Beach

Textos del desalojo

Between 1973-1975 Antonia Palacios (Caracas, 1915-2001) wrote the astonishing collection of prose poems called Textos del desalojo (excerpted at Kalathos). I sometimes translate the title as Homeless Texts, even though it sounds wrong. Palacios writes after ghostly preoccupations in this book. A figure sitting alone for days in a house in the center of the valley, far inside from the city around her. Ancient city, slowest movement trees quantum. Another writer I'd call secret.

*

Prose as a travelling feature, influence of travel in the XVIII and XIX centuries on the novel. Part of my essay should address how Roque Dalton and Roberto Bolaño's final novels are centered on a journey motif, the destroyed Russian countryside of 2666, and the dawning, crowded country bus entering San Salvador from the rural outskirts (returned from the dead) in Pobrecito poeta que era yo.

Thinking of these novels as partly being written under the spell of Walter Benjamin, in Bolaño through the Baudelaire epigraph. Dalton's poets are Baudelairean, the first page in a bar in San Salvador. From those instants after the opening credits have faded begins the deliberate abandonment of a central, epic narrative. Dalton's poet in the final pages returns to the city alone and penniless, disguised as a poor campesino, en route to exile from where he writes the novel.

*

"This is an old song, these are old blues
And this is not my tune, but it's mine to use"
(Joanna Newsom)

*

Saludos a los lectores en Tampa.

Trans-Caribbean

In the opening verses of his long poem "The Prodigal," Derek Walcott invokes a prose-like meter for his lines. Sections of the book suffer flat lines and images. But Walcott is writing a subtle Black Atlantic English, somewhat in correspondence with French and Spanish traditions (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, García Lorca, Borges and the Boom novelists).

"In Autumn, on the train to Pennsylvania,
he placed his book face-down on the sunlit seat
and it began to move. Metre established,
carried on calm parallels, he preferred to read
the paragraphs, the gliding blocks of stanzas
framed by the widening windows—
Italian light on the factories, October's
motley in Jersey, wild fans of trees, the blue
metallic Hudson, and in the turning aureate afternoon,
dusk on rose brickwork as if it were Siena."

With over 100 pages of these lines the intent is epic in the most reduced manner possible. The voice a register of locations, bodies, images semi-dissolved in memory as they happen. Old age and the separation of text and self. The ennumeration of what places the poem can imagine, even a semi-nightmare excursion in Colombia, armed escort inland from the coast. The effect of prose in its concise idioms.

I read a different engagement with travel and location in Juan Sánchez Peláez's later work. The prose poems in Sánchez Peláez's collection Rasgos comunes (1975). Its mood evokes a quality the critic Antonio López Ortega identifies in another poem from that collection, in his essay "Carta de Caracas." Experiencing (as we do today) a spiritual and political lack in oneself, the nation invoked through silence, as a function of poetry's hermetic yet public methods in Venezuela. Anticipating the bleakness and grace of his final handful of poems published in 2001 in El Universal's literary supplement, Verbigracia.

The poet absolves himself from any specific location, an internal exile, a series of journeys relived or foreseen, imagined or remembered. This intuition of quantum distortions of time occasionally contained, maybe sketched, by the prose. A flat, near-invisible tone framing the poems. A political awareness of saturation, a decline of vision (self or society) even amidst order or wealth. The wealth eventually becoming words, phrases locked by the text.

Sánchez Peláez writes a Venezuelan surrealism that occurs minimally, poised as in a wilderness, the city shadowed by Monte Ávila's green hovering tsunami. The poem made in Caracas also includes Iowa, New York, Liverpool and Paris in its trajectories. The penultimate city showing up in his final book Aire sobre el aire (1989). "Los viejos"* serves as a prologue to the title poem sequence, autumnal paring down of a collection to 14 poems. The dream or song of old people living in a hotel in Liverpool in this excerpt, prose instants:

"en una aldea que
pertenece a la luna
o en un hotel de Liverpool
no hay sino instantes
no vengan a contradecirme
mis pensamientos
vanos
hay eso
que sobra
nos falta
y
zozobra"






_______________________________________________
* An earlier version of this poem was published in Mexico by Octavio Paz's magazine Vuelta (July 1987).

Turntable

Sure enough, Kevin Young read several selections from his Basquiat book last night at his reading for the Blacksmith House Poetry Series. It's the only book by Young I've read all the way through. I'm not always a fan of some of his more narrative poems or the slam aspects of his delivery. Hearing the Basquiat poems reminded me why I enjoyed To Repel Ghosts so much: Young's effort to engage Basquiat in a dialogue, letting his three-line stanzas grapple with specific images and phrases in the paintings. In these poems, biography and art remain indissolubly joined. I look forward to reading The Remix.

*

I hadn't listened to the Silver Jews until their latest album, Tanglewood Numbers (Drag City, 2005). David Berman's monotonous voice ends up making sense after a while.

Also on Drag City, Joanna Newsom's album grows more beautiful with each listen. Tangled lyrics through a sharp, sometimes piercing voice.

Sigur Rós Takk (Geffen, 2005) is also on the turntable, helping me practice my Icelandic.

Conduit

I enjoyed hearing Anselm Berrigan read these poems and others last Thursday night at MIT. Tom Raworth read his own poems quickly, sometimes mixing in words in Latin or French, other moments in English but quickly disappearing into the frenetic rhythms of his delivery. (Jack Kimball writes about the evening at his blog.) Both of them, along with Bill Corbett, read excerpts from the massive Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan.

Tonight we'll go hear Kevin Young read in Cambridge. Hoping he might read sections from his great Basquiat book, To Repel Ghosts (Zoland Books, 2001), which I noticed has been "remixed" for its paperback edition this year.

*

I sit at readings and concerts recently thinking about my own work and how I present it on the page or at a microphone. I've got a very small number of poems I'm sifting through to read in Ithaca in a few weeks. Scores of disposable journal pages, notebook lines that dissolve upon reading them. The poem has to emerge of its own, without my hand.

I also plan on reading a few of my English translations from one or two Venezuelan poets. So much of what I translate ends up becoming a part of my own identity as a writer. Certain Venezuelan poets whose work I inhabit: Martha Kornblith, Juan Sánchez Peláez, Rafael Cadenas, Elizabeth Schön.

Or, other semi-secret poets one acquires without money, from friends and friendly books, in bookstores and pamphlets across the misconstrued reading universe. From Peru, César Moro, Emilio Adolfo Westphalen and Javier Sologuren.

The letters Moro wrote from Mexico before moving back to Peru. How much of a distance exists between the mythical page and the mundane life. Three of his letters to Westphalen and the poem included in Editorial Pequeña Venecia's excellent edition of his letters can be read online here.

*

A conduit between two languages, their equivalencies and disjunctions. I plan on posting translations of recent columns by Colette Capriles, Oswaldo Barreto and Joaquín Marta Sosa over the next few days. Part of what motivates these newspaper translations is how little most Americans know about Latin America (much less Venezuela).

I browsed through Richard Gott's newsly-released book on Venezuela last night, Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution (Verso, 2005). I enjoyed his first book on Venezuela very much, partly because Gott is such a thorough historian. However, Gott's accounts of its political crisis are so obviously biased toward chavismo, they read like cynical Soviet propaganda. Especially when one knows just how desperate life has become for most people in Venezuela.

After a certain point, one begins to question where exactly the American and European left actually stand today regarding Venezuela and Cuba. Who is seriously advocating the type of Stalinist regimes these two countries currently endure? Venezuela's dictatorship is of course still developing, as of yet uncharted.

*

To undertake a balance between silence and this necessary speech. To write as quietly as possible, engaged with the material consequences of reading. The script broken in notebooks, pulse of screen monitors, dear readers abandoned for trees, ice on select branches, closed windows for the rain to beat upon. It's the secret, poets.

DB

The Devendra Banhart concert at Somerville Theater was great musically, he began seated in blue docksiders on the floor of the stage to sing "Quedate Luna" more slowly. In certain songs an utter command of phrasing and the weight of choice words.

The surrounding hippie antics by students were tiresome in such a small theater. His band amplified many songs, playing well. Thinking about Banhart's evocation of race and ethnicity on this album, what intent some of his Spanish songs carry or impose. How invisible is Venezuela in his music? Not as a measure of his art. But what is that tremor in "Luna de Margarita," almost a wailing.

Opening verses, folk style sung in caraqueño Spanish, "Pero me voy a tomar un traguito ahora..." The Beatles in Spanish after an introductory epitaph. (The Guardian misreads the Spanish songs on the album.)

"White Reggae Troll/Africa" gets boring for me, though. Not quite The Clash's ability to maintain reggae dub productions and beats on Sandinista!. For masterful vesions there's also Jerry Garcia c. 1977.

*

Israel Centeno has posted his short story "El golpe" (The Coup) at Citizenmurder.

Socialismo y libertad / Héctor Silva Michelena

Socialism and Liberty

David Hume (1711-1776) said: "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." This is what happens daily in Venezuela, step by step, even beyond the Constitution and the laws, and against the right of the entire nation to freely elect their economic systems and their leaders. I liked the interview Mariela León conducted with Asdrúbal Aguiar (El Universal, 10/03/05), whose answers were stupendous. I cite a telling paragraph: "The lawyer seeks to call attention in front of the constant and measured advance of el proceso in its strategic new map that intends to eliminate the market economy, the regime of liberties and private property, now ambushed." Aguiar can't explain to himself why we don't notice the imminence of the danger.

The jurist provides his explanations, but perhaps Hume's phrase clarifies the point.

The New Map is of great importance, because the actions deriving from it are restricting liberty. Chávez has clearly said that "we must transcend capitalism in order to embrace socialism."

What does this all mean? We know that in el proceso Chávez and Castro are the ones who think and decide; those who execute orders are punished if they emit another opinion. The New Map is the real National Plan.

In classic socialism one aspired to the conscious guidance of the economy, by means of central planning; there had to be an upper branch of technicians and a single leader, whose actions could not be disturbed by means of discussion. In Venezuela today that New Map is the chavista substitute of the Stalinist Central Plan. If the lines emerge from a single center, what good are the market, cooperatives, co-management or endeogenous development? One should also remember that for the governing echelons of chavismo—this is not so with its base—decentralization is a neoliberal instrument. Fleeing from Satan, the country and its institutions have been strongly centralized.

This represents the survival, in Chávez's actions, of the authoritarian tendencies of old socialism, which meant the nationalization of the means of production and central planning.

Today the conception has changed. Socialism fundamentally means a profound redistribution of income through the beneficient State, with the cessation of a few productive measures. In this interpretation the deleterious effects of centralization on fundamental liberties are produced more slowly and indirectly and insensibly.

It has been demonstrated that the final result, when there is no rule of law, tends to be almost exactly the same, even if the path is different.

The coming of socialism was going to be the leap from the kingdom of indigence to that of liberty. In actuality it led to a shame as brutal as that of the Holocaust: the formation of the Gulag and of a citizenry afraid of espionage and the shot to the head. This asphixiation of liberty was a decisive factor in the fall of socialism. The masses watched the collapse of the oppressive Empire with disdain and tore down its symbols. The social ends had justified all means, including torture. May we never hear Lord Acton's (1834-1902) premonition: "The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion for equality made vain the hope of freedom."




{ Héctor Silva Michelena, TalCual, 10 October 2005 }

Revolución al revés / Demetrio Boersner

Reverse Revolution

The "Bolivarian revolution," recently remade as "socialist," has the peculiarity of ignoring the lessons of previous attempts toward an emancipatory or fair structural transformation. Instead of traveling through the stages that define the progressive experience of other latitudes, the chavista process jumps over these very moments and, in this way, it becomes historically reactionary.

When the bourgeois classes (tied to commerce and urban life) of medieval Europe fought to emancipate themselves from the asphixiating domination of the feudal lords, they intuited the necessity of allying themselves with another sector, of different but coinciding interests against the feudal powers. That natural tactical ally of the ascendant bourgeoisie was the centralizing national monarchy. Only after having created States and national markets in alliance with absolute kings, the bourgeoisie revolted against these in revolutions already oriented toward liberalism.

In the subsequent era of the syndicated and political rise of the working classes anxious to eliminate unfair labor relations and establish social democracies, the most outstanding theorists and leaders of this movement always recommended searching out tactical allies in the heart of the democratic bourgeoisie: to fight side by side with the least exploitative middle classes, those most open to the idea of social justice, against the most recalcitrant and oppressive managerial sectors.

In the historical process of national and social emancipation of Latin America during the XX century, facing the foreign economic hegemony allied with internal oligarchies and dictatorships, the interest of popular sectors to count on the effective support of our "national bourgeoisie" was obvious: progressive managerial sectors, promoters of national industrialization projects in cooperation with democratic public powers, in order to create modern homelands where stages of advanced social democracy could be projected later on. Such strategies were accomplished with partial but effective success in several Latin American countries.

Before president Hugo Chávez and his volunteer and anti-dialectical advisors, the idea did not occur to any Latin American "revolutionary" to direct the attacks, not against the principal adversary (which is surely transnational and globalizing capital), but rather against the national bourgeoisie, the creator of spaces for independent industrial progress and, consequently, a natural ally of a nation with aspirations for a better life. But that has been the conduct of the "reverse revolution" we are now living: the incessant politics of aggression and threats against the Venezuelan private sector (including the agricultural managers who are not "latifundistas" but rather national capitalists), destroys the achievements of forty previous years of modernizing transformation and worsens the nation's dependency before transnationals and imperial power.




{ Demetrio Boersner, TalCual, 14 October 2005 }

"I slept all day..."

Though I've heard of her for months now, I hadn't listened to Joanna Newsom's great album The Milk-Eyed Mender (Drag City, 2004) until tonight.

*

Alma Guillermopietro has published an excellent two-part series of articles on Venezuela in The New York Review of Books. I highly recommend both pieces:

-"Don't Cry For me, Venezuela," The New York Review of Books, October 6, 2005.
-"The Gambler," The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005.

Guillermoprieto takes the time to look closely at the Venezuelan political crisis. Her articles include an interview with Teodoro Petkoff, as well as a discussion of recent books by Alberto Barrera Tyszka, Cristina Marcano and Colette Capriles.

"Strongmen or caudillos like Chávez, and dictators, too, have always depended on fervent popular support to consolidate their hold on power. How else could they push through the measures that deny their opponents access to a fair hearing or fair trial, or fair elections, and cripple the press? They profit as well from the weird joy many people take in watching a strongman exert his power." ("The Gambler")

Footnotes

1.
"Zadie Smith is already famous for being in the world, for knowing and loving its diversity. Her characters are down to earth: they are coarse, fat, bald, myopic, have uneven teeth, they talk their own talk, and are, in short, human, living all they can since that's all they have; but she is nevertheless with Forster because she cares about religion, prophecy, philosophy. The main resemblance between the two books goes beyond the plot allusions everybody talks about. What lies behind both is an idea of the novel as what Lawrence called the one bright book of life—a source of truth and otherworldliness and prophecy."

(Frank Kermode, "Here she is," London Review of Books, 6 October 2005)


2.
"Y Nadja Yurenieva vio a Ansky y se levantó discretamente y salió del paraninfo en donde el mal poeta soviético (tan inconsciente y necio y remilgado y timorato y melindroso como un poeta lírico mexicano, en realidad como un poeta lírico latinoamericano, esos pobres fenómenos raquítico e hinchados) desgranaba sus rimas sobre la producción de acero (con la misma supina ignorancia arrogante con que los poetas latinoamericanos hablan de su yo, de su edad, de su otredad), y salió a las calles de Moscú, seguida por Ansky, que no se acercaba a ella sino que permanecía a la zaga, a unos cinco metros, una distancia que se fue acortando a medida que el tiempo pasaba y el paseo se prolongaba. Nunca como entonces Ansky entendió mejor—y con mayor alegría—el suprematismo, creado por Kasimir Malévich, ni el primer punto de aquella declaración de independencia firmada en Vitebsk el 15 de noviembre de 1920, y que dice así: <<Queda establecida la quinta dimensión.>>"

(Roberto Bolaño, 2666, pp. 908-909)


3.
"In this 'time' of repetition there circulates a contingent tension within modernity: a tension between the pedagogy of the symbols of progress, historicism, modernization, homogeneous empty time, the narcissism of organic culture, the onanistic search for the origins of race, and what I shall call the 'sign of the present': the performativity of discursive practice, the récits of the everyday, the repetitions of the empirical, the ethics of self-enactment, the iterative signs that mark the non-synchronic passages of time in the archives of the 'new.' This is the space in which the question of modernity emerges as a form of interrogation: what do I belong to in this present? In what terms do I identify with the 'we', the intersubjective realm of society? This process cannot be represented in the binary relation of archaism/modernity, inside/outside, past/present, because these questions block off the forward drive or teleology of modernity. They suggest that what is read as the 'futurity' of the modern, its ineluctable progress, its cultural hierarchies, may be an 'excess', a disturbing alterity, a process of the marginalization of the symbols of modernity."

(Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 351)

Paraísos artificiales / Juan Cristóbal Castro

Artificial Paradises

Large cities have gotten into the habit these years of belonging to the third world. Each summer they've decided to recreate one of the best marvels of that season: the maritime landscape, the inclement sky's intense blue and the whitish sand of its virgin beaches. Last August in Montreal one could see, in Ile Saint Helene near the Jean Dreapou park, an immense lagoon which has been surrounded by dirt and a scattering of tropical plants.

Likewise in Paris all along the Seine they've placed small sandy areas where citizens can, with umbrellas and all, enjoy the sun's luminous rays.

The proposal doesn't cease to surprise us. The horrible cement and concrete spaces are transformed into exotic locations that revive the praises of a Saint John-Perse or a Paul Valéry when singing to the sea. Everything has been a product of a researched decision. Mayors, governors and neighbors have given themselves the task of rebuilding these spaces, of implanting these places as if it were merely a matter of artificial stitching. Huxley's utopian dream is around the corner. Already the first world citizen, lover of exoticism, will be able to hedonistically enjoy its artificial paradises; borrowing a few words from Baudelaire that, while they do refer to drugs, designate these territories as toxic as the pharmaceuticals the poet sampled.

Suddenly a novel by Bioy Casares came to mind. In Plan de evasión prisoners are submitted to an infamous experiment for life. Always locked behind four walls they are built a tropical world, thanks to technology. The deception is less a salvation than a mechanism of punishment. But it's also a way of redemption because the invention was intended to be incorporated with other people. And aren't all forms of messianism thais way? Controlled dreams of radical change.

Perhaps these first world citizens, forced into the order of Capital, are living beneath that fiction; I don't doubt that eventually they could even reach the point of recreating revolutions for a while, to escape monotonous bourgeois life. Something that generates a certain amount of distrust: Are we perhaps a part of that simulation? At least one thing stands out: that the Adamic words of our revolutionaries might be so similar to the Edenic projections of a Christopher Columbus when he discovered America. Now I understand Ignacio Ramonet and his partisans. They're calmly catching some sun with us.




{ Juan Cristóbal Castro, TalCual, 11 October 2005 }

Dylan/Dalton/Bolaño

The water too cold to swim, some leaves turning orange or brown. A cluster of hundreds of small birds (sparrows) hovering over sand dunes and marshes in several parts of the harbor on Sunday morning. The beach at silver dusk, rocks dipped in ripples.

*

In the footage Martin Scorsese gathers for his Bob Dylan film, one scene stands out for me. It's when Dylan and The Band are on tour in England in 1966 and someone in the audience yells out "Judas!" as they're preparing to play.

Dylan scowls back at the anonymous heckler: "I don't believe you... You're a liar!" He turns to The Band and laughingly says, "Play it fucking loud!"

*

The image of a poet walking into San Salvador alone from the wilderness outskirts, at the end of Roque Dalton's novel Pobrecito poeta que era yo (1976), is repeated (translated) during an episode from the later pages of Roberto Bolaño's 2666. The months a fictional German novelist named Beno von Archimboldi spends in a Russian village in WWII, where he finds the journal of a 1930s Soviet poet, hidden behind a chimney in an abandoned house. Archimboldi was separated from his regiment and wanders the Russian countryside for weeks, living there and reading the poet's journal, which ends abruptly. Stalinist purges among literary circles, authors silenced or unpublished. The journal as a private form, an intimate and subvervise form.

Dalton is concerned with a testimonial account of a poet's political and aesthetic ordeals (and how this can be an allegory of the nation, "El Pulgarcito," site of countless ideological debates in the 1980s, beginning in some ways with Dalton's murder in 1975), narrated after a miraculous survival but still tinged with the factual postscript of Dalton's eventual troubles with sectarian violence. How much of the novel is to be read as autobiographical testimony?

Bolaño's Archimboldi is also an untraceable protagonist, one who initiates his own Baudelairean version of how a novel is lived or written. Archimboldi's Russian experience makes up a novella within the novel, with long extracts from the Soviet poet's journal. As in Benjamin's essays, invoking Baudelaire.

*

"Habla de la figura de Baudelaire que aparece en un extremo del cuadro, leyendo, y que representa a la Poesía. Habla de la amistad de Courbet con Baudelaire, con Daumier, con Jules Vallés. Habla de la amistad de Courbet (el Artista) con Proudhon (el Político) y equipara las sensatas opiniones de este con las de una perdiz. Todo político con poder, en materia de arte es como una perdiz monstruosa, gigantesca, capaz de aplastar montañas con sus saltitos, mientras que todo político sin poder es sólo como un cura de pueblo, una perdiz de tamaño natural."

(Roberto Bolaño, 2666, Anagrama, 2004, p. 912)

*

"Estaba escriturado hasta el detalle en los memorándums de la naturaleza que ese día sería el de mi segundo nacimiento. En menos de diez minutos, cuando aún ni siquiera había normalizado el ritmo de la respiración alterada por la escabrosa carrera, comenzó a subir hacia el centro del cielo negro la luna más grande que he visto en mi vida, una luna como para telón de fotógrafo de feria o para reducir al absurdo una tela selvática del aduanero Rousseau. Todo quedó claro como el día. Es lógico que decidiera continuar caminando, ya sin las desventajas de la negra carrera. Caminé, caminé, caminé, rabiosamente. Caminé hasta caer al suelo de cansancio, después de unas cuatro horas de subir y bajar lomas. Siempre he sido un buen caminador a pesar de mis pulmones nicotinizados y trasnochadores de cien temporadas teatrales (bueno, digamos, veinte), siempre llenas de segundas actrices temperamentales y emocionables en el momento preciso. Pero en esta ocasión esas cuatro horas fueron demasiado. Al caer al suelo, antes de dormirme, pensé que habría caminado por lo menos unos dóce kilómetros y que me quedaban veintitrés hasta San Salvador. Pensé además: ¿qué tipo de persecución habrán emprendido en mi contra? ¿Patrullas o cerco? ¿Ambas a la vez?"

(Roque Dalton, Pobrecito poeta que era yo, UCA Editores, 1994, pp. 439-440)

La pobreza como condena / Antonio López Ortega

Poverty as a Curse

Material poverty, of course, but also infinite spiritual poverty. Times of misery but also times of the death of ideas, of anachronisms, of ideological survivals. What vision of the world today can validate concepts such as nutritional security, endogenous development, asymmetric warfare? The poverty of ideas is a reflection of the poverty of goods. “Poor poor country”—said the motto of a seminar promoted by the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello not long ago—. Our essential, primary, unavoidable theme is the theme of poverty. Poverty in all its facets: not only that of the beggar who asks from a wheelchair, of the street performer who entertains with balls of fire at stoplights, of the Wayúu Indian girl who crashes her little face against your car window; but also that of political leadership, of public institutions, of the educational system. Nothing escapes the putrefaction and each day we submerge ourselves more in the mud. A minister makes a declaration and his language is trash, a mayor speaks and his ideas are trash, a teacher gives a class and thinks his students learn something. It has already been decades of deterioration, malnutrition and mental dysfunction. Organic masses who wander, who spend their day rummaging through the trash, who collect cans in sacks.

In the 1960s the middle class, which is the one that makes a country grow, represented more than 20%; today it barely exceeds 10%. The most poverty-stricken [la clase E], on the other hand, make up more than 50% of the population according to recent surveys. There is no locomotive that will pull such a heavy and immobilizing load. If the statistics keep rising, if the deterioration is not contained, a wave of mendicancy will flood everything: properties, land, streets, gestures, beliefs, worldviews. There is no greater curse than poverty; or, better said, there can be no future without a reversal of poverty. But to add to the ills, in a period of oil earnings without precedents, the governmental rhetoric (or what is today understood as the State) actually disconnects itself from society. Just as in earlier periods, the “Petrostate” deploys its maximum splendor: the agenda does not include the social anxiety but rather a phantasmagoric rosary that includes assassinations, invasions, bilateral conflicts, internal enemies. The supposed great solution is no different from past formulas and has evolved very little beyond assistance formats, which is like keeping a dead person always at the edge of death.

It is convenient for a certain State that it all be this way, for a certain State occupied in other affairs it is convenient that the great masses remain ignorant, that they resign themselves to their crumbs, that they remain imprisoned within their daily misery, so that it can perpetuate its power and domain. Because the other option, the real and qualitative leap, the real and decisive inclusion, will always bring political risks. True sovereignty, at least in modern democracy, is individual sovereignty, the independence of spirit, the forging of criteria. We are speaking of an actual citizen, associated with work, with education for his children, immersed in the chain of economic circulation, and not this old-fashioned and battered collectivist rehearsal that confiscates properties, denigrates wealth and covers its own inefficiency by blaming those who produce it. It is easy to rule in poverty; what is difficult, because it is upright and worthy, is to rule amidst the prosperity of citizens. A society of the poor is equal to a poor government and poor discourses. An endless chain whose links continue to grow.

But these chains, as our National Anthem reiterates, can be broken, even if it is done unconsciously. The image of a man who during the Caracazo disturbances [in 1989] jumps onto a car, or carries a slab of beef ribs over his back, speaks not so much of looting but of re-appropriation. Poor Venezuelans can be in the most extreme misery but they associate the notion of progress with goods: the little piece of land, the little house, the little car. Material goods, their own, earned through sweat. Ignorance may be widespread but everyone coincides in recognizing a State, yesterday and today, as all-powerful as it is useless, as grandiloquent as it is incapable of generating sources of work and diversifying the economy. We suffer under the State because it has not exercised its essential role: to be the catalyst of social and economic change.

Old recipes are sold like new ones while the great evils remain. If the social explosions of past eras responded to causes that still remain, nothing allows us to think they can’t happen once again. Desperation gives bad advice and can take us through bad roads. But we would also have to understand that all human existence has limits and hunger is one of them. If the bulk of our society continues to sleep, doped up by misery, let us hope to God its awakening won’t be as violent as the ones from past eras.




{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 4 October 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"

"Los moradores"

BB

R & I

*

From the 3rd until the 7th of October, the XII Semana Internacional de la Poesía is taking place in Caracas, sponsored by the Casa de la Poesía José Antonio Pérez Bonalde. The poet whose work is being honored this year is Alfredo Silva Estrada (Caracas, 1933).

The festival's organizers have announced that this year's edition will be the last one (see El Universal article linked above). At a news conference the director of the Casa de la Poesía, the poet Santos López, said: "...la poesía es liberación, no es revolución sino rebeldía." [Poetry is liberation, it is not revolution but rather rebellion.]

I've translated Silva Estrada's poem "Los moradores" into English at my Antología blog for this month. (This is a first draft I will be adjusting over the next week.)