El último gran surrealista: Juan Sánchez Peláez / Edgardo Dobry

The Last Great Surrealist: Juan Sánchez Peláez

                  [Juan Sánchez Peláez in 1979, by Vasco Szinetar]

The seven books the Venezuelan Juan Sánchez Peláez published between 1951 and 1989 are gathered in a single volume. A baroque union of mysticism and eroticism.

Juan Sánchez Peláez, Obra poética (Barcelona, España: Lumen, 2004)


The recent disappearance of Juan Sánchez Peláez (Altagracia de Orituco, 1922 - Caracas, 2003) gives this book the entity of a final milestone, the solemnity of a closure: with the deaths in recent years of the Peruvian Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, and the Argentines Olga Orozco and Enrique Molina, Sánchez Peláez was the last of the great representatives of the enormous plateau that Surrealism reached in Latin American poetry. Our tenacious baroque vocation —the American tendency of looking at words as if they were carnal objects as recent and astonishing as the world they needed to name— and a certain epic spirit in the cultivation of the 20th century aesthetic Left favored that great impetus of the movement founded by Breton. A chapter that opens in 1928, just four years after the publication of the first “Surrealist Manifesto,” when the magazine Qué appears in Buenos Aires, founded by Aldo Pellegrini. At that time Neruda was in Rangoon writing his first Residence on Earth and a few years later Lezama Lima, in Havana, was announcing the “Death of Narcissus”: “The hand or the the lip or the bird were snowing.”

The word, streaked with divergent senses, strips its own materiality. If the accent in the Surrealism of the Americas is markedly erotic, as for example with the Chilean Rosamel del Valle (an explicit influence on Sánchez Peláez), it is, in the first place, because of that visibility of the word as an unsettling object, dislocated from its reference: “The words sound like gold animals,” writes Sánchez Peláez. He appeared at the beginning of the 1950s in the vortex of that movement that had transformed poetry into a laboratory of rare images: his first book, Elena y los elementos (1951), which opens with an epigraph from Éluard as a declaration of principles, takes hold of the surrealist imaginary almost violently: “Milk bread of the moon, dark drum of cereals / Precipice of clouds that drowned my sleeping face in the waters.” Filiación oscura (1966), Lo huidizo y permanente (1969) and Rasgos comunes (1975) represent the most powerful zone of his voice, in search of a you whose encounter doesn’t, however, alleviate anxiety: “To her, my ritual of drinking at her breast because I want / to begin something, in some direction.”

A baroque union of mysticism and eroticism, as Valente noted regarding Westphalen, with words that also apply to Sánchez Peláez: “He belongs by nature and lineage to a tradition marked by the intense exploration of poetic language.” Eugenio Montejo, relatedly, designs a Venezuelan genealogy when he situates him as a descendant of José Antonio Ramos Sucre (1890-1930): “From him Sánchez Peláez inherits the emphatic and sumptuous tracing of the word.” Ramos Sucre (whose Obra poética, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Poética, 1999, is available), one of the rare geniuses who appeared after the dissolution of Modernismo, wrote almost exclusively prose poems, in the wake of Rimbaud’s Illuminations and the Baudelairean spleen, but already closer to the progressive abstraction that Symbolism operated on the construction of the phrase. Sánchez Peláez was also a master of the prose fragment, which he alternated with verse in nearly all his books. This barely posthumous compilation of his poetry reveals, complete, the images of a journey through one of the most extreme territories of poetic invention.




{ Edgardo Dobry, El País, 18 September 2004 }

Lorenzo García Vega ya duerme en Playa Albina / Edgardo Dobry

Lorenzo García Vega Now Sleeps in Playa Albina

(Photo: Gorka Lejarcegi)

There are those who actually believed a place called Playa Albina actually existed, as Lorenzo García Vega indefectibly called Miami, where he lived for many years as an exile; he had been born in 1926 in Jagüey Grande, Cuba, and he has just died in Florida’s Metropolitan Hospital. He was the youngest member of the Orígenes group, based in the Havana of the 1940s around José Lezama Lima and the magazine of the same name; in Los años de Orígenes (Caracas, Monte Ávila; 1978-Buenos Aires, Bajo la Luna, 2007) García Vega tells of how he met the “Master”: “I was in the backroom of a bookstore and a spectator said to me: Kid, read Proust! It was Lezama Lima.”

But Los años de Orígenes is far from being the typical memoir glorifying the author and his mentors. As with everything García Vega wrote, it’s difficult to define, almost impossible to gloss and because of that an extraordinarily read, very intelligent and free from all complacency —with the world and with himself— since, who was he going to be afraid of and who was the man who had invented Playa Albina going to ingratiate himself with, that place where everything, even desolation, was almost impalpable? Los años de Orígenes was a critical exercise of personal and collective memory, of a bitter humor, in which García Vega manifests his admiration and gratitude towards Lezama, but also his intolerance towards the Catholic whiff of a good part of the group that surrounded him; the rejection of the construction of the Lezama myth, sustained in good measure by writers and critics who never knew him and yet established a thesis regarding the relation between the poet’s asthma and his punctuation; the biting critique of the foundation and ceremonial of Neo-Baroque Havana-Parisian rituals commanded by Severo Sarduy, “Severo also a living marble flower”; in the end, the chronicle (veiled, like an omnipresent perfume) of the difficult situation of those who, after Castro’s revolution, left Cuba to never return again: with all the penury of the exile and, on top of that, without the least bit of solidarity from the Latin American intellectual system, nearly all of it committed to Castro, what he would call “the opportunistic purity of the farcical Latin American left.”

In a quiet, fragmentary way, full of self-irony and implicit laughter, García Vega built the alternative to revolutionary, Neo-Baroque or post-structuralist tropicalism and its carnavals with more or less fortunate adjectives. No mueras sin laberinto, El oficio de peder, Cuerdas para Aleister and Devastación del hotel San Luis are some of the García Vega’s books, almost always written in what we could call poetic prose if we admit here that “poetic” has nothing to do with sentimentalism, coloratura, the magic of instants or the sublime epiphany: “I have just visited the grave of a friend who recently died, in Chacarita, and it makes me desperate to understand that the dead will always be lying down,” he wrote in Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto, which his friend the poet Elsa López published last year in Ediciones La Palma; and also: “A sad reality of this Playa Albina where I live. Drums, knick-knacks. What in the end doesn’t sound, even after one spends the day playing the drum.” Playing the drum: writing the poem; persisting in what’s useless and even in what’s absurd as a —unique— form of survival. To create a self-portrait under the figure of one more piece of rubble from the century’s deliriums of greatness and their illuminated guides.

And yet a good portion of the best Cuban poetry wouldn’t be the same, wouldn’t be as good, without Lorenzo: we see it in Antonio José Ponte, in Rolando Sánchez Mejías, in Idalia Morejón, in Rogelio Saunders, in Pedro Marqués de Armas. Because that absurdity of life and of the story from which García Vega brings to fruition in his Playa Albina isn’t far from the tragicomic contortions of Beckett’s characters, or from the meticulous self-destruction of Bernhard’s protagonists, to mention two authors he admired. That is, the assumption of the great Cuban inheritance in poetry but with that unexpected, extemporaneous or unseasonable torsion of Lorenzo’s bitterness, that reduces the sweet aftertaste of Baroque styles that boomed for so many years into prestigious fine dust. In his final book, Palíndromo en otra cerradura, homenaje a Duchamp (Barcelona, Barataria, 2011), he wrote: “I maintain myself without naming myself. For how long? It’s a face that is nothing, a whiteness of the dry. Its lights —it’s a plane— pass over the night. It’s also like a rare stamp. It’s very curious.” Very curious, yes: like his fate, which is partly our own, that of his readers; and like his death now.




{ Edgardo Dobry, El País, 2 June 2012 }

Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto / Edgardo Dobry

Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto

Poetry. Lorenzo García Vega (Jagüey Grande, Cuba, 1926) was the youngest member of the group led by José Lezama in the Havana of the fifties, an experience to which he gave testimony in Los años de Orígenes (1997, published a second time in Buenos Aires in 2007). A book completely removed from self-serving memories and the trickle of prestigious names: García Vega speaks there of the “baroque boogie,” of “the lie of the French,” of “the opportunistic firmness of the farcical Latin American left.” Since, residing in Miami (which he indefectibly calls “Playa Albina”) for forty years now, he had to endure the unconditional support for the Cuban revolution, that condemned the true exiles of that Latin American chimera to ostracism; and the profuse mythology surrounding Lezama and the Orígenes group, against which he took revenge in that book. At once heir to this last resplendence of great Cuban poetry and marginalized, alone, without a tribune, a press or a professorship, García Vega wrote a series of desolate and funny poems, without pity or vain commiseration. Closer to Samuel Beckett’s convulsions of pain and laughter than to any neo-baroque rhetoric in use, there we have extraordinary, extremely unique books that have been published lately: El oficio de perder, No mueras sin laberinto, Devastación del Hotel San Luis. At eighty-five García Vega publishes this book made up of two blocks –Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto–, in a hybrid genre of prose poem, a sketch of chronicles of the void, fragmentary reflection removed from all systems. To the marginality of the exiled poet, of the man stripped of his destiny without receiving anything in return, sharply disillusioned of any fantasy of redemption (for him, for the world), he now adds the resentment of old age, received like a jovial mask: “Sitting at the living room sofa, at five in the afternoon –I didn’t do anything else (if before five in the afternoon you can say I did anything).” Or this: “A sad reality of this Playa Albina where I live. Drums, knick-knacks. What finally makes no noise, even if one spends the day playing the drum.” Play the drum: write the poem. Nietzsche said: “Nihilism is a type of idleness.” But a form of humanism persists in desolation, in the uncomfortable laugh, in the histrionic astonishment of true pain. If you want to know what forms truly contemporary poetry seeks in our language it is impossible not to read Lorenzo García Vega.


Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto
Lorenzo García Vega
Ediciones La Palma, 2011
284 pages. 13 euros




{ Edgardo Dobry, Babelia, El País, 10 September 2011 }