Witness

The Selected Poems of Mario Benedetti    

"The spirituality of work. Works make us experience in the most exhausting manner the phenomenon of finality rebounding like a ball; to work in order to eat, to eat in order to work. Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem."
   Simon Weil, "The Mysticism of Work"



We may forgive the saintly Weil for exaggerating: workers need bread more than poems, but we do need poems and we need poets.  Among the poets whose sensibility includes work--its glories and trials and beauty--is the great Uruguayan, Mario Benedetti, who died in 2009, and who was among a handful of the most prolific, popular, and versatile of Latin American writers of the 'boom' period, the "generation of 1945" in Uruguay, that hopeful post-War, liberal moment of Latin American history that was crushed--in Uruguay, Nicaragua, Cuba, Guatemala, El Salvador, and elsewhere--by the bipolar hostilities of the Cold War. 

Benedetti, born of Italian immigrant parents in Pasa de los Toros, "Was a man of the left who criticized the United States, championed Cuba’s revolution, embraced independence for Puerto Rico and, in 1971, helped organize a left-wing coalition in Uruguay called the Broad Front to challenge the two-party system that had prevailed for nearly 150 years."* Like many other Latin American intellectuals and progressives, Benedetti was forced into exile; banned from the United States, he lived in Argentina, Peru, Cuba, and Spain, before returning to his beloved Montevideo, in 1985.

I first read Benedetti, in Spanish, while living in Nicaragua in the 1980's.  A friend gave me one of Benedetti's many books--Viento del exilio--that I could barely make out.  Benedetti's Spanish is lively and idiomatic and attuned to the speech patterns of ordinary people--it is difficult to translate, but thanks to Louise B. Popkin and the good people at Buffalo's White Pine Press, we now have a generous, lucid, and accurate version of some of Benedetti's poems--he was enormously prolific, publishing eighty books, including poetry, plays, song-lyrics, and many novels (which I hope Ms. Popkin will consider translating as well). 

I love poets who are engaged with the world, whose political passion informs their writing.  We have few such poets in North America, and their work is generally marginalized in our search for the merely entertaining and our discomfort with art that doesn't affirm our way of living and thinking.   But Mario Benedetti's work demonstrates the richness of poetry that derives its life from this world, with us, the poetry of workers and of ordinary people who need bread and poems:

In this everyday poem I miss autumn
   with its permanent radiance
that golden sun encircling the pines
   and highlighting their majestic stillness
a certain aroma of boulevards taken over
   by dead leaves and grapes for sale
and of young girls digging their woolens
   out of mothballs.
[y tambien a muchachas que exhumaban sus prendas/de lana y naftalina], from Everyday Poem 4/20

Benedetti wrote some lovely poems to his wife, Luz, to whom he was married for half a century:

We've arrived at at neutral twilight
where day and night melt into sameness.
No one can ever forget this interlude.
The sky glides smoothly over my fallen lids,
emptying the city from my eyes.
Don't think now of time on the clock,
the time of petty sorrows,
Now there's only naked yearning [el anhelo desnudo]
the sun breaking free of its weeping clouds,
your face fading into the night
until it's but a voice and the whisper of a smile.
  [from Taking Hold of You]

My favorite Benedetti poems celebrate ordinary life:

From time to time joy
tosses pebbles at my window [!]
so I'll know it's out there waiting
but since today I'm feeling calm
I'd almost say cool-headed
I plan to stash my cares away
stretch out and look up at the ceiling
which is a fine comfortable position
for sifting out news and letting it sink in

who knows where my next steps will lead me
or when the measure of my life will be taken
who knows what words of caution I'll yet come up with
or what shortcuts I'll take to ignore them....[from Pebbles at My Window]

Like all great poets, Benedetti is not for the day, or the mood, or the cause, or the single idea--his poetry touches on the beauty of a life lived with passion, on politics and marriage, on joy and the great sorrow of exile.  He can write poems of grief and rage--as in "At Dream Level"--and then shift gears to meditate on hope, however fragile: "Hope so gentle/so polished so sad/a vow so lightly taken/is not my way/hope so docile/is not my way/rage so meek/so humble so weak/anger so discreet/is not my way/...my way is your gaze/so giving yet firm/your silence so guileless/is my way...." [My Way]

"We've arrived at that neutral twilight/where day and night melt into sameness./No one can ever forget this interlude...."

Witness: The Selected Poems of Mario Benedetti, trans. by Louise B. Popkin, with a (loving) introduction by Margaret Randall, published by White Pine Press, a great source for excellent poetry.
http://www.whitepine.org/

*New York Times obituary, May 19, 2009.

George Ovitt (2/14/13)

Dream Deferred

The Street by Ann Petry

Harlem

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

                        Langston Hughes

There was a cold November wind blowing through 116^th Street.  It rattled the tops of garbage cans, sucked window shades out through the top of opened windows and set them flapping back against the windows; and it drove most of the people off the street in the block between Seventh and Eighth Avenues except for a few hurried pedestrians who bent double in an effort to offer the least possible exposed surface to its violent assault.

It found every scrap of paper along the street—theater throwaways, announcements of dances and lodge meetings, the heavy waxed paper that loaves of bread had been wrapped in, the thinner waxed paper that had enclosed sandwiches, old envelopes, newspapers.  Fingering its way along the curb, the wind set the bits of paper dancing high in the air, so that a barrage of paper swirled into the faces of the people on the street.  It even took time to rush into doorways and areaways and find chicken bones and pork-chop bones and pushed them along the curb.

Cold, gritty, impersonal.  Such is the atmosphere created by Ann Petry in the opening pages of her extraordinary novel The Street.  Set and published in the immediate wake of WWII, the story follows Lutie Johnson, a strong and beautiful African-American woman, in her struggle to gain a foothold—a little peace and security—for her and her eight-year-old son, Bub, amidst the poverty, racism, sexism, and violence of 1940’s Harlem. By the time the story takes place, the great Harlem Renaissance, with its groundbreaking artists, writers, and musicians, with its headlong devotion to civic participation, political equality, and economic and cultural self-determination, is for many, like Lutie Johnson, but a figment of the past. Her life is defined instead by the Great Depression, which—at the time of this story—still casts its shadow over Harlem. ‘Last hired, first fired,’ African-Americans were hit even harder by the Depression than most. At the Depression’s height, 25 percent of Americans had no jobs. In Harlem the rate was as high as 50 percent, tapering off only gradually during the war and in the immediate post-war years.[i]  Harassed, all but consumed by worry in her daily effort to provide a life for her and her son, Lutie Johnson is haunted daily by reminders of the American Dream and its promise to those who work hard, the prospect of her fulfillment as a woman and mother in Harlem but a cruel and mocking mirage.

Described without a trace of sentimentality or self-pity, in a lucid, hard-edged prose, The Street retails the deeply moving struggles of an African-American woman battling the odds in her effort to defy the fate that stalks her.  “Written with cool anger,” writes a critic from Newsday: “The Street rushes toward its fatalistic climax like a train toward a washed-out bridge.”

Ann Petry (1908-1997) was an African American writer most famous for her novel, The Street, a hard-hitting social commentary on black urban life in the 1940s.  Published in 1946, the novel sold 1.5 million copies and brought Petry to national attention. The impact of Petry’s writing continues to be appreciated: literary critics praise her as the most successful follower of the 1940s “Richard Wright school” of urban protest writing; and black feminists cite The Street as the first African-American novel in which motherhood is a major theme. In addition, black feminists commend Petry for showing through The Street ‘s main character, Lutie, that a lack of connection to self and community can result in one’s downfall. (FemBio: Notable Women International)

Also recommended: Miss Muriel and Other Stories, Dafina Press

Painting by William H. Johnson

[1] Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, professor of history at Trinity College and author of “‘Or Does It Explode?’: Black Harlem in the Great Depression,” as well as the forthcoming “To Ask for an Equal Chance: African Americans During the Depression.”

Peter Adam Nash

We’ll Not Die in Paris

The Poetry of Natalka Bilotserkivets

Natalka Bilotserkivets is a poet whose work should be better known in the United States and Western Europe, her themes as ageless and timely as love and alienation, as Picasso and 9/11.  Inspired by the great Russian poets Blok, Pasternak, Akhmatova, and Mandestam, as well as by the French symbolists Baudelaire and Verlaine, her poetry nevertheless remains highly accessible to the Western reader.  “Life for Bilotserkivets,” writes Gerard Rasch, “has an indestructible integrity, with a hint of a mystic unity in which the sacred and the profane, the rose and the worm, the stench of urine and the aroma of spring can exist side by side…”

Here are two favorites of mine:

Hotel Central

for anyone

in one of the cities where at an uncertain time
capricious fate acknowledges us
where in the evening you can hear jazz in the restaurants
in the morning — bells from the gothic arches
water-lilies bloom in the canals there
people drink coffee there and later on beer
and the bicycles of radiant schoolgirls fly
in their sweet way in flocks

their backpacks bright and light
their legs long their hips slim
my God we once were like them too
ten twenty thirty years ago
but cast aside your itinerant pity
there's a Hotel Central in every city —
for those just like you who are no one for no one

here you'll unpack your ordinary things
remove the contacts from your eyes
wash your flesh get your drink
push the button of the pay TV —
there's everything you'd want; and how you'd want it too;
shut your eyes enter and take
nocturnal music knows no bounds
in the chambers of your Hotel Central

at three AM God like Bosch will come
to Hotel Central from the heavenly halls
with insects playing clarinets
with mosquitoes drinking submissive blood
with frogs and snails;
with fish, too;
and all your love —
is just caviar in the repositories of hell

just the struggle of a puny and a miserable slave
spread all over the walls,
of a human being — with a smiting Spirit
he sculpts and bends your body
then throws it into a tub of dung
removing it with his two fingers
shaking it looking and listening

like the first look of tender compassion
like the first touch of a somber "I love you"
like the burst of sun in the folds of a curtain —
Hotel Central meets the new dawn

and every day is like your last chance
and every night as though for the last time
and over the lily-flowered canals
the bicycles
of anxious schoolgirls fly

Grand Hotel Central
Rotterdam, June 22, 2002

© 2002, Natalka Bilotserkivets 

We'll Not Die in Paris

I will die in Paris on Thursday evening.

                                        — Cesar Vallejo

You forget the lines smells colors and sounds
sight weakens       hearing fades       simple pleasures pass
you lift your face and hands toward your soul
but to high and unreachable summits it soars

what remains is only the depot       the last stop
the gray foam of goodbyes lathers and swells
already it washes over my naked palms
its awful sweet warmth seeps into my mouth
love alone remains though better off gone

in a provincial bed I cried till exhausted
through the window       a scraggly rose-colored lilac spied
the train moved on       spent lovers stared
at the dirty shelf heaving beneath your flesh
outside a depot's spring passed       grew quiet

we'll not die in Paris       I know now for sure
but in a sweat and tear-stained provincial bed
no one will serve us our cognac       I know
we won't be saved by kisses
under the Pont Mirabeau murky circles won't fade

too bitter we cried       abused nature
we loved too fiercely
                        our lovers shamed
too many poems we wrote
                        disregarding poets
they'll not let us die in Paris
and the alluring water
                        under the Pont Mirabeau
will be encircled with barricades

*Translated by Dzvinia Orlowsky

From Three Worlds: New Ukrainian Writing.
Special issue (#12) in the series of Glas : New Russian Writing. Ed. by Ed Hogan
Zephyr Press, Boston, Massachusetts, 1996

Here, for those interested, is Bilotserkivets reading her poetry (in Ukrainian for those who know it; for those who don’t, listen anyway):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo4iDhL77sU

Natalka Bilotserkivets was born in Ukraine in 1954 and holds a degree in Ukrainian literature from Kiev University.  Some of her poetry can be found in the excellent compilation New European Poets edited by Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer and published by Graywolf Press (http://www.graywolfpress.org.)

Peter Adam Nash

An Artist of the Quiet World: Natsume Sōseki

The Gate

 

How do you like your books?  Large or small? Loud or soft? Full of pretense or as plain as a Quaker Meeting-House? 

 

There is the literature of agoraphila: Moby-Dick for example, or Doctor Zhivago, the open sea or the endless tundra, each swallowing up a human drama that derives, in part, from the vastness of the space where it occurs.  Or War and Peace, where space and time and the weight of history conspire to create the greatest novel of agoraphilia.  Victor Serge, 2666 (the world as graveyard), Ha Jin's War Trash, Thomas Glavinic's Night Work and David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress--where -philia tips over into -phobia as solitary characters wander aimlessly through  a world otherwise devoid of human beings.  The agoraphilic novel mostly terrifies as it removes the sense of scale and proportion that was the primary attraction of the genre in the first place.  The novel's precursors--epic poems, story collections by Chaucer and Boccaccio, mythic tales of travel--gave way in the eighteenth century to the emerging bourgeois world of domesticity, feminine consciousness, claustrophilia--to Richardson and Rousseau and Goethe.

 

My own preference is for books about small things, quiet books where nothing much happens--Proust, of course, is the demi-god of this subspecies of fiction--also Robert Musil, Robert Walser (The Assistant), all of Georges Perec, David Foster Wallace's Pale King (a book about boredom--perfect!), and nearly every Japanese novel I have ever read--from Genji (a summer's worth of nothing much) to minimalists like Kawabata and Oe.

 

Those who love their literature quiet--string quartets rather than symphonies--will love, as I did, Natsume Soseki's The Gate, a zen-like story of a married couple, Sosuke and Oyone, who live within the tiny confines of their small house, their garden, and their childless, but loving, marriage.  No problem--of money, of filial relations, of health or happiness--is important enough to require an immediate solution; for the most part, Sosuke, a melancholy, fatalistic office-worker, is content to let life go on around him without intervention.  He's indolent, Oblomovian, not one to say either 'no' or 'yes,' but always 'not yet.'  He believes in destiny, and his is to be no one; and yet he is devoid of envy and rancor--it would be too much trouble to feel such things, and he prefers to watch the world from the comfort of his veranda.   

 

At one point in the novel, Sosuke's younger and far more ambitious brother, Koroku, moves into the tiny "six-mat" room in Sosuke's house...there isn't money to send Koroku to university, and no one has a clue as to what to do about the young man's future until fate intervenes. Here we have Sosuke, just returned from work, inquiring about his brother:

 

"After a few sips of hot tea Oyone had brought him, [Sosuke] asked, 'Is Koroku home?'

     It was of course certain that his brother was there. But not the faintest sound could be heard from the six-mat room, and it seemed impossible that there could be anyone inside. As Oyone rose to call Koroku, Sosuke stopped her: There was no need to speak to him right now. Then, burrowing under the quilt attached to the portable kotatsu [a low table, covered by a quilt, with a heater underneath], he lay stretched out on his side. Twilight had already made its presence felt in this room, where the shoji all faced the steep embankment. His arm pillowed beneath his head, he simply gazed into the dark, confined space, his mind a blank."

 

With Sosuke, one might be tempted to think of Bartleby or Hamlet, but that would be inaccurate: these figures are still and inactive in the midst of activity--Sosuke is the calm center of no storm, of a world that is sequestered, monastic, unchanging (ironically the book culminates in Sosuke visiting a zen monastery--as if a respite were required from doing nothing). Aside from the neighbor's daughter's piano practice, it appears no one does much of anything behind the gated world of the novel.  Perhaps Soseki, who wrote the book in 1910, was nostalgically invoking pre-Meiji Japan, a world before modernization and the urban displacement of traditional Japanese life. 

 

The Gate reminded me of a quiet summer I spent just outside of Tokyo as a guest in the home of an older Japanese couple. We could not speak to one another, and, in the evenings, the three of us would sit, in unbroken silence, staring out into the garden, bamboo entwined with delicate pink hibiscis  (I took them as such), smoking and sipping tea. 

 

 

 

The Gate is available through New York Review Books, with a typically intelligent and helpful introduction by Pico Iyer, translated by William F. Sibley. 

 

http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

Paying Attention: Hahm Dong-seon, Choi Young-mi, and Others

Since I have been half-asleep all week, tonight I want to read in order to pay attention:

This is from "Record of a Journey," by the contemporary Korean poet Hahm Dong-seon:

If I go to my old home,
If I go to my old home on this journey,                        
I will see the doorway where we once stood
Gauging our height with a notched string
Gone slack by now like an old clothesline
   anchored to a pole.

And in this train that rattles with speed
I watch the wind-pulled stalks of corn
Lean their weight toward the passenger cars
That stir the same insects I fanned away
   when I was a child--
....

And this poem, by another contemporary Korean poet, Choi Young-mi:

Some Reincarnation

I do not believe the proposition
that spirits come around in April
as buds, as flowers.

I do not believe the poem that claims
the shades that left the earth in May
weep dolefully, changed to wind.

I cannot believe the song
that says the young one (I was standing right there)
that fell on the rowdy street in June
has now assumed the form of a flower, or wind,
  or anything else.
I cannot even dream it.

Back from the dead, this morning opens its eyes
with minimum travel,
no need to roam like a flower, like wind.

When the desk lamp flickers on
a riot of voices rushes straight for me.


The idea of being pulled into another life, or into a memory of another life--'has now assumed the form of a flower'--reminds me of Walt Whitman's "To A Stranger," well known, but worth quoting:

Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,

You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me as of a dream,)

I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,

All is recall'd as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,

You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,

I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours only nor left my body mine only,

You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,

I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone,

I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,

I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

"I am not to speak to you"-- this is also Choi Young-mi, from "The Mind's Mediterranean"

....I'm waiting for the perfection of silence.
Like the noon sun that departs
after warming my forehead,                  
like the fog that clears quickly
after its slow rising.

These lines lead me to Ruth Stone, "From the Porch." A wonderful poet, just looking:

What is a wild tree
but the tops of the maples                                                           
but the tops of the maples
when a storm
brawls up the mountain.
Or chokecherry smothering
the barn with its interlocking roots,
Or the entire mountain in September--
yellow and scarlet
and then turning brown
from the mountaintop,
slowly descending in front,
the dirt road
swirling past in a flutter of leaves.

All simple poems--from Seoul and Brooklyn and Vermont--records of what we might see if we can remain awake and pay attention.  Wendell Berry puts the matter of paying attention about as well as any poet I know:

What We Need Is Here

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.

 Poems by Hahm Don-seon and Choi Young-mi quoted from the translations of Yu Jung-yul and James Kimbrell, Three Poets of Modern Korea, published by Sarabande Books http://www.sarabandebooks.org/

George Ovitt (2/8/13)














 

“Minha Terra”: Ivo’s Brazil

Snakes’ Nest or A Tale Badly Told

But sometimes, it was as if the sea did not exist, and he lived among stones, in a nest of snakes.

“During a dictatorship, all narratives are poorly told…” writes Lêdo Ivo in reference to the rambling, unreliable narration of this short novel. Indeed, as University of New Mexico professor Jon Tolman explains in his helpful introduction, Snakes’ Nest is set in Brazil in the 1940’s, during what was known as the “New State,” a semi-fascist experiment in caudillismo, a cult of personality around the charismatic leader, Getúlio Vargas, that lasted from 1930-1945.  At heart an allegory of good and evil, this “sunny nightmare” rises like a miasma from the streets of Maceió—from the bars and brothels and sugar depots that distinguish this seedy port city in  northeastern Brazil that even today is renowned for its rampant corruption and violence.  As described in a 2011 article in The Economist, “The road from Maceió, the capital of Alagoas state, to its airport passes luxury-car showrooms and shops selling outsize Jacuzzis. In the central reservation, indigent families live under plastic sheeting. Even by the standards of Brazil's north-east, Alagoas is scarred by poverty and extreme inequality. With 107 murders per 100,000 people, Maceió is also the most violent state capital in Brazil, just as, with 60 murders per 100,000, Alagoas is the country's most violent state. It is a place of sugar and cattle, where the sugarcane cutters settle scores with fists and knives and the well-connected escape punishment by using contract killers instead.”  It is this latter world that serves as the setting for this collection of powerfully rendered vignettes about the workaday men and women of Maceió—the lawyers, gangsters, sailors, poets, prostitutes, and nuns—a story, a novel (though Ivo denied it the name) in which the narration flits like a hummingbird from character to character, from place to place, sipping here, drinking there, darting back and forth in time as if drunk on the nectar it finds. In an age when more and more American writers are forced by the market to answer to the same dull master, that is, plot over character, murder and mystery over language and symbol and theme, this novel comes as a positive relief. 

Ivo’s heterodox approach to storytelling, to fiction, should come as no surprise to anyone who knows of him, for he was a poet, first and foremost, a writer who flirted with Modernism before turning his back on it to embrace more classical, more traditional forms. One feels the poetry in his language and rhythms, in the weight and balance of his words, yet there is nothing fussy or self-conscious about his style. Even in English his phrasing has the blunt simplicity, the force and gravitas, of prophesy or scripture, as in this passage describing the moments—the minutes, the seconds—before one of his characters, a manager of a local airline agency, blows out his brains:

It was raining—it was a rain of words.  The wind blew—it was a wind of words.  The world wasn’t made of skies, clouds, cities, sugarcane mills, ports, dams, yards, old cars, streets, power plants, houses, men.  It was made only and exclusively of words—and the people spoke in words. Even the paving stones of Maceió were made of words.  Alexandre Viana ate words, slept words, worked words.  And he felt more alone than ever, as if the very weapon that sketched itself before his eyes would turn into a word.

While Snakes’ Nest is set in the Maceió of Ivo’s childhood, what he calls “minha terra” or “my land,” it is important to note that the period in which the novel was written, that is, the early 1970’s, was actually a more politically repressive time for Brazilian artists and writers than that of the quasi-fascist caudillismo of Getúlio Vargas, evidence enough that such authoritarianism is perfectly at home in the rich Brazilian soil. What makes this significant, what makes it  especially poignant to me, is that I have only just now finished reading the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s book, Brazil: A Land of the Future, a gushing, 250 page hymn to the nation that had given him home and sanctuary as a Jew in flight from Hitler’s Europe. The picture he paints of early 1940’s Brazil and its future in the world is just short of utopian, an incredible feat, given Vargas’ staunchly corporatist, right-wing, anti-Marxist politics, a tyranny over thought and expression that included censorship and the harassment, torture, and execution of leftists.  Somehow, for all of Zweig’s perspicacity as a writer and exile, he had failed to see the forest for the trees. Blinded to the rise of fascism there, in Brazil (in the selfsame period described by Ivo’s novel), by his desperate need to keep faith with the human race, to believe in the possibility of a paradise on earth, Zweig ends his introduction to this Panglossian tribute by writing: “For that reason, one of our best hopes for a future civilizing and pacification of a world that has been desolated by hate and madness is based upon the existence of Brazil.”  That Brazil was indeed a sort of paradise to Zweig is clear; what is also clear—a fact perhaps only acknowledged by Zweig himself on the eve of his suicide in 1942—is that, by the time he’d finished writing Brazil: A Land of the Future, the Serpent was already in. 

Here, to conclude, is one of Ivo’s better known poems:

The Sound of the Sea

Sunday afternoon, I return to the old Maceió cemetery
where my dead never stop dying
their consumptive and cancerous deaths
that penetrate the ebb tide stench and constellations
with coughs, groans, imprecations
and their dark mucus
and in silence I summon them to return to this life
where from childhood on they slowly lived
with the bitterness of long days fixed to their monotonous existence
and the fear of dying of those who witness the close of day
when, after rain, the ants are scattered
across the maternal ground of Alagoas and can no longer fly.
I say to my dead: Arise, come back to this unfinished day
that has need of you, of your persistent cough and your tired gestures
and your footsteps on Maceió’s crooked lanes. Return to those insipid dreams
and windows opening on to suffocating heat.

On Sunday afternoon, among mausoleums
that seem suspended by the wind
in the bluish air,
the silence of the dead tells me they won’t come back.
No use calling them. From the place where they are now, there’s no return.
Just names carved in stone. Just names. And the sound of the sea.

© Translation: 2010, Alexis Levitin

Lêdo Ivo (1924-2012) was a Brazilian journalist, poet, novelist, and essayist who was awarded the prestigious Brazilian Walpmap Prize in 1973.  Born in Maceió, Alagoas, Brazil, the son of Floriano and Euridice Placido de Araujo Ivo, he later married Maria Leda Sarmento de Medeiros and fathered three children.  Ivo’s first volume of poems — As Imaginações — granted him national recognition in 1944. His other works of include Ode and Elegy, Ode to Twilight, Birth of the Sonnet, Language, and The Common Soldier.  In addition to Snakes’ Nest, he write three other novels: Alliances, The Road without Adventure, and The Death of Brazil.  Snakes’ Nest is published by New Directions Books. 

Peter Adam Nash

Vampires, Curlicues, Lumps, and Insula Dei

I was already dyspeptic, feverish, out of sorts this morning when I came upon Michiko Kakutani's review of Karen Russell's new book, Vampires in the Lemon Grove (Knopf).  I said to my dogs--"Guys, why does the lead book-chat person of the New York Times--arguably the most influential critic in America--devote her column to yet another book about the undead?"

"A vampire couple who live in an Italian lemon grove, a pack of girls sent away by their werewolf parent to be educated by nuns, a minotaur and his [sic] human family joining the great westward American migration . . . "

Not that I dislike vampires--not when the greatest actor of all time, Klaus Kinski, gave life (so to speak) to the dead in the 1979 Werner Herzog remake of my all-time favorite horror film, Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, the genuinely freaky 1922 German Expressionist version of Bram Stoker's Dracula directed by F.W. Murnau, starring the positively blood-curdling Max Schreck as Count Orlok (I thought, a great name for a pug).  But these guys--Kinski (above right) and Schreck (below) were real vampires--they weren't pretty boys and nubile starlets with a dribble of fake blood on their chins--these two were the stuff of nightmares, all those odd-ball Herzog close-ups, and that limbic shadowland Murnau used to evoke the Freudian netherworlds of human fears come to life.  Kinski gave me the creeps in everything he was in--he looked like a demented David Bowie--and in make-up, hell, he was my id come to life. 


So: it's bad enough that even vampires have to be metrosexuals now, but then Ms. Kakutani goes on to criticize Russell's style--style?  I said to the dogs: "This is a book about vampires and we're worrying about style?"

"Vampires in the Lemon Grove shows Ms. Russell more in control of her craft than ever: the occasional curlicues of language that distracted the reader's attention [!] in her earlier books have been tamed in these pages, and the structural lumps in 'Swamplandia' have given way here to finely hammered stories that have an organic shape and speed." [my emphasis]

Organic speed? Hammered stories? I liked Karen Russell's Swamplandia! and even enjoyed the "curlicues of language"--that is, the style and voice--in which the book was written. (I like Karen Russell, okay?)  I mentioned to Rosie, our heeler, that language and "lumps" are the whole point--"What's this woman want," I said to Rosie, "who doesn't like a lumpy story?" What would Ms. Kakutani make of any random sentence from Kertesz or Bernhard or Robert Walser--talk about lumpiness!  I remember when MK trashed David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest for being too long, self-indulgent, inorganic. Why do we read if not to be scared out of our wits by great prose, by style and language that clots up like the blessed little formless doughballs in our oatmeal?  Do we want our vampires well-groomed, with two-hundred dollar haircuts? Boys and girls out of Vogue and GQ?  No: I want creepy Klaus, drooling out of the deformed hole that was his mouth, sniffing around his victims like a rabid dog--talk about lumps!

So I put the paper down, went to work, and as soon as I could, I reread a story by the great Dutch writer Nescio (Jan Frederik Grönloh, 1882-1961) called "Insula Dei."  This story is collected, with a handful of Nescio's other writings, in Amsterdam Stories, published by New York Review Books.  No vampires are to be found in this little gem of a tale about finding God in war time and trying to find meaning in memory:

 "You want to do something, make a difference. But these aren't the first eventful times I've lived through and if I'm granted even more years then with God's help I will most likely get to my third war. The silent course of things takes its silent, implacable course, the little man who is a hero today will tomorrow, when peace comes, be scolded in his stupid little job or maybe won't have a job at all and will turn back into the useless piece of clockwork he used to be." 

  Not all sentences go straight, not all writers eschew lumps, not all readers want their prose forged....Not all of the undead are vampires.  


Grönloh was born in Amsterdam, was director of a trading company, had four daughters, and wrote just a handful of short tales in what is considered, by those who know Dutch, to be the finest modern examples of that language.  The NYRB has a nice introduction by Joseph O'Neill whose Netherland (2008) is splendid--a great novel about New York City and cricket.         http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/amsterdam-stories/ 

Eros Mexicano

 The Colonist

by Michael Schmidt

Of late I’ve grown weary of the standard Bildungsroman, the often highly autobiographical, nearly always confessional coming-of-age-style story set in some quaint, typically southern town, complete with its cast of local eccentrics, its folksy wisdom, and its often shrink-wrapped epiphanies about innocence, race, and sex. While the tradition in this country is a rich one and not to be disparaged (one has only to think of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye), and while my favorite novel in the world, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, is nothing if not a protracted and supremely self-indulgent Bildungsroman, it was nevertheless with reluctance that I picked up a copy of Michael Schmidt’s novel The Colonist in a second-hand bookstore last winter. Three things had alerted me to a possible difference: the novel's  setting (Mexico), its publisher (The Gay Men’s Press) and the language (original, poetic, adroit).  Intrigued, I bought the book for $3.95, though it took me nearly a year to actually read it.  I am happy I did.

Set in the town of San Jacinto in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, The Colonist tells the story of a sickly English boy growing up in Mexico (in the de facto absence of his aloof and wealthy parents) in the nurturing company of the family’s devoted housekeeper, Doña Constanza, and a handsome local orphan named Chayo, the narrator’s friend, ‘brother,’ and romantic obsession. Remarkably, there is nothing hackneyed, nothing saccharine, in Schmidt’s treatment of the fraught and tender affinity between these boys. While clearly autobiographical, and every bit a story about the painful disenchantment of youth, The Colonist offers readers a fresh and moving exploration of the seemingly intractable divisions of class, race, religion, and sexual orientation, as the narrator is driven to act with increasing desperation to safeguard his relationship with Chayo, to fend off time itself in order to keep their little ‘green island’ intact.  Told in retrospect, from the vantage of an older man now settled in England, the novel is a compelling portrait of one’s man’s attempt to find completion in the past.

Here, to conclude, to entice you, is the novel’s very fine first page:

     Often even now when I wake up I think I’m there.  I retain the error of a few moments, half-consciously—seem to smell the conflicting scents and hear the bristling of tropical foliage, pretend that I am not alone in bed, extend my hand—into vacancy, and let my eyes fall open on English daylight.

     I still keep the habit of sleeping with the curtains drawn back and the windows thrown wide, even in winter.  I explain it as a hunger for fresh air.  But it is more a chronic expectation, as I lie gazing at the blue or cloudy blank framed by pelmet, curtains and sill.  It’s futile as the childhood prayers of an atheist, which recur to him instinctively and are half said before he catches himself out.  Sometimes an inert white moon lies against a daylit sky like a tiny cloud without a drop of water.

     In the disorientation of early morning I return there—because the events were incomplete.  It was a place and time alive as little has been since.  I spend hours interrogating it, like an historian puzzling at a fragmentary chronicle, who takes the problems home because they will not let him go.  Finally he decides to understand it at all costs, if only to be shut of them at last; he packs away his books, travels backwards in time, takes boat to the place where the lost events occurred;-- and there, in a suggestive climate, among ruins and citrus trees, in the dusty roads, among high white-washed rooms, in the cafés and bars of the descendants—there in the very face of change—he creates the matter missing from the text.  It is not a form of evidence his professional colleagues would countenance, but something better, whose truth the pulse acknowledges, the body understands uncritically, regardless of disciplines of mind.  As he approaches, it recedes, drawing him further on—and into it, so that in the end he finds an absence, or himself, or perhaps in a rare moment (and only for a moment) the thing he sought.  He has discovered that nothing but detail is ever lost for good.  The forms survive in present forms—flawed, as years pass, the flaws grow deeper. Nothing changes, each thing becomes in time more itself, defined, uniquely broken.

Michael Schmidt OBE FRSL is a Mexican-British poet, novelist, scholar, and publisher who was born in Mexico City in 1947. He is founder (1969) and editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press and a founder (1973) and general editor of PN Review.

Peter Adam Nash