of being leftists, and that the voting machines are not completely trustworthy.
I ask myself if we might be facing another fraud."
I was only able to answer: We too might be asking ourselves that same question within a few days.
{ Joaquín Marta Sosa, El Nacional, 28 October 2004 }
10.28.2004
Lines
The secret notebooks write for themsleves
In our hands, brown fingers key the dream
The e was blue on big pier, a guitar moon
August often hears that same silence with us
Twelve years ago it was white and North Tampa
The night of the L.A. riots between TV and flesh
That was the year of gardens, several flowers
The beach at Indian Rocks is now December
The entire state emptied for the coastal drive
The motel we embarked from across the intercoastal
Even with automatism, waiting for the color induced
Take it for the rest who left, whose form she took
The secret notebooks write for themsleves
In our hands, brown fingers key the dream
The e was blue on big pier, a guitar moon
August often hears that same silence with us
Twelve years ago it was white and North Tampa
The night of the L.A. riots between TV and flesh
That was the year of gardens, several flowers
The beach at Indian Rocks is now December
The entire state emptied for the coastal drive
The motel we embarked from across the intercoastal
Even with automatism, waiting for the color induced
Take it for the rest who left, whose form she took
10.27.2004
Essay Notes
"............................................It was not the song
That twittered from the veined mesh of Agamemnon,
but the low fingered O of an Aruac flute."
{ Derek Walcott, Omeros, FSG, 1990 }
*
"Hechiza y oprime con una hoz la mujer. Tengo que vigilar día y noche para abolir mi grito. Pero desde lo incognoscible de la especie su fuerza viene hasta mí porque me enseña en el libro y en el tiempo. Tengo una grieta en su rostro y en el enigma de ser."
{ Juan Sánchez Peláez, "Legajos," Filiación oscura, 1966 }
*
"The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority. And it is a double vision that is a result of what I've described as the partial representation/recognition of the colonial object. Grant's colonial as partial imitator, Macaulay's translator, Naipaul's colonial politician as play-actor, Decoud as the scene setter of the opéra bouffe of the New World, these are the appropriate objects of a colonialist chain of command, authorized versions of otherness. But they are also, as I have shown, the figures of a doubling, the part-objects of a metonymy of colonial desire which alienates the modality and normality of those dominant discourses in which they emerge as 'inappropriate' colonial subjects. A desire that, through the repetition of partial presence, which is the basis of mimicry, articulates those disturbances of cultural, racial and historical difference that menace the narcissistic demand of colonial authority."
{ Homi K. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man," The Location of Culture, Routledge, 1994 }
*
The essay on Harris will be in seven sections. A numerology of dispersal: the number nightmare I had in San José de Río Chico in 1994. Unable to write the "vision" as she might appear, whose forms are misleading, should not be reduced to a book, or page.
Whose line takes from & after in waves.
"............................................It was not the song
That twittered from the veined mesh of Agamemnon,
but the low fingered O of an Aruac flute."
{ Derek Walcott, Omeros, FSG, 1990 }
*
"Hechiza y oprime con una hoz la mujer. Tengo que vigilar día y noche para abolir mi grito. Pero desde lo incognoscible de la especie su fuerza viene hasta mí porque me enseña en el libro y en el tiempo. Tengo una grieta en su rostro y en el enigma de ser."
{ Juan Sánchez Peláez, "Legajos," Filiación oscura, 1966 }
*
"The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority. And it is a double vision that is a result of what I've described as the partial representation/recognition of the colonial object. Grant's colonial as partial imitator, Macaulay's translator, Naipaul's colonial politician as play-actor, Decoud as the scene setter of the opéra bouffe of the New World, these are the appropriate objects of a colonialist chain of command, authorized versions of otherness. But they are also, as I have shown, the figures of a doubling, the part-objects of a metonymy of colonial desire which alienates the modality and normality of those dominant discourses in which they emerge as 'inappropriate' colonial subjects. A desire that, through the repetition of partial presence, which is the basis of mimicry, articulates those disturbances of cultural, racial and historical difference that menace the narcissistic demand of colonial authority."
{ Homi K. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man," The Location of Culture, Routledge, 1994 }
*
The essay on Harris will be in seven sections. A numerology of dispersal: the number nightmare I had in San José de Río Chico in 1994. Unable to write the "vision" as she might appear, whose forms are misleading, should not be reduced to a book, or page.
Whose line takes from & after in waves.
10.26.2004
On Naipaul, etc.
"There is the real enigma: that the provincial, the colonial, can never civilize himself beyond his province, no matter how deeply he immures himself in the woods of a villa outside Rome or in the leafy lanes of Edwardian England. And that is not pathetic; it is glorious. It is the other thing that is the final mimicry: to achieve absorption into what is envied not because that absorption is the dissolution of individuality, the sort of blessed anonymity that Hinduism teaches, but because it is only the vain mutter of 'I have survived.'
As beautiful as the prose becomes in the first chapters of this novel [The Enigma of Arrival], it is scarred by scrofula, by passages from which one would like to avert one's eye; and these reveal, remorselessly, Naipaul's repulsion towards Negroes. It is a physical and historical abhorrence that, like every prejudice, disfigures the observer, not his object. To cite examples would reduce the critic to the role of defender or of supplicant, would expose him to more of Naipaul's scorn. That self-disfiguring sneer that is praised for its probity is only that: a wrinkling of the nostrils, a bemused crinkling of the eyes at the antics of mimicking primates, at their hair, at their voices, at their hands extended in the presumption of intimacy."
{ Derek Walcott, "The Garden Path: V.S. Naipaul," What the Twilight Says: Essays, FSG, 1998 }
*
In a profile of Walcott earlier this year in The New Yorker, Hilton Als quotes him as referring to Naipaul's disdain toward the Caribbean. Something along the lines of: "But of course we have culture here. How can Naipaul claim otherwise?" And yet Naipaul does this quite often. Particularly, as Walcott and Chinua Achebe point out, when it comes to blackness. Naipaul's narrators often stop to highlight distortions or cartoonish exaggerations of blackness. I imagine this is the same disdain, or self-denial, one sometimes finds in Venezuela when it comes to blackness or indianness. 500 years of colonization have left certain Eurocentric tendencies among us.
But one must read Naipaul for the wonder of his prose. And for his exploration of the various forms of exile and cultural displacement experienced by many of us in the Caribbean and Latin America. At times, when I was reading The Mimic Men, I momentarily lost track of whether the protagonist was in England or in the fictionalized version of Trinidad, Isabella. He was a shade, a ghost in both places. Dispersed and unable to return to any sense of home.
In The Mask of the Beggar, Wilson Harris is once again addressing this topic of the attempt to return home, always unsuccessfully. Like Walcott's Omeros, Harris' novel rewrites The Odyssey in seven cantos. They both make it clear that this postcolonial/postmodern experience of exile and displacement is not a new poetic subject. What is distinct is how Walcott and Harris approach the matter: from simultaneous and multiple directions. Harris, in particular, breaks his narrative into quantum fragments that repeat themselves with subtle variations throughout his seven chapters/cantos. When his Odysseus returns to the fictional South American city of Harbourtown, he has been away for centuries and one is never sure if it's him, his ghost or his echo that walks those crowded, precarious streets.
Walcott and Harris constantly return to tribal affiliations, poems and books that have survived the Middle Passage and the inferno of colonization. Those indigenous traces are as alive today as they were centuries ago, only now they're blended into the landscape (both human, vegetable and animal). Part of what these two poets are attempting (and what Naipaul seems to avoid) is to sustain those indigenous breaths and words that are often, and mistakenly, considered extinguished:
"The artist experiences an excitement, troubling and ecstatic, as he finds himself launched on pathways he never expected to travel and on which his intuition is aroused afresh."
(The Mask of the Beggar)
"There is the real enigma: that the provincial, the colonial, can never civilize himself beyond his province, no matter how deeply he immures himself in the woods of a villa outside Rome or in the leafy lanes of Edwardian England. And that is not pathetic; it is glorious. It is the other thing that is the final mimicry: to achieve absorption into what is envied not because that absorption is the dissolution of individuality, the sort of blessed anonymity that Hinduism teaches, but because it is only the vain mutter of 'I have survived.'
As beautiful as the prose becomes in the first chapters of this novel [The Enigma of Arrival], it is scarred by scrofula, by passages from which one would like to avert one's eye; and these reveal, remorselessly, Naipaul's repulsion towards Negroes. It is a physical and historical abhorrence that, like every prejudice, disfigures the observer, not his object. To cite examples would reduce the critic to the role of defender or of supplicant, would expose him to more of Naipaul's scorn. That self-disfiguring sneer that is praised for its probity is only that: a wrinkling of the nostrils, a bemused crinkling of the eyes at the antics of mimicking primates, at their hair, at their voices, at their hands extended in the presumption of intimacy."
{ Derek Walcott, "The Garden Path: V.S. Naipaul," What the Twilight Says: Essays, FSG, 1998 }
*
In a profile of Walcott earlier this year in The New Yorker, Hilton Als quotes him as referring to Naipaul's disdain toward the Caribbean. Something along the lines of: "But of course we have culture here. How can Naipaul claim otherwise?" And yet Naipaul does this quite often. Particularly, as Walcott and Chinua Achebe point out, when it comes to blackness. Naipaul's narrators often stop to highlight distortions or cartoonish exaggerations of blackness. I imagine this is the same disdain, or self-denial, one sometimes finds in Venezuela when it comes to blackness or indianness. 500 years of colonization have left certain Eurocentric tendencies among us.
But one must read Naipaul for the wonder of his prose. And for his exploration of the various forms of exile and cultural displacement experienced by many of us in the Caribbean and Latin America. At times, when I was reading The Mimic Men, I momentarily lost track of whether the protagonist was in England or in the fictionalized version of Trinidad, Isabella. He was a shade, a ghost in both places. Dispersed and unable to return to any sense of home.
In The Mask of the Beggar, Wilson Harris is once again addressing this topic of the attempt to return home, always unsuccessfully. Like Walcott's Omeros, Harris' novel rewrites The Odyssey in seven cantos. They both make it clear that this postcolonial/postmodern experience of exile and displacement is not a new poetic subject. What is distinct is how Walcott and Harris approach the matter: from simultaneous and multiple directions. Harris, in particular, breaks his narrative into quantum fragments that repeat themselves with subtle variations throughout his seven chapters/cantos. When his Odysseus returns to the fictional South American city of Harbourtown, he has been away for centuries and one is never sure if it's him, his ghost or his echo that walks those crowded, precarious streets.
Walcott and Harris constantly return to tribal affiliations, poems and books that have survived the Middle Passage and the inferno of colonization. Those indigenous traces are as alive today as they were centuries ago, only now they're blended into the landscape (both human, vegetable and animal). Part of what these two poets are attempting (and what Naipaul seems to avoid) is to sustain those indigenous breaths and words that are often, and mistakenly, considered extinguished:
"The artist experiences an excitement, troubling and ecstatic, as he finds himself launched on pathways he never expected to travel and on which his intuition is aroused afresh."
(The Mask of the Beggar)
10.25.2004
La danza del jaguar
Fiction is my staple. As a reader, I'm moved by novels more than any other form. Last night I finished V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men (1967). Like his earlier A House for Mr. Biswas, it's a brilliant and engrossing novel. Despite his problematic reading of Trinidad, the Caribbean and the rest of the Third World, his prose is magnificent. (Derek Walcott and Chinua Achebe have written eloquent critiques of Naipaul's "problem" regarding race and location.) The narrator of The Mimic Men offers a terrifying glimpse of a life lived as though one were half invisible, half dead.
(Who are these notes to? Myself and the machine, I suppose.)
When I was in NY recently I was surprised to find a novel by the Venezuelan writer Ednodio Quintero, La danza del jaguar (Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana, 1991) at 14th street's Librería Lectorum. From what I read in El Nacional, where he was interviewed a few months ago, he still teaches at the Universidad de Los Andes in Mérida.
The cover of this paperback edition has a painting by Oswaldo Vigas, entitled "Mi animal de costumbre" (1977), a reference to Juan Sánchez Peláez's 1959 collection of poems. In English, the phrase doesn't seem to carry the same tone: "My creature of habit..." Since I became aware of Vigas' work several years ago, I've noticed the affinities between him and Cuba's brilliant Wifredo Lam.
The first sentence of La danza del jaguar begins:
"I was born in a rustic place on the high mountain."
One topic I sometimes think about is why Venezuelan literature remains so invisible outside Venezuela. I approach the topic from a distance, from this city I was born in, far North of Caracas. Part of it must be nostalgia, which is a useless emotion.
It amazes me that such great poets and novelists remain untranslated throughout the English speaking world. In his introduction to Eugenio Montejo's selected poems, The Trees (Salt Publishing, 2004), the critic and fiction writer Miguel Gomes offers some interesting reasons as to this invisibility. One explanation is the relative stability and wealth that Venezuela enjoyed throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when many South American countries were crippled by dictatorships. This relative prosperity kept Venezuela out of the news, for the most part. Gomes also discusses how Venezuelan writers ended up at the fringes of the Boom literary movement, even if novelists such as Adriano González León and Salvador Garmendia received wide critical acclaim.
I don't remember my initial visits to family in Caracas in the early 1970s. My first memory of Venezuela is when we moved there, taking a freight ship from NY to La Guaira in the summer of 1976. There was one other family travelling aboard that ship, including a girl my age who I played with at dinner and on deck during the days-long journey. I distinctly remember the view of La Guaira's hills and palm trees seen from the deck as we approached and the intense burst of humidity that surrounded the boat during those hours we were docked and unloading. One has no choice but to write these memories down, in varying forms.
Fiction is my staple. As a reader, I'm moved by novels more than any other form. Last night I finished V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men (1967). Like his earlier A House for Mr. Biswas, it's a brilliant and engrossing novel. Despite his problematic reading of Trinidad, the Caribbean and the rest of the Third World, his prose is magnificent. (Derek Walcott and Chinua Achebe have written eloquent critiques of Naipaul's "problem" regarding race and location.) The narrator of The Mimic Men offers a terrifying glimpse of a life lived as though one were half invisible, half dead.
(Who are these notes to? Myself and the machine, I suppose.)
When I was in NY recently I was surprised to find a novel by the Venezuelan writer Ednodio Quintero, La danza del jaguar (Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana, 1991) at 14th street's Librería Lectorum. From what I read in El Nacional, where he was interviewed a few months ago, he still teaches at the Universidad de Los Andes in Mérida.
The cover of this paperback edition has a painting by Oswaldo Vigas, entitled "Mi animal de costumbre" (1977), a reference to Juan Sánchez Peláez's 1959 collection of poems. In English, the phrase doesn't seem to carry the same tone: "My creature of habit..." Since I became aware of Vigas' work several years ago, I've noticed the affinities between him and Cuba's brilliant Wifredo Lam.
The first sentence of La danza del jaguar begins:
"I was born in a rustic place on the high mountain."
One topic I sometimes think about is why Venezuelan literature remains so invisible outside Venezuela. I approach the topic from a distance, from this city I was born in, far North of Caracas. Part of it must be nostalgia, which is a useless emotion.
It amazes me that such great poets and novelists remain untranslated throughout the English speaking world. In his introduction to Eugenio Montejo's selected poems, The Trees (Salt Publishing, 2004), the critic and fiction writer Miguel Gomes offers some interesting reasons as to this invisibility. One explanation is the relative stability and wealth that Venezuela enjoyed throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when many South American countries were crippled by dictatorships. This relative prosperity kept Venezuela out of the news, for the most part. Gomes also discusses how Venezuelan writers ended up at the fringes of the Boom literary movement, even if novelists such as Adriano González León and Salvador Garmendia received wide critical acclaim.
I don't remember my initial visits to family in Caracas in the early 1970s. My first memory of Venezuela is when we moved there, taking a freight ship from NY to La Guaira in the summer of 1976. There was one other family travelling aboard that ship, including a girl my age who I played with at dinner and on deck during the days-long journey. I distinctly remember the view of La Guaira's hills and palm trees seen from the deck as we approached and the intense burst of humidity that surrounded the boat during those hours we were docked and unloading. One has no choice but to write these memories down, in varying forms.
10.24.2004
Fortuito / Juan Sánchez Peláez
Fortuitous
If it were not suspended in air, that sound. If man were not a broken absence under the firmament. If our awaiting infinite root didn’t tilt us into nothingness. If we didn’t stand on the shore of vast solar rivers, with our enigmatic pupil somewhere in the night’s suggestion.
{ Juan Sánchez Peláez, Rasgos comunes, 1975, Obra poética, Editorial Lumen, 2004 }
If it were not suspended in air, that sound. If man were not a broken absence under the firmament. If our awaiting infinite root didn’t tilt us into nothingness. If we didn’t stand on the shore of vast solar rivers, with our enigmatic pupil somewhere in the night’s suggestion.
{ Juan Sánchez Peláez, Rasgos comunes, 1975, Obra poética, Editorial Lumen, 2004 }
10.21.2004
Lines
Arrangement of leaves
The temporary segment
Branch formal, complicit
A wear for this turn
Blind upon our grace
Leaves electron pulse
Flew upon thy shore
I'll never write again
After this dragging
Skill of a loud ghost
Among the ceiling clouds
At my consent
After an alphabet real
You will simulcast
I feel I won't last
The afternoon
A blue or black pen
The house built itself
In chance for graves
A gray room sound hall
Before the session
Disinter block
Arrangement of leaves
The temporary segment
Branch formal, complicit
A wear for this turn
Blind upon our grace
Leaves electron pulse
Flew upon thy shore
I'll never write again
After this dragging
Skill of a loud ghost
Among the ceiling clouds
At my consent
After an alphabet real
You will simulcast
I feel I won't last
The afternoon
A blue or black pen
The house built itself
In chance for graves
A gray room sound hall
Before the session
Disinter block
10.20.2004
Synchronous
..from the Spanish and the Indian home of the heroes and villains
(Brian Wilson)
Funny to realize that CD, too, is a treatise of sorts on mestizaje. Collaged throughout, magnificent. Beauty and history synchronous to each other in this album, even though history's terror seems to always conquer once we step outside the music.
..from the Spanish and the Indian home of the heroes and villains
(Brian Wilson)
Funny to realize that CD, too, is a treatise of sorts on mestizaje. Collaged throughout, magnificent. Beauty and history synchronous to each other in this album, even though history's terror seems to always conquer once we step outside the music.
10.17.2004
Smile
I've been listening to Brian Wilson's new recording of Smile (Nonesuch, 2004) this afternoon, agreeing with the consensus that it's a masterpiece, a beautiful listen all the way through.
*
Speaking with my grandmother last summer, she had told me about the first time she ever saw a television. It was at the World's Fair in 1939, on Long Island. She saw an image of herself and others crowded next to her in a black & white box, looking at the camera and back at themselves on screen.
*
Driving through Ybor City last summer, along Port of Tampa, I noticed a ship, the Alafia, docked next to the white silos that used to say TAMPA TERMINAL. The letters have disappeared from the top of the silos, leaking into the sky. The scene made me think of Álvaro Mutis' friend Maqrol, the continuous succession of obscure ports and towns, cities traversed.
*
Derek Walcott's The Prodigal (FSG, 2004) echoes some of Maqrol's nomadic inclinations, though firmly absconded in the personal, anti-epic voice. There are some trite lines in the book (so far) but these are outweighed by Walcott's obsessive return to words as objects to be revered, repeated, savored.
"Then the old gentlemen at lunch in Lausanne
with suits of flawless cut, impeccable manners,
update of Rembrandt's Syndics of the Drapers' Guild.
I translated the pink, shaven faces of the Guild
to their dark-panelled and polished ancestry
of John the Baptist heads each borne on a saucer
of white lace, the loaded eyes, the thinning hair
over the white streaks of the foreheads, a syndicate
in which, far back, a negligible ancestor
might have been a member, greeting me
a product of his empire's miscegenation
in old Saint Martin. I could find no trace."
(1, V)
When I saw him read from this manuscript last year in Cambridge, the lines sounded as they look now on the page: drawn out, weary, unrhymed and spoken loosely. A doubtful semi-prayer.
I've been listening to Brian Wilson's new recording of Smile (Nonesuch, 2004) this afternoon, agreeing with the consensus that it's a masterpiece, a beautiful listen all the way through.
*
Speaking with my grandmother last summer, she had told me about the first time she ever saw a television. It was at the World's Fair in 1939, on Long Island. She saw an image of herself and others crowded next to her in a black & white box, looking at the camera and back at themselves on screen.
*
Driving through Ybor City last summer, along Port of Tampa, I noticed a ship, the Alafia, docked next to the white silos that used to say TAMPA TERMINAL. The letters have disappeared from the top of the silos, leaking into the sky. The scene made me think of Álvaro Mutis' friend Maqrol, the continuous succession of obscure ports and towns, cities traversed.
*
Derek Walcott's The Prodigal (FSG, 2004) echoes some of Maqrol's nomadic inclinations, though firmly absconded in the personal, anti-epic voice. There are some trite lines in the book (so far) but these are outweighed by Walcott's obsessive return to words as objects to be revered, repeated, savored.
"Then the old gentlemen at lunch in Lausanne
with suits of flawless cut, impeccable manners,
update of Rembrandt's Syndics of the Drapers' Guild.
I translated the pink, shaven faces of the Guild
to their dark-panelled and polished ancestry
of John the Baptist heads each borne on a saucer
of white lace, the loaded eyes, the thinning hair
over the white streaks of the foreheads, a syndicate
in which, far back, a negligible ancestor
might have been a member, greeting me
a product of his empire's miscegenation
in old Saint Martin. I could find no trace."
(1, V)
When I saw him read from this manuscript last year in Cambridge, the lines sounded as they look now on the page: drawn out, weary, unrhymed and spoken loosely. A doubtful semi-prayer.
10.14.2004
"What a killer..."
In the latter half of his most recent novel, Wilson Harris incorporates Hernando Cortez as one of several characters whose identity shifts between ghost and material realms. In Harris's novel, Cortez remains the blood-soaked killer he was but he also reflects on the consequences of his genocidal endeavors. Through Harris, Cortez questions his own actions from the space offered by quantum time travel, simultaneously undermining and reinforcing his historical legacy.
Neil Young's epic-sounding mythography of Cortez (on Zuma) has always seemed to me a treatise on mestizaje, besides being such a fantastic song. I've written before here that Slint's Spiderland (Touch & Go, 1991) is, in many ways, the model I emulate for poetry. A poetics of screams, underwater narrative, early loss, incommunication, repetition, lyric and simplicity. Anger a second breath with night laurels, the Spanish moss that hangs from trees all over Tampa.
Recently, I came across Slint's version of "Cortez the Killer," recorded live in Chicago in the summer of 1989. Slint's rendition is slow drain heavy and magnificent--scratching the shoreline with an LP needle.
In the latter half of his most recent novel, Wilson Harris incorporates Hernando Cortez as one of several characters whose identity shifts between ghost and material realms. In Harris's novel, Cortez remains the blood-soaked killer he was but he also reflects on the consequences of his genocidal endeavors. Through Harris, Cortez questions his own actions from the space offered by quantum time travel, simultaneously undermining and reinforcing his historical legacy.
Neil Young's epic-sounding mythography of Cortez (on Zuma) has always seemed to me a treatise on mestizaje, besides being such a fantastic song. I've written before here that Slint's Spiderland (Touch & Go, 1991) is, in many ways, the model I emulate for poetry. A poetics of screams, underwater narrative, early loss, incommunication, repetition, lyric and simplicity. Anger a second breath with night laurels, the Spanish moss that hangs from trees all over Tampa.
Recently, I came across Slint's version of "Cortez the Killer," recorded live in Chicago in the summer of 1989. Slint's rendition is slow drain heavy and magnificent--scratching the shoreline with an LP needle.
10.12.2004
Archivo como una casa
I
Reading aloud a poem last night that quoted from Derrida's Mal de archivo, not knowing that he had recently died, since I'd been away (in suburbia) from newspapers or the machine. I enjoyed the sound of my voice and Matvei's through the speakers, amplified by the wooden walls. Crisp air and shadows of the island, walking up and down the blocks to S.'s studio on 29th, our discussion of the inevitability (and nightmare) of the machine, in all of its inhuman manifestations.
Reading aloud my translations of Animal de costumbre into the machine (microphone). Earlier that day coming across a painting by Oswaldo Vigas from 1977: "Mi animal de costumbre." I. and I had seen his retrospective at the MACCSI in 2002 and days later our father's friend showed us his small collection of prints and drawings by Vigas, hanging in his office and dining room. When we left his house that morning, he joked with el Negro, saying "You and I are the last Indians left in Venezuela."
"Sí, es verdad."
II
From Matvei's reading, I jotted down these three lines:
"The Chinese garden has one Jewish tree"
"You, poet of the blank revolver"
"Oh, to be removed from the machine"
III
The Roman numerals are, like so many things, taken from Juan Sánchez Peláez, whose Obra poética (Editorial Lumen, 2004) arrived today from Spain. His decades-long revisions, cutting his stanzas down to their ghost, abiding by the rules of silence first. The final section of this Collected Poems includes ten recent poems, some of whose versions I've seen before in different forms. Four of them appeared in El Universal in the spring of 2001, when Patricia Guzmán was still editing its now-defunct literary supplement, Verbigracia. But Sánchez Peláez had gone back to the poems since then, changing and adjusting words or phrases slightly, at times almost imperceptibly. My reading of him eventually borders on a mythological conception of the function of poetry. Not for myself, of course, but rather as a reader of those few poets whose work I find inevitable.
When I re-write his poems in English I feel like a ridiculous character out of Borges, embarked on a futile and ridiculous task. I don't know how tone, mood or ghosts can even be touched across languages. The same thing happens when I translate Elizabeth Schön's verses, although at least when reading her I can adjust myself to the vines, flowers and branches of her gardens, the pulse/sound of the river she writes alongside.
One of the poems in the final section of Obra poética refers to Schön's garden, any poet's garden, that necessary library that Sánchez Peláez failed to build, like I fail for lack of sleep, for fear, for the infernal machine of capital tied to my feet.
*
LA VIDA HERMOSA
Mi novena inquietud
tal vez ocurra en ciudades que carecen de nombre;
al despedirnos de sabios maestros
un día ligero y tibio
improvisaremos veinte mil rosas:
bajo un cielo de todos, de todos nosotros
se han ido volubles nociones sentimentales y trágicas
y tengo una herida abierta
mientras huye el mar que calma y apacigua,
¿de dónde vengo
al despedirnos los sabios maestros en un jardín,
o he sido con mi sentido de estar vivo
huésped puntual?
o jamás viví o ha sido
cercanía de hechizos con regiones
adoradas la vida hermosa
que juntos imaginamos.
IV
A simplicity, a blindness, a naive sentiment, a hallucination, or the invoked traces of paranoia in repetition's verse. Lucidity and resolve.
There was an epigraph I found yesterday morning, in the introduction to Eugenio Montejo, The Trees: Selected Poems 1967-2004 (Cambridge, England: Salt Publishing, 2004):
"Although superficially refurbished with eye-catching and ear-pleasing 'revolutionary' imagery, the current Venezuelan neocaudillismo (that is, the adoration of a strong ruler with a highly individualized and egocentric leadership style) imposes upon the present a cult of the past. But this past, instead of the spiritual environment often recreated by Montejo's poetry, has proven to be a solemn and archaic idolization of founding fathers with no positive effect whatsoever on the country, now officially renamed República Bolivariana de Venezuela. The 'Bolivarian Republic' created by Hugo Chávez's regime in 1998 amounts to a new mirage, a grotesque cover-up for an undoubtedly reactionary revival of old ghosts."
{ Miguel Gomes }
V
One would build the house in five stages
That one disappearing incrementally fused
Without machinery a tentative field of rubbish
The separation of our bodies assured
Vision formed without words about this act
I
Reading aloud a poem last night that quoted from Derrida's Mal de archivo, not knowing that he had recently died, since I'd been away (in suburbia) from newspapers or the machine. I enjoyed the sound of my voice and Matvei's through the speakers, amplified by the wooden walls. Crisp air and shadows of the island, walking up and down the blocks to S.'s studio on 29th, our discussion of the inevitability (and nightmare) of the machine, in all of its inhuman manifestations.
Reading aloud my translations of Animal de costumbre into the machine (microphone). Earlier that day coming across a painting by Oswaldo Vigas from 1977: "Mi animal de costumbre." I. and I had seen his retrospective at the MACCSI in 2002 and days later our father's friend showed us his small collection of prints and drawings by Vigas, hanging in his office and dining room. When we left his house that morning, he joked with el Negro, saying "You and I are the last Indians left in Venezuela."
"Sí, es verdad."
II
From Matvei's reading, I jotted down these three lines:
"The Chinese garden has one Jewish tree"
"You, poet of the blank revolver"
"Oh, to be removed from the machine"
III
The Roman numerals are, like so many things, taken from Juan Sánchez Peláez, whose Obra poética (Editorial Lumen, 2004) arrived today from Spain. His decades-long revisions, cutting his stanzas down to their ghost, abiding by the rules of silence first. The final section of this Collected Poems includes ten recent poems, some of whose versions I've seen before in different forms. Four of them appeared in El Universal in the spring of 2001, when Patricia Guzmán was still editing its now-defunct literary supplement, Verbigracia. But Sánchez Peláez had gone back to the poems since then, changing and adjusting words or phrases slightly, at times almost imperceptibly. My reading of him eventually borders on a mythological conception of the function of poetry. Not for myself, of course, but rather as a reader of those few poets whose work I find inevitable.
When I re-write his poems in English I feel like a ridiculous character out of Borges, embarked on a futile and ridiculous task. I don't know how tone, mood or ghosts can even be touched across languages. The same thing happens when I translate Elizabeth Schön's verses, although at least when reading her I can adjust myself to the vines, flowers and branches of her gardens, the pulse/sound of the river she writes alongside.
One of the poems in the final section of Obra poética refers to Schön's garden, any poet's garden, that necessary library that Sánchez Peláez failed to build, like I fail for lack of sleep, for fear, for the infernal machine of capital tied to my feet.
*
LA VIDA HERMOSA
Mi novena inquietud
tal vez ocurra en ciudades que carecen de nombre;
al despedirnos de sabios maestros
un día ligero y tibio
improvisaremos veinte mil rosas:
bajo un cielo de todos, de todos nosotros
se han ido volubles nociones sentimentales y trágicas
y tengo una herida abierta
mientras huye el mar que calma y apacigua,
¿de dónde vengo
al despedirnos los sabios maestros en un jardín,
o he sido con mi sentido de estar vivo
huésped puntual?
o jamás viví o ha sido
cercanía de hechizos con regiones
adoradas la vida hermosa
que juntos imaginamos.
IV
A simplicity, a blindness, a naive sentiment, a hallucination, or the invoked traces of paranoia in repetition's verse. Lucidity and resolve.
There was an epigraph I found yesterday morning, in the introduction to Eugenio Montejo, The Trees: Selected Poems 1967-2004 (Cambridge, England: Salt Publishing, 2004):
"Although superficially refurbished with eye-catching and ear-pleasing 'revolutionary' imagery, the current Venezuelan neocaudillismo (that is, the adoration of a strong ruler with a highly individualized and egocentric leadership style) imposes upon the present a cult of the past. But this past, instead of the spiritual environment often recreated by Montejo's poetry, has proven to be a solemn and archaic idolization of founding fathers with no positive effect whatsoever on the country, now officially renamed República Bolivariana de Venezuela. The 'Bolivarian Republic' created by Hugo Chávez's regime in 1998 amounts to a new mirage, a grotesque cover-up for an undoubtedly reactionary revival of old ghosts."
{ Miguel Gomes }
V
One would build the house in five stages
That one disappearing incrementally fused
Without machinery a tentative field of rubbish
The separation of our bodies assured
Vision formed without words about this act
10.08.2004
Canto de oficio
Si le temes a las rosas
Llena de oraciones el jardín
(Será inútil, no podrás salvarte)
¿Quién dijo que no tienen labios?
Nos besan de la cabeza a los pies sin sacar la lengua
Altas alturas
Altas alturas
Y un sólo corazón: carne buena, carne mala
Las rosas son espadas
Llena de oraciones el jardín
Las rosas son buenas
(Cantan despacio, despacio)
{ Patricia Guzmán, Canto de oficio, Editorial Pequeña Venecia, 1997 }
Si le temes a las rosas
Llena de oraciones el jardín
(Será inútil, no podrás salvarte)
¿Quién dijo que no tienen labios?
Nos besan de la cabeza a los pies sin sacar la lengua
Altas alturas
Altas alturas
Y un sólo corazón: carne buena, carne mala
Las rosas son espadas
Llena de oraciones el jardín
Las rosas son buenas
(Cantan despacio, despacio)
{ Patricia Guzmán, Canto de oficio, Editorial Pequeña Venecia, 1997 }
10.05.2004
A Reading
Guillermo Juan Parra & Matvei Yankelevich
Monday, 11 October 2004, 8:00pm
The Poetry Project
St. Mark's Church
131 E 10th St. (@ 2nd Ave.)
NYC
Guillermo Juan Parra was born in Cambridge, MA. His poems have appeared in XCP, New York Nights, and 6x6. He is currently editing an anthology of Venezuelan poetry in English translation. Matvei Yankelevich is editor of the Eastern European Poets Series for Ugly Duckling Presse, where he also co-edits 6x6. His translations of Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky are forthcoming in an anthology of OBERIU writing, edited by Eugene Ostashevsky for North Western University Press. His poetry and translations have appeared in 3rd Bed, Carve, New American Writing, Open City, and Torch, among others. He teaches at Hunter and Queens Colleges.
*
I will have copies of a pamphlet of translations from Juan Sánchez Peláez's Animal de costumbre (1959) at the reading.
Guillermo Juan Parra & Matvei Yankelevich
Monday, 11 October 2004, 8:00pm
The Poetry Project
St. Mark's Church
131 E 10th St. (@ 2nd Ave.)
NYC
Guillermo Juan Parra was born in Cambridge, MA. His poems have appeared in XCP, New York Nights, and 6x6. He is currently editing an anthology of Venezuelan poetry in English translation. Matvei Yankelevich is editor of the Eastern European Poets Series for Ugly Duckling Presse, where he also co-edits 6x6. His translations of Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky are forthcoming in an anthology of OBERIU writing, edited by Eugene Ostashevsky for North Western University Press. His poetry and translations have appeared in 3rd Bed, Carve, New American Writing, Open City, and Torch, among others. He teaches at Hunter and Queens Colleges.
*
I will have copies of a pamphlet of translations from Juan Sánchez Peláez's Animal de costumbre (1959) at the reading.
10.02.2004
Crónica de un poeta en el parque / Adriana Villanueva
Chronicle of a Poet in the Park
It was a difficult decision. I was debating whether to take to heart the idea that a classification exists between writers of the regime and writers of the opposition, or to enjoy the X Feria de Libro. I was still deciding when Marsolaire Quintana, from the Fundación para la Cultura Urbana, invited the participants of the workshop The Writer and the City to an open class by Armando Rojas Guardia on Sunday morning at the Cinemateca Nacional, and I didn't want to miss it.
For the first time in many years, I returned to Los Caobos park on Sunday morning. It's easy to forget that Caracas still has green zones where athletes jog, children ride bicycles, people take their dogs for walks and there is a functioning fountain, which is a true act of faith since it hasn't ceased to rain and the resevoirs are empty. The booths for the book fair still haven't opened but I'm greeted by dozens of young people with orange shirts putting together the green and orange display modules designed by Juan Pedro Posani. On this fresh June morning I'm almost reconciled with Caracas. But there's no time to waste with sentimentality, the Cinemateca is waiting.
Even though it's almost ten, the doors of the Galería de Arte Nacional (GAN) are closed. Armando appears behind the gates and opens a little door for me. We gather on the steps of the museum under the tryptich of Miranda in the Carraca which announces the exhibit Masterpieces of Venezuelan Art. The visitors who are here to see Reverón and Michelena paintings ask impatiently: "When do they open the GAN?" The GAN opens and we remain standing on the steps waiting for the Cinemateca to do the same, when Marsolaire appears with the bad news that the Centro Nacional del Libro (CENAL) forgot to reserve the space. But Venezuelan culture has been able to emerge from worse aggravations, the friends from the CENAL assure us that the class is still on, if not in the Ateneo then under a small tent in front of the fountain by Maragall. And that's where we end up, the poet dressed in white, his disciples, the photographer with her camera and poetry lovers who woke up at dawn for the pleasure of listening to Rojas Guardia, because Sunday morning at ten is dawn.
The wait drags on despite the fact that we have with us the most important element, which is the poet. We're seated in a clearing of the park which at the moment doesn't receive shade from the trees, and while we're sweating the slow hour, boys in orange shirts try to make magic so that the microphone will work, because the post it's connected to doesn't have any power. Marsolaire decides that we've had enough, even Venezuelan poets have dignity and in these conditions it's better to just cancel the event. We leave with our heads hanging low from that feeling of cultural defeat which has become so familiar when, along the way, Marsolaire bumps into one of the organizers from the CENAL, who accepts no complaints: "After all, we were doing you a favor."
But the morning isin't lost. A small group gathers in the cafeteria of the Museo de Ciencias. Rojas Guardia reads a few brief texts, Mariahé Pabón and Alberto Márquez tell us about the worship of poets in Colombia, and I reach the conclusion that yes, in Venezuela literature is treated with disdain but, seated in the cafeteria of the Museo de Ciencias, I can't help feeling privileged.
{ Adriana Villanueva, El Nacional, 4 June 2003 }
It was a difficult decision. I was debating whether to take to heart the idea that a classification exists between writers of the regime and writers of the opposition, or to enjoy the X Feria de Libro. I was still deciding when Marsolaire Quintana, from the Fundación para la Cultura Urbana, invited the participants of the workshop The Writer and the City to an open class by Armando Rojas Guardia on Sunday morning at the Cinemateca Nacional, and I didn't want to miss it.
For the first time in many years, I returned to Los Caobos park on Sunday morning. It's easy to forget that Caracas still has green zones where athletes jog, children ride bicycles, people take their dogs for walks and there is a functioning fountain, which is a true act of faith since it hasn't ceased to rain and the resevoirs are empty. The booths for the book fair still haven't opened but I'm greeted by dozens of young people with orange shirts putting together the green and orange display modules designed by Juan Pedro Posani. On this fresh June morning I'm almost reconciled with Caracas. But there's no time to waste with sentimentality, the Cinemateca is waiting.
Even though it's almost ten, the doors of the Galería de Arte Nacional (GAN) are closed. Armando appears behind the gates and opens a little door for me. We gather on the steps of the museum under the tryptich of Miranda in the Carraca which announces the exhibit Masterpieces of Venezuelan Art. The visitors who are here to see Reverón and Michelena paintings ask impatiently: "When do they open the GAN?" The GAN opens and we remain standing on the steps waiting for the Cinemateca to do the same, when Marsolaire appears with the bad news that the Centro Nacional del Libro (CENAL) forgot to reserve the space. But Venezuelan culture has been able to emerge from worse aggravations, the friends from the CENAL assure us that the class is still on, if not in the Ateneo then under a small tent in front of the fountain by Maragall. And that's where we end up, the poet dressed in white, his disciples, the photographer with her camera and poetry lovers who woke up at dawn for the pleasure of listening to Rojas Guardia, because Sunday morning at ten is dawn.
The wait drags on despite the fact that we have with us the most important element, which is the poet. We're seated in a clearing of the park which at the moment doesn't receive shade from the trees, and while we're sweating the slow hour, boys in orange shirts try to make magic so that the microphone will work, because the post it's connected to doesn't have any power. Marsolaire decides that we've had enough, even Venezuelan poets have dignity and in these conditions it's better to just cancel the event. We leave with our heads hanging low from that feeling of cultural defeat which has become so familiar when, along the way, Marsolaire bumps into one of the organizers from the CENAL, who accepts no complaints: "After all, we were doing you a favor."
But the morning isin't lost. A small group gathers in the cafeteria of the Museo de Ciencias. Rojas Guardia reads a few brief texts, Mariahé Pabón and Alberto Márquez tell us about the worship of poets in Colombia, and I reach the conclusion that yes, in Venezuela literature is treated with disdain but, seated in the cafeteria of the Museo de Ciencias, I can't help feeling privileged.
{ Adriana Villanueva, El Nacional, 4 June 2003 }
10.01.2004
Morning Papers
Over the next few days I'll be posting two translations from El Nacional:
Adriana Villanueva, "Crónica de un poeta en el parque," 4 Junio 2003.
Jesús Sanoja Hernández, "Venezuela saudita," 1 Octubre 2004.
Villanueva's piece recalls a workshop she attended in Caracas with Armando Rojas Guardia. Historian and poet Sanoja Hernández discusses Venezuela's 1970s oil boom era and its relation to today's crisis.
*
Two recent poems by Michael Hofmann remind me why I like his work so much. A bleakness acknowledged and deepened through bilingual grief, grey humor. His struggle with/against the border between English and German is finely arrayed, always taut.
"A soft freeze. The woods are rusty stone, henna fuzz ravines,
snow slicks. Ice blinds and dries. Dazzles and steams.
Swans outside Croton. I sit in the train,
at the very back of the last car,
ruing every mile. Some sort of folly and exhiliration.
A caffeinated feeling of being all heart."
{ Michael Hofmann, "Hudson Ride," Poetry, September 2004 }
*
Thanks to Mark for Fulcrum 3, which includes a long feature (mini-anthology) on the Berkeley Renaissance. Two 1950s photos of Robert Duncan on a Boston rooftop, a typewritten letter from Charles Olson, plenty of great things I look forward to reading.
*
Saw Francisco Goldman read a few nights ago from his new novel, The Divine Husband (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004) , which is based on José Martí's years in Guatemala. Goldman spoke about Martí's fifteen years in New York and that city's influence on his work. I can't remember how long Martí lived in Tampa, where he worked as a lector for several cigar factories. The beautiful park in his honor in Ybor City was locked when I passed by it last summer, a lush garden with a map of Cuba in tiles behind his alabaster figure, arm outstreched. Goldman mentioned how Martí approached his journalistic writing with the same passion he had for poetry. As it should be.
*
"La ciudad con televisoras hermanas a la mesa"
*
"I am a believer now dreaming
is really a threat to knowledge"
Over the next few days I'll be posting two translations from El Nacional:
Adriana Villanueva, "Crónica de un poeta en el parque," 4 Junio 2003.
Jesús Sanoja Hernández, "Venezuela saudita," 1 Octubre 2004.
Villanueva's piece recalls a workshop she attended in Caracas with Armando Rojas Guardia. Historian and poet Sanoja Hernández discusses Venezuela's 1970s oil boom era and its relation to today's crisis.
*
Two recent poems by Michael Hofmann remind me why I like his work so much. A bleakness acknowledged and deepened through bilingual grief, grey humor. His struggle with/against the border between English and German is finely arrayed, always taut.
"A soft freeze. The woods are rusty stone, henna fuzz ravines,
snow slicks. Ice blinds and dries. Dazzles and steams.
Swans outside Croton. I sit in the train,
at the very back of the last car,
ruing every mile. Some sort of folly and exhiliration.
A caffeinated feeling of being all heart."
{ Michael Hofmann, "Hudson Ride," Poetry, September 2004 }
*
Thanks to Mark for Fulcrum 3, which includes a long feature (mini-anthology) on the Berkeley Renaissance. Two 1950s photos of Robert Duncan on a Boston rooftop, a typewritten letter from Charles Olson, plenty of great things I look forward to reading.
*
Saw Francisco Goldman read a few nights ago from his new novel, The Divine Husband (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004) , which is based on José Martí's years in Guatemala. Goldman spoke about Martí's fifteen years in New York and that city's influence on his work. I can't remember how long Martí lived in Tampa, where he worked as a lector for several cigar factories. The beautiful park in his honor in Ybor City was locked when I passed by it last summer, a lush garden with a map of Cuba in tiles behind his alabaster figure, arm outstreched. Goldman mentioned how Martí approached his journalistic writing with the same passion he had for poetry. As it should be.
*
"La ciudad con televisoras hermanas a la mesa"
*
"I am a believer now dreaming
is really a threat to knowledge"
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