Edited by Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon-Grosman
Oxford University Press 2009
Reviewed by Ken L. Walker

“To nail God down”

In his poem “The Way it Must Be,” Enrique Molina writes: “Here is my soul, with its strange/dissatisfaction” — quite possibly the bull’s eye poetic layer for what it means to possess the “double vision” of being Latin American, and of course, of being a Latin American poet. Molina was an avid South American traveler. He was in-journey for years-at-a-time. This lifestyle pushed him to acquire a sense for the erotic fluctuations that exist everywhere in nature, an intuitive and internal facet of a Latin poet’s existence. Molina is one of over 120 poets presented in the Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, a 561-page thick multi-lingual (though the cover claims “bilingual”) anthology newly released from Oxford, edited by Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon-Grossman.

Poetry anthologies love to take a course of neutrality, a pathway of mere presentation which allows a campaign, movement, or hierarchy no notice at all. This anthology is the exception, holding steady to the soil of “a poetics of resistance,” where, as Vicuña puts it, “conflict generates new realities” and “the vision translates into a passion for the in-between.”

The closest competitor the Oxford Book . . . may have is Tapscott’s (an ardent Neruda translator) 1996 Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry which the University of Texas press put out. One note of exception is that Tapscott went out on a ledge to include a ton of Jose Martí as well as a poem by Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Martí has two poems in the Oxford Book. Che Guevara has none. And there’s zilch of that hip Trotskyite Roberto Bolaño—Vicuña told me in a recent interview that anyone who made their mark in prose (aside from Borges) was not to be included.

The project is incredibly encompassing, literally spanning the last 500 years, beginning with anonymous Maya scribes and ending (in around 1999) with the consequentially momentous “Cantares” from Mexican linguist Juan Gregorio Regino, where he sings in Mazatec, Time is reaching across, an insane time-leap for such a tactfully-comparable piloting. The shredding of the “myth of modernity” is here, tightly disguised with a clown mask. Beneath the mask, a fierce rebel with a shimmering set of lungs and a huge intellect. As Enrique Dussel puts it, euro-centrism is a false conviction because the subjugators perpetually learn from the subjugated. Quite Gramscian.

Look at Xul Solar, who makes his brief appearance about one-third of the way through the Oxford Book . . . with an excerpt from “Es un Hades fluido” (This Hades Is Fluid). This is, quite possibly, one of the most impenetrable poems to translate (as Molly Weigel so generously does) because it derives its power from neocriollo, “a fusion of Spanish and Portuguese founded on [its] own universalist principles.” Xul Solar invented his own language! Just have fun following the beginning:

This Hades is fluid, almist, no roof, no floor, redhaired, color in sunshut
eyes, stirred in endotempest, whirlpools, waves and boiling.
In its clots n foam dismultitumans float passivao, disparkle,
therz also solos, adults, kidoids, n they pergleam softao.

What appears as nonsense requires a painted microscope. Look deep enough and you can find both the myth and the underside. And, the very next poem in the anthology comes from Gabriela Mistral, entitled “Gotas de hiel (Drops of Gall)”. The Chilean poetess who grew up in a family of abandoned women writes:

Don’t call death kind,
for within its immense white flesh
a live fragment will remain and feel
the stone that smothers you
and the voracious worm that unbraids your hair.

And the way the ideas of the underside or periphery, via intellectuals like Dussel, Levinas, and Gramsci, so vibrantly dance through Latin American poetics prove further that English-speaking poets can learn (through translating) the pulsating-effervescence of sound (and fiesta). Look at the Gabriela Mistral poem cited above: “Don’t call death kind,” is a Jacketti translation from Y no llames la muerte por clemente,—a circus of vowels and open mouths. There is, generally, no equivalent in English. English is a closed-mouth language. Every major syllable whispers through thinned lips and every word ends with sealed chops. But Español juxtaposes this, driving and coercing the speaker to continue on and on (en y en) with an unfastened, releasing voice, unblocked and free to sing.

The resistance doesn’t let up although it’s not a sledgehammer or an ambulance siren; there are ice-cream truck moments (Surrealissimo, Modernismo, etc). The clarity of the confrontational nature endures though, even in the editors’ choices of which Neruda poems to place in the book—“Walking Around” and “Right, Comrade, It’s the Hour of the Garden”. No love sonnets for the tender-hearted, just the struggle of being a man in a myth-filled world. And for Violetta Parra (who appears in the book right after her famous “anti” brother Nicanor), perhaps the quintessential modern Latin woman, the sky is always empty. In “Maldigo del alto cielo” (Goddamn the Empty Sky), one can feel the oft-humorous torment:

Goddamn getting on your feet
to watch the flag go by
damn every kind of lie
Venus and Main Street
and the canary’s tweet

[. . . ]

I damn them every week
in Spanish and in Greek
thanks to a two-timer
my pain’s as bad as that.

Both John Felstiner and W.S. Merwin shine more than ever in the Violetta Parra translations. Then again, that may not be Merwin exactly shining, as dull as some of his Machado translations have been. That might just be Parra’s doing. The intro to Parra (each poet gets one) states that “To connect with the street she set up a circus tent in Santiago as her performance space. Ignored by Chileans, she committed suicide in that space.” Suicide a major component of a Latin poet’s identity, especially women, as primarily and unendingly realized in the spirit of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz who was censored by the Vatican and forced to give up writing. Fast forward three hundred and fifty years to María Mercedes Carranza, a Colombian poetess who also took her own life. In the poem “La patria” (Homeland), Carranza channels the energy of the continually uninterrupted, tacit Colombian civil war:

This house with its thick colonial walls
and nineteenth-century patio with azaleas
has been collapsing for centuries.

[ . . . ]

In this house we are all buried alive.

Tackling the “Place of Women” (as Vicuña terms it in her introduction) is possibly the best subtextual layer this anthology does better than any other, even the Tapscott. The one thing Tapscott and the University of Texas press outclasses Oxford on is the original presentation. The original (Spanish, Portuguese, etc.) and indigenous languages are presented cheaply and contemptibly in prose-block, backslash format. It’s difficult to read and find how each and every poem was primarily (and most importantly) written. Walter Benjamin and the ample folds of his robe would be turning over six feet beneath their coastal grave. Oxford has positioned itself like a child on a teeter-totter, lowering one side to the dirt by completely insulting the indigenous, the Mestizo and the oppressed Latin mass with this gaudy presentation; but, they do raise the bar taking the financial and literary risk to embolden this highly-substantial artifact that’s taken 500 years to make.

And it is a risk, especially to publish the likes of Juan Luis Martínez and Humberto Ak’abal. These two represent so much in the aesthetic glory of rebellion, craft-continuance, and of being human in a world that strives daily to caution-tape that off. These guys’ presence also shows that even an expert is given the gift of never-seen-before, or at least, hard-to-find packages.

A quick New York library search, as well as a general Amazon search, for the work of Juan Luis Martínez results in nada. His intro in the Oxford Book calls him the “best-kept secret of Chilean poetry.” In a montage-manipulation piece called “La nueva novella: El poeta como Superman” (The New Novel: The Poet as Superman), a hand-painted image of the body of Superman leaping to fly while holding a nude woman in high-heels also shows the collaged-on heads of Karl Marx and Adam Smith. Marx’s head is on Superman’s body. Smith’s head is on the nude woman’s body. Super-Marx is also squeezing the left breast of the naked Smith. The poem, published in 1977 reads:

SUPERMAN has become extraordinarily popular thanks to his dual,
perhaps three-part identity. [ . . . ]
In essence, the myth of SUPERMAN satisfies the secret yearnings
of modern man who knows he is weak and limited but
dreams nonetheless of rebelling one day as a “person
of exception,” a “superhero” whose suffering is called
upon to move the markers of being in the world.

It’s gemstones like Juan Luis Martínez that blow this anthology out into its own wide-open.

Lift, again, to the 1990s to find the work of indigenous Maya K’iche poet Humberto Ak’abal. One cannot mention Ak’abal and not discuss the true meaning of original; the uncanny thing is that he’s also contemporary. The Maya of Guatemala exist in shadows ruled by corrupt governance, American hyper-militarism and hyper-capitalism. Ak’abal speaks to and away from that, renovating real space and time as well as political space and time. The poem “K’uch” (Buzzard) proceeds at the height of indigenous symbolism:

Buzzard:
box for the dead,
grave on the wing,
but you’re not burdened
with the names of the dead.

The oratory and performative aspect of Latin American poetry overrides the repressive factors that Othered existence seems to always come with. It’s a “mixed blood” call out to space and a response to the unfinished dialectic between sound and situated form. Nearly a year ago, at Poets House, a group of performers including Mónica de la Torre, Rodrigo Toscano, Anne Waldman, Bob Holman, and many many others, came together to read, scat, sing, and execute many of the poems in the Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry. Students who were in the audience, there obviously to garner some class-credit, laughed hysterically at some of the indigenous performances which obviously sounded like clown buffoonery rather than poetry, expression, and sheets of emotion. That rather nihilistic divide is clearly what a book like this needs to and can conquer.

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