The Smelting Process Podcast: Recent Episodes
The Smelting Process
Regularly published podcasts of literary translations from works by major & marginal writers from Latin American countries & elsewhere. Episodes also include interviews with artists, writers & film-makers who address multilingual & multi-cultural issues in their work.
In this poem from dark night of the body, the Peruvian poet, Jorge Eielson takes his exploration of the physiological to a deeper level, a level of dissection without disgust, without moral sentiments of any kind. The poet counts extremities "as were they cherries or grapes". One problem that arises in the translation of this poem is located in the first line: "Cuento los dedos de mis manos y mis pies". In Spanish, "dedo" refers to either "fingers" or "toes"; however, the line would become quite clumsy if it were "I count the fingers on my hands & toes on my feet". Due to this, "digits"– both the medical terms for finger & toes –has been preferred, partly because it captures this semantic aspect of the line, but also because it plays off the idea of "counting", albeit this double meaning does not exist in the "dedos" of the Spanish version. This sheds light on the translation process in general. While it commonly thought that the translation of a poem loses poetic elements of the original, this example shows that a translation can also add poetic elements without doing harm to the poem itself.
It seems intuitive that truth ought to be sought after by any person, no matter how the degree of seriousness, the frequency, the method. We believe in truth. We believe in everyday truths & hold people accountable for them. In fact, while the truth can set you free, it can also lock you up or even reward you with a death sentence. But what would happen if one were able to "forget about truth"? Or, to use Pessoa's phrasing, if truth forgot about me? In this poem, signed by Álvaro de Campos, Pessoa explores the part of human being that years to be severed from truth, to be exempt from the necessity to seek it, to suffer its absence, to always live in its shadow.
The Peruvian poet, Jorge Eduardo Eielson, explores the double-meaning of the "body" in his collection "dark night of the body". In this context, it must be understood anatomically & textually alike: it is the human body that is the body of work, or the body-as-text. Eielson's anatomical language– a list of body organs –is closely linked to the emotions: the "shine of pain" & the illness "whose name is melancholy". Etymology sheds light on this, since "melancholy" comes from the Greek "melan-" (black, dark) & "cholē" (bile). The theme of melancholy warrants the anatomical language; it links the physiological to the emotional.
Jorge Eduardo Eielson is one of Peru’s most unrecognized poets & artists, which is greatly do to the fact that he expatriated to Italy early in his life, only to return twice. The poem “prior body” comes from a short collection called “noches oscura del cuerpo” (dark night of the body), published in Rome, 1955. It’s made up of 14 short “bodies” of poetry. One point of interest, with respect to the form, is the fact that Eielson uses no commas throughout the entire collection. He regularly substitutes 3 blank spaces for commas, colons or semicolons & replaces a period by breaking a line. His modification of grammatical function is innovative & represents the subtlety of gesture in his poetics.
The poetry of Brazilian poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, saw several transformations throughout its development, with the publication of 31 books in the poets lifetime. This poem was originally published in 1928 in the magazine Antropofagia. The simplicity of the language adds to the focus of the observation of the "stone", which is not only in the middle of the road, but it also "halfway" (i.e. incomplete, trying to arrive), & this, in turn, makes it a perfect metaphor for the human condition as it is found in the modern period.
Under the heteronym, Ricardo Reis, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa wrote poetry altogether different from that which he wrote at the hand of Álvaro de Campos, whose poems have been presented previously on this blog & podcast. Reis has come to be known as the "sad Epicurian". This means that, accordingly to the principals of Epicurian thought, one can find happiness in almost every situation through the moderation of desires & passions as well as through the cultivation of friendships. Moreover, with this stoic optimism the fear of death is avoidable & is advisable to avoid if finding happiness in any situation is the objective. However, while Reis maintains this, his optimism does not reach the same degree as that of traditional Epicuriansism; given that he is nevertheless modern.
In this poem, the game of chess serves as an effective metaphor for vocation in general. The metaphor is dramatized by the nearby war occurring which the two players indifferently ignore. Particularly challenging in the poem is the fact that the players do not even go to the rescue of their wives & children when they are being raped, killed, maimed, etc. This, however, is because in Epicurianism there still exists a hierarchy; which in our humanitarianism, is practically non-existent.
Also from Against the Professional Secret, Vallejo here places us in one of his favorite scenes: before the tribunal. This allows the Peruvian poet to explore the ideas of justice, guilt, innocence & responsibility through numerous perspectives. Indeed, his three month incarceration in Peru was clearly a big part of his proclivity to take up the topic– especially because he was unjustly imprisoned & since it took the Peruvian government 8 years (!) to formally express a pardon. Nonetheless, here Vallejo explores the relationship between the accused & the collective that will decide his fate. The figure of Milad– his likeness –is the key to the piece. Is it that this double simply extracts the guilt out of the "murderer" because of this likeness, or is it that the likeness itself convinces the "accused" that he is guilty, that he is the murderer?
Girondo published his first collection of poetry in 1922 (the same year that brought us other cutting edge works, such as Finnegans's Wake, The Waste Land, Trilce, The Enormous Room, Paulicéia Desvairada, The Marine Cemetery, etc). In this poem, "Exvoto"– the Latin derivation meaning "offering" –Girondo satyrizes the "chicas de Flores", an affluent neighborhood of Buenos Aires. He pokes at their pretentiousness, snootiness in a way that is likely chauvinistic; however, if we take in its historical & cultural context, we do not interpret Girondo the machista, but Girondo the general thorn in the side of a society that was still struggling with all the classist baggage left over from a major immigration to Argentina. Exvoto comes from 20 Poems To Be Read On The Tram, which is definitely not his greatest poetic achievement, but its importance is indisputable, since it pronounces the trajectory of modern Argentine literature– both in theme & form –& places Girondo alongside Vallejo, Andade, Arce & Huidobro in that group of innovators that brought modernism to Latin America.
In a collection of short prose pieces titled, Against the Professional Secret, César Vallejo formulated a measured response to Cocteau’s essay The Professional Secret. By 1926, Vallejo had already expatriated from Peru & was living in France, from which he would venture off to Russia twice in order to get a first hand experience of the revolution. In this essay, Vallejo attacks the idea of simultaneity with regards to substantive reality. In the context of literature, this enables him to counter the aesthetics of Cubism & Surrealism, where reality is represented as fragmented. For Vallejo, reality is a parade, where everyone & everything is in line, & moves forward in a succession, one after the other. It is not hard to see the Whitmanian influence here, though clearly being pushed towards a Marxist ideology, which the Peruvian does indeed do in other parts of this collection.
In this poem from Persuasion of the Days, Girondo takes up the theme of perversity by demanding that he be flogged, precisely because he deserves it. It is curious that his "defense" is a series of acts which he never took part in, and for this, he deserves the punishment. The attitude of the poem is completely in line with the book in general & can be compared to themes from late Romanticism and the European Decadents, such as Baudelaire in verse & Housman (see Against the Grain) in prose.
The sense of deficiency comes through this poem in the poet's declaration of the ineluctable. Coming from Persuasion of the Days, Girondo here uses the dog as an emblem of man; a dog which cannot be described, which is one of a kind &, ultimately, which makes him want to "break a chair".
There is a certain vision of existence that comes through, it would seem, the description of this dog who is similar to other dogs & at the same time quite distinguished from its mother & father. In this sense, he is an "orphan" and his reality is comparable to that of Vallejo's "orfandad de orfandades" in Trilce.
This poem as well comes from Persuasion of the Days– one of Girondo's later works –& it is representative, in form & content, of that collection. There is an unmistakable feeling of nausea that emanates from these lines; not just a feeling of extreme disgust, but also that of groundlessness, which comes through the word when we interpret it with all its etymological richness from the Latin "nausia" (seasickness). So then, what is it that makes our speaker nauseous here? What triggers the extreme disgust? What pulls the floor boards out from under him?
Another poem from Girondo's collection, Persuasion of the Days, here we find a sort of ode to procrastination. The presence of a somewhat physiological vocabulary calls to our attention & directs us toward the concrete. The length syntactical phrasing is characteristic of Girondo in Persuasion..., where he manages to create lists of clauses that serve the same syntactic function. In the aesthetic, this contributes to the overall sense of boredom; a boredom that severs the speaker from his future projects, reveals his past to him as obligation and leaves him in the present. But, this suspension is temporary, which is why the wait is "insaciable".
Only so much can be done in a day, in a week, in a month, in a year... only so much. What happens when pro-activeness deflates & the bleary eyes only see those activities beyond the attainable? In this poem, from Persuasion of the Days, the Argentine poet Oliverio Girondo explores the unattainable, with an almost Epicurean tone. (It would not be a mistake to compare Girondo here with the poems of Ricardo Reis, one of Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms).
Using his hometown as the main image of the poem, Pessoa here touches on the feeling of nostalgia which arises out of insomnia: "I want to imagine anything, & something else always comes up". In our modern vocabulary, we might say that he suffers from anxiety, but, what does this really mean? Might this not just be a way to bury a profound act of consciousness under the sod of a clinic definition? The speaker wants to go to sleep, but can't because there is always another image, another sound, another thought to be contemplated; another feeling, another memory, another sensation to be perceived. Insomnia, in this sense, points toward a heightened state of awareness, a continual peeling off of the self from itself (i.e. Sartre's being-for-itself) which aims with all its might at sleep, here a symbol for a kind of being that simply "is" or that "is and is nothing else".
If we can make the stark (& perhaps unfair) distinction that one is either contained by the world or that one contains the world inside oneself, then Pessoa, in this poem signed by Campos, belongs to the second category. Campos here contains the world, observes it like a little crystal ball inside a secret room, where no one else is permitted to enter. & by the power of containing the world inside himself, he is not in the world nor can he enter it.
In a curious way, rearranging the apartment, or even just one room in it, can provide a deep sensation of Order. We may tend to attribute the value we place on Order to our own productivity (i.e. having an orderly desk makes it easier to pay the bills on time), but there seems to be more to it than that. & while some may argue that Disorder has replaced Order in our (post)modern society, it would entail the same type of involvement, but now inversely.
In this concise yet dramatic poem, Pessoa uses Álvaro de Campos, the naval engineer, to pose a series of questions whose answers are only available through the act of living: what’s with my reality, that I only have a life? The figure of the Caesar at the end is bound to arouse humor, but what does it mean? What does it mean to be a Caesar? Have I been one without knowing it? Have I been many?
Trilce LXX, another poem by the Peruvian poet, César Vallejo, again presents the reader with the decision of how to interpret the abnormal line-breaks or enjambments. For those of you familiar with Lima, you'll notice that the capitalized "Barrancos" does not only refer us to "cliffs", but also to that seaside borough of the city [...]
Álvaro de Campos is one of the heteronyms used by the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa. The others he used were Ricardo Reis, Alberto Cairo & in his prose, Bernardo Soares. The use of these must be differentiated from simply using pen-names, since these were truly characters, each with their own personalities, appearances and attitudes, which Pessoa masterfully designed & described in numerous letters & journals. In future posts, we'll endeavor to define each of the heteronyms in order to contrast their poetics [...]
One of the more daring poems of the collection, Trilce LV has aroused considerable dispute as to whether its form is that of a "prose poem", which would mean that the lines get wrapped at the ends without consideration to the line-breaks, or whether it is not a prose poem, which would mean that those line-breaks are important & essential to the poetic therein [...]
One of the central themes of Trilce is Time, with a capital T. Vallejo is never at a loss for ways in which this theme can be woven into that heteroclite poetic which emerges from his most daring work. The language of Trilce LIII is difficult, to say the least, & after recovering from the jaw-dropping imagery, one is undoubtedly left to ask about the meaning of the poem. Perhaps, to obtain an understanding of Vallejo's concept of Time... [for more, visit www.jwmulligan.wordpress.com]
In a unique critical essay written in Paris, though published in Lima (El Comercio, 1924), Vallejo lays his cards on the table & openly discusses the shortcomings of North American poetry in the 20’s. In that piece, he suggests that Imagists, such as Pound & Doolittle, were simply riding the coat-tails of the “artificial” vanguards of Europe & that the only hope for American poetry was through Walt Whitman (more on this elsewhere. Vallejo saw in Whitman sincerity without style [...]
Another translation of a poem by César Vallejo's "Trilce". One of the shortest poems of the collection, Trilce XXIX reaches a surprising level of complexity & depth in just 9 short lines. The “tedio enfrascado” is emblematic of the book as a whole; it is the same tedium or boredom that comes through the prison poems surrounded ‘by the four walls of the cell’ [...]
Vallejo’s second collection of poems, Trilce, does not bear any other titles than roman numerals. There do not appear to be any organic sequences in the collection, however, numerous scholars have pointed out that certain poems can be grouped together, based on their thematic content, the poetic devices employed & biographical data that has been acquired over the last 80 years or so. Concerning this last category, it’s important to know that about one third of the poems in Trilce were written in the Trujillo jail, where Vallejo had been imprisoned on trumped up charges of “intellectual instigation”. In its totality, the theme of the jail takes on a monumental role & allows the poet to explore the idea of incarceration not only as a personal experience, but as an existential condition as well. Trilce XX is one of these ‘jail poems’. It’s also noteworthy that this theme also receives expression in Vallejo’s last publication before expatriating– Escalas (Scales) –where a series of prose poems can be seen as a very close link to the poetic exploration that takes place in Trilce.
This poem is drawn from César Vallejo's avant-garde masterpiece, Trilce. Originally published in 1922, it stands alongside other monumental works of literary Modernism, such as The Wasteland by Eliot, Finnegan's Wake by Joyce, The Enormous Room by Cummings, The Marine Cemetery by Verlaine and 20 Poems To Be Read On The Tram by Girondo, among others.
One defining characteristic of Oliverio Girondo is his ability to explore new poetic forms. One only needs to compare a poem like his– Gratitude –from his later collection Persuasion of the Days, with any of the poems from his first or section collections: Twenty Poems to be Read on the Tram and Decals, respectively.