The lyre went mute for want of content - but there will always be poetry! - abstract and concrete Bécquer

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer wrote stories as well as poems, the posthumous Leyendas (Legends).  I have read one of them, “Master Pérez the Organist” (1861), again in Great Spanish Stories (tr. Martin Nozick).  An obscure but great organist dies at the organ and then haunts it.  The story is a good knockoff of E. T. A. Hoffmann, and has some particularly good passages describing the music (“The organ exhaled a strange discordant sound, like a sob, and fell silent”) and some excellent Seville local color.  You can, in fact, visit the church – you can see the organ.  Just scroll down a bit past the “cuerpo incorrupto” of the nun who founded the convent.  Now there’s some Andalucian local color.

It is funny how little it matters that the Bécquer story is derivative.  The changes in locale and custom are sufficient to give it some interest, even if it were otherwise a pure copy of a Hoffmann tale.  Just moving from Berlin to Seville is an interesting change in the hands of a skilled writer.

I am less convinced that moving typical Romantic ideas from French or German into Spanish is similarly interesting.  Thus I suggested that the value of Bécquer’s poetry lies more in its intrinsic qualities than in its ideas, however much trouble this causes for a translator.  Bécquer seems to agree:

Do not say, Its treasure exhausted,
the lyre went mute for want of content:
it may be there’ll be no more poets,
but there will always be poetry!  (IV)

Translation can provide the narrative of a poem , if it has one, and can give us a good sense of the concerns of a poet, and poetic translation is usually good with imagery.  Bécquer’s poems are as stuffed with imagery as any poets, little of it especially original or surprising.  I can imagine him sacrificing an original image for an original sound.  He compares himself, his artistic self, in one poem to an “[a]rrow randomly shot,” a “gale-whipped leaf,” a wave and “light in trembling rings,” and in another his “inspiration” is like a hurricane or madness  or “a flying horse \ with no reins to guide it” or

Misshapen silhouettes
of impossible beings,
landscapes that appear
as if through tulle  (III)

which is pretty good, right, but also awfully fuzzy.  Those rings or circles of light, a recurring image, actually do strike me as original, but abstract.  But Bécquer’s aesthetic is abstract.  He is describing his poetry accurately.  I will not get a good look at those “impossible beings” but perhaps the sound and shadow of them will work on my imagination, as it did on a generation of Spanish-language poets who followed Bécquer.

A concrete setting forms at the end of the Rimas sequence* when the beloved woman dies and is entombed.  “The startled owls that pursued me” and “From a clock was heard the pendulum’s rhythmic beat” and

Pick-axe on shoulder
The gravedigger,
Crooning,
Faded into the distance.  (LXXIII)

Still, even these last poems, although set in a church and a crypt, also find the poet in “the silent world of ideas” – “I do not know if that visionary world lies within or outside us” (LXXV), about as succinct a summary of Romanticism as I know.  In the poems of Bécquer, more within than outside, although I wonder what he might have found if he had lived even a few years longer.

*  The  sequence Michael Smith provides, at least.  I am sticking with him and Collected Poems (Rimas) today.

What is poetry? - singing along with Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

“Spanish poetry of the late seventeenth  century and of the eighteenth is not very interesting, and that of the early nineteenth contains nothing that was not done better  in France, in Britain, or in Italy,” or so say J. M. Cohen in the introduction to The Penguin Book of Spanish Verse (1988, p. xxxvi), and thus he skips from almost two hundred years from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (“the last considerable poet of the Spanish Golden Age”) to Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (“the greatest of Spain’s poets of the 19th century”).  What is the greatest etc. like?

What is poetry? You ask
as you fix your blue eyes on mine.
What is poetry!  And it’s you who ask me?
Poetry… it is you. 

Hmm.  Yuck!  What goo.  This is Michael Smith, not Cohen, in Collected Poems (Rimas) (Shearsman, 2007, p. 65).  The English is nothing, but the Spanish is something:

¿Qué es poésia?, dices mientras clavas
en mi pupila tu pupila azul.
¡Qué es poésia!  ¿Y tú me lo preguntas?
Poésia… eres tú.

The sentiment is still trivial, but there is poetry here, particularly in the rhythm and the repeated vowel sounds.  That musical second line, for example, with its “i u i u i u,” resonating with the later repeated “tú.”  The rhymes and near-rhymes are unusual for Bécquer, but the mastery of assonance is not.

Although this poem does not seem to do all that much, it contains almost all of Bécquer’s subject matter.  He wrote love poems, expectant, joyous, anguished, and despondent, most of which also seem to be about poetry as much a woman.  He died young, having written poems for about a decade and leaving just one posthumous book, Rimas (1871).  The poems are from manuscript, so an editor can arrange them as he likes.  In the Collected Poems I am reading, a sort of story is formed in which poetry is replaced by (or turns into?) a woman who, sadly, dies, allowing the poet a full range of passionate poetic moods.

I find it hard not to mock, gently, lightly, lovingly, such a purely Romantic artist.  Another kind of reader, perhaps younger, may well take him more seriously.  He and I both take Bécquer’s vowels seriously (I am switching to Cohen’s prose translation):

Volverán las oscuras golondrinas
en tu balcón sus nidos a colgar,
y otra vez con el ala a sus cristales
     jugando llamarán;   

The black swallows will return to hang their nests on your balcony, and once more, as they sport, to knock with their wings against its window-panes,

pero aquellas que el vuelo refrenaban
tu hermosura y mi dicha al contemplar,
aquellas que aprendieron nuestros nombres…
    ésas… ¡no volverán!

but those that stopped their flight to observe your beauty and my good fortune, those who learnt our names…  they…  will not return!

Two more stanzas follow with similar “Something (honeysuckles, words of love) will return, but the ones who were here when we were happy will not return."  The rhythm is that of a song, perhaps a flamenco; I in fact have a tune in mind and if you were here I could sing it for you.  Thus if “golondrinas” and “colgar” and “cristales” and “llamarán” do not rhyme, the singer can stretch the “a” sound as if they do.  I also recommend that the singer employ a dramatic pause (and, if dressed appropriately, a dramatic pose) in the middle of that last line – “ésas [pause, longing gaze into the distance, that flounce of the skirts the flamenco singers do] ¡no volverán!”

It is just a question of finding the right tune.

Best Books of the Year - 1860 - the mysterious tracts that separate waking from sleep

When I imagine the Top 10 lists of two centuries ago, long before, it seems, the invention of the Top 10 list, I rarely come up with anything like ten books.  Not ten books that have survived.  Maybe I could find ten good books, but that distinction is insufficient.  The process of canon formation or whatever you want to call it is a means of discarding good books.

The Top 10 list of 1860, for novels, at least, is an unusual one, then.  It’s long, and matches surprisingly well with our judgment.  I’m not sure which novel would actually win if we polled the English-language critics of 1860, but I have no doubt that Great Expectations and The Mill on the Floss would occupy the first two slots.  It’s the twelfth full-length novel of Charles Dickens, and only the second of George Eliot, but I somehow think the newcomer would win.  My speculation is based on some of the reading in Victorian criticism I have been doing this year, in Rohan Maitzen’s anthology The Victorian Art of Fiction (2009) and Richard Stang’s The Theory of the Novel in England: 1850-1870 (1959).  Dickens was a giant, but that Eliot novel made a heck of a splash.

The Marble Faun would have been on a lot of lists, too.  I’m less sure about The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.  He was much read but not quite reputable.  Still, that makes four novels, in English, that we still read – that are even well-known.  An unusual year.  An amazing year.

If I spread my reach, I find more books, more and more.  Ivan Turgenev published two outstanding novellas, On the Eve and First Love.  The mysterious Multatuli published Max Havelaar, the most important Dutch novel of the century, apparently (I ain’t read it).  Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson gave Norway, and us, A Happy Boy, a peasant novel.  Now I’m joking, but the joke is on my own ignorance.  Bjørnson won the Nobel Prize in 1903.  I'll bet he’s good.  I should find out some day.

John Ruskin had two books out, the outrageous Unto This Last and the fifth, final, volume of Modern Painters.  Waldo Emerson’s last important books of essays, The Conduct of Life, is from 1860, as is Jacob Burckhardt’s vivid The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy.  These books would have been on various Top 10 lists, too, famous and impirtant then, still read now.  I could squeeze the bibliographies and find a few more, but I want to switch back to my usual dismal story, and look at poetry.

Some landmark works of poetry were published, or at least written, in 1860.  But I doubt they would have made many year-end lists.  The crucial third edition of Leaves of Grass is from 1860 – who was reading it?  Who knew it existed?  Frederick Goddard Tuckerman’s single book, Poems, is from this year, too, but his best poems were not published until 1931, or, in the case of “the greatest poem in English of the century,” 1950.

The image of an arbutus plant at the top of the post is an 1860 painting by Martin Johnson Heade, a reminder of another shadowy poet.  Emily Dickinson, identified with the arbutus, or so Christopher Benfey tells me in A Summer of Hummingbirds (2008), and was, in 1860, in the middle of her most extraordinary burst of creativity.

The Murmur of a Bee
A Witchcraft – yieldeth me –
If any ask me why –
‘Twere easier to die –
Than tell –                 (from #155)

And I have one more example.  Spanish literature, torpid for two centuries (with one major exception), was jolted back into life by an enormously influential little book, Rimas,** by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer:

I did not sleep, but wandered in that limbo
in which objects change shape,
the mysterious tracts that separate
waking from sleep.*

I love Top 10 lists, and think they’re enormously useful.  The Top 10 lists of 2010 may very well include our own Great Expectations or The Woman in White or A Happy Boy.  But give a thought to the contemporary Whitman, Dickinson, and Bécquer.  Are they on anyone’s list?

* Plain prose translation from The Penguin Book of Spanish Verse, 1988, ed. J. M. Cohen, p. 388.

** Or am I simply wrong - was there an actual book in 1860? Or is that simply around the time Bécquer began publishing individual poems? I now think it was the latter.