Review of Rough Song by Blanca Varela
Rough Song by Blanca Varela, translated from the Spanish by Carlos Lara.
The Song Cave, 2020. $17.95.
Blanca Varela’s recently translated book, Rough Song, begins with a collection of playful short poems that metaphorically stand for the experience of the whole. Under the section Eyes to See, these little poetic aperçus entice us in their attacks on the word that serves them as title. The ambiguity of a sentiment that declares, at the memory of the word “Game”, “within my grasp / an angel burned” or the effect of picturing the immaterial “Then”, its afterness, as “beyond the rose”, as beyond that crystallized symbol of natural and classical beauty and the sounds and colors of lyric poetry, and beyond us in turn, as “shadow”, paralyze us in a moment of thought, divert us briefly from obsolete accommodations with words. But as we pursue their trail, fascination and attraction blow away, and the enigmatic dizziness of the verse leaves us unsatisfied. At times the poems remain chained to superficial impressions of the object (angel, innocence, children, game) and held together by a thin veil of “difficulty” — even a tone of self-mystification — distinct from the complex articulations of rhythms, symmetries, and figures inherent to poetry. We are confronted in these poems, as in the book as a whole, with a dissonance between what the poems offer us — a poetic attitude, an unexplored quality — and our sensation that their simplicity might express a gratuitous retreat from clarity and concreteness as opposed to the distillation and explosion of something essential.
Photograph of René Magritte, ca. 1938. AnOther.
THEN
beyond the rose
shadow
GAME
within my grasp
the angel is burned
DESPUÉS
tras la rosa
sombra
JUEGO
entre mis dedos
ardió un ángel
If one would submit to these poems as to the machination of a delirious dream, concerned only with the terror and deliciousness of that which we don’t yet know, we would find there a collage of images transparently placed together under the force of an idea or a musty fear of thought. To our disappointment, their motifs and metaphors appear as trapped under the obligation of expressing something vague or too precise, something already known; their montage-like abruptness somehow avoiding the creation of new meaning. A noisy, hustling flock of birds, trickling water, a worm, and some delicate steps are roused in poems such as “Justice” or “Streaming Light” in order to bring forth the potential of a sentiment. Presented too distinctly or too distant, however, each image seems to replace feeling by a fully constructed conception of the world or by just a faint delineation of its blurred outlines. Neither the impressions of water, nor birds, nor steps coalesce into a moment of reflection — worms and humans do nothing but illustrate a “man is wolf to man” feeling of pessimism. Their exactness appears to us narrow; their vagueness as irresolute. A mere collection of words, some of the poems fail in their attempt to mean more than they already would in ordinary language; to pause and suggest a totality, a unity, greater and different than its parts.
Salvador Dalí, Trois sécheresses, ca. 1936. ArtNet
JUSTICE
along came the bird
and devoured the worm
along came the man
and devoured the bird
along came the worm
and devoured the man
STREAMING LIGHT
morning is distinct
every morning
at times like a flock of birds
too noisy
hurried
other times like water
trickling and torrential
illegible
other times
like footsteps
ever so lithe
self-conscious
JUSTICIA
vino el pájaro
y devoró al gusano
vino el hombre
y devoró al pájaro
vino el gusano
y devoró al hombre
LUZ CORRIENTE
la mañana es distinta
cada mañana
a veces son pájaros
demasiado ruidosos
apurados
otras veces es agua
delgada o gruesa
ilegible
otras
como pisadas
demasiado ligeras
egoístas
A generous reading of these texts would consider them as reflections on the act of poetry writing, on our capacity to live the world poetically, and remake with words our aesthetic experience of the present. To be precise, they could reflect the necessity and impossibility of poetry, the incapacity of words to truly crystallize the agonizing barbarism of modern life. And indeed in such monologue-poems as Monsieur Monod Doesn’t Know How to Sing or Rough Song, this problem is thematized with intensified melancholy and nihilism. In the latter, a malnourished poet is gifted with a momentary epiphany and meditates on whether to create or annihilate her insight: to struggle, once poking into it, with “overflowing heavens / on an empty plate.” When offered history, the imagination sees only “indigestible black miracles”, religion is a light meal, and love, “gnawed and hard”, is always on “another plate.” A multitude of masks then abuses and bemoans this experience and her urge to transform it into poetry — ending with a impulse to reduce it to nothingness. The entire poetic apparatus is subordinated to this ambivalent wish to obliterate the poetic experience, but both its necessity and impossibility, its suffering and passion, remain merely latent, presentational, and do not surface into form. The unintelligible swirls of poetic nourishment and “consciousness” fall like rent cloth from the text, one after the other, until we are left solely with a naked corpse. Its words, like shadows, carry no real weight of the conflicted object, but merely project the impression of solidity and are intended to fade quickly away. Poetry does not fail in these poems, because its failure would entail a real tragedy crystallized in words — a soul-shaking confrontation between will and fate, conviction and nature. Rough Song takes failure as given and thus never attempts it. It shrinks back from its desire, and thus remains faceless, and from the standpoint of history, unfortunately forgettable.
Jacques Callot, Anatomical Studies after Lodovico Cigoli and studies of a figure and horses, circa. 1616. British Museum
ROUGH SONG
and suddenly life
on my plate of poverty
a thin slice of celestial pork
here on my plate
observe me
observe yourself
or kill a fly unmaliciously
annihilate the light
or create it
create it
like one who opens her eyes and chooses
overflowing heavens
on the empty plate
rubens onions tears
more rubens more onions
more tears
so many stories
indigestible black miracles
and the star in the east
cloistered
and the bone of love
so gnawed and so hard
shining on another plate
this hunger itself
exists
it is the urge of the soul
which is the body
it is the rose of grease
that ages
in its heaven of flesh
mea culpa the cloudy eye
mea culpa the black morsel
mea culpa divine nausea
there is no other here
on this empty plate
but me
devouring my eyes
and yours
CANTO VILLANO
y de pronto la vida
en mi plato de pobre
un magro trozo de celeste cerdo
aquí en mi plato
observarme
observarte
o matar una mosca sin malicia
aniquilar la luz
o hacerla
hacerla
como quien abre los ojos y elige
un cielo rebosante
en el plato vacío
rubens cebollas lágrimas
más rubens más cebollas
más lágrimas
tantas historias
negros indigeribles milagros
y la estrella de oriente
emparedada
y el huesos del amor
tan roído y tan duro
brillando en otro plato
este hambre propio
existe
es la gana del alma
que es el cuerpo
es la rosa de grasa
que envejece
en su cielo de carne
mea culpa ojo turbio
mea culpa negro bocado
mea culpa divina náusea
no hay otro aquí
en este plato vacío
sino yo
devorando mis ojos
y los tuyos
“[Crude symbolism] is typified by use of the word ‘like’ or that ‘evocation’ of the ‘image’ which served us for a time. Its abuse is apparent. The insignificant ‘image’ may be ‘evoked’ never so ably and still mean nothing”, wrote Williams Carlos Williams, railing against a similar abuse of images for poetry in the early twentieth century. Varela’s exhaustion of images is interesting for how it points backwards as well as forwards. Some of her verses appear as if written today (“I no longer know what to do with my collection of lock picks and lies”), but also murmur their derivation from historical modernism, more exactly, Surrealism. Has nothing really changed in poetry in the last century? With Varela’s poems, surrealist images and montage seem to have come full-circle and landed on their head. The surrealist invocation of the poetic image was a reaction to the deteriorated articulation of tiresome rhetoric and self-consoling rhymes; the sentimental picture-making that froze sound and sense under the formulae of tradition; the simultaneously abstemious and sybaritic, parochial and risqué, sounds of a well-exhausted late nineteenth century. The fragmentary apparitions of automatic writing, like Breton’s famous “man cut in half by a window”, were above all explosive motifs, “springboards of the mind”, from which to pry open a self-consumed potential. Instead of open-ended intoxications in need of poetic elaboration, the surrealist image in Varela hits back as a belabored command. From impactful, dream-like motifs collapsing into each other faster than the mind, tasking the mind with the swiftness of a cinematic cut, they become again inert ornamental details and overbearing concepts, unnecessary fancies or all-controlling ideas, nonchalant configurations with just a slightly different tint of defeatism for a change.
Little remains redeemable from the historical avant-garde if not their spirit of absolute negativity. Modernism is spirit in self-contradiction, the recognition of exhaustion and the necessity of transformation today. Modernism's most important insight might be its absolute commitment to the present as a passing moment. A trace of this spirit is glimpsed in Carlos Lara’s translation of some of Varela’s poems. Flowers for the Ear, for example, invokes the motif of sounds as flowers whose colors and fragrances affect our musical sensibility. The poem pictures us walking in the city, where the abundance of life, its “jackhammered streets”, are occasion for anxiety and suffocation, for a “horror of spring”, wherein reality curls and coils around us until one day we might “end in the mouth of some flower.” Over the insinuation of sound, Lara designs a web of musical delicacies (of slowly dragging sibilants, strident /t/ cracks or punctuated /l/’s and /r/’s) barely existent in the original, setting into motion our whole organism in the exercise of an exacting and reciprocate play of ear, voice, and expression. They evoke a mimesis by sound which images are often designed to prevent. From within Varela’s rough text, Lara extracts unexpected threads of forms, unarticulated rhythms and figures of speech that keep the metaphors together and yet, by the same token, undermine and fulfill Varela’s austere treatment. The translation enables the musical ambivalence contained in the original to be experienced deliberately, opening up our latent and unknown desires and fears for beauty at the level of words. Out of Varela’s monochrome metaphors, Lara’s translation is above all that of a skillful colorist which reasserts the freshness of experience, summoning the echoes of a repressed past on behalf of contact with something unseen.
Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines, 1873-4. Wikimedia.
FLOWERS FOR THE EAR
flowers everywhere
and just now I found them by listening
flowers for the ear
slow silent hastened
flowers
for the ear
walking toward the street
being jackhammered apart
I felt the horror of spring
of many flowers
blooming in the air
and closing
with many echoes
curly black petals
trailing
to the edge of the seashore
newly opened
I know that one of these days
I will end in the mouth of some flower
FLORES PARA EL OÍDO
en todas partes hay flores
acabo de descubrirlo escuchando
flores para el oído
lentas silenciosas apresuradas
flores
para el oído
caminando para la calle
que un hombre rompe con un taladro
sentí el horror de la primavera
de tantas flores
abriéndose en el aire
y cerrándose
de tantos ecos
negros rizados pétalos
arrastrándose
hasta el borde del mar de tierra
recién abierto
sé que un día de estos
acabaré en la boca de alguna flor
The exhaustion of modernist forms — their repetition — transforms the elements of language into stamps. Surrealist montage and images are perhaps the instruments of poetic elaboration most exhausted in these originals, and despite the efforts of the translation to change that, neither sound nor turn-of-phrase is sufficient to save them from their prolonged ossification. The historical situation of Surrealism and the present demand much more. Surrealism brought them into existence in the pursuit of the extremes of subjective liberation in the face of social obsolescence. Their vision to exacerbate our confrontation with reality and open up the imagination to the unknown, its infinite interpretative quest, was the last response of the European intelligentsia to a dusk of that promise of happiness upheld by art since around 1848. It sought to organize the energies created by 1917 in its defeat. We, on the contrary, need to reconstitute a humanity capable of thought without fear. Darkness has further settled, and a rehash of historical intoxication will not do. Like everything else half-heartedly revived, it will only do service to a notion of “culture” which no longer represents anything but an agonizing fantasy. What the tiger’s leap into the open air of history looks like for poetry today is up for grabs; the only certainty about the present is that it is characterized by exhaustion. A poetic practice adequate to our times will pierce through the veil of what history has today for sale and claim its right of ownership over those moments of language concealed behind the given forms. Above all, it must no longer repeat what already is.
Jean Siméon Chardin, The Attributes of Art, 1766. MiA.
