I'm Speaking: Selected Poems by Raphael Guillén Translated by Sandy McKinney with Raphael Guillén, Hydra Books, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2001, ISBN: 0-8101-1851-3.
his is the best book of poetry I've seen in twenty-five years. The Spanish en face is a bonus.
When I catch myself swearing and railing against the poet for writing lines I should have written, I know I am into something very important. The sonofabitch. I wish I knew more camel-related curses.
Speaking as a translator, I have always held that the object of the process is to produce superb poetry in English (in this case) deriving soul and argument from another precinct in the Tower of Babel. Guillén, in a beautifully edited interview which functions nicely as a preface, seems to agree. Guillén is fortunate indeed to have a fine poet as a translator. Not even Rilke, so far, has been that lucky.
McKinney: What elements of your own work do you regard as most important to be preserved in translation?
Guillén: I think it's essential that the idea of the poem be preserved as fully as possible. Every poem has an argument, a theme, and since the theme is developed around a series of images, the imagery should hold together, which requires some careful thought about word choice. Line, meter, and rhythm are more difficult to capture, of course, but I would hope a translator would take tone and quality of language into account. And I'd like to see some attention paid to the use of unusual syntax, which I employ often in my later poems, and which serves to create a particular emotional tone: a hesitation of speech or thought or, on the other hand, a breathless, uninterrupted flow of words and lines leading to a resolution not necessarily anticipated. But, above all, since what I write is not merely ideas, but poetry, the translation should be more than a mere exercise in word transposition, [it] should exist as a poem in its own right with all the graces the new language offers [translators, nota bene]…if I were to see a literal translation back into Spanish, I'd like to feel that I would recognize my own voice and sensibility.
The antagonist of art is ever merely living. I've never met an artist with it clear in his mind whether art is a way of life or a pretty alternative to living. When asked by Sandy McKinney about his aspirations as poet and a man, Guillén replies: "My aspiration as a poet is that I should be read by all the men and women in the world who share my sensibilities, and it's all the same to me if that amounts to eight or eight hundred thousand. And my aspiration as a man is to keep breathing as long as possible."
In the interview, he has some marvelous takes on fame, salon, and media. In his essay on Rodin, Rilke suggests that fame is a collect of all the possible mistakes to be gathered about a name. Guillén seems, more or less, to agree. The title poem, "I'm Speaking", is a verse table of contents, so to speak, and more formal than most of the book: love, life, mother, country, death faith, and god. Poetry is conspicuously absent from the catalogue. This is not a book of poetry about writing books of poetry.
In "The Last Gesture" begin the mighty lines and images carved in high resolution, offered like frames of film the creative reader must project on his own screen of consciousness. These are the signatures of all great poetry:
This is the most terrible thing about the dead: that life covers them and absorbs them. A dead man is hope facedown.
Poetry and speech remain always time pivoted arts—which is to say I'm Speaking is a book which belongs to time both in form and theme.
I once had a student who informed me that he was going to quit writing poetry in favour of writing prose fiction. His reason: it pissed him off that readers remembered only lines and images of poetry: none grasped the poem in toto. I've been pondering what he said for many years. Like Browning and numerous others, Guillén writes poems like "Tracings in the Dust" which resist their being quoted/remembered only by image or by line. However, his most resounding poems are the most highly resolved in image and accompanied by Marlovian "mighty line." Or I am part of the tradition which honked off the student. Thus, while there are no poems in book I dislike, I find imagery like:
Your labial voice, visible, as if tasting the air, as if creating puckers and pouts for kisses. Your voice like a dark forest with tiny streams.
—from “Poem for the Voice of Marilyn Monroe” more engaging.
I don’t find Guillén derivative in Spanish tradition or any other His textures of style are very much his own. But this is a poet who, to use Joyce's line, "…has read everything and forgotten nothing." His arguments move sometimes with a hint of Amichai and sometimes those of Milosz (especially Milosz's later work). One knows he has read the symbolists from La Forgue through Rilke to Stevens and Roethke. However, Guillén is metaphorically more discursive than any of these. And the personae of Pound and Eliot are missing.
Having established that I have tremendous admiration for this book and its creator, best I allow the work to speak for itself:
One Day, with the Dawn One day, with the dawn, I came back alone, the way men do. It must have been some time ago. Clarity was born there in the depth of the streets, the way rue is born at the bottom of a drink. We always come back alone. I don't know why the streets seem so empty at the end of a night of love. Behind the closed doors, couples could be heard shifting in the dampness of sleep. I've never understood it. We climb onto a body the way a boy goes for the highest branch. And suddenly, under heaven, the body that was everything consumes itself away beneath our embrace. And then and there we see how earth fails us, how life drains out through a crack under the door. The round plenitude that came to us with a touch in the same touch escapes and dissipates. In the fields, over the roofs, five o'clock was ringing. Somewhere near, a jasmine must have been coming awake. I came back tired, the way a man comes back Who's contributed his share to the pain of the world. The nakedness of an arm. An expanse of throat.Two legs flung apart, seeking a release. A firm waist to cling to with your hands, the way you'd lean your weight against a plow. I've never understood it. Gazes face-to-face, like twin mirrors reflecting only each other. In front of the eyes, an opaque film behind which every lover conceals his egoism. She was very close, that once, to giving me something that might have become, in time, a memento. I look at her from here, but she has no face. It couldn't be sadder if she'd never existed. We throw ourselves on a body as into the sea, and learn that love, like water, doesn't offer resistance. Precious little is what's left afterward, if tenderness Doesn't invent its reasons to keep on living. We thrust into places that don't belong to us. Flesh, like smoke, moves away when it's touched. Today I don't ask for reasons, and I give myself, and accept, and pretend, but I know it's blackmail. That day started like any other day because all days start and never end. Dawn softened the last roofedges and the light prepared its first explosion. We always come back alone from making love. Like then, since a man is bound in his skin, and dreams only count, not always, when a breast, half glimpsed Suddenly reveals to us our great misadventure.
To Be an Instant Certitude comes as a bedazzlement, instants of light. Or of blackness. The rest is just hours passing, the backdrop, gray for contrast. The rest is the void. It's a moment. The body untenants itself, sets free that transparency with which it can see itself. It moves into things, materializes in matter, and we can sense it from some distant place. I remember an instant when Paris struck me with the weight of a burnt-out star. I remember that total rain. Paris is sad. Everything lovely is sad while time exists. To live is to pause with one foot lifted; losing a step, to gain a second. Watching a river flow, we don't see the water. To live is to see the water, to hold its patterns. I was lazily propped on my elbows over the iron railing of the Pont des Arts. Suddenly, life flashed out. It was raining over the Seine and the water, riddled, turned into stone, the ash of hardened lava. Nothing alters its order. It's only one heartbeat of a self which, by surprise, becomes perceptible. And the density of iron is sensed from within, and we become the glance that pierces us. Lucidity always selects unforeseen moments, as when in the projection room, a failure interrupts the action, leaving a still-shot. The motion begins again, and we sink into it. The heavy silhouette of the Louvre no longer took up space, but was installed in some part of me, part of that total consciousness split by a ray whose aim is absolute. To be one instant. Yourself immersed in other things that are. Afterwards, nothing. The universe continues its whirling death in the void. But for one moment, it pauses, fully alive. I remember that rain over Paris. Even the trees on the banks became eternal. The next moment the water renewed its course and once more I watched it, seeing nothing, lose itself under the bridge.
After the Ball As for me, always look for me after the ball. When the empty ballroom still conserves the odor of perfumed flesh, and the memory of an airy waistline floats over the disordered tables and chairs. When the last beat still lingers, pointlessly obsessive, without a body to settle in. When God draws nearer through this unlit tunnel of abandon. For me, always look for me here, after the ball. This is the hour of those who didn’t come to the party. The sad packed-up instruments of the orchestra form, in dirty grey the desolate underside of pleasure. Over this floor the flight of multicolored confetti is trash already, next to that cigarette stubbed out half-smoked. Glasses, opened bottles, the remains of a no-longer serviceable hope. Within this smoke and solitude, there's still the empty space in which a firm young lady was endlessly embraced. God invented this party to give us the precise dimensions of his silence. This is my spot. You’ll find me here. Here, in the middle of the dance floor, alone. After the ball.© Michael Yates