La casa de la noche / Francisco Pérez Perdomo

I first came across Francisco Pérez Perdomo's poetry in 2001, browsing through bookstores in Caracas. I'm just now starting to read through his book of poems La casa de la noche (Privately Printed, Caracas, 2001).

He was born in Boconó, Venezuela in 1930 and is a poet, critic, and lawyer. He formed part of the literary groups Sardio and El Techo de la Ballena. He was awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura in 1980 and, as far as I know, he lives in Caracas. I hope to translate several poems from this recent collection. The following is the original Spanish version of the opening poem.

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"En una larga noche de invierno

En una larga noche de invierno,
recogido y distante,
miraba el hombre
una neblina negra
que se cernía en el espacio.
En los cielos, el ojo brillante
de la luna se apagaba.
Y se hacían las tinieblas.
Del árbol copudo y rafagueado
por incesantes rachas
se oían atormentados quejidos
en mitad de la plaza.
Se escurría por el mundo
un inmenso sollozo terrestre
que a todas las cosas anegaba.
Los terrores nocturnos,
encadenados, dejaban de pronto
sus refugios secretos y ocultos
en los pantanos del patio;
erizados trepaban por los aires,
le rodeaban el cuello
y con sus dedos flacos y sombríos
le apretaban duramente la garganta.
Por los lados del viento
aullaban los espectros del huracán.
Amarrado por sus tejidos mentales,
íngrimo y reflexivo, el hombre
se enfrentaba a la tempestad.
Temblaban sus manos otoñales.
La lluvia con violencia
arreciaba y desbordaba
los límites de la tierra.
Los relámpagos de la revelación
alumbraban por instantes su cara.
Casi sin darse cuenta,
mucho había envejecido
en los últimos años
y las marcas profundas de la edad
con rigor lo flagelaban.
A cántaros,
desde su balcón en ruinas
el hombre veía caer la lluvia,
ensimismado, y en los molinos
agitados de la muerte
sentía ahora rodar sus propios pasos."

"Every day is like Sunday"

Was it from Morrisey's first solo album? Nice reading last night by David Perry, Mike County, and Nick Piombino in Cambridge. Haven't had a chance to read other blogs yet, too much "work" for work to do just now.

Enjoyed talking w/ Mark Lamoureux & hearing poems. Thanks, Nick, for the books. I read your Two Essays last night:

"The truth is what we must repeat. The facts are what we must accept. This is why the truth is poetic and the facts journalistic."

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This week has been spent listening to Julieta Venegas, Sí (BMG Entertainment, México, 2003).

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And wondering if Sonic Youth's magnificent song "Schizophrenia" could be read as an allegory:

"I went away to see an old friend of mine
His sister came over she was out of her mind
She said Jesus had a twin who knew nothing about sin
She was laughing like crazy at the trouble I'm in
Her light eyes were dancing she is insane
Her brother says she's just a bitch with a golden chain
She keeps coming closer saying: 'I can feel it in my bones'
Schizophrenia is taking me home

My Future is static
It's already had it
I could tuck you in
And we can talk about it
I had a dream
And it split the scene
But I got a hunch
It's coming back to me"
{Sister, SST Records, 1987}

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The rest of the week and now, of course, spent thinking about Venezuela, hoping there can be a peaceful transition. I have no energy right now to write about it, but the news I hear is good so far.

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Reading Elizabeth Schön, Eileen Tabios, and Francisco Pérez Perdomo.

Recently Read

"Who seeks a spot to sit, to let the unease flow
Which needn't be let, nor does it flow, but stammer.
A meanwhile tonal musics play in private space
Which is the public's right, routine, to route your wills.
Mall. (does it matter?) Chairs, on its western borders.
Incessant. And there's two people taking surveys.
What stores (as in a store, of) do you wish, to see?"

{Rodrigo Toscano, The Disparities, Green Integer, 2002}

Hip-hop-ology

"I wrote it in the dark so I could feel it like braille"
{De La Soul, Stakes Is High, 1996}

Armando Rojas Guardia, etc.

(Translation of an excerpt from the opening lecture for his workshop "Escritura y Ciudad," a few months ago at the Fundacion Para La Cultura Urbana in Caracas.)

"I don't have to reiterate that for a city to reach the level of personal myth it's not essential for our first years to have been spent there. Nor is it essential that the memories we carry of our earliest sense of self-awareness blend with its streets, its public squares, its trees, or its birds. All that is required is that a significantly symbolic event--such as an accident, falling in love, a sexual encounter, the death of a loved one--unleash in us the living, enduring, archetypal force of the mythical. And for this mythical element to be precisely linked to that place and not another, transforming the setting into the symbolic geography of a psychic moment that distinguishes itself from the rest, separating that moment from the regular flow of our daily routine."

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For various reasons, I've fallen into the habit of mythologizing certain cities. Or, to be more specific, certain experiences or "seasons" that I've gone through in Tampa, Mexico D.F., Caracas, and Boston. Nomadism forces you to observe and memorize your surroundings, lest they disappear from your mind, too.

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During my last year in Tampa, for instance, I remember the pixel vision film that A. made of her and L. driving through West Tampa, talking about their experiences as young Latinas in that city. The blurred images and their conversation in that film resonate within me everytime I drive through West Tampa nowdays. I can still remember watching it late at night at A.'s apartment off campus, feeling the city transforming me, as though I were a silent passenger in the back seat of that car.

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In 1999, when Claudia and I were in Mexico D.F. for a week, I found a copy of Ernesto Cardenal's Salmos at a bookstore near Parque Alameda. While I had been browsing, the soldier armed with a machine gun next to the cash register had followed me throughout the bookstore, trained as he had been (I assume) to keep an eye on indios and mestizos (just like him) closely. Reading Cardenal's re-interpreations of the Psalms, later that night, was a lesson in poems as amulets, prayer, protection.

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Boston and Caracas, parallel cities.

"30 September 1939
[...]
After that in the world today is the desolation of ideas. In times of war and revolution, the great comfort has always been that in place of home there is the idea. One goes out into the street and finds people friendly , everyone is a brother or sister of everyone else because England is threatened. Patriotism, revolutionary fervor, can knit people together into a spasmodic unity. But today, for hundreds of people, even that consolation is denied them. There is confusion of ideas. Many can no longer fight with any conviction for their country, because it represents the Past. And the idea of the future, Revolution, is so compromised that only the most ideological thinkers wish to fight for that either. Suddenly the world appears a desert. There is no woman, there are no children, there is no faith, there is no cause.

The moon shines above the London streets during the blackouts like an island in the sky. The streets become rivers of light. The houses become feathery, soft, undefined, aspiring, so that any part of this town might be the most beautiful city in the world, sleeping amongst silt and water. And the moon takes a farewell look at our civilization everywhere. I have seen it in Valencia, Barcelona, and Madrid, also. Only the houses are not plumed, feathery, soft there. The moon was brighter and they seemed made of white bone. [...]"
{Stephen Spender, Journals 1939-1983}

I am thoroughly contradictory.

"3 October 1980
[...]
I said I knew very well what he meant, because I had been reading Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads that morning. Wordsworth wrote in 1800: 'A multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.' Wordsworth felt as Harry does.

Harry is at the centre of things. Paranoia means that he thinks incessantly about the outward forces that are destroying inner peace. His 'madness' consists (a) of thinking that the disturbance of the world is all directed at one person--him, and (b) of taking what is really poetic metaphor as poetic truth. If poets are associated with madness it is because some poets have inhabited a world of their own metaphors, taking them quite literally. Perhaps, in ancient times, poets were holy madmen.

I found the conversation tiring, because I understood it so well. Harry was talking about the realities I know and run away from. [...]"
{Stephen Spender, Journals 1939-1983}

I have wasted much of my life on anger and fear. An early awareness of the hypocrisy and evil of Empire. Hearing Johnny Lydon scream w/ PIL: "Anger is an energy!" in a car on Clearwater Beach one afternoon in middle school years.

"Thanksgiving" always a reminder of dead Indians and dead Africans.

I'm now thankful for those who led me to these two LPs when I was in 8th grade:

1. The Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks

2. The Clash, Sandinista!:

"It's up to you not to heed the call-up
I don't wanna die
It's up to you not to heed the call-up
I don't wanna kill"

polemical

"Picture us cooling out on the Fourth of July
And if you heard we were celebrating
That's a worldwide lie"
{Public Enemy}

Same goes for this "Thanksgiving."

A Statement by Venezuelan Intellectuals Against Chavismo

Today, the newspaper Tal Cual published a statement signed by more than one hundred Venezuelan intellectuals urging all Venezuelans to vote "Sí" against Hugo Chávez at the Reafirmazo, which begins on Friday, November 28. I include their statement and my translation of it below, along with a partial list of the writers and artists who signed the document.

(Accents didn't all come through in the Spanish version. I still can't figure out accents and ñs on this blog.)

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"Nosotros, escritores y artistas, queremos sumar nuestra voz a la mayoria de los venezolanos para llamar a firmar con decision y contra toda amenaza la solicitud del referendo revocatorio del Presidente de la Republica, a partir del proximo 28.

Convencidos como estamos de que no hay otra salida civilizada a la dramatica e insostenible situacion del pai­s que darnos la posibilidad de decidir nuestro futuro. Confiados en que la sociedad venezolana encontrará las claves de la paz y la reconciliacion, la transparencia democratica y el desarrollo material que hoy se nos niegan. Igualmente queremos decir, porque es nuestro oficio y destino, que, despues de estos años marcados por el dolor, atisbamos la reconstruccion de una cultura consustanciada con el devenir nacional y deseosa de una distinta espiritualidad colectiva, sin exclusiones. Que deje atras la abulia y el desprecio, el aldeanismo y la miseria sectaria de la actual administracion cultural cuyos emblemas mas visibles podrian ser los desmanes contra el personal calificado de la Biblioteca Nacional, la destruccion del patrimonio artistico urbano o la conversion de nuestros teatros mayores en degradados escenarios partidistas.

Firmar es afirmar los más pristinos valores civicos y democráticos."



(English translation)

We, writers and artists, want to add our voice to that of the majority of Venezuelans to make a call to sign, firmly and against all threats, the solicitation for a recall referendum for the President of the Republic, beginning on the 28th.

Convinced as we are that there is no other civilized solution to the dramatic and unsustainable situation of the country, aside from allowing us the opportunity to decide our future. We are confident that Venezuelan society will find the keys to peace and reconciliation, democratic transparency and the material development that are denied us today. Likewise, we want to say, because it is our job and our destiny, that after these years marked by suffering, we envision the reconstruction of a cultural sphere directly tied to the nation's future and inspired by a different type of collective spirituality without exclusions. A sphere that will leave behind the apathy and hatred, the provincialism and sectarian misery of the present cultural administration, whose most visible emblems could be the excesses committed against qualified personel at the National Library, the destruction of our cities' cultural patrimony, or the conversion of our theaters into degraded partisan stages.

To sign is to affirm the highest civic and democratic values.

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Partial list of signatures:

Edda Armas
Rafael Arráiz Lucca
Alberto Barrera Tyszka
Oswaldo Barreto
Elizabeth Burgos
Rafael Cadenas
Israel Centeno
Carlos Cruz Diez
Jacqueline Goldberg
Patricia Guzmán
Sofía Imber
Ana Julia Jatar
Oscar Marcano
Ibsen Martínez
Milagros Mata Gil
William Niño Araque
Maria Fernanda Palacios
Yolanda Pantin
Armando Rojas Guardia
Elizabeth Schön
Milagros Socorro
Guillermo Sucre
Ana Teresa Torres
Adriana Villanueva
Pedro León Zapata

Chicanismo

At hilaritas, Heriberto Yépez reprints a recent article he wrote for the newspaper Reforma in Mexico City about the U.S.-Mexico border during the last decade. Very interesting discussion of the Americanization of the border and the Chicano-ization of Mexicans.

Making me think about what has always been a central element of my life, deracination. For many Latinos in the U.S. (whether we were born here or elsewhere) life is a slow bleed, a continual loss of _______________. How many Latin Americans have I encountered in academic settings who dismiss the Chicano and the U.S. Latino as pariahs, as incapable of creating culture? (A= Many) Of course, plenty of U.S. Latino literature is easily dismissable. And yet.

I am not a Chicano but I am. Writing in languages that do not "belong" to me. Impure, misspelled, we pochos are maybe ghosts from the future sent to frighten Latin Americans.

What is undeniable is the sheer destructive force of the United States as an unprecedented empire, as it makes its way through the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Arab world. And we colonial children, here inside the U.S., have been recolonized countless times. Part of my desire for writing and reading is that it allows me a space for travel, where I can organize my scattered ancestries. With no illusion of ever being completely "Venezuelan," "American," "Venezuelan-American," "Latino," etc. Thinking and living in pieces.

Del río hondo aquí / Elizabeth Schön


Born in Caracas in 1921, Elizabeth Schön's poetry is distinguished by its mystical and philosophical tendencies. Schön's collection Del río hondo aquí was published in 2000 under her own editorial imprint, Editorial Diosa Blanca. Last summer, the Semana de la Poesía (a week-long series of lectures, readings and conferences in Caracas) was dedicated to her work.

I want to thank my friend the poet Yelimar Becerra for lending me her copy (autographed!) of Del río hondo aquí, from which the following four translations are based.

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From the Deep River Here (excerpts)


"Ah del río completo"

Ah, the complete river
with Andromeda between prows
and Ulysses between his anchors!



"Hay un río semejante al cielo"

There's a river resembling the sky
at the bottom of the mountain
Upriver, in the tree and summit
and another, likewise, in the dream
dream of beings



"Ágil el alma"

The soul is agile
if it follows the inimitable spaces
of those golds, those blues
ready to rescue the ephemeral in our origin



"Ángeles opacos en la extension"

Opaque angels on the landscape
blue reflections from an above
equally blue over waters
The afternoon, the day
The tracks wait for dark
The gold has a strange skin like sable

Juan Sánchez Peláez (1922-2003)

This past Thursday at dawn, Juan Sánchez Peláez died from cancer in Caracas. Horrible news in an already dreadful year. A beautiful poet, whose words accompany me everywhere.

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"IX

Soplo el grano, paso el dedo en la llama. Me envanece la palabra que hallo, que busco en vilo, riberas arriba o abajo, absorto, pleno (de mí, del rumor), ahíto y solo.


X

Yo voy por mi laúd, descalzo
El poeta se ausenta en el arbol de mi mudez.
recoge a la zaga, en confines, mis fetiches vacíos.

La ciega de amor en su cima no ve mis giraflores.

Miseria en mis viajes por tan exiguo equipaje.

El ímpetu, la evidencia abrupta de mi ausencia.
Por el náufrago ruega mi bella de brazos cruzados."

{"Otra vez otro instante," Filiacion oscura, 1966}

Jean Grae!!

Her new EP is fantastic. She pulls off a chorus that consists of "Fuck you" repeated so beautifully on the opening song. She is one of those raw, jagged and intellectual rappers that one hardly sees nowdays. The song "My Crew" is on continuous rotation here in my mind:

"I represent for a Nation
Thought we was in it together
But I guess it gets strange
When money reigns in sunny weather
Tougher than leather..."

Entrevista / Rafael Cadenas

translated from Rafael Cadenas, Antologia (Madrid: Coleccion Visor, 1999)



Interview

In his final days
the old poet
reached the Great Uncertainty;
but since he had become reticent
he gave no details about his state.
He only felt--he declared--
that he had lost his life.
I would rather know what he didn't say
over any one of his poems.
Perhaps he, too, couldn't see
where the mistake was;
but throughout the conversation
a dilemma emerges between the lines: art
is an offering
or vanity.

My Boston & Fanny Howe

A frantic pace with work, city, family and words innundating me. Autobiographical impulses. I was born in Boston in 1970 and left when my parents moved to Caracas in 1976. Although I returned here regularly, including 3 years of high school in the 1980s, when I settled here in 1998 (again, for "school") it was a complete shock for me to realize how little I knew about Boston. I do feel "at home" here, but living in Boston has made me realize how nowhere is completely home for me. No lament, just an awareness of melancholy, displacement, etc.

There have been certain poets whose work has helped me understand my place in Boston. One of these poets is John Wieners, who I feel lucky enough to have met briefly. One memorable reading he gave was at the now-defunct Waterstone's Bookstore, off Newbury street in 1997 or 1998. Fanny Howe read with Wieners that night, and since then I've found pieces of my Boston in her work as well. This afternoon, I've been reading the introduction to her recent book of essays The Wedding Dress (2003). The Boston she remembers (from the 1960s to the present) in her introduction, is one that in many ways remains the same:

"Encircling this rather quiet and interior domestic quest was the city of Boston and its racist and violent rejection of progress, desegregation, dialogue. Louise Day Hicks and the vociferous Boston Irish were like the dogs and hoses in the South. No difference. Boston, always segregated into pockets of furious chauvinism--from the North End to the South--from rich white sections of Cambridge to poor working-class areas there--did not know how to separate issues of race and class. The poor were set against the poor, while the rich continued to glide around the periphery dispensing moral judgements."
(xii)

"There is very little cross-cultural exchange even at the most privileged level in Boston. From that point down, the divisions have enlarged and darkened and continue to enlarge and darken."
(xiv)

"I quickly learned that white people are obsessed with race, and the subject comes up at least once in any three- or four-hour gathering. One night I went to a small town in Massachusetts to give a reading, and when I entered the room where an all-white group of people had gathered afterwards, they were saying, "If the lines ever get drawn, and the situation gets seriously violent, I know which side I will be on." And then they began to speak (liberals, all of them) about their fear of blacks, and their judgements of blacks, and I had to announce to them that my husband and children were black, before hastily departing.

This event has been repeated so many times, in multiple forms, that by now I make some kind of give-away statement after entering a white-only room, one way or another, that will warn the people there "which side I am on." The situation most recently repeated itself about a hundred times in my presence over the subject of O.J. Simpson. His name was like the whistle of a train coming down the line, and I knew what was coming--vindictive racialized remarks, coming from otherwise socially progressive white people. You would think that he had organized mass murders and guerilla warfare on American streets. Louis Farrakhan is the only other public person who produces the same reaction. On these occasions, more than any others, I feel that my skin is white but my soul is not, and that I am in camouflage."
(xviii-xix)

My Boston is mapped by color, and I too often feel "camouflaged." Thinking about the mestizaje in my own family, in this city I am a camouflaged being, a mixture of white, Indian, Black, "Spanish," Venezuelan, "Mexican," etc. Sometimes "passing" for a few moments but usually trying to navigate Boston's class and racial map as unnoticed as possible. Ellison's "invisibility" as a method.

Howe's daughter, Danzy Senna, has written so much of this "mixed" and Black Boston in her amazing first novel, Caucasia. At one point, the book's narrator, a teenage girl named Birdie, mentions how the subway map of Boston effectively graphs the racial divisions of the city: blue line, orange line (Black and Latino), red line (poor and wealthy whites), etc. Reading her novel, at times, for me was a way of finding out what city I had been living in as a child.

What I love about Boston is the presence of so many writers whose work I admire. I find the city to be as divided as Howe describes it, yet in some way the books I encounter are part of that other, intellectual city I aspire to live within. I can't imagine staying here permanently, but for now it works. What I dread about Boston is the dull repetition of the same situation Howe is referring to and how these politics of race and class get played out on a daily basis. At work, on the street, with my white family, etc. Many dramas with no resolution in sight. But I'm grateful for Fanny Howe's attempts at writing a different city, for her poetic Vision.

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Reading Nick Piombino's wonderful comments today on Walter Benjamin in relation to blogging.

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Also, Leny Mendoza Strobel's comments on Barbara Jane Reyes' work-in-progress "Poeta en San Francisco":

"How wide does an angel's
Wingspan have to be to
Carry all your sorrow?"

Oraciones para un dios ausente / Martha Kornblith


three versions from Oraciones para un dios ausente (Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1995)

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"Mi universo tematico"

My thematic universe
only encompassed
three meager phrases:
I think that you
say that I
say that he
thinks of me
in a bad way.

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"La calle esta llena"

The street is full
and there's a woman
at the bottom of a room
weeping alone.

She loves a man
who writes theory.

She remembers that day
full of last goodbyes.

It's night,
and outside
I'm raining.

Because it's Friday,
December
and you're leaving.

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"A veces"

At times
one must
return to memories
to annul memory,
annihilate vestiges,
other lives,
salute old links,
decapitate ancient papers,
stumble again,
so they come back to say
and not have,
not possess anything.

Conjunto residencial / Rafael Cadenas

Residential Grouping

You can listen to the wind again here.

It passes through the buildings, sways
the pine trees, freezes the drive-in theater.

Dweller from nowhere,
I can’t say to you: “Listen, listen,
be my spirit.”
There is only a waiting
at night,
but no one has the strength to speak to you
as they did in enthusiastic times.
You are what you are, a solitary voice
that resounds in the city suburbs.
The words they directed at you have also disappeared
like the hallucinatory leaves.
This is another world, there is no direction.

The wind, when it strikes,
punches into chaos.




{ Rafael Cadenas, Antologia, Madrid: Colección Visor, 1999 }