Jorge Luis Borges and Poetry in Spanish

Jorge Luis Borges at L'Hôtel, Paris, 1969. Photo by José María 'Pepe' Fernández. Public domain


I made a list the other day and subsequently realised that it looked like a really stupid poem. One who perfected the art of using lists in poems, however, was the great Jorge Luis Borges, as in 'That One'.


THAT ONE (Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Srikanth Reddy) 


Quintessential Borges, always wandering in a labyrinth of mirrors and ephemeral walls, but also able to compress a life of shifting perspectives into a snapshot of intention.

I have spent more time speaking and reading Spanish this year than I have for the past fifteen-plus years. This has occasionally included reading Spanish poetry, both in the original and in translation - not only Borges, but Lorca, Machado, Neruda, Rafael Alberti, Octavio Paz, and various more contemporary poets. The curious discovery that I have made is that (at least for now) I seem to prefer Spanish-language poetry to French-language poetry. This is odd at least because my French is so much better than my Spanish - I can freely read French poetry without any accompanying translation, whereas in Spanish I'd have to look up at least some words and preferably look at a facing translation - but I suppose that's not all there is to it.

The English language reminds me of a Gothic cathedral with trapdoors, dead ends, endless staircases, secret entrances and exits, trompe-l'oeil and on and on. French reminds me of the flashing of a bright sharp knife. Spanish, with its rounded vowels and strong inclination towards rhyme, makes me think of drinking red wine. These are all rather facile comparisons, but maybe it's partly that I'll take wine over knives, for now.

David Morley's The Gypsy and the Poet: "Worlds Move Underfoot..."

 

The Gypsy and the Poet by David Morley. Carcanet Press (2013)

 

 

David Morley's most recent collection, The Gypsy and the Poet, reflects his background in ecology and his Romany heritage, but it is also a unique tribute to one of the most celebrated poets of the English countryside, John Clare. Many of the poems make up an ongoing dialogue between Clare and a mysterious Gypsy named Wisdom Smith.

 

Wisdom Smith appears briefly in John Clare's notebooks, and Morley uses this as a starting point for a series of playful, joyous sonnets made up of springy, alliterative verse which occasionally turns sombre (as when Clare says "Were poems children/I should stamp their lives out" and Wisdom Smith responds "Then do not make them", in 'My Children'.) I found myself wondering if Wisdom Smith was simply another aspect of Clare's complex personality (or is Clare another aspect of Wisdom Smith?) and if the sequence was a sort of Yeatsian dialogue of self and soul. This is particularly the case towards the end of the collection, as Clare descends into madness and the corporeal reality of the two figures' encounters becomes more doubtful. I think the poems can be read either as real encounters or as aspects of one personality, but in any case, the two characters have much to teach each other. Each sees the world at an angle that the other finds challenging, and so they bring each other to new understandings, even if it's through banter and mockery:

 

 

'I do not read, brother,' states Wisdom smiling,

'for I will not bother with Mystery.

Worlds move underfoot. Where lives Poetry?'

 

(from 'Worlds')

 

 

Wisdom Smith gets Clare to live in the moment, in the natural world; Clare gets him to look more seriously at poetry.

 

 

'Poetry is in season,' laughs John. 'Rooms woven from wound wood

are like rooms of woven words.' Wisdom looks at Clare - hard.

'Poetry is not everything. You know that, John,' smiles the Gypsy.

'You are wrong,' dances Clare. 'Everything. Everything is poetry.'

 

(from 'Bender')

 

 

The poems are highlighted by English and Romany epigraphs, which heighten the impression of a dialogue between two cultures, both at home in the natural world, but in different ways.

 

The book is divided into three sections, the first and third of which are the John Clare and Wisdom Smith sonnets. The central section is made up of a variety of nature poems, including pieces which became part of the Slow Art Trail in Strid Wood, poems based on birdsong and painted on bird boxes, and shape poems. I am not really a fan of shape poems in general, but I saw all the poems in this section as a kind of extension of John Clare's (and David Morley's) notebooks and his observations about his life in the natural world. These poems are a record of what is happening around us, often unperceived, and they go a long way to show us how complex and intertwined the natural world is. Two poems, 'Fight' and 'Ballad of the Moon, Moon' are based on Lorca and his rich, strange perceptions of the Gypsy world.

 

The Gypsy and the Poet is a book to be taken out and read in the fields or the forest, but if this isn't possible, it can at least take the reader there in imagination and provide new insights into our relationship with the natural world and with other cultures, all wrapped up in some very colourful, distinctive and haunting verse.

 

 

 

BARDEN TOWER (David Morley)

 

 

I have heard a tourist claim this view

as though she had bought it at cost -

an expensive mirror. Unseen and ornately

ivy throws its ropes across the leaf-litter

shifting a forest's massive furniture;

 

the moss robes veil the thrones

of fallen oaks; trees flare with lichen;

Autumn smashes rainbows across

the woodland floor. You may never

have seen these trees more brilliantly

 

than when you turned your eyes

to that hunting lodge and sensed the light

kindle a million leaf mirrors.

In his woods near Lake Tuusula

Jean Sibelius shaped symphonies

 

from the speech of trees; firs bowed

violins while his swans sailed, keening.

Before his death a solitary swan

veered over and made him her own.

I am close to you who once shared this view.

 

This is not my sky, my flight, my words. This is not a mirror.

 

 

                                                     Walking from Embsay back to Barden Bridge

 

 

 

 

Poem © David Morley, 2013. Artwork © Peter Blegvad. Used by permission.

 



Spain and Poetry 4: Federico García Lorca: "Green, How I Want You Green..."

Bodega Sandeman, Jerez de la Frontera



In the bitter green
a hard playing-card light
carves out furious horses
and profiles of riders.

-Federico García Lorca, from 'The Quarrel', translated by Jane Duran and Gloria García Lorca


The day in Granada when I visited Huerta de San Vicente - one of Federico García Lorca's homes , now a museum - it rained pretty hard for much of the day. It was a nuisance, as it is anywhere, and I found out that it made the sidewalks desperately slippery. After my tour of the house, I bought a bilingual edition of Romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads), and also a postcard with one of Lorca's own pieces of art - a spidery drawing of the Alhambra - and a letter. I'm not sure who the letter was addressed to but it must have been a friend or a family member. When I later tried to read the writing, I saw that the opening lines said: "All day it has rained... Autumn has come." I didn't mind the rain any more, suddenly. It was as though Lorca was waving at me across 80 years or more.

Lorca is an enormous topic and I am really just starting out on that journey, so these are more or less initial thoughts. It does seem as though he has been converging on my life lately, gradually - as these things often happen. A reader of The Stone and the Star in New York, who works at the New York Public Library, very kindly sent me a copy of the wonderful program for the recent Poet In New York exhibition held at the NYPL. I've also been reading various poems more or less inspired by him (more about that to come, I think). Meanwhile, as I prepared to go to Spain, the section on Andalucia in my Lonely Planet guide noted: "It is debatable whether you can truly understand modern Andalucia without at least an inkling of Spain's greatest poet and playwright, Federico García Lorca. Lorca epitomised many of Andalucia's potent hallmarks - passion, ambiguity, exuberance and innovation."

Then I went and saw for myself. I had been to this part of Spain before, of course, but I went with more of an eye to Lorca and poetry this time, and was rewarded. (Although I know the titles of his famous plays, I have not yet engaged with those at all.) Lorca's poetry seems to embody the dichotomies and tensions of Andalucia - beauty and violence, concrete details and fairytale-like images. He moves between the real and the fantastic worlds with ease, evoking the blinding light and extreme darkness of Moorish Spain, Gypsy Spain, pre-Civil War Spain. In the midst of a poem with edges as sharp as stained glass or the blue-stained ceramic tiles of the region, I would find moments of description so true to the spirit of what I had observed or experienced that it took my breath away.


Carriages the Guadalquivir
lays down on its ancient glass
between sheets of flowers
and resonances of dark clouds.
[...] But Córdoba does not tremble
under the confused mystery,
for even if the shadow raises
its architecture of smoke,
a marble foot affirms
its chaste, gaunt radiance.

(from 'San Rafael', translated by Jane Duran and Gloria García Lorca)


If I could write like Lorca and I had that intensity of vision, I would describe Cordoba something very much like that; that's how true to life his words feel to the spirit of the place, despite (or perhaps because of) the fantastic and grotesque lurking in the background of the poems.

On a tour of Huerta de San Vicente, I was part of a group of twelve or fifteen, all of whom were Spanish except me, I think. I found some of it hard to follow, but did my best. Huerta de San Vicente was the García Lorca family's summer home from 1926 to 1936. In those days it was in the countryside outside Granada, although now it feels very close to the centre of the city, and is surrounded by a lovely park dedicated to the poet.

The house had been maintained almost just as it always had been. I was struck by the photograph of Lorca's sister Concha, whose beautiful laughing face was incredibly vivid. There were some of his drawings, and the piano on which Lorca played and composed. It was possible to imagine that he and his family members would soon return, which I found a little hard to take. As well as writing some of his important works in Huerta de San Vicente, Lorca also stayed there shortly before his arrest and murder.

If I were Spanish, I would probably understand a little better what Lorca means to them. Some of the tour group was made up of an enthusiastic collection of ladies in their fifties or thereabouts, who ignored the guide's request not to touch anything, and exclaimed over everything (in the kitchen, when the guide explained a few of the details of the facilities: "How useful! Look at that! My sister has one almost like it! Oh my, was I not supposed to touch that?" etc.) Later, one of the ladies asked: "Do they know which house Federico lived in, in Granada?" (The exact location is lost, if I understood right.) I thought it was telling that he was "Federico", not "Lorca" or "García Lorca" - perhaps this was to differentiate him from his family, but I would have thought it was clear enough. To these visitors, he was Federico.

I will be making my way through the spotlit, bloody and gorgeous landscapes of his poems for some time, I think, especially comparing the originals and the translations, with my so-so Spanish. Meanwhile, I will point you in the direction of the following poems which seem to me especially amazing, or representative, or just so worth reading.


ROMANCE SONAMBULO (Federico García Lorca)

THE GUITAR (Federico García Lorca)

RIDER'S SONG (Federico García Lorca)



All photos © Clarissa Aykroyd, 2013

The Dark Poetry of Spain

In December, I spent two weeks in Andalucia, Spain with a friend. In terms of sheer well-rounded pleasure it was among the best holidays I've had. Years of living on chilly northern islands have definitely convinced me that there are advantages to chasing the winter sun. Here, it wasn't exactly hot (except for some particularly pleasant hours in the sun), but it was mild to warm and there were blue skies for at least part and often all of every day.

We stayed in Jerez de la Frontera, a little over an hour by train from Seville. It proved to be a perfect base - a lovely, friendly town well placed for day trips elsewhere; not too big and not too small; and home to the Royal Andalusian School of Equestrian Art, where I spent several happy hours both at a show and on a training day, watching exquisite dancing horses and handsome caballeros. It really does not get much better. Elsewhere, we wandered Seville's ornate shopping streets; sat by the vast blue reaches of water on Cadiz's shores; had one of the best meals I've ever had on holiday, a stunningly artistic selection of tapas, in Puerto de Santa Maria; admired the vistas from Arcos de la Frontera, a medieval dream of a town; and drank a lot of delicious coffee.

I hadn't previously spent a lot of time in Spain, although I speak the language up to a point (I was pleased at how much I was able to use it on holiday, and how well I was generally able to get by) and have had some excellent friendships with Spanish people. I had already spent a week in Mallorca, but although there are flashes of Spanish culture, it is pretty touristy and you don't always know where you are. In 2010 I spent a few days in Madrid and a day trip to Toledo, and loved both. Madrid's Prado is hands down one of the finest art galleries I have ever visited, and I finally caught a tantalizing glimpse of the mystery of Velazquez's Las Meninas. Madrid is monumental but beguiling, dark but fun-loving - definitely a city I could revisit any time. And Toledo, a gemlike town, is truly the stuff of fantasy.

It may have been mere holiday-fuelled musings, but I concluded that Spain was probably where I'd chose to live if I had to go somewhere in southern Europe. I love the south of France but it is somehow a bit too Mediterranean for my taste. Italy is enchanting and rich and beautiful but I don't feel at all at home there or with the people. Spain has something in common with both but perhaps there is a little more darkness and solemnity, which has a certain appeal. Ted Hughes wrote of Sylvia Plath's reaction to the country:


Spain frightened you. Spain
Where I felt at home. The blood-raw light,
The oiled anchovy faces, the African
Black edges to everything, frightened you.
Your schooling had somehow neglected Spain.
The wrought-iron grille, death and the Arab drum.

(from 'You Hated Spain', Birthday Letters)


I know that my experience of Spain is still fairly limited, but this seems pretty accurate: especially "Black edges to everything." The Spanish friend who took me to Madrid refused to go to the Prado with me; with a shudder, she said "Oh, I hate Spanish art...it's so dark." It's hard to argue with her "dark" assessment.

I knew that Spain had a rich literature, most of it not very familiar to me. But I was really delighted to find that they love and honour their poets. In Seville especially, and in other towns too, I came across many plaques dedicated specifically to poets. This one is dedicated to José María Blanco White - "a life dedicated to fighting intolerance." He moved to England and wrote a sonnet, 'Night and Death' (in English), which was dedicated to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and has achieved some fame.

I certainly realised that I don't know very much about Spanish poetry. I bought a book of Antonio Machado's poems, which seems beautiful, but reading poetry in Spanish is bound to be a slow project for me.

Federico García Lorca is one of the greats, and an Andalucian as well. From dipping into his poems a little, they immediately seem profoundly Spanish with their imagery of death, horses, idealised women, winding roads through dry landscapes, and music - this is a deeply and passionately musical nation. This poem, 'Romance Sonambulo', chilled me to the bone with its morbid imagery and references to the Civil War - a tragic event which ultimately caused his death, as with so many others. You can find it on this link both in English translation and in the original Spanish:

ROMANCE SONAMBULO (Federico Garcia Lorca)

I'm glad that Spain loves its poets. Another good reason to return and try to uncover a little more of the mystery.