Against
Heaven: Selected Poems by Dulce María Loynaz
To
She Who Loves So Sadly
You who love a phantom love.
You who give a name to the fog
and to the ash of our dreams.
You who bend down over your
self like a willow bending
over its shadow reflected
in the water. You who cross
your empty arms over your
chest and whisper the word
nobody hears. Come and teach me
to bore through this stony silence.
Teach me to light loneliness on fire
and to keep it aflame.
“The
poetry of Dulce María Loynaz is, above all, a poetry of solitude,” writes James
O’Connor in his introduction to this marvelous collection. Indeed in reading
these poems one comes to treasure her particular solitude like a darkly
burnished gem. It is a quality, this reclusion of hers—a relationship to the
world, to the word, to herself as a woman, a Cuban, a writer—that gives her
poetry (even in English) a grave and lyric beauty, a frankness and aestheticism
that is nearly monastic in its clarity, restraint. Yet the object of Loynaz’s
reverence in these poems is as much Death
and Love (and paradoxically the solitude they afford her) as it is some hidebound
conception of God. “Loynaz,” observes O’Connor, “is a religious poet in the way
that Kierkegaard is a religious thinker: melancholy, not ecstasy, is the door
to paradise.”
Detachment
The sweetness of feeling more detached every
day.
More detached and more lethargic
without knowing if it’s because
all things fade away or oneself fades away.
The sweetness of oblivion like a light dew
falling in the darkness, the sweetness
of being untouched by anything, of
transcending everything
like an infinitely distant star
shining in silence.
In silence?
God help me.
As
a poet Loynaz thinks often of oblivion, of death, but less as an end to worldly
things, to the burdens of this earth-bound life (which she also recognizes), than
as a consummation of them, a means of transcendence, a mundane, temporal, ultimately secular rapture that exhilarates, even as it moves one to sadness and dread.
Always,
Love
Always, love.
Above the kiss
that proved food for worms,
above the roses that rot
every blue morning in a coffin,
above the thousand moons in the slime
on the floor left behind
by the pale mollusk,
above the bread mixed with as,
above the clenched fist beside the iron.
Always, love. Beyond every flight,
beyond every bitterness, beyond every
thought,
beyond mankind, beyond space and time.
Always, love. At the very moment
the body frees itself from its shadow,
at the very moment darkness begins
to feed on the body.
Always, love. (two shipwrecked words
between body and soul nailed to the wind!)
Loynaz’s
life itself, spent all but entirely in Cuba, was not without its own melancholy
hues. Born in Havana in 1902, the daughter of Enrique Loynaz del Castillo, a
famous general in Cuba’s War of Independence, Maria Dulce lived the privileged,
sheltered life of most young women of her class, though she traveled widely,
earned a Doctorate of Civil Law, and—thanks to her family’s reputation for
patronizing the arts—made the early acquaintance of many great writers of the
time, such as Gabriela Mistral, Alejo Capentier, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and
Frederico García Lorca, each of whom spent time in their home.
After
trying her hand at the law (and not liking it), Loynaz directed all of her
energy to the challenge of writing poetry. Though she had written and published
poetry since she was a teenager, it was not until the 1950’s that she really
hit her stride as a writer. In a span of eight years the Madrid publishing
house published four works of hers, including three collections of her poetry (Garden, Poems with no Names, and Lyric
Poems) as well as a highly successful novel of hers called A Summer in Tenerife, which Luis Bañuel tried
without success to adapt for the screen.
Around
1959, having refused to join the communist party (for reasons more personal
than political), Loynaz gave up writing and publishing altogether to live in seclusion
in her family’s old house. It was not until the late 1980’s, after nearly
thirty years of anonymity and solitude, that her work was rediscovered, earning
her a flood of national and international distinctions, including the National
Order of Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, the Order of Felix Varela of the Culture,
the National Culture Distinction Award, the Alejo Carpentier Medal, the Cuban
National Prize for Literature, as well as the Nobel Prize equivalent for the
Spanish-speaking world, the Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra Literature Prize,
awarded to her in 1993 by King Juan Carlos I of Spain.
Spanish
Nobel Laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez had many names by which he knew this modest, elegant,
extraordinary woman: “Sister Dragonfly, Saint Lawyer of Lost Jonquils, of Lost
Mosquitos, of Lost Rowboats, of Lost Pins, of Lost Toothpicks, Ophelia Loynaz
the Subtle, archaic and new…” In his prologue to Cuban Poetry in 1936 he described her as a cross between “the
gothic and the overreal,” “a singer desiccated, nailed by her own heart” whose
deeply private poetry was alive with a “mystic irony.”
While
Loynaz was not the first or last of the world’s great melancholy writers, she
is undoubtedly a singular strain of the breed. Neither misanthrope nor bully,
neither narcissist nor suicide nor drunk, she spent a nun’s life as a poet,
keeping her own grave counsel, admiring her own dark and furtive saints. In his
eccentric and magisterial work The
Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621, the English writer Robert
Burton not only defines the condition of melancholy at length (virtually ad infinitum,
and with a garrulous digression on human anatomy), as well as its causes,
symptoms, and ‘prognostics,’ but devotes some 261 pages to describing its remedy.
What would he have said, I wonder, to the likes of Dulce María Loynaz, a woman,
a poet, with no interest in a cure?
Peter Adam Nash
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