The Never Projected
in seven etchings by Gego
1.
The never projected
sustains itself in true shadows
2.
The never projected
varies its instant in the unusual crossing
3.
The never projected
lets itself be seen circling its clearance
4.
The never projected
affirms itself in the turning of willing light
5.
The never projected
up in the air of the glance lifts its rhythm
6.
The never projected
plots its resurgence with the same variant
7.
The never projected
lives its slight chance of plain lights
1967
{ Alfredo Silva Estrada, Acercamientos, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1992 }
Showing posts with label Alfredo Silva Estrada. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alfredo Silva Estrada. Show all posts
10.25.2009
Acerca de por qué Alfredo Silva Estrada era un Mago de Oriente con poder y ciencia rara / Luis Enrique Belmonte
Regarding Why Alfredo Silva Estrada Was A Magician of the Orient with Rare Power and Science
1
Speaking about magicians isn’t easy, since they are prodigious by nature and what is prodigious tends to be fleeting. Magic is one of man’s deepest influences. When we encounter a magician the first thing that impresses us is his incantatory power. The spell of magicians seduces because it creates a temporal suspension of the senses, as happens when we look at a Persian carpet or at a gang of bluebirds fluttering at the window (I’m watching them right now). This is the source of the hypnotic nature of magical operations. F. Vergesen tells us that in Alfredo Silva Estrada’s poetry “the poem heads along a route where the near totality of data of sensibility, thought and the imaginary cross paths.” A poem like “En delirio de piedra,” for example, is nothing more than a prodigious verbal artifact capable of enchanting and disordering our senses. Alfredo was a delightful person; that’s why children, dogs and exalted creatures loved him and greeted him.
2
Magicians defy the possibilities of matter and subvert the order of things. They produce explosions where we least expect it. An explosion is a sudden and vivacious manifestation of something that wasn’t there and that by the force of the art of magic appears. This is the source of the sparks and illuminations in life and in Alfredo’s poetry. His poetry is like dynamite for language. It contains marvelous hidden mines that when stepped upon provoke unexpected conflagrations of the sign. They are like ritual fires: fascinating, celebratory, cathartic. Alfredo was a subversive, a rebel of forms (of “the form that in its own self liberates itself.”)
3
All acts of magic have to do with transmutation, that is, with the transformation of one thing into another. For Alfredo this was a daily practice. To transmute experience into word and the word into experience was the substrata of his alchemy. This is what he refers to when he speaks to us of “existing in the duration of the poem,” or when he wagers for “the poetic word rooted in existence itself.” This implies an ethics of language and a way of life. And his life was a transgression of the limits of expression: his poetic word sought the experimental encounter with other material worlds. That explains the approaches to the plastic arts (with Gego), to music (with Del Mónaco), to graphic design (with Leufert), or to Hertzian waves (with Ofrendas, on Radio Nacional de Venezuela, one of the longest running programs in the history of national radio). In El libro de las puertas one of his preferred poetic operations is manifested, which by the way is very closely related to transmutation: it is the transfer, the passing through what is unknown, the exploration of the edges of being to found, in the open, new spaces that might expand the possibilities of matter. We’re talking about the transmuted word. Zoroaster (or Dr. Faustus) did the same thing.
4
Simon Magus was persecuted by Saint Peter. Simon possessed the secret to levitation and Peter couldn’t stand this. They say that once Simon was trapped and taken to Rome to be tried, Peter asked him to fly and once the magician was in the air they began to throw stones at him and this is how they got rid of him. The thing is that Peter bought stones to establish churches, while Simon flew through the air establishing other kingdoms, less apprehensible, more suggestive. The poetry of our magician is light and ludic. But it turns out that when interacting with his fellow beings Alfredo was also like that. Alfredo took a lucid stance against intellectual and literary shyness. His humor erased with a spark the impostures of the serious and the pretentious. When facing the cardboard nature and prejudice of those who insist on making certain spaces hostile, Alfredo preferred to open up the vents of light and sound so as to avoid the blockade. He belonged to no court, nor did he set up obstacles for anyone. Alfredo would fly in his famous chair and sing “Alma libre” with fervor, a song that begins like this: “Like a magician of the Orient / With rare power and science / I will break the chains / That bound me without pity...”
5
Obliquity is another superpower that belongs to magicians. They tell you one thing goes here and it ends up showing up over there. They make you climb into a suitcase, for example, so as to then have you emerge from a mirror. That’s what Alfredo’s poetry is like. The phenomena of refraction appear in his work and in his life. And those reflections cast spells on us. They produce strange resonances, echoes, explosions, syncopations, cracks. You never know where a verse is taking you until you find a reflection of it somewhere else and it surprises you because you weren’t expecting it. His poetry is endless because it has that reverberational quality that’s found in acts belonging to magic. As though it were a reticularea of light.
6
Magicians generate spaces for connivance. A moment comes when those who witness an act of magic find an element of communion in wonder. Magical phenomena have an enveloping nature and they tend to set bridges of unity between beings, circuits under the auspices of shared delight and the celebration of life. Alfredo made his house a home of tolerance and brotherhood around the poetic word. He was a server of friendship. He didn’t cultivate any type of hatred and he respected human beings profoundly. Magicians radiate warmth and they tend to wink an eye at you when you are surprised by amazement.
7
Now we’ll have to talk about what is most precious for a magician: revelation. This is the true card a magician hides under his sleeve. And revelation only manifests itself to visionaries (those who can see through, the authentic revolutionaries). Alfredo is a visionary because he invites us to see what no one else has seen before. Bordering the limits he lifts himself to glance at the horizon in search of the place where the unspoken arises, because “in poetry the only thing worth saying is the unspeakable,” as Reverdy said, fifth member of the Reverdy quartet. Alfredo’s poetry is highly stimulating because it’s difficult and is full of occult codes that, thanks to patience and chance, manifest themselves to us suddenly. It’s what Alfredo called the superlife [supervivencia] of the poetic act, that is: “The surprising place of the poem with its own structure that resists, even in its vacilations and faults, all possible readings.” Because the mystery of the unspeakable is revealed to us and that mystery is as endless as the imagining consciousness.
8
To finish this indagation regarding why Alfredo Silva Estrada was a Magician of the Orient with rare power and science, all I have left to say is that magicians exist on borders and they spend their time feeling, scanning, gathering herbs from one place to plant them in another. Magicians are in contact with the hidden forces of the matter they manipulate. They are transgressors of limits (sometimes, with dynamite). They speak with the absent. They weave webs of astonishment. They proceed with joy of the bow [alegría de proa] towards the confines, well-planted in the going. We know they have always been among us. Bon Voyage! Cheers! (Greetings, Sonia.)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 24 October 2009 }
1
Speaking about magicians isn’t easy, since they are prodigious by nature and what is prodigious tends to be fleeting. Magic is one of man’s deepest influences. When we encounter a magician the first thing that impresses us is his incantatory power. The spell of magicians seduces because it creates a temporal suspension of the senses, as happens when we look at a Persian carpet or at a gang of bluebirds fluttering at the window (I’m watching them right now). This is the source of the hypnotic nature of magical operations. F. Vergesen tells us that in Alfredo Silva Estrada’s poetry “the poem heads along a route where the near totality of data of sensibility, thought and the imaginary cross paths.” A poem like “En delirio de piedra,” for example, is nothing more than a prodigious verbal artifact capable of enchanting and disordering our senses. Alfredo was a delightful person; that’s why children, dogs and exalted creatures loved him and greeted him.
2
Magicians defy the possibilities of matter and subvert the order of things. They produce explosions where we least expect it. An explosion is a sudden and vivacious manifestation of something that wasn’t there and that by the force of the art of magic appears. This is the source of the sparks and illuminations in life and in Alfredo’s poetry. His poetry is like dynamite for language. It contains marvelous hidden mines that when stepped upon provoke unexpected conflagrations of the sign. They are like ritual fires: fascinating, celebratory, cathartic. Alfredo was a subversive, a rebel of forms (of “the form that in its own self liberates itself.”)
3
All acts of magic have to do with transmutation, that is, with the transformation of one thing into another. For Alfredo this was a daily practice. To transmute experience into word and the word into experience was the substrata of his alchemy. This is what he refers to when he speaks to us of “existing in the duration of the poem,” or when he wagers for “the poetic word rooted in existence itself.” This implies an ethics of language and a way of life. And his life was a transgression of the limits of expression: his poetic word sought the experimental encounter with other material worlds. That explains the approaches to the plastic arts (with Gego), to music (with Del Mónaco), to graphic design (with Leufert), or to Hertzian waves (with Ofrendas, on Radio Nacional de Venezuela, one of the longest running programs in the history of national radio). In El libro de las puertas one of his preferred poetic operations is manifested, which by the way is very closely related to transmutation: it is the transfer, the passing through what is unknown, the exploration of the edges of being to found, in the open, new spaces that might expand the possibilities of matter. We’re talking about the transmuted word. Zoroaster (or Dr. Faustus) did the same thing.
4
Simon Magus was persecuted by Saint Peter. Simon possessed the secret to levitation and Peter couldn’t stand this. They say that once Simon was trapped and taken to Rome to be tried, Peter asked him to fly and once the magician was in the air they began to throw stones at him and this is how they got rid of him. The thing is that Peter bought stones to establish churches, while Simon flew through the air establishing other kingdoms, less apprehensible, more suggestive. The poetry of our magician is light and ludic. But it turns out that when interacting with his fellow beings Alfredo was also like that. Alfredo took a lucid stance against intellectual and literary shyness. His humor erased with a spark the impostures of the serious and the pretentious. When facing the cardboard nature and prejudice of those who insist on making certain spaces hostile, Alfredo preferred to open up the vents of light and sound so as to avoid the blockade. He belonged to no court, nor did he set up obstacles for anyone. Alfredo would fly in his famous chair and sing “Alma libre” with fervor, a song that begins like this: “Like a magician of the Orient / With rare power and science / I will break the chains / That bound me without pity...”
5
Obliquity is another superpower that belongs to magicians. They tell you one thing goes here and it ends up showing up over there. They make you climb into a suitcase, for example, so as to then have you emerge from a mirror. That’s what Alfredo’s poetry is like. The phenomena of refraction appear in his work and in his life. And those reflections cast spells on us. They produce strange resonances, echoes, explosions, syncopations, cracks. You never know where a verse is taking you until you find a reflection of it somewhere else and it surprises you because you weren’t expecting it. His poetry is endless because it has that reverberational quality that’s found in acts belonging to magic. As though it were a reticularea of light.
6
Magicians generate spaces for connivance. A moment comes when those who witness an act of magic find an element of communion in wonder. Magical phenomena have an enveloping nature and they tend to set bridges of unity between beings, circuits under the auspices of shared delight and the celebration of life. Alfredo made his house a home of tolerance and brotherhood around the poetic word. He was a server of friendship. He didn’t cultivate any type of hatred and he respected human beings profoundly. Magicians radiate warmth and they tend to wink an eye at you when you are surprised by amazement.
7
Now we’ll have to talk about what is most precious for a magician: revelation. This is the true card a magician hides under his sleeve. And revelation only manifests itself to visionaries (those who can see through, the authentic revolutionaries). Alfredo is a visionary because he invites us to see what no one else has seen before. Bordering the limits he lifts himself to glance at the horizon in search of the place where the unspoken arises, because “in poetry the only thing worth saying is the unspeakable,” as Reverdy said, fifth member of the Reverdy quartet. Alfredo’s poetry is highly stimulating because it’s difficult and is full of occult codes that, thanks to patience and chance, manifest themselves to us suddenly. It’s what Alfredo called the superlife [supervivencia] of the poetic act, that is: “The surprising place of the poem with its own structure that resists, even in its vacilations and faults, all possible readings.” Because the mystery of the unspeakable is revealed to us and that mystery is as endless as the imagining consciousness.
8
To finish this indagation regarding why Alfredo Silva Estrada was a Magician of the Orient with rare power and science, all I have left to say is that magicians exist on borders and they spend their time feeling, scanning, gathering herbs from one place to plant them in another. Magicians are in contact with the hidden forces of the matter they manipulate. They are transgressors of limits (sometimes, with dynamite). They speak with the absent. They weave webs of astonishment. They proceed with joy of the bow [alegría de proa] towards the confines, well-planted in the going. We know they have always been among us. Bon Voyage! Cheers! (Greetings, Sonia.)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 24 October 2009 }
10.17.2009
Voz apagada / Douglas Gómez Barrueta
Extinguished Voice
The poet, essayist and translator Alfredo Silva Estrada died on Wednesday night in Caracas
[Photo: Iván González, 2005]
“To write at the limits: shock, emotion, touchstone: That shock called poetry.” That is what was sought in Al través by Alfredo Silva Estrada, the poet who died on Wednesday night accompanied by the dancer and choreographer Sonia Sanoja, his inseparable wife since 1960, the first reader of all his verse, his essays and his translations.
Silva Estrada was born in Caracas on the 14th of May in 1933, and at the age twenty he published his first two collections, De la casa arraigada and Cercos. A year earlier he studied Art History in Italy. He received a degree in Philosophy in 1957 from the Universidad Central de Venezuela, where he taught for several years. He attended graduate school at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Between 1965 and 1982 he produced the show Homenajes on Radio Nacional de Venezuela. His work also includes the books Integraciones/De la unidad en fuga and Del traspaso, published in 1962 and Literales (1963). In 1964 Lo nunca proyectado, Trans-verbales I (1967) and Acercamientos (1969). In the seventies he published Trans-verbales I, Trans-verbales II y Trans-verbales III (1972), Los moradores (1975), Los quintetos del círculo (1978), Contra el espacio hostil (1979) and Variaciones sobre reticuláreas (1979). In 1986 Dedicación y ofrendas was published, De bichos exaltado in 1989, ten years later Por los respiraderos del día y En un momento dado, and in 2000 Al través.
In 1997, Silva Estrada received the Premio Nacional de Literatura. In 2001, he obtained the international prize in poetry at the Liege Biennial (Belgium), an award previously given to Giuseppe Ungaretti, Saint-John Perse, Octavio Paz and Roberto Juarroz, among others. In October 2005, Silva Estrada was honored at the XII Semana Internacional de la Poesía in Caracas.
He also translated into Spanish the poetry of Salah Stétié, Georges Schehadé, Vahé Godel, Francis Ponge, Fernand Verhesen, Pierre Reverdy, André du Bouchet and Andrée Chedid. The essay “La palabra trasmutada/la poesía como existencia” was published in 1989, and in it he wrote: “Poetry as experience and not merely as formal experimentation, because its material (language) is only manipulable to the degree that it will continue being newborn and incitingly elusive. A diction of what have been called “the great commonplaces of humanity:” love, pain, joy, the consciousness of death... universal feelings that have always been spoken, that always need to be expressed and that each poet, individualizing them, pronounces with the intensity of a first time.”
*
Alfredo Chacón
Poet, Anthropologist, Essayist
“With Alfredo Silva Estrada, I lose a very dear brother and one of the poets I most admire. Venezuelan readers of poetry can hold on to the inextinguishable part of his life: his books of poems and his writings of reflection on poetry. Poets and critics from here and elsewhere will continue to trust that Alfredo Silva Estrada’s work will attain in Latin America and in Spain the acknowledgment it has received in our country and among French-language poets. May it be so.”
Jesús Alberto León
Poet, Scientist, University Professor
“Alfredo stands out amidts Venezuelan poetry of the second half of the twentieth century as a revolutionary, even though I don’t like that word because of the implications it has today. And he stands out because all his contemporaries, which include those who belonged to El Techo de la Ballena or Sardio, centered their fuss in behavior, their ruptures were existential ones transferred to literature. But Alfredo leaves a trace in language which is the theater of all life. We Venezuelan poets owe Alfredo for liberating us from certain slaveries, for having dared to engage in games, in ruptures.”
Bárbara Gunz
Mathematician, Director of the Fundación Gego
“Alfredo and Sonia went every afternoon to Gego and Leufert’s house to have a few drinks and to talk. From that experience emerged Variaciones sobre reticuláreas. Besides, Sonia danced on many occasions among Gego’s works. I was an adolescent and that was an intellectually enriching salon.”
María Antonieta Flores
Poet, Essayist
“Thanks to him I was able to see that it’s true that poetry saves. In desperation, I stumbled onto one of Gego’s panoramas with a blank book. Each word and each verse by Alfredo stopped me and I never left. The poem “Lo nunca proyectado.” Neither cold nor distant, his poetry is emotion and sensuality suspended in a tense web, and it emerges from the everyday... I’ve lost the last of my three poet friends, the poetic as humanity incarnate.”
Luis Enrique Belmonte
Poet, Novelist, Psychiatrist
“My teacher has died, the great poet Alfredo Silva Estrada, who has outlined one of the most fascinating and dangerous adventures of language in contemporary poetry. He was an explorer of the limits and of the“edges of being.” He wrote from the clearing against hostile space. He was a man who made his house a space where poetry and friendship were celebrated. His word always sought to expand the possibilities of being, opening breaches of light and sound in the gills of the day. He died in his chair, on a Wednesday, and those of us who knew and loved him know what Wednesdays meant: the day of encounter after his lit word. He never lost his sharp sense of humor. The last time I saw him he surprised me because he sang “Alma libre” impeccably, one of his favorite songs. He was a western mage with clear power and a science that possesed the mysterious gift of transmuting the word.
Now his soul flies freely.”
*
Before Departing
Before departing
Don’t stop to look
At those undone sheets
And that glass
Where you’ve drunk so many times
Seek out instead
The horizons you can sew like yarn
The birds that eat on the shoulders of the blind
And that trail that will lead you
Like a writing
{ Douglas Gómez Barrueta, Tal Cual, 16 October 2009 }
The poet, essayist and translator Alfredo Silva Estrada died on Wednesday night in Caracas
[Photo: Iván González, 2005]“To write at the limits: shock, emotion, touchstone: That shock called poetry.” That is what was sought in Al través by Alfredo Silva Estrada, the poet who died on Wednesday night accompanied by the dancer and choreographer Sonia Sanoja, his inseparable wife since 1960, the first reader of all his verse, his essays and his translations.
Silva Estrada was born in Caracas on the 14th of May in 1933, and at the age twenty he published his first two collections, De la casa arraigada and Cercos. A year earlier he studied Art History in Italy. He received a degree in Philosophy in 1957 from the Universidad Central de Venezuela, where he taught for several years. He attended graduate school at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Between 1965 and 1982 he produced the show Homenajes on Radio Nacional de Venezuela. His work also includes the books Integraciones/De la unidad en fuga and Del traspaso, published in 1962 and Literales (1963). In 1964 Lo nunca proyectado, Trans-verbales I (1967) and Acercamientos (1969). In the seventies he published Trans-verbales I, Trans-verbales II y Trans-verbales III (1972), Los moradores (1975), Los quintetos del círculo (1978), Contra el espacio hostil (1979) and Variaciones sobre reticuláreas (1979). In 1986 Dedicación y ofrendas was published, De bichos exaltado in 1989, ten years later Por los respiraderos del día y En un momento dado, and in 2000 Al través.
In 1997, Silva Estrada received the Premio Nacional de Literatura. In 2001, he obtained the international prize in poetry at the Liege Biennial (Belgium), an award previously given to Giuseppe Ungaretti, Saint-John Perse, Octavio Paz and Roberto Juarroz, among others. In October 2005, Silva Estrada was honored at the XII Semana Internacional de la Poesía in Caracas.
He also translated into Spanish the poetry of Salah Stétié, Georges Schehadé, Vahé Godel, Francis Ponge, Fernand Verhesen, Pierre Reverdy, André du Bouchet and Andrée Chedid. The essay “La palabra trasmutada/la poesía como existencia” was published in 1989, and in it he wrote: “Poetry as experience and not merely as formal experimentation, because its material (language) is only manipulable to the degree that it will continue being newborn and incitingly elusive. A diction of what have been called “the great commonplaces of humanity:” love, pain, joy, the consciousness of death... universal feelings that have always been spoken, that always need to be expressed and that each poet, individualizing them, pronounces with the intensity of a first time.”
*
Alfredo Chacón
Poet, Anthropologist, Essayist
“With Alfredo Silva Estrada, I lose a very dear brother and one of the poets I most admire. Venezuelan readers of poetry can hold on to the inextinguishable part of his life: his books of poems and his writings of reflection on poetry. Poets and critics from here and elsewhere will continue to trust that Alfredo Silva Estrada’s work will attain in Latin America and in Spain the acknowledgment it has received in our country and among French-language poets. May it be so.”
Jesús Alberto León
Poet, Scientist, University Professor
“Alfredo stands out amidts Venezuelan poetry of the second half of the twentieth century as a revolutionary, even though I don’t like that word because of the implications it has today. And he stands out because all his contemporaries, which include those who belonged to El Techo de la Ballena or Sardio, centered their fuss in behavior, their ruptures were existential ones transferred to literature. But Alfredo leaves a trace in language which is the theater of all life. We Venezuelan poets owe Alfredo for liberating us from certain slaveries, for having dared to engage in games, in ruptures.”
Bárbara Gunz
Mathematician, Director of the Fundación Gego
“Alfredo and Sonia went every afternoon to Gego and Leufert’s house to have a few drinks and to talk. From that experience emerged Variaciones sobre reticuláreas. Besides, Sonia danced on many occasions among Gego’s works. I was an adolescent and that was an intellectually enriching salon.”
María Antonieta Flores
Poet, Essayist
“Thanks to him I was able to see that it’s true that poetry saves. In desperation, I stumbled onto one of Gego’s panoramas with a blank book. Each word and each verse by Alfredo stopped me and I never left. The poem “Lo nunca proyectado.” Neither cold nor distant, his poetry is emotion and sensuality suspended in a tense web, and it emerges from the everyday... I’ve lost the last of my three poet friends, the poetic as humanity incarnate.”
Luis Enrique Belmonte
Poet, Novelist, Psychiatrist
“My teacher has died, the great poet Alfredo Silva Estrada, who has outlined one of the most fascinating and dangerous adventures of language in contemporary poetry. He was an explorer of the limits and of the“edges of being.” He wrote from the clearing against hostile space. He was a man who made his house a space where poetry and friendship were celebrated. His word always sought to expand the possibilities of being, opening breaches of light and sound in the gills of the day. He died in his chair, on a Wednesday, and those of us who knew and loved him know what Wednesdays meant: the day of encounter after his lit word. He never lost his sharp sense of humor. The last time I saw him he surprised me because he sang “Alma libre” impeccably, one of his favorite songs. He was a western mage with clear power and a science that possesed the mysterious gift of transmuting the word.
Now his soul flies freely.”
*
Before Departing
Before departing
Don’t stop to look
At those undone sheets
And that glass
Where you’ve drunk so many times
Seek out instead
The horizons you can sew like yarn
The birds that eat on the shoulders of the blind
And that trail that will lead you
Like a writing
{ Douglas Gómez Barrueta, Tal Cual, 16 October 2009 }
10.15.2009
El poema que escucha mi amigo / Alfredo Silva Estrada (1933-2009)
The Poem My Friend Listens To
In the poem when my friend listens to it
the echo of the earth is prolonged
Silence returns to the throat
the pores of the page reabsorb it
A certain transparency reveals itself in the humus
if we say humus
feeling the connivance of the earth
its indolence necessary to our pain
When the friend receives my poem
a foreign song arrives with the air
that envelops us
{ Alfredo Silva Estrada, Al través, Caracas: Angria Ediciones, 2000 }
In the poem when my friend listens to it
the echo of the earth is prolonged
Silence returns to the throat
the pores of the page reabsorb it
A certain transparency reveals itself in the humus
if we say humus
feeling the connivance of the earth
its indolence necessary to our pain
When the friend receives my poem
a foreign song arrives with the air
that envelops us
{ Alfredo Silva Estrada, Al través, Caracas: Angria Ediciones, 2000 }
8.01.2006
Salah Stétié / La terre avec l'oubli
The Earth with Oblivion
Here it is, fiery rose in the burn,
That which gives its own fruit to fire
When the water appears right there, daughter of the house,
And when she's sleepless with fire in the burning
Above the roof and the long palm tree of the clouds
Lit up by blood
Beyond oblivion's course
In the pleats and folds of the course
There's the earth, the earth with a lost
And terribly blue horse
And those hills, further and full of angels
Who sweetly follow their blind hands
In created sterility, her fingernails
Marked by the moon's edge
Anyways the landscape talks—and it is the coffins
Mixed into the great disaster of the clouds
In that which no longer has a name, but is only
A mouth made of herbs
Speaking what little she says: that which is
Fresh clay and innocent flame
Protecting the grain that trembles against the birds
___________________________________________
Translator's note: These poems are taken from the opening sequence of the book La tierra con el olvido (Caracas: Angria Ediciones, 2002), a Spanish version translated by Alfredo Silva Estrada from the original French of the Lebanese poet Salah Stétié (Beirut, 1929). Stétié first published La terre avec l'oubli in Paris in 1994. I've based my own English translations on both the Spanish version and the original.
Here it is, fiery rose in the burn,
That which gives its own fruit to fire
When the water appears right there, daughter of the house,
And when she's sleepless with fire in the burning
Above the roof and the long palm tree of the clouds
Lit up by blood
Beyond oblivion's course
In the pleats and folds of the course
There's the earth, the earth with a lost
And terribly blue horse
And those hills, further and full of angels
Who sweetly follow their blind hands
In created sterility, her fingernails
Marked by the moon's edge
Anyways the landscape talks—and it is the coffins
Mixed into the great disaster of the clouds
In that which no longer has a name, but is only
A mouth made of herbs
Speaking what little she says: that which is
Fresh clay and innocent flame
Protecting the grain that trembles against the birds
___________________________________________
Translator's note: These poems are taken from the opening sequence of the book La tierra con el olvido (Caracas: Angria Ediciones, 2002), a Spanish version translated by Alfredo Silva Estrada from the original French of the Lebanese poet Salah Stétié (Beirut, 1929). Stétié first published La terre avec l'oubli in Paris in 1994. I've based my own English translations on both the Spanish version and the original.
10.05.2005
Alfredo Silva Estrada
Monday's El Universal includes this article on Alfredo Silva Estrada ("Silva Estrada homenajeado"), whose poem "Los moradores" I've translated into English at Antología.
I'm familiar with Silva Estrada's work as both a poet and translator. Thanks to his translations from the French into Spanish, I've gotten to know the wonderful work of two Lebanese poets, George Schehadé (Beirut, 1907-Paris, 1989) and Salah Stétié (Beirut, 1929). Angria Ediciones in Caracas has published Silva Estrada's beautiful translations of these poets, as well as his own recent collection Al través (2000).
Last Sunday's Papel Literario in El Nacional featured several pieces on Silva Estrada's work. Included among these is an essay by Silva Estrada on his translation methods, entitled "La traducción es el agua de mi tercera sed." He writes:
" 'One consecrates oneself to others in order to know oneself better,' my friend the Swiss poet Vahé Godel, translator from Armenian to French, has written. Although there could be a great deal of truth in that affirmation, I confess I have never, at least in a conscious manner, guided myself by that design. But in each translation, inevitably, one undoubtedly projects oneself up to a certain point, and finds a piece of oneself, a partial, mysterious affinity which had not been felt at the beginning of the work. I want to add that I do not only translate poets for whom I have an explicit affinity, but also those whose strange palpitation, quite different and distant from my own, captivates me from the first reading. I translate (I prefer to say: I pour) as though moved by a fatality, a passion, and an insatiable curiosity of my spirit, and a need to give myself to others, to open my borders."
Venezuela's state-funded publishing house, the famous Monte Ávila Editores, has published two excellent collections by Silva Estrada: the anthology Acercamientos (1992) which includes an introduction by Rafael Castillo Zapata and Por los respiraderos del día/En un momento dado (1998).
Silva Estrada's versions of Salah Stétié in La tierra con el olvido (Angria Ediciones, 2002) are poems I continually return to, savoring their arid lines. Whether in his own poems or in his translations, Silva Estrada remains attuned to the silences that can make poetry an antidote to chaos.
In the introduction to La tierra con el olvido, Silva Estrada describes when Stétié first gave him a copy of the book, published in France as La terre avec l'oubli in 1994:
"As he offered me a copy he said, with a certain timidity: "These are the poems of a life." A life, it is understood, that begins to face old age with an exceptional corporeal courage incorporated into the poem and an unusual lucidity. Here, what could be merely pain and nostalgia becomes a discovery of language and a constellated revelation, a revelation of the human body and the cosmos..."
Silva Estrada's versions of Stétié's untitled poems in that collection have the merit of sounding and reading impeccably as poems in Spanish. Finding this collection for the first time in Venezuela several years ago I felt an immediate confluence between Beirut, Paris and Caracas. Not in a geographical or political sense, but rather through the images and rhythms of Salah Stétié's translated lines. Poetry as an immediate and ancient form of dialogue.
"...Pero la otra mujer, ella es su dolor en el espíritu
Con su bello rostro y sus ojos oscuros
Habiendo la fusión de la nieve disuelto el hombro
Y sus dos manos y sus dos brazos se volvieron
Ese duro torrente de la devastación del corazón
El vientre también donde hubo una hierba de delirio
Ahora no es más que estrecho de los torbellinos
Istmo del viento"
I'm familiar with Silva Estrada's work as both a poet and translator. Thanks to his translations from the French into Spanish, I've gotten to know the wonderful work of two Lebanese poets, George Schehadé (Beirut, 1907-Paris, 1989) and Salah Stétié (Beirut, 1929). Angria Ediciones in Caracas has published Silva Estrada's beautiful translations of these poets, as well as his own recent collection Al través (2000).
Last Sunday's Papel Literario in El Nacional featured several pieces on Silva Estrada's work. Included among these is an essay by Silva Estrada on his translation methods, entitled "La traducción es el agua de mi tercera sed." He writes:
" 'One consecrates oneself to others in order to know oneself better,' my friend the Swiss poet Vahé Godel, translator from Armenian to French, has written. Although there could be a great deal of truth in that affirmation, I confess I have never, at least in a conscious manner, guided myself by that design. But in each translation, inevitably, one undoubtedly projects oneself up to a certain point, and finds a piece of oneself, a partial, mysterious affinity which had not been felt at the beginning of the work. I want to add that I do not only translate poets for whom I have an explicit affinity, but also those whose strange palpitation, quite different and distant from my own, captivates me from the first reading. I translate (I prefer to say: I pour) as though moved by a fatality, a passion, and an insatiable curiosity of my spirit, and a need to give myself to others, to open my borders."
Venezuela's state-funded publishing house, the famous Monte Ávila Editores, has published two excellent collections by Silva Estrada: the anthology Acercamientos (1992) which includes an introduction by Rafael Castillo Zapata and Por los respiraderos del día/En un momento dado (1998).
Silva Estrada's versions of Salah Stétié in La tierra con el olvido (Angria Ediciones, 2002) are poems I continually return to, savoring their arid lines. Whether in his own poems or in his translations, Silva Estrada remains attuned to the silences that can make poetry an antidote to chaos.
In the introduction to La tierra con el olvido, Silva Estrada describes when Stétié first gave him a copy of the book, published in France as La terre avec l'oubli in 1994:
"As he offered me a copy he said, with a certain timidity: "These are the poems of a life." A life, it is understood, that begins to face old age with an exceptional corporeal courage incorporated into the poem and an unusual lucidity. Here, what could be merely pain and nostalgia becomes a discovery of language and a constellated revelation, a revelation of the human body and the cosmos..."
Silva Estrada's versions of Stétié's untitled poems in that collection have the merit of sounding and reading impeccably as poems in Spanish. Finding this collection for the first time in Venezuela several years ago I felt an immediate confluence between Beirut, Paris and Caracas. Not in a geographical or political sense, but rather through the images and rhythms of Salah Stétié's translated lines. Poetry as an immediate and ancient form of dialogue.
"...Pero la otra mujer, ella es su dolor en el espíritu
Con su bello rostro y sus ojos oscuros
Habiendo la fusión de la nieve disuelto el hombro
Y sus dos manos y sus dos brazos se volvieron
Ese duro torrente de la devastación del corazón
El vientre también donde hubo una hierba de delirio
Ahora no es más que estrecho de los torbellinos
Istmo del viento"
1.12.2004
Las ciudades a veces / Alfredo Silva Estrada
"Las ciudades a veces
derivan nombres en tus ojos
hacia otros territorios
Nos abandonan las imágenes
a los recodos de horizontes
en el relevo de los puntos de fuga
.................................. Atravesamos
nuestros rostros con el óxido de las ráfagas
Un halo desde el sueño
protege todavía los frutos entrevistos"
Alfredo Silva Estrada, Acercamientos (Monte Avila Editores, 1991)
"Las ciudades a veces
derivan nombres en tus ojos
hacia otros territorios
Nos abandonan las imágenes
a los recodos de horizontes
en el relevo de los puntos de fuga
.................................. Atravesamos
nuestros rostros con el óxido de las ráfagas
Un halo desde el sueño
protege todavía los frutos entrevistos"
Alfredo Silva Estrada, Acercamientos (Monte Avila Editores, 1991)
1.10.2004
El libro de las puertas / Alfredo Silva Estrada
The Book of Doors
to Luisa Palacios
Et par la porte ouverte
La perspective du hasard
Pierre Reverdy
1
the closest door:
a beginning block opens
2
from a threshold of unfelt things
doors of the five senses
3
to be born in the strangeness of knocking at a door
4
may it be the door
between sky and earth
5
robust memory doors
for the inner fire
6
listen to eternal chance
at the trembling door
7
doors that drop
a horizon in our hands
8
to love the light that unfolds through the door
9
infinitely, the eyes
through the half-opened door
10
some other avid door
while we taste our bread and the unpronounceable
11
what doors grow from earth
when we enjoy our earth-being?
12
o door sustained by knowledge of air!
13
secret scent of true earth
carried by the glowing door
14
maybe there is an absent door
moving calmly
15
and chance
--in pairs, after all--
as a friendly door
Translator’s note: Poet, essayist and translator Alfredo Silva Estrada was born in Caracas in 1933. He has published several collections of poetry, including most recently: Por los respiraderos del día / En un momento dado (Monte Ávila Editores, 1998) and Al través (Angria Ediciones, 2000). In 1997 he was awarded Venezuela's Premio Nacional de Literatura. Silva Estrada lives in Caracas and recently published his translations into Spanish of the work of Lebanese poet Salah Stétié.
{Alfredo Silva Estrada, Acercamientos, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1991 }
to Luisa Palacios
Et par la porte ouverte
La perspective du hasard
Pierre Reverdy
1
the closest door:
a beginning block opens
2
from a threshold of unfelt things
doors of the five senses
3
to be born in the strangeness of knocking at a door
4
may it be the door
between sky and earth
5
robust memory doors
for the inner fire
6
listen to eternal chance
at the trembling door
7
doors that drop
a horizon in our hands
8
to love the light that unfolds through the door
9
infinitely, the eyes
through the half-opened door
10
some other avid door
while we taste our bread and the unpronounceable
11
what doors grow from earth
when we enjoy our earth-being?
12
o door sustained by knowledge of air!
13
secret scent of true earth
carried by the glowing door
14
maybe there is an absent door
moving calmly
15
and chance
--in pairs, after all--
as a friendly door
Translator’s note: Poet, essayist and translator Alfredo Silva Estrada was born in Caracas in 1933. He has published several collections of poetry, including most recently: Por los respiraderos del día / En un momento dado (Monte Ávila Editores, 1998) and Al través (Angria Ediciones, 2000). In 1997 he was awarded Venezuela's Premio Nacional de Literatura. Silva Estrada lives in Caracas and recently published his translations into Spanish of the work of Lebanese poet Salah Stétié.
{Alfredo Silva Estrada, Acercamientos, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1991 }
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)