Come and see the blood in the streets - notes on Miguel Hernández, Pablo Neruda, and the poetry of the Spanish Civil War

Months ago, I was reading quite a bit of the literature of the Spanish Civil War, especially the poetry but also George Orwell’s clear-eyed Homage to Catalonia (1938, a good sequel to Joseph Kessel’s 1934 reporting from an abortive start to the war).  Also a single Hemingway story, come to think of it, “Old Man at the Bridge” (1936), a sad little sketch of a refugee.  I guess I should read For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a famous book.

Mostly poets, though: Rafael Alberti, Pedro Salinas, Vicente Aleixandre, Federico García Lorca (I read his best-known plays, too), and the astounding Miguel Hernández.  Alongside them, Pablo Neruda’s surrealist book, Residence on Earth, which incorporates Spain in Our Hearts (1937).

Neruda was working in the Chilean consulate in Spain during the Civil War, helping poets escape the country, that sort of thing.  In his poetry, he had been working in asurrealist mode during the 1930s, but not surprisingly Spain in Our Hearts is political and direct.  Some titles: “Spain Poor through the Fault of the Rich,” “General Franco in Hell” (some other politicians are also assigned to their infernal spots), “The Victory of the Arms of the People.”  Poems as propaganda, some more than others.

from I Explain a Few Things

You will ask: why does your poetry
not speak to us of sleep, of the leaves,
of the great volcanoes of your native land?
Come and see the blood in the streets,
come and see
the blood in the streets,
come and see the blood
in the streets!  (tr. Donald Walsh)

I wish I had something to say about Lorca.

Miguel Hernández, he just overwhelmed me.  Years ago, I wrote about Don Share’s translations of his poems, and this time I supplemented that book with the peculiar Selected Poems: Miguel Hernández and Blas de Otero (1972, ed. Timothy Baland and Hardie St. Martin, tr. many hands), peculiar because Hernández and Blas de Otero have nothing to do with each other, so this book is just two separate shorter books under one cover.  I knew nothing about post-Civil War Spanish poets, religious and reactionary compared to the great generation that preceded it, so I was glad to read some of Bras de Otero’s poetry.

But, Hernández.  The book’s section titles are painful enough.  “Poems Written During the Civil War,” “Poems Written in Prison,” “Last Poems before Death” (age 31).  Forget that, how about something from the “Early Poems” section, when Hernández was the “shepherd poet,” self-educated, sponging up five hundred years of Spanish poetry:

Your heart? – it is a frozen orange,
inside it has juniper oil but no light
and a porous look like gold: an outside
promising risks to the man who looks.

My heart is a fiery pomegranate,
its scarlet clustered, and its wax opened,
which could offer you its tender beads
with the stubbornness of a man in love.

Yes, what an experience of sorrow it is
to go to your heart and find a frost
made of primitive and terrifying snow!

A thirsty handkerchief flies through the air
along the shores of my weeping,
hoping that he can drink in my tears.  (tr. Robert Bly)

The Spanish sonnet, of course, is composed of more than imagery but also rhymes and flows and so on.  If only Hernández had been allowed to write more of this kind of sad poem, and fewer about the death of his son from wartime malnutrition.

I meant to write this up for for Stu and Richard’s Spanish Literature Month(s), and now I have.

I speak of things that exist - more of Pablo Neruda's Residence on Earth

Glancing at Pablo Neruda’s Residence on Earth, just the first part from 1933, I discussed the pleasures and difficulties of what I called “international surrealism.”  Sometimes it makes no sense, that is the difficulty.

Now I’ve read the second part, from 1935.  Does reading more Neruda help me find more sense?  Let’s look at a passage from the first poem, “Un Día Sobresale / One Day Stands Out” (tr. Donald Walsh):

From resonance come numbers,
dying numbers and dung-covered ciphers,
dampened thunderbolts and dirty lightningflashes.

This is a strange start.  The previous collection was also full of thunder and lightning.  “Resonance” is “de lo sonoro,” and the next stanza begins with the same phrase.  Now that is a clue.  Pay attention to the sounds, even if, as in the fourth stanza, they are “Fishes in sound, slow, sharp, moist.”  It also seems to be nighttime.  The poem is several pages long, with the beginnings of most stanzas including either “resonance” or “silence.”

Brusque shoes, beasts, utensils,
waves of harsh roosters overflowing,
clocks running like dry stomachs,
wheels unrolling on downcast rails,
and white water closets awaking
with wooden eyes, like one-eyed pigeons,
and their sunken throats
make sudden sounds like waterfalls.

Now Neruda has done it.  He has given me what I like, things, things I can take literally.  The sounds of shoes, roosters, clocks, and streetcars, the sounds of the toilets above and below and in the next room.  The poet is in a bedroom – a hotel room, is my guess, sleeping, dreaming, waking, likely earlier than he had planned as the city and the hotel awake around him.  A few of the concrete nouns are parts of similes, but the rest are part of the scene.  This must be one of the finest literary descriptions of a toilet.

A couple of stanzas later, the sun is up, “shadow recently fleeing / and drops that from the heart of heaven / fall like celestial blood,” the poem ends, and the book begins.  Up, poet, up!  But the next poem is “Only Death,” where “To resonance comes death” and death is “like a pure sound,” so I see why he wanted to stay in bed a little longer.

Images and individual words link the poems, allowing me to create a mood or perhaps even a narrative.  The sounds continue.  Sea imagery is everywhere, foam and waves and coffins with sails.  The poet is always alone, lonely.  “Do you want to be the solitary ghost that near the sea / plays upon its sad and sterile instrument” (“Barcarole”).  For a poet, that sounds bad.

This piece of Residence on Earth is in six parts, and each part builds its own structure of imagery.  I did not figure out a way in to each part, but I have a better idea of how to do it.  Part III contains the poems about sex, which felt like kitsch, and Part IV attacks my preference for things by loading “Three Material Songs” with the goofiest images, “hats of defeated bees” and wine that “walks its lugubrious hedgehogs” and that sort of glorious nonsense.  Those examples are from “Ordinance of Wine,” and I am happy to interpret the whole poem as a parody of the language of wine snobs.  But then how to interpret the previous material poem, “The Apogee of Celery”?

I speak of things that exist.  Heaven forbid
that I should invent things when I am singing!

That’s also from “Ordinance of Wine.”

Part V begins with a beautiful, direct, but uncanny “Ode to Federico García Lorca” – “Federico / you see the world.”  Neruda became friends with many Spanish poets while serving in the Chilean consulate in Spain.  Please remember that this is 1935, and there is no Civil War:

What are verses for if not for that night
in which a bitter dagger finds us out, for that day,
for that dusk, for that broken corner
where the beaten heart of man makes ready to die?

Neruda establishes indefinitely sad clauses and Salinas lives in pronouns - some 1930s international surrealism

I’m going to try to grind through everything I read in April.  I have never thought I had to write about everything I read.  It is a valued luxury to have nothing to say, although I could just say that.  If I am lucky I will kill off some half-baked posts I feel I should write but never will.  Some of this will be a little more doughy in the middle than usual.  And it will be many posts, obviously, not one giant one.

Beginning in the 1920s and into the 1930s. I detect a trend I call “international surrealism,” by which I mean many poets, all over the world, not just those associated with French Surrealism, are experimenting with some combination of dream-like imagery, radical gaps or jumps between images, and non-referential obscurity, the latter meaning as opposed to the kind of difficult historical or literary references I associate with Pound and Eliot, a separate trend.

Complex, disconnected images with private meanings or with the logic of the meaning deliberately obscured – I do not understand a lot of the poems I have been reading.  That is what I am saying.  That is all right.  I am surveying the field.

A good example is the first part of Pablo Neruda’s Residence on Earth (1933), poems written when he was in the diplomatic service in Asia, not that I could have guessed that from the poems.  Let’s look at a fragment chosen almost at random:

from Dream Horse

Unnecessary, seeing myself in mirrors,
with a fondness for weeks, biographers, papers,
I tear from my heart the captain of hell,
I establish clauses indefinitely sad.  (tr. Donald Walsh)

I love that last line, especially, but as Neruda piles on the phrases – “superstitious carpets of the rainbow,” “the wasted honey of respect,” “a lightningstroke of persistent splendor” – I lose the thread, if there is one, and what if there is not?

One good way to learn to read a poet like Neruda is to read more Neruda, and Residence on Earth has three more parts (1935, 1937, 1947), so we will see how that goes.

A big part of my difficulty with international surrealism is my preference for the material, for things.  This poetry is often pretty abstract.  For example:  My Voice Because of You by Pedro Salinas (1933, tr. Willis Barnstone) which is a book-length poetic sequence about a love affair, so in a sense we have two characters, the poet and his beloved, and in a sense there (probably?) is a narrative as the affair unfolds, but Salinas is in search of essences:

from Poem 13

To live, I don’t want
islands, palaces, towers.
What steeper joy
than living in pronouns!

Just “I” and “you.”  The nouns are often presented plainly, but spin into strange conceits, like in Poem 19, where is all about, and against, math:

Let ciphers burst
and foul the calculation
of time and kisses.

Direct and intense, but also distant and misty if my concentration is not up for it.

The poems of Vicente Aleixandre would fit well here, too, but I read him in May.

At this rate – no, tomorrow I will blast through the British and American poets I fail to understand.

Spanish poetry and the translations thereof in The Hudson Review

The warm and engaging hosting service of Wuthering Expectations took an unexpected but well-deserved personal day yesterday.  Some pool time in the afternoon, a mani-pedi, a hot stone massage, and then some solid TV watching, catching up with the first season of Treme.  Now, relaxed, energized, Blogger has returned to work refreshed  and alert.

A few comments from yesterday seem to have been temporarily misplaced.  I will be recreate them from my email soon if they do not turn up on their own.  There were some good ‘uns.  Yesterday’s post about Bolaño, Aira, and Argentine literature was pretty good, too.  Actually, that sounds a mite strong.  Let me look back for a minute – yesterday’s post was on a highly interesting subject, and might be worth reading for that reason.

I had planned to spend a few minutes writing about the poetry in the Spanish Issue of The Hudson Review, a magazine that has become, for better or worse, my primary source of contemporary poetry.  For better, I think; I gave Poetry magazine an honest effort a few years ago, but abandoned them just before being bored almost to death, although I do owe them my introduction to Kay Ryan.  My point, my point – the poetry in The Hudson Review is typically excellent, but not so typically by the all-star cast of the Spanish Issue:  Luis de Góngora, Ruben Darío, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Silvino Ocampo.

The Neruda poem, “Ode to my Socks,” is a curious one.  Its translator is William Carlos Williams, who is careful to turn Neruda into WCW, mostly with the line breaks:

I stretched out
my feet
and pulled over them
the
beautiful
socks
and
then my shoes.

Once properly shod, Williams proceeds to eat Neruda’s plums because they are so sweet and so cold and chop down his house because the beams are so inviting.

The lead feature is given to fragments of a 16th century masterpiece, Soledades (The Solitudes) of Luis de Góngora, expertly translated by Edith Grossman, more fruit of her turn to the Spanish Golden Age.  I read the poem several years ago in a different, vaguely remembered translation; even vaguer is a memory of reading part of it in Spanish, which must be wrong.  The long poem, an imitatio of Virgil’s Georgics, is enormously complex, not merely in its syntax so much as its extraordinary range of classical allusions and intricate and obscure metaphors.  Here a traveler has stumbled upon the preparations for a rustic wedding:

        You, oh singular bird,
arrogant splendor – for it is not comely –
        of the remote Occident:
hang the wrinkled nacre of your forehead
down over the kinked sapphire of your neck,
for Hymeneus wants you on his tables.

The exotic, ugly bird now on its way to the wedding (“Hymeneus”) feast is the American turkey.  The nacreous forehead foreshadows the piscatorial second book of the poem, which is about fishermen.   Góngora  demands patience and concentration:

A rebellious nymph, now a humble reed,
obscures  the margins of a small lagoon,
        where a kingbird inspects
even the smallest flake of its flying snow.

The snow is the foamy surf; the nymph is Syrinx; etc., etc.  How wonderful that Góngora’s poem will be available again, soon,  from Penguin Classics.  Who on earth is the audience?

But I suppose I could ask that about many of my favorite parts of The Hudson Review – one of my all-time favorites was an essay about the great pleasures of reading Clarissa!  Any reader widely curious about literature will find a lot to enjoy.