Last Update:
11/6/09
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Issue 13/14 2009 Special Double Issue
Featuring Chilean Poetry Today
Chilean Feature includes new translations of work by Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Nicanor Parra, Roberto Bolaño and numerous other contemporary Chilean authors, guest-edited by Mariela Griffor.
This double issue also includes major work by Paul Celan, Eugenio Montale, Mahmoud Darwish, Carolyn Forché, Eleanor Wilner, Jean Valentine, Gerald Stern, Anne Waldman, Jane Mead, D.A. Powell and Katie Ford.
Solids and Non-Solids
Jane Mead
The air is solids and non-solids.
The person is solids and non-solids:
Solids and non-solids all the way down.
Halo of leaves. Aura of notes.
No kidding. All the way down.
Forgotten and not forgotten.
Candle. Matches. Needle. Down.
The old-fashioned stream remains.
Lost. Lost. Loster. The mind
saying loster all the way down.
Pink down of the barn-owl.
Wing crushed in mud. The road ditch.
Donkey
Gerald Stern
How God in three religions rode on his back
and one there was a festival and one he
dragged his feet on the ground until the dust
filled his sandals; and what we say is the mane
is hogged and you can fold your fingers around
and through and there are stripes that make him a zebra
though they are muted and he is a Chevy mostly
with a slant V6 and a tufted tail and a strip
in the center of the windshield which since it was
a type of truck it carried two enormous
pouches and died suddenly after a hundred
thousand miles or after a lifetime of burdens
as a donkey does, first looking up for
it was his last piece of affection and he wanted
something more than he got though he was grateful,
and dying they both look up with grass in their teeth
or filthy handkerchiefs in their round metal mouths.
unfortunately typical song lyric
D.A. Powell
iron carbide permeates my sleep
razor against strop
the metallic screech of brakes
at each shingled whistlestop
and the iron horse careens through the night
like a bullet from a pistol shot
if I were a train, I’d shuttle back and forth
between you and the boy I love
if I were a train, I’d smash through the wall
of your bedroom
and the firetrucks would have to come
to put us both out
electric lights compete for my attention
they pulse on and off
like the chopping blade of a Cuisinart food processor
that wants to break me apart
and stretch me like the glutens in winter wheat
if you think you’ll knead me
then just press “start”
and if you think you’ll eat me
then have a piece of my heart
and if I were a quilt, I’d cover more than one man:
I’d be on you and the boy I love
if I were a brush, I’d smother your face
with shaving cream
and the barberchair would pump you up and up
close enough to feel the blade
there are atoms smashing in my brain
they refuse to stop
until the mushroom cloud begins to rise
in my bikini crotch
and the sand on the beach is a smelting pot
this little atoll is getting hot
and if I were a nurse, I’d attend to you and
I’d sponge your body like you’re the boy I love
if I were a clerk, I’d wait on you hand and foot
and chest and thigh
and I’d wrap your clothes in parcels
of the finest butcher paper
if I were in love, I’d be in love with you
and one or two others who’d substitute
when you and I had had enough
of the smell of each other’s soap
and “no more tears” shampoo
ooo, ooo, oooo
—for Jascha. & at least one other
Jean Valentine
At the library
she passed a tray with little
books of baked earth on it—
Take one,
and eat it;
It is sweet,
and it is shed for you.
How can I live?
said Earth—
Then Abraham
Jean Valentine
Then an old man came down out of the thicket,
with an axe on his shoulder, and with him
two people made out of light
—one a blameless son,
the other like a Vermeer girl,
on their way back down with the old man.
Still, all the history of the world
happens at once: In the rain, a young man
holds out a blue cloth
to caress her head
at the landing-pier
of the new bride.
You can’t get beauty. (Still,
in its longing it flies to you.)
Prayer of a Man in Snow
Israel Emiot
Today there is no bloodstain on the snow;
nobody was shot; there's just snow and snow
around you—snow
in you snow—white on white.
O protect me God from snowy Words:
You have been weighed and found wanting.
God has numbered thy kingdom and finished it.
The face of the village: snow.
The sky that has nowhere to fall—
and sinks into snow.
The little gates swinging in the wind—
so much to say and only saying: snow.
For the village face—snow;
for morning prayers—snow, added prayers—snow, sunset
prayers—snow,
for east, west, north, south—snow,
a man in snow
a dog in snow
a horse in show.
This dear little day counts like a child
up to two:
one—snow
two—snow,
snow, snow.
Translated from the Yiddish by Leah Zazulyer
Untitled
Israel Emiot
I will trade the bread for a small box of tobacco,
already accustomed, already resigned to a day without bread;
what shall I do?—for even in the Yabbok book
such a death, such woe, couldn't be read.
Fed up, the everlasting march in a line, march in a line,
and it's a blessing to be dead, with your feet to the door;
I have already forgotten if I should walk on two all the time
or completely crawl like a beast on all fours.
Translated from the Yiddish by Leah Zazulyer
A Prayer in Nineteen Forty-Three
Israel Emiot
Good God, look I'm poor, and trip over myself,
and my child wears shoes three times his size,
and plays with children, falls, and runs crying to me,
as I to you—with and without a reason.
I know all prayers crown you in gold
and address the most exquisite words to you;
still, don't insult the prayer of a child, who just wants
his own bed, and has to sleep fourth on the ground.
Your song—the day—I read and admire daily;
I still marvel at your last verse—your sunset,
but when I want to praise you my hands fail me!
Oh do not punish me, even my shirt is borrowed.
Wisdom tells me man is insignificant,
and earth the least of all your spheres;
still, do not punish me; listen to the lament
of a child who sleeps fourth on the ground.
For H. Lang
{Kazakhstan, war years}
Translated from the Yiddish by Leah Zazulyer
From Xenia
Eugenio Montale
4.
We had studied for the afterlife
a sign of recognition, a whistle.
I’m trying to modulate it in the hope
that all of us are already dead without knowing it.
Translated from the Italian by Pattie Wells
From Xenia
Eugenio Montale
5.
I never understood whether I
was your faithful and distempered dog,
or you mine. But not to others,
for them you were a myopic insect
lost in the twaddle of high society.
Those clever ingenious ones
did not know they
were your laughing stock:
you could see even in the darkness
and shock them with your infallible
sense of smell—and your bat’s radar.
Translated from the Italian by Pattie Wells
From Xenia
Eugenio Montale
12.
Spring emerges with the pace of a mole.
Never again will I hear you talk of poisonous
antibiotics, of the nail in your femur,
or the patrimony plucked from you.
Spring advances with its dense fog,
its long daylight and unbearable hours.
No longer will I hear you wrestle with the backwash
of time, of ghosts, or the logistical problems
of summer.
Translated from the Italian by Pattie Wells
Greek Blood
Radu Andriescu
Badge believed he had Greek blood in his veins and in consequence
the whole of the world was a fishing boat and the whole of the sky
a bottle of rum
the night was balmy and Hellenic, you could pass through it
in just a shirt
Badge walked the streets of Iaşi in shirt sleeves while the frost
bit fiercely
one night while music was dissipating hazily between
the two undivided rooms of his garret digs
while I was befriending a vicious runty dog
his fur half mangy
more than ugly
Badge broke the landlady’s sink with an empty bottle of Russian
vodka
the bottle had to get broken, the bottle as with the Greeks
his Greek blood drained from his body to the rotten wood of the
staircase
the cur G.G. sniffed and licked it
outside the cold was doing its utmost and not until much later
did he come to learn
it had only been through marriage, do you catch the drift? only
through marriage
anyway his short Greek life
had been wonderful
Translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin with the author
Nights in Panciu
Radu Andriescu
On a collective farm in Panciu I climbed with a turkey hen
to the roof of the canteen
we looked around, it was fantastic, I was chortling
she was clucking, a bit frightened
she was a white turkey hen
we could hear voices songs loud curses from the dining hall
the long dormitories next door oozed silence
on all sides only grapevines, I clutched her to my breast
she was frightened
she was like a book you open for the first time
I took her to the canteen, I placed her in front of the singers
her shy movements were more graceful than
a ballerina’s
in her whitest tutu
I took her into the dormitories, I swallowed the protests
she was whiter than the bed sheets
from the roof of the canteen we’d seen the world together
Translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin with the author
Introduction to the Chilean Section by Mariela Griffor
New Age in Chilean Poetry
Mariela Griffor
Poetry is charged with the unconscious. It involves the constant search for a new language–to bring the unconscious forth in a world composed of words. But if the language we seek no longer exists, how do we express such vital truths on paper? How do we construct the language we need? To construct such a language has been the most important challenge in Chilean poetry in the last thirty years. Why such a challenge? Disruptive events, like economic disasters and political and military repression, isolation from the world and dislocation inside one’s own parameters of identity, create issues that are not easily resolved in language.
In Spain, it took at least thirty years since the end of Franco’s regime for Spaniards to define and discover a new language of expression, one capable of articulating the experiences left by Franco and his government. It took so long not only because the language prior to Franco was old, passé and unprepared for such a task, but also because considerable time was required to heal that part of the language that had been injured. That injury was initially manifested as the inability of individual poets to adequately express their experience of the horrors and repression from the years under the oppressive regime.
In Chile, the situation was even more complicated. The methods of repression were somewhat more sophisticated than those of Franco’s. In Chile, too, people were killed, their bodies disappearing without a trace. Many were tortured, and fear became the one pervasive truth endured by those who survived. One in three families in Chile had a relative in compulsory military service, and these families were segregated from the civilian elite. Despite the first months of violence after the coup d’état, Chileans rather quickly returned to some mean approximation of normalcy, and life continued superficially as it was before. Perhaps it is not without a reason that the rest of Latin America calls Chileans the English of Latin America.
However, many Chileans were not able to accept or adapt to these changes. The writers, began to scavenge the ruined soul of the language for alternative sources of inspiration: Elicura Chihuailaf and Cecilia Vicuña searched for their roots in Mapundung; Elicura Chihuailaf found his source of inspiration in the universe of memory and in his own history as a child.
*
When the old definitions of poetry no longer worked, poets began to define things by their opposites. Nicanor Parra is famous for creating “Anti-Poetry.” Later, another poet, such as Cecilia Vicuña, attempted to create “precarious works”—ephemeral installations in nature, cities and museums—as a way of “hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard.”
The poem is the animal
Sinking its mouth
in the stream.
This work of re-definition continues today. For example, while the work of a poet such as Chihuailaf comes from the consideration of family experiences, the outcome of his considerations is different from the typical confessional poem on family matters so prevalent in the U.S.A. today. Chihuailaf heard what was hidden in the whispers of adults. He paid attention to what was happening in the rest of the country, far away from the safety of his native city of Cunco. He remembered what his elders had said as they sat around the fireplace drinking mate. Since he had been told as a child that poetry is worthless, he began to invent a language that gave his writing new value and meaning, uniting oral tradition with an original conception of the world where the essence of his experience could be resuscitated as elegy:
Poetry is good for nothing
I am told
And in the forest the trees
caress each other
with blue roots
and wave their branches in the air
greeting with birds
the Southern Cross
Poetry is the profound whispering
of the murdered ones
the rumor of leaves in the fall
sadness for the boy
who preserves the language
but has lost his soul
*
The Chilean poet’s understanding that “who preserves the language … has lost his soul” is a feeling perhaps not unusual for writers from countries under repression. Reading these words one is immediately reminded of Brecht’s famous guilt for having survived as a German in World War Two. But the tragedies of Chile happened before our very own eyes: people disappeared, books were banned and burned in front of our eyes, while at the same time we became blinded and deafened and muted by technology, by movies and TV melodramas and video games, all of which radically altered what remained of reality. The possibility of impartiality was somehow obliterated. The ability to understand, to create a powerful language, to bring the life of the unconscious into poetry, and to be consumed and transformed by the fire of individual suffering and truth had been snuffed out, “for the boy who / preserves the language / has lost his soul.”
*
Compiling this anthology has been a very personal experience for me. As the only member of my family in exile with no possibility of reentering the country for ten years, I experienced many of my family’s most important moments only through videos they had taken at weddings, communions and the like. One of my most painful experiences with poetry happened a few years ago. My family had sent me a video of a poetry reading. Two poets, one old and one young, both used the word motherfucker in their poems.
As a kind of experiment, I watched the video with the sound off. Whenever the older poet said the word, I could feel his pain, anger and hate, all reflected in his eyes, in his body. Every time he came up against an unspeakably harsh experience, the word motherfucker appeared, as it often appears between couples before they divorce; they scream at each other; then they swear at each other. They are completely consumed by pain and desperation until finally they can’t talk anymore. They can no longer find a way to express their feelings in words. What has happened to them? The younger poet, on the other hand, used the word motherfucker as simply a literary resource, a stylistic element, without hate or anger.
I did research on both poets. They had both been in jail, and the old one was tortured, as were many known and unknown poets of my country. The word motherfucker revealed in him a darker, deeper secret: the loss of the language as a tool of expression of his unconscious mind. The language was not enough. The time had come for inventing new ways of expressing our dark experiences during the time under dictatorship.
Poets say that rhythm in poetry is comparable to three bodily functions: the beat of the heart, one’s manner of walking, and one’s way of breathing. I would say that rhythm is one of the aspects of language that Chilean poetry uses to bring forth the unconscious. If any of the pieces of the bridge is broken (or missing), then we need to reestablish a common language to repair it.
This is the challenge of this anthology: To show the variety and the commonality that has been achieved in contemporary Chilean poetry. To help its readers understand the ways poets in Chile and outside of Chile are reinventing themselves and finding their own identity through a common language, if not, through a common experience.
I'm going to wrinkle this word,
I'm going to twist it,
yes, it
is too smooth,
as if a large dog or a large lake
had passed its tongue or water over it, over it,
for years. Years.
I need ferrous salt
in the word, I want the desdentada
of land,
iron salt in the word,
the blood
of those who have spoken and those who have not spoken.
I want to spit the thirst
inside the syllables:
I want to lick the fire
in the sound:
I want to hear the darkness
in the cry. I want to
spit the words,
words stone as virgins.
Translated by Anna Beth Young
The Heavenly Poets
Pablo Neruda
What have you done
you intellectualists? Rilkistas?
you fucked up mystifiers, fake witches?
existential poppies shining on a tomb?
you pale grubs in the capitalist cheese?
What did you do
about this dark human being?
about this head
submerged in shit?
this essence
of raw life?
You didn't do anything but run:
you sold piles of debris
you looked for heavenly hairs
cowardly plants, broken fingernails
"Pure Beauty" "Spell".
Your works were those of the poor and terrified
trying to keep your eyes from looking
trying to protect their delicate tangle of pupils
so you could make for your living
a plate of dirty scraps which the masters flung at you.
Without seeing that the stones are in agony,
without defending,
in the cemetery when the rain soaks the motionless
rotten flowers on the grave.
Translated by Anna Beth Young
To See Him Again
Gabriela Mistral
And never, never again?
Not on nights packed with a few stars,
or in mornings’ first slender sun
or afternoons sacrificed to afternoons?
Or at the edge of a pale road
that surrounds the farm fields,
or a rim of a trembling fountain,
whitened by a moon?
Or beneath the forest's lush poplars
where, yelling at him,
I was overtaken by the night?
Not in the grotto that returns
the echo of my words?
No. To see him again --
it does not matter where --
in heaven's dead water
or inside the boiling hole
or still moon or in bloodless fright!
To be with him.
To be every springtime and winter,
united in one pained knot
around his bloody neck!
Translated by Mariela Griffor
Your attention, ladies and gentleman, your attention for one second:
Turn your heads for a moment to this part of the republic.
Forget for one night your personal affairs,
Let pleasure and pain wait at the door:
Hear the voice from this part of the republic.
Your attention, ladies and gentlemen! Your attention for one second!
A soul that has been bottled up for years
In a sort of sexual and intellectual hole,
Feeding itself most inadequately through the nose,
Yearns to be heard.
I’d like to figure out a few things,
I need a little light, the garden’s swarming with flies,
My mind’s a disaster,
I work things out in my own peculiar way,
As I say these words I see a bicycle leaning against a wall,
I see a bridge
And the official car disappearing between buildings.
You part your hair, that’s true, you walk in the public parks,
Under your skins you have other skins,
You have a seventh sense
Which lets you in and out automatically.
But I’m a child calling for its mother from behind rocks,
I’m a pilgrim who makes stones jump high as his nose,
A tree crying out to be smothered in leaves.
Translated by Mariela Griffor
The Tablets
Nicanor Parra
I dreamed I was in a desert I was sick of myself
And I started beating a woman.
It was devilish cold, I had to do something,
To shoot someone, take a little exercise;
I had a headache, I was tired,
All I wanted to do was sleep, die.
My shirt drenched with blood
And between my toes were hairs—
The hair of my poor mother—
"Why do you hurt your mother," a stone asked,
A stone covered with dust, "Why do you abuse that woman?"
I couldn't tell where these voices came from, they gave me the shivers,
I looked at my nails, I bit them,
I tried to think of something but without success,
All I saw around me was a desert
And the image of that idol
My god who watched me do these things.
Then came a few birds.
And at the same moment, in the dark, I discovered some slabs of rock.
With a supreme effort I managed to make out the tablets of the law:
"We are the tablets of the law," they said,
"Why do you abuse your mother?”
“You see those birds that have come to perch on us”
“They are here to record your crimes."
I yawn, I am bored with these admonitions.
"Get rid of those birds," I said aloud.
"No," replied a stone,
"They represent your different sins,”
“They are there to look”
So I turned back again to my lady
And started to let her have it harder than before.
I had to do something to keep awake.
I was under obligation to act
Or I would have fallen asleep among those rocks
And those birds.
So I took a box of matches out of one of my pockets
And decided to set fire to the bust of the god.
I was dreadfully cold, I had to get warm,
But that blaze only lasted a few seconds.
In desperation, I looked for the tablets again
But they were gone:
and the rocks, the rocks were gone.
My mother had abandoned me.
I beat my brow. But
There was nothing more I could do.
Godzilla in Mexico
Roberto Bolaño
Hear me, my son: bombs were dropping
all over Mexico City,
but no one realized.
The air spread poison through
the streets and open windows.
You’d just eaten breakfast and were
watching the detectives on TV.
I was reading in the next room
when I knew we were going to die.
Despite the dizziness and nausea I dragged myself
to the dining room and found you on the floor.
I held you close. You asked me what was happening.
I didn’t tell you we were on death’s telethon
but I whispered, We are going on a journey,
you and I, together, don’t be afraid.
When leaving, death didn’t even close our eyes.
What are we? you asked a week a year later,
ants, bees, wrong numbers
in the great spoiled soup of chance?
We are human beings, my son, nearly birds,
public heroes and secrets.
-A version by B. H. Boston
Lisa
Roberto Bolaño
When Lisa told me she had made love
with another, in the eternal telephone booth of life
in the market in Tepeyac, I thought the world
ended. A tall thin man with
long hair and a long cock, didn’t wait even
one night to penetrate her to the core.
It’s nothing serious, she said, but it
is the best way of getting you out of my life.
Parmenides Garcia Saldana had long hair and could
have been Lisa’s lover, but some
years later I saw he’d died in a mental hospital
or committed suicide. Lisa didn’t want
to lie any longer with losers. Sometimes I dream
of her and see her happy and cold in Mexico
designed by Lovecraft: We listen to music
(Canned Heat, one of Parmenides Garcia Saldana’s
favorite groups) and then we make
love three times. The first time he comes inside of me.
The second time inside my mouth, the third, hardly a thread
of water, a short fishing line, between my breasts. And all
of that in two hours, Lisa said. The two worst hours of my life,
I said from the other end of the line.
Translated by Mariela Griffor and B. H. Boston
Prayer to a Farm Worker
Victor Jara
Rise up and look at the mountain, from
where the wind, the sun, the water arrive.
Thou, who determines the course of
rivers, thou who scatters the flight of
your soul.
Rise up. Look at your hands. Join
hands with your brothers, together
in blood we go. Now is the time that
can be tomorrow. Tomorrow.
Deliver us from the men of
misery. Take us to your kingdom of justice and
justice. Blow like the wind the gorge’s flower.
Clean the fire
in the barrel of my gun.
Thy will be done
here on Earth. Give us your strength and
your courage in combat.
Blow like the wind the field’s daffodil.
Clean fire in the barrel of my gun.
Rise up and look at your hands. Join
hands with your brothers, together
in blood we live,
now and at the hour of
our death. Amen. We live. Amen.
Translated by Mariela Griffor
From UNUY QUITA
The Water Sequence (fragment)
Cecilia Vicuña
The poem is the animal
Sinking its mouth
in the stream.
Translated by Eliot Weinberger
IN MEMORY OF PAUL ELUARD
Put the words in the dead man’s grave,
the words he spoke in order to live.
Cradle his head among them
let him feel
the tongues of longing,
the tongs.
Put the word on the dead man’s eyelid,
the word he refused to speak
to the one who said “thou” to him,
the word
his heart’s blood rushed past
when a hand bare as his own
knotted the one who said “thou” to him
into the trees of the future.
Put that word on his eyelid:
maybe
his eye, still blue,
takes on a second, stranger blue,
a second blue,
and the one who said “thou” to him
dreams with him: we.
YOU TOO SPEAK
You too speak:
you speak last,
say your word.
Speak–
but never split No off from Yes.
Give your word a meaning:
give it the shade.
Give it enough shade,
give it as much shade
as you know is parceled around you
between midnight and noon and midnight.
Look around:
how everything comes alive–
In the presence of death! Alive!
whoever speaks shade speaks truth.
Now, though, the shade where you stand is shrinking:
Where now, shade-stripped?
Upward. Grope your way up.
You grow thinner, less perceptible, finer.
Finer: a thread
a star would like to slide down on:
to be able to swim down there
where it observes itself glimmering: in the flow
of drifting words.
Left to My Own Devices
The floor's level now. It was as easy as moving
a red handle, as buying a jack, as cutting a hole
in the floor, as being born, as translating Rilke badly
but with the exhilaration of one who loved
flipping the pages of two dictionaries simultaneously.
Not the panther poem but some other
Austrian lyricism I've forgotten, how many of my moments
are contrails, bold, white slashes
against a blue background that are gone the next time
you look up from your turkey sandwich? You
and your box lunches. I suspect jets are really a means
for the birth of contrails, that forgetting
is a form of life, just as knowing for certain
where the keys are should have a species name. No matter.
I'll never be six foot tall so I hop a lot,
and at the top of the hop, I'm probably six two,
six three, so I write that down on forms
that want to know how tall I am, as if a blank space
is really curious. The form is not specific
about duration—how tall are you and how long
have you been that tall—so the question
is either demure or badly phrased. The difference
between the thought of the thing and the thing
goes away for Caroline when she gathers and staples
her skin. There's just the pain. It's not a word
or a ball of sunlight, it's this very specific attempt
not to scream so her husband won't know
what she's doing to the thigh he doesn't visit much
these days. Is there a point, you might be asking,
and I might be telling you no, not beyond the shape
of a god up ahead as we're walking,
which when we get to it, is not a god but a naked
piece of stone. The days have stacked into who I am
but if I met one of them again, out on the street,
I doubt I'd recognize it. It could ask me the time
and I wouldn't know it was my past, the irony of this
would be lost on me, it would float off wherever
forsaken irony goes, and someone in an official smock
would trip the "we're running low on irony siren"
but it wouldn't work, thus increasing our stock of irony,
praise the Lord. I'd be sad if trees stopped telling
the truth. I mean really, really sad, like rusted lug nut
sad, you out on the highway with your flat, beating
what won't let go with the lug wrench, then sitting there
with bits of bottles thrown from cars, sorting shatter
by color and shape.
Psalm of Filling the Rental Car
For the director of music. To the tune
of static.
Man eating from a dumpster at a BP
off Middlebelt in Romulus.
From an apple core, then a burger first wiped
against the dumpster, to remove ants,
maybe, maybe
maggots. Early March, grime-snow
lines the roads. Jets
drop from the east, the air is paper,
torn. He never looks up, he is dilligent,
he is fed. I do not forget the mouth
of Your promise.
How servant my eyes, pitfalls of hope.
Who will bring us
to the fortified city? I fail
greatly. My soul faints like smoke.
A Poet Among Us
On a winter night in Beirut twenty-two years ago, a physician working among Palestinians in southern Lebanon whispered to me that I had arrived too late, that the poets had left Beirut the year before, Mahmoud Darwish among them, and in the darkness of a black-out he spoke of how unsettling it was for the people to know that the poets were no longer there, most especially Darwish— whose work was beloved by millions in the Arab world and beyond, whose lyrics were sung by heart, set to the music of their ancient oud, whose poetry readings filled stadiums. Having survived a life of imprisonment, house arrest and exile, he wrote of love, survival and our common humanity. Now Mahmoud Darwish is no longer among us, this poet who made of his language a homeland, who dwelled in exilic being—this solitary, private man who became the voice of a people, and who, in a language of fig trees, olives and flute music, exile and longing, re-built in poetry the four hundred and seventeen invisible villages of Palestine, such as Al-Birweh—which he was forced to flee as a boy—the village to which his empty, symbolic coffin was carried to be set among the stones of what may have once been his house, near a prickly pear bush, in a dry wind. At that same moment in Ramallah, tens of thousands attended his state funeral and laid him to rest on a hillside with Jerusalem visible in the distance. Those who carried the second coffin to Al-Birweh knew that their poet had to be buried twice, once for his presence and once for his absence.
Almost twenty years after Beirut, I came to know Mahmoud Darwish as one of his collaborative translators and then as his friend, and would come to understand why the people of that besieged city were so bereft at his loss. No other poet of his time gave voice to an entire people, no other poet was so beloved, and yet he also cleaved to his art, and carried within himself the solitude it demanded. He seemed to know and accept his destiny, and desired only to finish the work under his pen. A year before his death, we were together at Struga in Macedonia, the oldest poetry festival in the world, and as he stood on a bridge over the River Drim, he read his poems to the thousands who crowded its banks and drew their flotilla of boats as close as they could to him beneath the bridge. During the festival, the sky flowered with fireworks in his honor, torches were lit, songs sung, and he was presented with the Golden Wreath Award, one of the highest honors given to a poet. A few days later, we were taken by boat across a spring-fed pool near Lake Ohrid. There was no sound but that of the oar rising and falling. Mahmoud was pensive as he leaned over to touch the water, while telling me very quietly that his heart was giving way. I didn’t understand at the time that he was saying goodbye, and now I must say goodbye to him, who realized his wish to be a candle in the darkness of the times in which he lived, and by whose poetry, memory and light we must now find our way.
—Carolyn Forché
She didn’t come. I said: And she won’t…so
let me rearrange the evening with what suits my failure
and her absence:
I put out the flame of her candles,
I turned on the electric lights,
drank her wine then broke the glass
and switched the music: from the swift violins
to Persian songs.
I said: She won’t come. So I loosened my elegant
necktie (to relax more) and put on
my blue pajama. I could walk barefoot
if I want. And sit cross-legged, sagging
on her sofa, to forget her
and forget all the things of absence.
Then I put back in the drawers what I had prepared
for our party. I opened the windows and pulled back the curtains.
I stood in front of the night, my body holding no secret
other than what I waited for and lost…
and I mocked my obsession with purifying the air for her
(I had sprayed rose and lemon water).
She won’t come…I will move the orchid
from the right to the left to punish her forgetfulness…
I will cover up the mirror with a coat, I don’t want to see
her radiant image…and add to my regret.
I said: Forget what you have chosen for her
of ancient love lines, she doesn’t even deserve
a plagiarized poem…
Then I forgot her, ate my quick meal standing,
and read a chapter in a school book
about our distant planets,
and wrote, to overlook her harm, a poem,
this poem.
By Mahmoud Darwish. Translated by Fady Joudah
A remembrance of the poet Svetozar Daniel Simko, 1959-2004
Yesterday, in the bronze light of late afternoon, in a wild March wind I walked from West to East Berlin, retracing the steps I took eighteen years ago with the poet Daniel Simko, through a city at once delirious and hesitant with joy, where could be heard in the streets both the quiet of disbelief and the uplifting strains of Beethoven’s Ninth. Somewhere here, just here or was it a few hundred meters away?—sections of The Wall still stood at that time amidst its rubble, and while it was still necessary to pass through Checkpoint Charlie, even that had become a formal relic of a shattered State. But now it seemed impossible to tell East from West, except for a path of small stones marking where the wall and been here and there, and so I found myself in the windy expanse of Alexanderplatz—in front of its glass arcade and atomic clock—before I knew that I had gone from one world to another, from past to present. Only Alexanderplatz looked familiar, but its surroundings were as crystalline as the new century. You wouldn’t believe this, Svetko, I whispered to my now dead, ever-present friend, but you would be happy in your disbelief.
This is the short story of a friendship between poets, which began so serendipitously, and is now marked in memory by a path of moments. We met in 1976 in Iowa City, and again in New York a few years later. During our friendship of almost thirty years, we shared poems, books, an extended family, houses and apartments here and there, travels and a passion for literary art. He was from former Czechslovakia, as was my father’s family. That, in the beginning, drew us together, but what carried us further had to do with poetry, and then with all else.
In 1985, when my husband, the photographer Harry Mattison, was often in South Africa documenting what would become the last years of the apartheid regime, I welcomed the chance for camaraderie in what had become an oasis of Czechoslovakia on East 27th street—Daniel Simko’s studio apartment, whose shelves groaned with double-stacked books but for the wall where a painting hung, and the closet kitchen, and the alcove study where he wrote his poems and translated, in those days, Friedrich Hölderlin. I remember that we drove my little car down to Greenwich St., where Harry and I lived in a loft in an old spice warehouse that still smelled faintly of spices when it rained. I do remember Daniel and his friend James Reidel taking turns holding a wedding band by a strand of my hair over my pregnant belly. If a boy, the band would swing back and forth, it was said by the old wives, and if a girl, the band would move in a circle, but over and over, it swung back and forth, and about seven months later, I gave birth to my son in Paris, where we were to spend the year 1986 beginning with the summer of the Paris bombings. When our Sean was a few months’ old, Daniel arrived to stay with us while working on his translations of the twentieth-century Austrian poet, Georg Trakl.
In the months before I had joined Harry in Johannesburg, sometimes Daniel and I spoke by telephone—Johannesburg to New York—and he discerned, in my silences and hesitancies, the caution one feels when under surveillance—which as foreigners in South Africa—we were. Daniel would joke then that our halting conversations reminded him of “the old country,” the Czechoslovakia of his childhood, then still under Soviet domination. As it happened, we had to leave South Africa precipitously, having been accused by our landlady, formerly of “Rhodesia,” of breaking apartheid laws. That is how it happened that we arrived in Paris as I was entering my ninth month of pregnancy. We moved into an atelier overlooking Cimitière Montparnasse, at 11 rue Schoelcher, beside Simone de Beauvoir’s atelier at 11 bis. She would die that April, and be laid to rest in a grave that I could almost see from the window of our loggia. After she died, mourners came to rue Schoelcher and tossed flowers through our open windows, mistaking one atelier for another. At the end of those days, I would bring the bouquets to her grave and add them to the mounds of wilting flowers.
When Daniel wasn’t working on Trakl at the café around the corner, we would walk together with my newborn son, Sean in his carriage through the cemetery, reasoning that the bombs going off in metro stations and stores would never be planted among the graves. Daniel smoked his Turkish cigarettes as we walked, and between smokes, held Sean up to see the tomb sculptures and pigeon flocks. Once we did hear an explosion, and it turned out to be a bomb hidden in a baby carriage, detonated in a department store, but our cemetery was always left undisturbed, and in my memory, Daniel and I are often walking there, from one grave to another. In a few hours of peace and wind, we could visit Tristan Tzara and Charles Baudelaire, and then make our way over to composers Camille Saint-Saëns and César Franck, and before leaving pause at the graves of Julio Cortázar and Jean-Paul Sartre. As we walked, Daniel recited his versions of Trakl to me, asking if one word might be better than another and then, one afternoon, he came back to the atelier in a dark mood and announced “I am becoming Trakl.” I tried to reassure him that becoming Trakl might be necessary to the work of translating him. A translator of poetry must enter the language of another as closely as possible to the moment of its making. But entering Trakl carried a special risk, and Daniel knew this. His poet had been attached to a field hospital as a lieutenant pharmacist on Austria-Hungary’s Galician Front facing the Russians. There he witnessed the Battle of Grodek and Rawa-Ruska during September, 1914. Responsible for many critically wounded soldiers housed in a barn, and without an attending physician or drugs to relieve their pain, Trakl announced he could no longer bear to live and fled to shoot himself only to be disarmed. Under the pretext of a transfer to a military hospital in Krakow, he was placed under psychiatric observation and shared a room with a fellow officer suffering from delirium tremens. The windows were barred like a jail and Trakl had to wear hospital pajamas resembling a prison uniform. His publisher, Ludwig von Ficker, saw the brutality of the hospital and its screaming patients and attempted unsuccessfully to have Trakl released. Knowing of his prewar bohemian days as a drug addict, von Ficker asked Trakl if he had drugs in his possession. The poet is said to have replied, “Would I be alive otherwise?”
One of Vienna’s most promising young expressionist poets, the painter Oskar Kokoschka, was his close friend, and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was an avid reader of his work. Trakl began to write again, but died on the third of November from a self-administered overdose of cocaine. These circumstances certainly interested Daniel, but it was the lucidity of Trakl’s lyric response to war experience that drew him to the work, along with his fluid imagery, mutable figures, and mysterious vision. He was drawn as well to the near-prophetic poems written before his war experience, and to Trakl’s referential density, lyric consciousness, and capacity to sustain almost infinite ambiguity without diminishing the poetry’s expressive force. Trakl was inarguably among the twentieth-century’s genuine poets, but there may have been other reasons for Daniel’s elective affinity, having to do with Trakl’s youth, when he was viewed as a bit strange, perhaps as Daniel himself may have sensed himself viewed as a young immigrant in Ohio. It was said, for example, that Trakl sniffed chloroform from a flask and dipped his cigarettes in opium. Later, as a poète maudit , emulating Charles Baudelaire, he took morphine, Veronal and cocaine, dressed as a flaneur, drank prodigiously and otherwise transported himself, but always seemed to his friends “more awake” than others. Daniel was certainly himself “more awake,” more observant and attentive, with a formidable knowledge of European history and literature, against which he read his “new Americans.” On the night I met him in July 1978, he was sitting alone on a couch in the living room of a poet’s house in Iowa City, as an after-reading party swirled around him. Although I was very young, I had been that night’s reader, and wishing to escape the confusing social mélange, sat down on the couch as well. After a time, he introduced himself, and I heard a familiar accent (perhaps barely perceptible to others), that I hadn’t heard since childhood.
He was from Bratislava, Slovakia, also the birthplace of my father’s family, and so we talked for several hours about his life, “the old country,” and European poets. I didn’t see him again for several years, until the night the Master of Fine Arts program at Columbia University chartered a Circle Line boat for a starlight cruise around Manhattan. After we disembarked, Daniel invited my husband and I back to his then nearly empty apartment on East 27th Street, and so our enduring friendship began. Although he studied with me at Columbia for a semester or two, I never thought of myself as his teacher, but perhaps the sister and friend he more deeply needed. Over the years, we spent time together in Paris, Provincetown, Vermont, and then in the spring of 1990, after the “Velvet Revolution” liberated former-Czechoslovakia, we traveled together to Bratislava, where I joined him in a family attic, searching for the jazz records and books he had left behind when he fled in early 1969. We drove then to Prague, still quiet that spring, still gothic and dark, and not yet crowded with tourists. Most nights, we walked back and forth across Charles Bridge by ourselves, occasionally encountering clusters of students talking, singing and playing guitars.
In Wenceslas Square, thronged only months before with tens of thousands of Czechs demanding the government’s capitulation, we could still find the jingle bells rung in celebration of newly won freedom, and rippling candle-wax memorials to the revolution’s martyrs.
We visited my great-aunt in Brno, then living in an apartment given to her by the Jewish Council for her work on behalf of Jews during the occupation and Shoah. There is much more to say about our time with her, but the conversation would not have been possible without Daniel’s fluency in Slovak and sensitivity to her special circumstances.
From Prague we drove to Dresden, where the ruins of the fire-bombing were still visible, and then on to Berlin, where the wall was being jubilantly dismantled. We stayed in the East, near Alexanderplatz, crossing through the still-active Checkpoint Charlie several times a day. We took walks in the neighborhood where Daniel lived years earlier with his love, Tania Taubes, daughter of philosopher Jacob Taubes, one of the founders of Berlin’s Freie Universität. During these walks, Daniel grew pensive and melancholy, but always retained his sharp wit, as well as a certain gravitas. He knew where we were and “what time it was,” as we picked scraps of the wall from the ground and chose which ones to bring home with us. Behind the soot-blackened Reichstag, vendors had spread blankets with Russian war medals, particularly artful examples of wall graffiti, dog-fur hats and Soviet mementos. My friend, the late Charles Newman, captured this flea market of history perfectly. Thinking of a museum, he wrote: “Grim History proceeds painstakingly and openly from room to room, until the last very small one (devoted to the near present) where it dribbles away into a meaningless collage of artifacts; a sword from the Russo-Japanese War, a bust of Stalin, a cosmonaut, a photo of an expedition to Antarctica, a Chinese vase inlaid with Brezhnev’s visage and some Gorby buttons—all in no particular order, and without explanation. It’s as if—‘here are the pieces’—you figure it out.”
Throughout our journey that spring, Daniel was painstakingly and contemplatively “figuring it out.” He showed me where he had lived and gone to school, the abandoned castle in Bratislava where he played as a boy, and in the musty attic of his aunt’s house, with its old wooden trunks, dove nests and broken chairs, he showed himself that it was impossible to be more than the ghost in a country that was no longer his. There wasn’t very much in that attic that he wanted to bring back.
During the next fourteen years, he lived in New York, earning a degree in Library Science and working for the New York Public Library. He continued to write, but grew less and less interested in publishing his poems, other than in the books he made himself, and in his “manuscriptions” of notes, aperçus and versets, all privately distributed among his friends. He sent out translations, yes, but not his own poems—and although he offered reasons having to do with a contempt for “literary politics,” it seemed to me his reticence had deeper roots. Perhaps parting with his lover, Tania, had inflicted a decisive wound, held open by his vigil over his mother’s long illness. Dr. Mary Simko had suffered from a rare blood disease and died in 2003, only ten months before her son. Perhaps his reluctance to publish could be attributed to some other cause, but the mode of his poetry in those years was decidedly European. In boyhood he had fled his country, but only in adulthood did he become an exile, and not only from Slovakia. He lived in a realm of exilic being. He wrote in English but he often seemed, in so doing, to be translating himself—not his language—himself. It seems to me now that in his youth, he was attempting that rarely accomplished feat, full assimilation.
He didn’t “lose” his Slovak accent. He learned to mimic American speech. His humor and youthful carryings-on were attempts to fit in, to be accepted by his peers. The humor, the indulgences, even his invented language “Tanto,” in which he sometimes wrote his letters and experimental poems, were partially in the service of this acceptance. In his later years, I believe he realized what he had lost—not only Tania and his mother—but his own past. He had to watch “The Velvet Revolution” from a distance, and he was desperate in its aftermath to return to Czechoslovakia. In the last months of his life he was attempting to have his Slovak citizenship restored, and I am told by his friend, Zuzana Andreánska, that in his last days, drifting in and out of consciousness, he spoke only his mother tongue. That is why, throughout his later years, it seemed that when one stepped into his apartment on East 27th Street, one was stepping into an oasis of Central Europe.
Whenever I came to visit him there, he met me at the top of the stairs in Penn Station, elegantly dressed in overcoat and silk scarf, an umbrella on his arm, a valise over his shoulder, and we went back to his apartment to sit and talk, share passages from our reading, poems in draft, and moments of quiet laced with his cigarette smoke. Always he had arranged a vase of roses on the table, and a plate of fruit and biscuits, and later we would go to dinner at Mocca, a Hungarian restaurant on Second Avenue, for wiener schnitzel and goulash, or else to the nearby bistro Les Halles, and then take long walks into the night, usually through Gramercy Park and Union Square, and sometimes as far south as Greenwich St., where my husband and I had first lived. On every trip, we visited the Strand bookstore where Daniel once worked and where he still seemed to know everyone. Usually we also went to the Museum of Modern Art, but during most of our time together we stayed in his apartment refuge, talking and writing, revising and reading to each other. It was there we argued our way through selections for Against Forgetting: TwentiethCentury Poetry of Witness.
Throughout those years, Daniel lived quietly, worked diligently, smoked prodigiously, and if he drank heavily, never did he seem inebriated. I knew, in his last years, that he was ill, and should have realized how gravely ill he was, but his comportment obscured his suffering until it was too late. He once told me that he preferred to die rather than endure medical treatment. I thought the remark an odd instance of his dark wit, but as it turned out, he was serious. Throughout what must have been a long ordeal, he insisted that everything was “fine.” Vyborne , he said often in Slovak. Fine. When I offered to help him assemble a manuscript, he made his usual excuses: the poems weren’t “ready,” the work was “in-progress,” there was “more to come.” We used to joke with each other that whoever died first would have to cope with the other’s library and papers, and I added to this the threat that eventually he would publish a book, even if I had to assemble it when he was gone. So, I said, you had best now make your revisions and selections.
Despite my failure to persuade him to let his poetry into the world, it is to Daniel that I owe my own reemergence as a poet in the late 1980’s. Had it not been for him, I may have remained in self-protective seclusion myself, saving my poems in boxes and manila folders for someone else to find one day.
Daniel had been given a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center in 1987, and as we had returned en famille from Paris to the United States with as-yet no definite home, I moved with Sean to a winter beach house in Provincetown’s West End, and Harry commuted from Georgetown University to join us on weekends until a suitable residence could be found for us all. Daniel lived on the East End, and would visit us after writing for most of the day. In those days, we shared poems with each other, or rather I listened to Daniel’s drafts, and we shared a little supper most evenings. Daniel worried that I hadn’t allowed myself time to write in the aftermath of the publication of my controversial second book, The Country Between Us. I had become, he thought, wary and reclusive—a bit too much like himself—and that I had understandably retreated into motherhood so determinedly that I might never publish poetry again. Not while I’m alive, I used to joke with him.
“This must not happen,” he had said, and he offered to take Sean in his carriage to the East End for two hours every day, as long as I wrote while he was away, and he demanded to see the pages upon his return, so that I wouldn’t use the time for domestic chores. I would wave goodbye to them and close the little gate, taking in a breath of sea: beyond us was the bay, and on the horizon, shore clouds; below my windows, drying kelp and bladder wrack, and above, herring gulls holding their black-tipped wings rigid on the wind. I would go back into the house and, trying not to pick up toys, move toward the desk—to typewriter, ink and paper—as if this were a piano that hadn’t been played in years. I set to work, filling five pages with notes in an unfamiliar form, and in what seemed only minutes, I would hear the creak of the gate. After placing the sleeping baby in his crib, I dutifully showed Daniel my pages, asking him please not to read them, but only confirm that something had been written. That is how my third book, The Angel of History, was made possible, and it would be some years before I would let it go into the world, after much back-and-forth with Daniel and at his urging. Otherwise I may not have brought myself to write for others again.
Daniel had always wanted to make a pilgrimage to Krakow but never had done so. I was in Krakow when I learned of his death in a dawn telephone call from my husband. My son and I were staying in Hotel Logos. For an hour before I knew that he was dead, I listened to the bells of a far off church and made notes of the kind I had made in Provincetown that winter, and imagined showing them to Daniel when I next visited New York.
When I hung up the phone, I opened the casements and let the morning wind into the room. In my soul Daniel waved goodbye, and turned to walk away through the fog on Charles Bridge in Prague. Our Svetko was gone, and I don’t remember the rest of that morning well.
A few days after his death, my son and I walked through the wards of the military psychiatric hospital, to the room where Trakl was kept at the end of his life. The room has been turned into a small museum. It is only by chance that I was offered to see it, by someone who knew nothing of my history with Daniel nor his with Trakl. The hospital patients were still wearing striped pajamas, and the windows were still barred. I remember speaking very deliberately in my heart to my friend at that moment: This, at last, is your visit to Krakow. I have come here for both of us.
And now, from the new Berlin, I send a postcard made of light and hope to Svetko, telling him that his poetry will be published in an American edition by Four Way Books, to be read at last in his adopted country, as it has been, posthumously, in the new Slovak Republic, and in the coming months I will place a stone on his grave in Bratislava, that he, as well as his poems, will not be forgotten.
Carolyn Forché
Berlin, March 2008
An earlier version of this tribute was published in Slovak in Kritika & Kontext, edited by Samuel Abrahám, No. 36, Volume XIII. Bratislava, Slovak Republic, 2008.
TESTIMONY
Go on and on.
It is a fact that now you understand the music.
The kind that is played quickly, and in terror.
The one whose skull you last saw sunning itself.
Yet it is important to carry on,
to continue speaking
in the arrested voice you once used in a different language.
To simply continue speaking.
The one whose skull you last saw sunning itself.
It is bothersome to exorcise history.
It is just a flat row of wheat, a cut poplar.
As for trees, they always remain singular.
What else is there to say, and how many ways to say it
You, being the I.
PRAYER
It is so. It touches the clothes
with the rustle of leaves under a naked back,
And to sleep a little less now
is a small compassion.
That darkness you see, a land
of darkness, is darkness itself.
To be mad is to be like this.
Prayer is like this: to live on nothing.
Even I, the judicious failed scholar
find no reason for this.
Tomorrow, if I remember,
I will continue to repeat the same.
The way a face is pure.
The way fear is pure.
How simple it all becomes.
Thy deed is done.
THE ARRIVAL
after a photograph almost taken in Berlin
Wet slate roofs. Pigeons. A light.
A leaf on the sidewalk.
The shadows slipping between cobblestones.
It is already dusk
when you arrive
from Paris,
smoke rising from the Diesel
as you step out
with your black hair untied.
I am almost always
turning into that smoke,
into the pigeons landing
on the glass roof.
Or I wake up
and you come
with a shawl
black with stars.
Paris, 1980
IN MEMORY OF PAUL ELUARD
Put the words in the dead man’s grave,
the words he spoke in order to live.
Cradle his head among them
let him feel
the tongues of longing,
the tongs.
Put the word on the dead man’s eyelid,
the word he refused to speak
to the one who said “thou” to him,
the word
his heart’s blood rushed past
when a hand bare as his own
knotted the one who said “thou” to him
into the trees of the future.
Put that word on his eyelid:
maybe
his eye, still blue,
takes on a second, stranger blue,
a second blue,
and the one who said “thou” to him
dreams with him: we.
YOU TOO SPEAK
You too speak:
you speak last,
say your word.
Speak
but never split No off from Yes.
Give your word a meaning:
give it the shade.
Give it enough shade,
give it as much shade
as you know is parceled around you
between midnight and noon and midnight.
Look around:
how everything comes alive
In the presence of death! Alive!
whoever speaks shade speaks truth.
Now, though, the shade where you stand is shrinking:
Where now, shade-stripped?
Upward. Grope your way up.
You grow thinner, less perceptible, finer.
Finer: a thread
a star would like to slide down on:
to be able to swim down there
where it observes itself glimmering: in the flow
of drifting words.
by Paul Celan. Translated by David Young.