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?

for my joy in the tooth of the wheel - a glance at Lorca's poems

The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca (New Directions, 1955) was an early overview of the poems of Lorca in English, not just a look at the poet but at how he was being translated.  It is translated by many hands.  Here is Langston Hughes, doing one of the Gypsy Ballads (1928):

from Ballad of One Doomed to Die

Learn to cross your hands,
to taste the cold air
of metals and of cliffs
because within two months
you’ll lie down shrouded.

The echoes of Lorca’s murder that now ring through his poems is almost irritating.  The “Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias” (1935), which is about the death of a bullfighter, is almost unreadable.  “The rest was death, and death alone.”  It is a poem of great power in English and beauty in Spanish, and is not about Lorca’s murder a year later.

The variety of Lorca, in a career that lasted fifteen years, is hard to understand.  Long and small, formal and crazy, traditional and new – at some point he mastered everything.  Little fragmented imagistic lines:

The sea
smiles from far off.
Teeth of foam,
lips of sky.  (from “Ballad of the Water of the Sea,” 1921, tr. Lloyd Mallan)

Or big wild yawping:

Not for one moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman,
have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies,
nor your shoulders of corduroy worn out by the moon,
nor your thighs of virginal Apollo,
nor your voice like a pillar of ashes:
ancient and beautiful as the mist…  (from “Ode to Walt Whitman,” 1930, tr. Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili)

Not that there is no continuity.  They’re both seashore poems.  Lorca’s years in New York City produced what looks to me like his biggest leap, though, towards (or perhaps against) Whitman and his boldest, least comprehensible imagery:

from Fable and Round of the Three Friends

I saw them despoil themselves, sobbing and singing,
for a hen’s egg,
for a night that displayed its tobacco-leaf skeleton,
for my woe full of faces and piercing moon splinters,
for my joy in the tooth of the wheel and the lash of the whip,
for my breast shaken with doves,
for my derelict dying, with a single mistaken bypasser.  (tr. Ben Belitt)

This is the Lorca invoked by so many American Beat poets.  They thought they knew what he meant.  I’m happier with Lorca the singer, the balladeer, but I hardly know his poems.

I read the 2005 edition of Selected Poems, which includes an unusually personal introduction by W. S. Merwin, who says that his undergraduate encounter with a single Lorca poem was the life-changing cause of his discovery of 1) translation and 2) “Modern poetry began for me, not in English at all, but in Spanish, which I scarcely knew, in the poems of Lorca, and even more specifically in one book of his, the Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Ballads), which Lorca had finished in the year I was born” (xi).

All right, that was some Spanish literature for Spanish Literature Month.  Now with the holiday and a little trip I’m done for the week.  Maybe I’ll have The Golden Bowl done when I get back.

Do you hear me!? Silence, I said silence! Silence! - a noisy nightmare from Federico García Lorca

Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba (1936) begins with noise:

SERVANT   I’ve got the pain of those bells right inside my head.

  PONCIA enters, eating bread and sausage.

PONCIA   Over two hours of gabbling and wailing. (11)

It ends with the bells again:

BERNARDA   No-one say a word!  She died a virgin.  Tell them to ring the bells twice at dawn.

Not quite – the actual end, a few lines later - not bells at all:

BERNARDA   I’ll have no tears!  We’ll look death in the face.  Be quiet!  (To another weeping daughter.)  Quiet I said!  You can cry when you’re alone.  We’ll drown in a sea of mourning.  She was Bernarda Alba’s youngest daughter and she dies a virgin.  Do you hear me!?  Silence, I said silence!  Silence! (64)

In between is a noisy female nightmare, a tyrannical mother, her five daughters, a senescent grandmother, all trapped in their house, trapped by Spanish mourning customs, but also by that inflexible, spirit-crushing mother.  They all tear each other to pieces.

BERNARDA   I said silence!  I could see this storm coming but I never thought it would break so soon.  You’ve poured hate on my heart like a hail storm.  But I’m not so old yet.  I’ve got five chains, one for each of you and these walls my father built to keep you in.  Not even the weeds will know of my desolation.  Now get out! (42)

The House with the Green Shutters and its nightmarish tyrant of a father begins to seem almost pleasant.  At least the character’s in Brown’s novels are allowed to leave the house.  The House of Bernarda Alba is worse, much worse.  Spain was worse.

BERNARDA   Quiet!  Behave yourselves!  Oh if only I had a bolt of lightning in my fist! (62)

One is tempted to read the play politically, if only because that lightning struck Lorca.  He was silenced – murdered by fascists – a month after he finished this play. Age 38.

Tranlsation by Rona Munro, 1999, Nick Hern Books.

Those interested in Lorca, and others, will want to visit Prof. Mayhew at ¡Bemsha SWING!.