shaw, donald l. - [en] spanish american poetry after 1950

Colección Támesis

SERIE A: MONOGRAFÍAS, 251

SpANISh AMERICAN pOETRy AFTER 1950

bEyONd ThE vANGuARd

providing a basis for understanding the main lines of development of poetry in Spanish America after vanguardism, this volume begins with an overview of the situation at the mid-century: the later work of Neruda and borges, the emergence of paz. Consideration is then given to the decisive impact of parra and the rise of colloquial poetry, politico-social poetry [dalton, Cardenal] and representative figures such as Orozco, pacheco and Cisneros. The aim is to establish a few paths through the largely unmapped jungle of Spanish American poetry in the time period. The author emphasises the persistence of a generally negative view of the human condition and the poets' exploration of different ways of responding to it. These vary from outright scepticism to the ideological, the reli-gious or those derived from some degree of confidence in the creative imagination as cognitive. At the same time there is analysis of the evolving outlook on poetry of the writers in question, both in regard to its possible social role and in regard to diction.

donald L. Shaw is brown Forman professor of Spanish American Literature at the university of virginia.

Tamesis

Founding EditorJ. E. varey

General EditorStephen M. hart

Editorial BoardAlan deyermond

Julian WeissCharles davis

dONALd L. ShAW

SpANISh AMERICAN pOETRy AFTER 1950

bEyONd ThE vANGuARd

TAMESIS

© donald L. Shaw 2008

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CONTENTS

1 preliminaries: The vanguard and After 1

2 Neruda and parr 22

3 borges and Cardenal 44

4 Orozco and dalton 74

5 pacheco and Cisneros 116

Conclusion 159

bibliography 165

Index 177

1

preliminaries: The vanguard and After

Before the mid-century

Why begin a book about modern Spanish American poetry using the mid-twentieth century as the point of departure? because, as William Rowe has pointed out (Rowe, 2000, 17), vanguardism as a movement had largely run out of steam by the 1940s and “In the poets who began to write in the 1950s, there is a concern with new starting points”. Other critics (cf. Salvador, 1993, 262) agree. We can now see that the clearest illustration of this concern is to be found in the Poemas y antipoemas (1954) of Nicanor parra. but as we examine this collection we notice that, while it is highly innovative in terms of its approach to poetry, its diction and even some of its themes, in one important respect it is not original at all – that is, in its despairing view of the human condition. here parra’s outlook connects directly with that of a long line of earlier poets going back to the darker side of Romanticism and to the “devil World” hypothesis. When parra writes that “El poeta anda buscando la casa para el hombre actual, que está a la intemperie” (quoted in Morales, 1972, 213), he is saying nothing new. What this compels us to keep in mind is that the major poetry of Spanish America in the second half of the twentieth century, in its various forms, has to be seen, not just in the context of on-going innovation, but also in terms of an equally on-going crisis of ideals and beliefs which links it very intimately to the past. yurkievich puts it cogently when he writes:

una conciencia desgarrada y conflictiva será característica casi unánime de la poesía contemporánea. denota una agudización de la crisis que comienza con el romanticismo, que penetra en hispanoamérica a través del modernismo, encuentra su expresión más cabal en vallejo, en Neruda, en huidobro y se generaliza después de la segunda posguerra hasta involucrar a las promociones más recientes. (yurkievich, 1973, 277)

To go back briefly to the beginning of the twentieth century: it used to be thought that modernismo, then in its heyday, was a movement preeminently, if not exclusively concerned with modernizing the “arsenal poético” of its members; that is, with purely technical innovation, as if this process were

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somehow autonomous and could be kept largely separate from the evolving world-view of (for example) its leader, Rubén darío. This view of modern-ismo has long been abandoned. Not for nothing does Olivio Jiménez, in his excellent “Introducción a la poesía modernista hispanoamericana” (Jiménez, 1985, 9–66), speak of “esa poesía de temple agónico y existencial” (11), which “prefigura espiritualmente la modernidad” (22). he quotes with approval the title of picón Garfield and Schulman’s collection of essays on modernismo: Las entrañas del vacío (1984) in which the authors lay heavy emphasis on the “desorientación social, buceo interno, pesimismo, acoso metafísico y angustia existencial” (ibid., 31) which emerge from modernismo to char-acterize modernity in Spanish American poetry. This is clearly what Cobo borda has in mind when he writes of the modernistas that “Sus preguntas siguen siendo nuestras preguntas” (Cobo borda, 1986, 54). In relation to darío, Rivera-Rodas, perhaps more clearly than anyone else, in the last two chapters of his La poesía hispanoamericana del siglo xix (1988) develops the idea that modernista poetics was deeply concerned with the “búsqueda del significado escondido de las cosas” (321). he goes on to argue that it was the realization of the probable futility of that quest that linked modernismo with the vanguard. It is interesting to observe how Octavio paz was to take up afresh the modernista notion of “la poesía como recurso gnoseológico” (ibid., 326), and for similar reasons, despite its earlier collapse. In addition, as Guillermo Sucre points out in what is still one of the densest books on modern Spanish American poetry, La máscara, la transparencia (1975), we must not overlook the fact that it was the modernistas who “prepararon una actitud crítica frente a todo poder verbal” (14), prefiguring the movement of modern “critical” poetry so well studied by Thorpe Running (1996). Nor should we overlook the fact that pacheco published an anthology of modern-ismo in 1970.

When, therefore, we speak of the sharp reaction against modernismo which is visible in the writings of the next generation of poets, we have to be alert to the fact that it took place at levels which did not necessarily include the deepest thematic level. Ernesto Cardenal has reminded us that when his fellow poet of an earlier generation, José Coronel urtecho, wrote his well-known dismissive “Oda a Rubén darío” he did not have in mind the darío of “la tortura interior” (bellini, 1993, 77). The profound spiritual malaise visible in several of the most memorable poems of darío’s Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905), which belie the collection’s title, notably the “Nocturnos” and “Lo fatal”, lived on. Schopf, like Rivera-Rodas, picón Garfield and Schulman, and many others, insists that the heritage of the late nineteenth-century religious and cultural crisis in the West was crucial to modernismo. The modernista poet aspires at bottom to “un fundamento en que vuelvan a reunirse el yo y la realidad externa. de esta carencia, de esta búsqueda exist-encial y cognoscitiva, surge el símbolo modernista y otros recursos expre-

ThE vANGuARd ANd AFTER 3

sivos” (Schopf, 1986, 14). The first major poet to break completely with modernismo and move deliberately towards the foundation of vanguardism, vicente huidobro, picks up this heritage in his major poem Altazor (1931, but begun as early as 1919), where Altazor himself is described as an “animal metafísico cargado de congojas” (huidobro, 1976, I, 393). Already in the preface to Adán (1916) huidobro has written of his “enorme angustia filo-sófica” and his “gran dolor metafísico” (189). The main imagery of the poem, especially in its early part, revolves around the concept of a “fall” into soli-tude, “naufragio”, emptiness and anguish. Initially, huidobro seems to have had, like darío before him and paz after him, some degree of confidence in the redemptive power of the creative imagination. de Costa has shown that, having rejected modernista diction (“basta señora arpa de las bellas imágenes”, huidobro, 1976, I, 406) huidobro aspired to create a new pattern of creacionista imagery which would, like the word of God, produce a libera-tion from congoja. but the attempt failed (de Costa, 1981, 35; 1984, 161).

At the beginning of vanguardism in the 1920s, that failure lay in the future. It is important to emphasize that there is a palpable difference of mood between early vanguardism and the full tide of the movement in the next decade. Gustav Siebenmann perceives clearly that “Las vanguardias de los años 10 y 20 eran más bien estéticas, las de los años 30 se hicieron cada vez más ideológicas” (Siebenmann, 1977, 211). but this is not the whole story. As we read through the manifestos of the period of the “ismos” collected by verani, Collazos, Schwartz and Osorio, we hear a tone of youthful optimism, vitality, even euphoria: a sense of liberation. Thus the Estridentista manifesto of Manuel Maples Arce (1923) insists on “un arte nuevo, juvenil, entusiasta y palpitante” (verani, 1990, 94). The previous year in puerto Rico there had appeared, characteristically, a “Manifesto euforista” (ibid., 115–16) aimed at “la juventud americana” and calling for “gestos seguros y potentes en nuestra literatura falsificada y rala.” “Cantemos a lo fuerte y lo útil”, the author, Tomás batista, proclaims “Fortalezcamos nuestras almas entumecidas” (ibid., 115). A similar spirit is discernible in borges’s ultraísta manifestos. It derives in large part from the notion that poetry should reflect what Jaime Torres bodet, in “La poesía nueva” (1928 published in the Mexican vanguardist magazine Contemporáneos), called “el espíritu de la vida moderna … la intensidad del pensamiento actual” (ibid., 99). We find much the same insist-ence on the need for poetry to incorporate “la fisonomía peculiar del tiempo que vivimos” in Jorge Mañach’s 1927 article “vanguardismo” (ibid., 133). One of the most striking manifestos is Oliverio Girondo’s “Manifiesto Martín Fierro” (1924; Schwartz, 2002, 142–3). After accusing the public of “imper-meabilidad hipopotámica” and the younger generation of cultural paralysis, Girondo proclaims “nos hallamos en presencia de una NuEvA SENSIbI-LIdAd y de una NuEvA COMpRENSIÓN, que, al ponernos de acuerdo con nosotros mismos, nos descubre panoramas insospechadas y nuevos medios y

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formas de expresión” (ibid., 142). Like other vanguardists, Girondo calls for “pupilas actuales” and “un acento contemporáneo” (ibid.). Masiello (1986, 71) is right to contradict those earlier critics who were dismissive of Giron-do’s manifesto and to insist that “merece especial consideración”. but she accepts Girondo’s affirmations at their face value as offering “una forma nueva de discurso para la tradición literaria argentina” (ibid.) without really considering whether the “programa de acción” (ibid., 72) which Girondo proposes was followed through, except perhaps in parts of his own poetic work. Although he advocates modernity, novelty and americanismo, aware-ness of tradition as well as openness to European influences, Girondo signally fails to make clear what kind of world-view underlay the new sensibility whose existence he proclaims. Leland correctly points out that the world of almost ludic confidence to which Girondo’s manifesto belongs collapsed in 1930. Therafter, he asserts “The existential concerns operating fitfully within much of the work of the Generation of 1922 became central” (Leland, 1986, 153). It is hardly surprising therefore to find del Corro asserting that by 1937 Girondo had become “un hombre atormentado” (63) This underlines the fact that one of the most striking features of these early vanguardist manifestos is the complete absence of any significant attempt to define or analyse the “modern spirit”, or “new sensibility” which vanguardist poetry was supposed to express. It seems to have been ingenuously taken for granted, by Girondo among many others, that (as, for example, Marinetti and the Futurists in Italy had proclaimed) modernity and especially modern technology were in themselves automatically exciting, positive, vital and appealing to the young. Thus borges in “Al margen de la moderna lírica” (1920; verani, 1990, 250) could assert that ultraísmo “representa el esfuerzo del poeta para expresar la milenaria juventud de la vida”. The modernista realization that the “enigma”, the mystery of things, was not going to give way, as darío at one stage hoped, to a rebirth of the ideal, was temporarily forgotten.

Initially, the desire to have done with the past, to march ahead with the times, to abandon what seemed to be a false and outmoded poetic tradition, led young poets and writers to believe that the result would inevitably be “un arte constructivo, afirmativo, eficaz”, as Martí Casanovas declared in “Arte nuevo” (1927; verani, 1990, 137), published in Cuba’s more or less vanguardist magazine Revista de Avance. It took time for it to be understood that the “espíritu de la época” was to reveal itself to be neither construc-tive nor affirmative. What was thought to be a moment of spiritual renova-tion, potentially productive of new, possibly “American” values, turned out to be a further moment of crisis. Few examples are more illustrative of the misplaced optimism of the early vanguardistas than José Carlos Mariátegui’s “Arte, revolución y decadencia” published in Amauta in 1926. The article begins with a fundamental affirmation. vanguardism is not just characterized by technical innovation: “La técnica nueva debe corresponder a un espíritu


nuevo también” (verani, 1990, 182). Out of the anarchy of the “ismos” will arise a “reconstrucción” explicitly associated with political change.

The figure who courageously attempted to prick the bubble of early vanguardist euphoria was César vallejo. In characteristically far-sighted articles published between 1926 and 1930 (verani, 1990, 190–9), “poesía nueva”, “Contra el secreto profesional” and “Autopsia del superrealismo”, he took up, like Mariátegui, the relationship between “poesía nueva” and “sensi-bilidad nueva” in order to assert categorically that in the period of the “ismos” that link had been lost. What vallejo called the “timbre humano”, the “latido vital y sincero” of true poetry, had disappeared, he declared, amid a welter of attempts simply to renovate the poetic medium, to modernize diction and symbolism (all, in his view, derivative from European models). No one in Latin America, he affirmed roundly in 1927 (“Contra el secreto profesional”, ibid., 194) was currently able to transmit through poetry this acute awareness of “lo humano”. Like Mariátegui and Neruda, vallejo came to believe that the key to the reintroduction of truly human content into poetry would be brought about by acceptance of “el verdadero y único espíritu revolucionario de estos tiempos: el marxismo” (“Autopsia”, ibid., 197). It is hardly too much to say that vallejos’s articles mark a strong reaction against the ideas of huidobro, which are at the centre of early vanguardism. In contrast to the latter’s notion of a totally created poetic reality, a kind of parallel reality “independiente del mundo externo” (“El creacionismo”, 1925; ibid., 219) and hence independent of any value-laden, new “Spirit of the Age”, vallejo demanded a poetry which was new in technique, certainly, but which consciously expressed human, social and political insights. What neither vallejo, nor Mariátegui nor Neruda could foresee was that the political allegiance which they assumed that the new “human” (in Neruda’s term “impure”) poetry would embrace, would not provide an enduring solution to the congoja, the spiritual malaise, as its re-emergence in the three great works of mature vanguardism: Altazor (1931), Trilce (1922) and Residencia en la tierra (1935) would reveal.

In what follows, I have chosen to study poets who, I believe, best represent the mainstreams of poetry in Spanish America after 1950. If we accept Jaime Giordano’s postulate of four overlapping generations of poets in Spanish America in the second half of the twentieth century (Giordano, 1989, 91–9), it will be seen that leading figures from each of the generations have been considered here. These are: borges and Neruda from the first generation; parra and paz from the second; Orozco and Cardenal from the third, and dalton, Cisneros and pacheco from the fourth. A wide variety of choices have been made by other critics for their own reasons, as I discuss in the conclusion. For the purposes of this book, Neruda, paz and borges (despite the latter’s lack of influence) are such towering figures in the poetry of the last half of the twentieth century that it seemed impossible to leave them out. In addition, borges’s views on poetry, and particularly on diction, are so

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challenging that they surely must be taken into brief consideration. parra’s Poemas y antipoemas clearly mark a watershed which has to be discussed. dalton and Cardenal best represent the current of committed poetry which played such an important role in the period. Cisneros and pacheco are widely regarded as probably the major figures who have a more or less completed body of work at this time. Among women poets Orozco seemed to me to fit best into the broad pattern of development which I have tried to describe. I did not wish to include younger poets, partly because of the existence of Kuhnheim’s (2004) excellent book on poetry at the end of the twentieth century and partly because I was unwilling to include poets who are still in mid-career. In the broadest terms, my contention is that in the second half of the twentieth century we can perceive several overlapping lines of poetic development. These include among others: poesía pura, poetry concerned with the metaphysics of the modern human condition; social and political poetry; humourous and colloquial poetry; “Americanist” poetry; and meta-poetry or poetry concerned with the problematics of poetry itself. If I have chosen to emphasize the second of these principal lines of development, it is because it so often underlies the others, as we can see quite clearly in poets as different as parra and dalton, to say nothing of poets in whose work reli-gion plays an open role, such as Orozco, Cardenal and Cisneros. In effect, at the most basic level, we can postulate two major factors which govern the development of Spanish American poetry after 1950. One, as I have just argued, concerns the relationship of individual poets to the existential theme emphasized by Carrera Andrade (1987, 81): “La angustia existencial es el común denominador de los poemas que se escriben desde 1940 hasta nuestros días.” here we can situate Orozco and Cisneros on one side of the issue, with strong residual religious overtones in parts of their work. On the other side we have figures like Neruda and dalton, whose response is via left-wing ideology and a non-transcendental pattern of beliefs. borges, parra and pacheco represent different degrees of scepticism, while Cardenal specifi-cally fuses Christianity and Marxism. There are, of course, many individual divergences from this basic pattern, but an underlying theme of this book is that the pattern is generally recognizable across the broad picture and useful for that reason. The other factor is diction. On the one hand we have the evolution of consciously poetic diction which descends, in the last analysis, from huidobro’s famous assertion in 1921 that “El valor del lenguaje de la poesía está en razón directa de su alejamiento de la realidad” (1976, I, 716). The result is the movement towards “poesía pura”. On the other hand, we have the colloquial diction associated with parra and accepted by Cardenal and others. Once more there are many variations. but it is contended here that these are the two chief factors.

I am aware that attempting to postulate reaction to a perceived cultural crisis as a broadly unifying factor in the work of the poets selected for


study is open to criticism as using an unduly “Westernized” or “metro-politan” approach. It is, of course, one of several possible ones. I can only plead that in fiction it is the dominant approach, as is revealed, for example by Jesús Rodero’s La edad de la incertidumbre (2006) among many other similar works. I hold that in literature everything goes forward more or less together – “tout se tient” – and I am unapologetic about seeking a parallel pattern in poetry. Earlier I quoted yurkievich (himself a poet) in defence of the pattern which is here postulated. I do not think we can overlook the statement, asserted as late as 1973, of another relevant poet, Jorge Carrera Andrade (quoted above, page 6). Ten years later Ramón Xirau could write in “del modernismo a la modernidad”: “Muchas de estas ideas y actos que caracterizan a la modernidad se engarzan en una tradición que nace con el romanticismo y son consecuencia y parte de la crisis de los valores univer-sales” (Xirau, 1983, 67).

Similarly it could be argued that more could have been included about the reactions of poets inside Spanish America to one another’s work rather than about the reactions of many English-speaking critics. My response is two-fold. On the rare occasions where I have found such reactions relevant (as for instance in the case of Cardenal’s remark à propos of parra, or pacheco’s poems on darío and Guillén) I have mentioned them. but, although, for example, pacheco published Descripción de Piedra de sol (by paz) in 1974, in many cases the real influences between poets have been between Euro-pean, sometimes English-speaking, poets including some from the uSA, and Spanish American ones. parra’s first antipoemas were written after his contact with contemporary English poetry. Orozco’s few comments about poetry clearly reveal French influence. Following the example of Alberto Girri, Cisneros published an anthology of modern English poetry and a poem on the death of Robert Lowell. pacheco wrote poems on Matthew Arnold and Juan Ramón Jiménez and, according to Cobo borda was influenced by Cavafis (1986, 91). Cardenal’s poetic formation was clearly affected, not only by darío, Coronel urtecho, pasos, Cortés and Cuadra, but also by Eliot, Frost and especially pound (Mereles Olivera, 2003, 123). These are only a few instances among many others: Coronel urtecho, for instance, published a panoramic anthology of North American poetry in his time; Carrera Andrade brought out an anthology of French poetry. The whole question of reciprocal influences among poets, and of their relations with one another, is a mine-field, and one which I have not felt capable of exploring further.

The mid-century

What, then, was the situation of Spanish American poetry like at the mid-century, when vanguardism had pretty well come to the end of its creative cycle? vallejo had died in 1938, leaving Poemas humanos and España aparta

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de mí este caliz to be published posthumously the following year. Though he was already famous among his fellow poets, his influence was still growing. In total contrast, huidobro who had been dead for only two years, having published his Últimos poemas in the year of his death, 1948, was a spent force, now quite overshadowed by Neruda. Even so, since the publication in 1935 by Eduardo Anguita and volodia Teitelboim of their important Antología de la poesía chilena nueva, huidobro had been recognized as the pioneer of vanguardism in Spanish American poetry and it has been argued that his 1932 manifesto “Total”, in which he turns to some extent against his earlier poetics, marks the end of the aggressively experimental phase of the movement. We should not overlook the fact that Lagar, the last collection of Gabriela Mistral, who represents the backward-looking other end of the poetic spectrum, was not to be published until 1954, by which time it was all but completely anachronistic. Nonetheless, the fact that her verse continued to appear until after the middle of the century symbolizes one of the difficul-ties of periodizing Spanish American poetry at this time.

borges, as a poet, had been silent since Cuaderno San Martín in 1929 and was not to publish a significant amount of poetry again until El hacedor in 1960. he had been a major figure in the renovation of the 1920s, but, as we can see from his ultraísta manifestos, his contribution at that time had been to all intents and purposes exclusively aesthetic. Although, like huidobro, Neruda, vallejo and eventually paz, he became deeply aware of the on-going cultural crisis of his time, this awareness did not really emerge in his early poetry. When it did appear, in his essays and short stories, and in later poems, like “Ajedrez II” (El hacedor) where at the climax he asks:

Qué dios detrás de dios la trama empieza de polvo y tiempo y sueño y agonías? (borges, 1974, 813)

it reveals that his life-long interest in metaphysics and his suspicion that life might be best seen as a circular labyrinth, with no entrance or exit, and commonly with death at its centre, were clearly related to the cultural pessi-mism of later vanguardism. however, one aspect of borges’s early poetry is highly significant in view of future developments. We have seen that a series of dichotomies were visible in the twenties and after. Tradition, espe-cially outside the Southern Cone, continued to face radical innovation; youthful optimism faced a growing sense of spiritual crisis; emphasis on “el hecho estético” and the central role of imagery faced advocacy (especially by vallejo) of “lo humano”. but there is a fourth dichotomy: that produced by the contrast between a vision of “pure” poetry, which was universalist by definition, and the desire for a specifically American or Americanist poetry which had surfaced in late modernismo and can be found in the later darío, prada and above all Chocano. For a short time the latter produced borges’s


adhesion to a poetry which was highly Argentine in setting and deliber-ately laced with argentinismos. We can see the same trend in vallejo’s early “Nostalgias imperiales” and in much Afro-Caribbean poetry, represented by figures like palés Matos and especially Nicolás Guillén. It fell to Neruda at the mid-century to give this consciously Americanist poetry a strong ideo-logical colouring in Canto general. This collection marked a striking return to the “civic” tradition in Spanish American poetry, the notion of a patriotic, value-laden, nation-building poetry dating from the nineteenth century. It was destined in poesía comprometida, protest, guerrilla poetry and militantly left-wing poetry of all kinds (with a major representative in Cardenal) to have a major role in the second half of the century.

The final figure whom we have to mention briefly at this point is Octavio paz, whose early evolution illustrates afresh the change that came over vanguardism. paz was a latecomer who dated the beginning of his authentic work from 1949 with the first version of Libertad bajo palabra (paz, 1988a, 16). In practice he had been publishing since 1931 when he was still in his teens, but this was already more than a decade later than the first poems of borges, huidobro or Neruda. The interval had seen the “ismos”, most of the major vanguardist manifestos, and in Mexico, the formation of the Contemporáneos group at the end of the 1920s. unlike the three poets just mentioned, paz did not go through the kind of vanguardist phase we see in borges’s ultraísta poetry, nor that of huidobro’s creacionismo or Neruda’s Tentativa del hombre infinito. Santí points out that, virtually from the outset of his work, paz rejected “pure” poetry and specifically “la posición estética de Contemporáneos” (Primeras letras; paz, 1988b, 19), sharply criticizing it in his early essay “Ética del artista”. bowers, examining paz’s earliest poetry rightly suggests that the programmatic poem, No I of Luna silvestre (1933), advocates a type of poetry which is equidistant between the two extremes of thesis-poetry and “pure” poetry which paz had discussed in the essay (bowers, 1999, 179). Subsequently, however, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and paz’s visit to Spain the following year produced a small but significant group of ideologically motivated poems which show him aligning himself temporarily with Neruda, vallejo and other poets from Spain and elsewhere who were in sympathy with the Republic. This did not mean that he had broken completely with the recent past. Santí correctly insists that he and other poets in Spain at the time “rechazan el arte puro, pero no el aspecto crítico, el rigor estético, de la vanguardia” (paz, 1988a, 26). Noteworthy is the lecture “Noticia de la poesía mexicana contemporánea” (1937) given in Spain, in which paz aligns himself completely with vallejo, criticizing some of the Contemporáneos because they “olvidaron al hombre” and asserting that he and other younger Mexican poets (unnamed) “preten-demos plantear, poéticamente, es decir humanamente, con todas sus conse-cuencias, el drama del hombre de hoy” (paz, 1988b, 136). At that moment he

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saw this drama in revolutionary terms, but in the same lecture he mentioned “la crisis metafísica” (135) of the times. It was this which soon prevailed, emerging prominently in “Calamidades y milagros” in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It led, as we have mentioned, to a mystique of cognitive poetry, in which a combination of fully sexualized love and the creative imagination of the poet could bring entry into “la vida más vida”.

The fundamental fact of the mid-century, sadly overlooked by Sucre because of his astonishing decision to exclude Neruda from his superb book, is the publication, precisely in 1950, of the first edition of Neruda’s Canto general (preceded by “Alturas de Macchu picchu” in 1945 in which the change of direction in his outlook was already plainly chronicled). It was followed by the first set of Odas elementales in 1954, with its extreme shift both in content and diction from Residencia en la tierra. The embrace by both vallejo and Neruda of left-wing ideology, partly as a result of events and conditions in Europe in the 1930s leading up to the Spanish Civil War and the war itself, must obviously be seen in political terms. but it also attests a reaction against their joint participation in the second phase of vanguardism, in which, as yurkievich has pointed out, the “exaltación optimista”, which we have noticed in some areas of the early movement, gave way increasingly to “disfórica desolación, reificación, angustioso vacío, quebranto existencial con la consiguiente carencia ontológica” (yurkievich, 1982, 361). In the 1930s meaning had returned to poetry with a vengeance; but it was meaning often of a highly disturbing kind. It could be life-rejecting, as in Neruda’s “Walking around” or vallejo’s Trilce XXXIII or even, as at the end of huido-bro’s Altazor, the rejection of any notion that language can convey meaning at all. The vanguardist advocacy of strikingly novel, newly minted images, new symbols, new formal arrangements which did without some logical nexuses and challenged the reader, was adapted to express this desolate outlook and produced the masterworks of the period. but when Neruda and vallejo turned to Marxism in search of immanent values with which to replace a lost hope of transcendence, the end-result, in Neruda’s case especially, was a return to poetry of direct communication.

This return was not initially confined to left-wing, politically committed poetry. Looking back in 1958 to the end of the 1930s, Nicanor parra empha-sized, in a talk, that he and a number of his fellow poets in Chile were “en general apolíticos”. yet, in the face of “los poetas creacionistas, verso-libristas, herméticos, oníricos, sacerdotales” (the reference is clearly to the the vanguardists and in particular to the Neruda of Residencia en la tierra) they declared themselves to be “tácitamente, al menos, paladines de la claridad y la naturalidad de los medios expresivos” (parra, 1958, 47). At the start, parra conceded, this was a step backwards. but eventually, he affirmed, it came to mark a turning-point in Chilean poetry – implicitly with his antipoemas as the spearhead of change. We shall see that the change in question was not to


be restricted to Chilean poetry. We can plausibly assert, therefore, that as the vanguardist period came to an end, a split was developing between poets in the universalist “high Culture” tradition of a search for humanist values in a world where they seemed to have disintegrated, and poets who were much more interested in re-establishing direct communication with the reading public, poets with a more down-to-earth relationship with the real, with the here-and-now, with lived experience rather than abstract intellectual explora-tion of the human condition. It is clear that the primary difference concerned the matter of diction. We have seen that the leading figure in this area, parra, attacked “hermeticism”, one of the buzz-words of the times among poets of the “Conversational” or “Colloquial” grouping to characterize what they were against; it serves as an instant identification sign. Alemany bay has shown that this advocacy of clarity and naturalness found widespread accept-ance. She cites as characteristic the statement by Mario benedetti of uruguay that in buenos Aires he had discovered the poetry of baldomero Fernández Moreno, “un poeta que tenía obsesión por la claridad” and had at once begun to write “poemas que pretendían ser claros” (Alemany bay, 1997, 16). In different parts of Spanish America, and to different degrees, other poets, including Roque dalton in El Salvador, Roberto Fernández Retamar in Cuba (who baptized the movement), Enrique Lihn in Chile, Jorge Enrique Adoum in Ecuador, Antonio Cisneros in peru, Francisco urondo in Argentina and, most famous of all, Ernesto Cardenal in Nicaragua, bought into the notion that poetry must become much less writerly, and use a much less specialized diction, one that was based on orality, everyday conversational Spanish. As time went on this new anti-rhetorical, anti- “hermetic”, more populist poetry in turn became polarized. One wing moved leftwards into committed social poetry and militant protest. The poets of the other wing remained primarily interested in exploring the everyday life they observed around them.

We can say, therefore, in broad terms that three primary figures were exerting enormous influence, in different directions, after 1950. The first was Octavio paz, whom González and Treece (1992, 366) describe as “not only an important poet, but the dominant influence on Latin American poetry criticism for the last thirty or so years”. They describe him as setting out to “resurrect or generate new universals, new general and global truths about human experience in a world that has seen their collapse” (ibid., 200). Their third relevant assertion is that “antipoesía was the diametrical opposite of the poetry of Octavio paz” (ibid., 193). Thus the second major influence, alongside that of paz, was parra, who set out deliberately to demythify and desacralize the “high” poetic tradition. The third towering figure, was of course, the Neruda of Canto general. It is time to glance at these three figures at the mid-century.

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Octavio Paz (Mexico, 1914–98)

paz was the youngest of the five poets whom yurkievich (1971) called the founders of the new poetry of Latin America: vallejo (b. 1892), huidobro (b. 1893), borges (b. 1899), Neruda (b. 1904), paz (b. 1914). he was thus ten years younger than Neruda, fifteen years younger than borges and twenty-two years younger than vallejo. When he began publishing poetry in the early 1930s, vanguardism was already firmly established and Neruda was only a few short years away from the shift in his work after the first two Residencias, chronicled in “Explico algunas cosas” (Tercera Residencia, 1947). Although in his first collection of poems Luna silvestre (1933) paz was drawn towards “pure” poetry”:

… volviste a mí, poesía, tan casta en tu desnudez, vestida de pudores.

(paz, 1933, 9, poem no. 1 [untitled]),

it is clear that he refused to carry the notion to an extreme. The key expres-sions in this tiny poem are the adjective “equidistante” and the phrase “en la frontera exacta de la luz y la sombra”, both applied to his poetry. As we have seen, they suggest a kind of poetry which is balanced between expression which has been stripped down to juxtaposed images with some sort of rhyth-mical support, which is basically what borges had advocated in his ultraísta manifestos, and expression which is strongly charged with meaning, tending towards ideology, which was the direction Neruda was soon to take. While on a visit to Spain during the Civil War, as we have mentioned, paz went in the second direction with poems like “Oda a España” and “No pasarán”, but this was merely a brief interlude in the prehistory of his mature poetry. Once he found his true poetic voice, it was that of a man seeking a home in a hostile world, a man at odds with the human condition and at odds with himself, “sin donde asirme”, as he says already in poem no. 4 of Luna silvestre. Words (poetry, creativity) offer hope, but are always threatened, at this stage of his work, by ambiguity or ominous silence; fully sexual love may open a door of perception, but always there is fear of ausencia. Trapped between these and other cognate dualities, paz plainly underwent some sort of long-lasting spiritual crisis in the 1930s and early 1940s, which has caught the attention of critics, notably brenda Segall and Frances Chiles, and which his most famous poem “piedra de sol” (1957), with its reference to:

… una vida ajena y no vivida, apenas nuestra (paz, 1990, 352),

(as distinct from the longed for “vida más vida” of “Más allá del amor” a few years earlier) reveals was still casting its shadow. All of paz’s greatest poetry


is in a sense a record of spiritual travail, a pilgrimage through words in search of something ultimate which lies beyond words. but there are stages in the pilgrimage and the mid-century marked a shift. “Alrededor de los años 50”, yurkievich affirms, “la poesía de paz cambia de tono y de registro” (yurk-ievich, 1971, 217). Insofar as this is true, it has to do with paz’s growing awareness of the limits of language, of the fact, as Jason Wilson puts it, that “being’s truth-experience is indecible” (Wilson, 1979, 111). This awareness was to remain central to his later work.

historically speaking, what marks paz out after the mid-century and the emergence of colloquial poetry is his uncompromising preoccupation with abstract themes: life, being, language, time, identity, the duality of “real” / visionary reality and the like. he was not concerned with orality, but instead with evolving a specialized diction based on exploration of language’s ability to express the gnoseological, truth-divining potentiality of the poetic imagi-nation. he was less interested in communication than in creation. Not surpis-ingly Carlos Magis could entitle his important contribution to paz criticism La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz (1978). paz’s poetry directly challenges the reader. but in contrast to the Neruda of Canto general, Cardenal and committed poetry in general, paz’s poetry challenges the reader not so much to be aware of the problems of Society, but rather to be willing to contem-plate those of existence and the human condition. hence in an interview with García-huidobro in 1990 he characterized himself, along with borges and Mallarmé as belonging to the class of poets who are primarily preoccu-pied with “el enigma del universo” (García-huidobro, 1993, 120). All paz’s important poetry is predicated on a notion of crisis: the crisis of modern man, for which one of the call-signs in his poetry is the word “abismo”. And as Fein explains, “all of his work is unified by a utopian wish for the fulfillment of man’s wholeness in individual creativity and in the building of society, offering an ennobling vision of man to an uneasy world” (Fein, 1986, 4).

The wish generates a quest, a search for holism, for an integrating and authentic response to the modern crisis. This constitutes the universal aspect of paz’s poetry. As Erich Fromm puts it in The Sane Society (Fromm, 1967, 31):

Man’s evolution is based on the fact that he has lost his original home, nature … he has fallen out of nature, as it were, and is still in it; he is partly divine, partly animal; partly infinite, partly finite. The necessity to find ever-new solutions for the contradictions in his existence, to find ever-higher forms of unity with nature, his fellow men and himself, is the source of all psychic forces which motivate man … [Man’s] inner contradictions drive him to seek for an equilibrium, for a new harmony.

These words are exactly applicable to the deepest level of paz’s work. but

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it has to be said at once that his quest appears to fail. There are sporadic moments of epiphany, when a solution seems to have been grasped. but they are never more than momentary. At other moments paz seems forced to agree with borges that there may be some mysterious order governing the universe, but if there is, we are not programmed to understand it. At one point in Pasado en claro paz seems to re-embrace darío’s key assertion in “Coloquio de los centauros” (Prosas profanas):

¡himnos! Las cosas tienen un ser vital … cada hoja de cada árbol canta un propio cantar … el vate, el sacerdote, suele oír el acento desconocido … (darío, 1954, 643)

when he writes:

¿hay mensajeros? Sí … Animales y cosas se hacen lenguas, a través de nosotros habla consigo mismo el universo … ¿que dice? dice que nos dice … (paz, 1990, 656)

This is at once portentous-sounding and anti-climactic: what the universe seems to be saying is no more than that it exists within our consciousness. What it does not say is that it exists objectively and meaningfully. but paz clung to the hope that somewhere there was a different reality which made sense of the one around us. In other words, just as Cortázar postulated a mysterious “yonder” which seems to lie outside the conventional limits of metaphysics and yet which promises a lost but rediscoverable source of exis-tential authenticity, so paz at times postulates an “otra orilla” towards which his on-going metaphysical quest is always directed. We need for paz the equivalent of Moran’s study of Cortázar’s quest, Questions of the Liminal in the Fiction of Julio Cortázar (2000), relating his thought, especially in his later work, to the outlook of radical modern thinkers who seek to deconstruct the dualistic pattern of thinking (“either/or”) we take for granted, and replace it with a “both/and” or an “oscillation between”. but what comparison of paz with Cortázar shows is that in both cases the attempt to go beyond the hith-erto accepted boundaries of metaphysical thinking in search of a new source of existential confidence leads either to a mystique or to a set of unresolvable paradoxes. It strains language beyond what it will bear and in the end leaves one with the suspicion that reaching the “yonder” or the “otra orilla” is no more than an endlessly deferred illusion. As Wilson writes implacably: “paz pursues an elusive salvation” (Wilson, 1979, 6).

From this point of view, one of the most illuminating discussions of his


poetic stance is Lelia Madrid’s “Octavio paz, el tú y la mirada” in her book on the poetics of darío, vallejo, borges and paz. Madrid recognizes that, in all four poets, their poetry is less concerned with eliciting aesthetic pleasure in the reader than in operating as an alternative form of knowledge which may ultimately reveal a lost unity, a more harmonious vision of reality, for which all four poets are searching, by overcoming in some degree its own limits. Thus she posits as one of the goals of poetry in Spanish America, from that of darío onwards, “el desciframiento del mundo, el conocimiento” (Madrid, 1988, 38). This is the key to her analysis of paz’s innermost desire: to tran-scend mere analogy and glimpse behind it identity. Repeatedly paz links poetry and religion, especially in El arco y la lira, in the sense that poetry supposedly offers man reconciliation within himself and can bring a shift to a new dimension of being. In a rare attempt to compare the poetic outlook of borges and paz, Madrid correctly emphasizes that the former remains trapped in a mysterious pattern of eternal repetition in which death alone may ultimately bring a vision of the unifying archetypes, while paz aspires to the creation of a new reality. What is missing in Madrid’s book is any desire to link the poetic outlooks of vallejo, borges and paz, as yurkievich, Cobo borda and others have done, with a wider Western pattern of spiritual unrest. In addition, we miss a clear recognition that what Madrid acknowledges in paz as “ese tránsito de la profecía a un centro deseado, nunca alcanzado” (92) cast a shadow of defeat over his whole poetic enterprise.

According to paz himself, as we have mentioned, the mid-century marked the beginning of his mature poetry: “Mi primer libro, mi verdadero primer libro, apareció en 1949: Libertad bajo palabra” (paz, 1988a, 16; subsequently it underwent significant revisions). A year earlier, in Naples, he had written a key poem: “himno entre ruinas” (paz, 1990, 233–5). It contains seven stanzas of irregular length and versification. Its structure is based on contrast: stanzas 1, 3, 5 and 7, in normal type, are increasingly positive; stanzas 2, 4 and 6, printed in italics are pervaded with negativity. but, despite the alter-nation in the first six stanzas, we can easily see that the poem is a climactic sequence leading to the triumphant affirmations of stanza 7. The language of stanza 1 is strikingly up-beat, beginning with the majestic image of the sun-drenched day as an eagle spreading its wings. In the following lines we find benéfico, hermosas, and verdad supported by a system of references to one of paz’s most positive symbols: light (deslumbrante, resplandece, sol, luz). Even the ruinas are vivas (because they recall classical culture, which lives on in the present). but the climax of stanza 1 is a reference to the modern world: “un mundo de muertos en vida”. We are immediately reminded of Canto III of Neruda’s “Alturas de Macchu picchu” with its evocation of the great mass of mankind, suffering “cada día una muerte pequeña”, people whose lives are trivialized by their lack of awareness. Equally we think of vallejo’s Trilce LXXv (“Estáis muertos”; vallejo, 1986, 174) flagellating his acquaint-

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ances in Trujillo for their similar readiness to go on being “los cadáveres de una vida que nunca fue”. All three poets locate part of the modern crisis in mankind’s passive refusal to face it and react to it. “himno entre ruinas” asks for a vivifying word which will act on mankind like the water of life. As the poem progresses, light overcomes shadow and when the sun reaches its zenith there comes an epiphanic instant, expressed in eucharistic terms (“espiga henchida de minutos / copa de eternidad”) and, as the poem concludes, man reconciles his divided selves, consciousness becomes a well-spring of fábulas (sources of wisdom?) and he is enabled to speak: “palabras que son flores que son frutos que son actos” (paz, 1990, 235).

but paz was not able to sustain this instant of optimism. A scrutiny of his poems about poetry both before and after the mid-century, such as “La poesía”, “hacia el poema”, “El río”(Libertad bajo palabra), the first poem of the centre column of Blanco and others, reveals an on-going conflict. On the one hand we clearly perceive paz’s will to believe that the practice of poetry-creation would both show him his truest identity and at the same time reveal that this deepest self was somehow in tune with a realm out there “on the other shore” which would give meaning to existence. but on the other hand, we recognize his recurrent realization that this can never be more than a hope or a leap of faith. As paz himself writes at the climax of “vrindaban” (Ladera este): “A oscuras voy y planto signos” (paz, 1990, 426). Sucre’s attempt in La máscara, la transparencia to suggest that somehow, later, paz manages to overcome or at least come to terms with his vision of “un tiempo que carece de centro” and “una realidad que se fragmenta y se desintegra” (Sucre, 1975, 214) jars against the critic’s own recurring use in his chapter on paz of words like “posibilidad”, “precariedad”, “proyecto”, “problemática”, “paradoja” and even “contradicción”: they are inescapable.

Piedra de sol (1957) has been described as “a summary of all that paz has said before concerning man, love and the experience of transcendental communion with a sacred world” (bernard, 1967, 13). Like “himno entre ruinas” it proceeds via alternations of positive and negative, ecstasy and insight, but this time framed by the circularity of the Sunstone. There are no full stops, only commas, semi-colons and colons, so that what is implied is an endless uninterrupted flow. Somehow, like borges’s Library of babel, reality is limitless and, at the same time, recurrent. More than anywhere else in his poetry up till then, Piedra de sol illustrates two fundamental elements in paz’s outlook. The first is connected with his much discussed interest in Surrealism. he has made clear on several occasions that what really drew him to the movement was not connected with automatic writing or making creative contact with one’s unconscious, but rather Surrealism as containing a view of the human condition, as accepting the notion of the poet as visionary and the belief that poetry had an important role to play in changing man and society. More specifically, we need to see that he may have found in


Surrealism a comforting confirmation of his deep need to believe in the iden-tity of opposites, in man’s ability to see through contradictions to a unity which has been lost because of a “fall” (another of his basic concepts). One of the many symbols of that unity of opposites is, in Piedra de sol, Melusine, half beautiful, half sinister. The second element of great significance is the fact that Piedra de sol ends with a prayer: a prayer to an unknown deity to awaken him from the sleep of reason which produces monsters, to reunite him with his real identity, to save him from his own fall and reconcile his divisions. The prayer is another manifestation of the theme of aspiration, of quest, of pilgrimage, which runs right through paz’s work. here, typically, the prayer seems to have been answered at the climax of the work, and yet the circular pattern, re-emphasized at the very same climax, suggests that it will always be uttered afresh.

All critics are agreed that paz’s contact with Eastern thought and culture, especially during his period as Mexican ambassador to India from 1962 to 1968, had an impact which was second only to that of Surrealism. What it seems to have done was to intensify his quest for some form of “peak experi-ence” which would be the climax of a process of self-actualization realized through poetic creativity. The essence of that peak experience would be a sense of unity, the perception that all aspects of reality are somehow linked. The experience itself would not only seem uniquely real, but also uniquely meaningful. It should be emphasized that such an experience would not be in the narrow sense religious. It would not go beyond the relationship between the psychology of the individual and the world outside. Rather than a faith, we are concerned with a would-be cognitive schema, developed experien-tially: a set of assumptions about what we perceive and how we perceive it. Ideally it would allow the mind to go beyond immediate perception and normal experience. From the early 1950s on, paz’s mainstream poetry reveals a gradual process of cognitive restructuring as the poet strove to integrate his Aztec/Mexican cultural heritage with European and ultimately Indian and Eastern influences.

The poems of the late 1950s reveal a deep sense of frustration, one of the symbols of which (as in Neruda’s “Walking around” in the second Resi-dencia) is the urban environment, as we can see from “Entrada en materia” (Días hábiles) with its use of adjectives like “indescifrable”, “demente” and “incoherente” to describe the life of the modern city. Another indicator is paz’s treatment of language, which is “escritura gangrenada” in “Repeti-ciones” (Días hábiles) but in contrast:

la que sostiene el rostro, al sol, al tiempo sobre el abismo (paz, 1990, 326)

in “La palabra escrita” (Días hábiles). The poet “vivo/entre dos paréntesis”

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(birth and death) in “Certeza” (Días hábiles) sees writing as the fragile guar-antee of existence: “escribo para que viva y reviva” (“El mismo tiempo”). In “Lauda” (Homenaje y profanaciones) eroticism again provides a momentary and contradictory promise of deeper spiritual insight, which seems to grow as we approach the early 1960s. The triumphant affirmation of “Noche en claro” (Salamandra):

Todo es puerta todo es puente ahora marchamos en la otra orilla (paz, 1990, 351)

seems to be supported by a series of poems in which loving sexuality appears to bring a return of existential confidence, culminating in the joyful comple-mentarity of the male/female dualities in “Movimiento” (Salamandra). A climax of this positive movement comes in Salamandra (1962) which brings together ancient Mexican myths about the hero-God Xólotl and some Euro-pean lore. What is crucial is the association of the Salamander, the crea-ture of fire, with a whole range of positive symbols: “amapola”, “garra de sol”, “grano de energía”, “espiga” and above all “puente”. Xólotl, the central mythical figure of the poem, Rachel phillips asserts (1972, 15) is “doubly a symbol of sacrifice and redemption”.

The question at this point was again whether this more positive response to life could be maintained. paz’s experience of India and the East seemed to provide part of the answer. All paz’s serious critics have seen that his frustration expressed itself increasingly in paradox. This is true even of his symbolism. In Libertad bajo palabra we have a fairly clear distinction between positive and negative symbols: “muro”, for example, versus “puerta”. but in “Solo a dos voces” (1961) we read:

la piedra se despierta lleva un sol en el vientre (paz, 1990, 388)

the negative contains the positive. From now on this is to be a constant. “La lógica de la conciliación de los contrarios”, Manuel ulacia writes (1999, 228),”a partir de Salamandra, opera en todos los planos de la escritura.” Much has been made of the notion that paz found support and confirmation of his aspiration to harmony via holism in Eastern Tantrism, which brings together a spiritualization of the erotic and the idea of the identity of opposites, which the sexual act can be seen as symbolizing. This is a key to the understanding of Blanco (1967), subsequently included in Ladera este (1969). It was paz’s most ambitious poem since Piedra de sol. The title can be read as referring to the world as a blank space left by the collapse of earlier myths of meaning, or as a goal or target. The poem was accompanied and partly explained by the


essay “Los signos en rotación” added to the second edition of paz’s El arco y la lira in 1967. There paz attempted to outline the basis for a new poetics derived from Mallarmé’s idea that poetry was a “glorious lie” uttered in the face of nothingness. The formal arrangement of Blanco derives ultimately from Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés, but the content of the poem contains an attempt to contradict Mallarmé’s pessimism. The new poetry is not only set out on the page differently from the way we are used to seeing it, but also contains “signs”, which can be compared to Cortázar’s “figuras”, hinting at a secret reality behind appearances, and which can reconcile us with “other-ness” in a new Edenic, prelapsarian unity.

Thus Blanco has to be seen as beginning from a loss: the loss of the “Other” – that reality which lies behind and envelops everyday reality in something greater, which points towards all-embracing meaningfulness, love, religion, art, destiny. Insofar as Blanco has a discernible theme, that theme is the link between language, the poetic medium, and harmony. The typographical organization of the poem in the first edition has been described many times and is lost in more recent printings. As one originally unfolded the single page, the poem appeared gradually as a symbolic movement in space and time. The formal appearance was intended to become part of the meaning: a “figura” in the Cortazarian sense. Similarly, the disposition of the poem is that of a central text which can be read either as a unity or as six separate poems interacting with the texts on either side. Each of these has four parts, so that numerous permutations are possible. This was intended to illustrate the idea expressed in El arco y la lira that the poem is a set of shifting signs, seeking, rather than expressing, a meaning. The non-linear form represents an attempt to avoid the traditional way of seeing a poem as a climactic sequence. but this does not exclude meaning: Blanco is also a kind of mandala, the Eastern object of contemplation which leads the contemplator from variety to unity. In “viento entero” (1965; Hacia el comienzo) paz had written “ver duele”, awareness is painful. but at the climax of Blanco the fusion of loving eroticism and language emerges and confers on the (poetic) gaze, on creative insight, “reality”.

Enrico Mario Santí (1997, 301) asserts that the five major poems of paz’s production are: Piedra de sol (1957); Blanco (1967); “Noche de San Ilde-fonso” (1974); Pasado en claro (1974) and Carta de creencia (1987). Critics are divided on whether the implicit conclusion of Blanco is fully positive and on whether paz’s sometimes mechanical-seeming technique of succes-sive affirmation and contradiction is a meaningful strategy. Fein in particular, using the poem “vrindaban” from Ladera este (1969) as an example, suggests that “the victory is hollow, for the poet’s grasp of success is transitory” (Fein, 1986, 99). but he quotes afresh paz’s often mentioned quotation from “John Cage”: “The situation must be yes-and-no/not either-or” (“Lectura de John Cage” [Ladera este]) which is key to paz’s outlook during and after the

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1960s. In much of his later work he stubbornly presents paradox as if it opened the way to synthesis and as if by reiteration of paradox he could beat down the reader’s resistance to seeing the world in terms other than those which remain conventionally and comfortably dualistic.

paz continues to circle round the possibility of resolving duality into unity, so that we become increasingly aware that, like unamuno’s agonismo, it becomes an on-going attempt to bend negativity back on itself, to attribute to the struggle with ambiguity an intrinsic value, or to challenge the reader to resolve the dichotomy. In real life, problems of this sort are sometimes resolved, or more usually just grown out of. but in the case of writers like unamuno or paz, to overcome the crisis taking place in the mind is to risk losing the main source of creative inspiration. Thus paz goes on trying, as Fein puts it, “to define a reality beyond appearances and perception” (Fein, 1986, 115) and in the process to arrive at a new understanding with the reader. The latter is expected to assume an ever-greater responsibility to familiarize him- or herself with the background to the poetry (Surrealism, Tantrism, Structuralism) in order to decipher it. The result is likely to be an ever smaller, if more select and intellectual, audience. This being said, we need for the present purpose proceed no further than Blanco, since paz’s subsequent poetry continues along the same track (Sucre, 1975, 217). It is sufficient for us to understand why paz, in the last half of the twentieth century, represented one pole of poetic endeavour in Spanish America and why two other groups of poets felt impelled to react against his increasing complexity of both conception and diction, which eroded the already limited public appeal of poetry, and to seek to move in a less “hermetic” direction.

In “Fábula” (Libertad bajo palabra) paz had evoked:

una palabra inmensa y sin revés palabra como un sol un día se rompió en fragmentos diminutos Son las palabras del lenguaje que hablamos Fragmentos que nunca se unirán Espejos rotos donde el mundo se mira destrozado

(paz, 1990, 134)

but not all the poets of his time shared the belief that everyday language is merely the debris of broken mirrors. Similarly, not all his fellow poets were willing to place the emphasis squarely on the poet’s individual self-actualiza-tion, however much the process of its achievement might involve others or “the Other”. There were those who were more inclined to stress the collec-tivity which involved the individual. And so, growing up alongside paz’s poetry of specialized diction (metaphor, symbol and paradox) there came into


being, in reaction to vanguardism and its prolongation, two very different strains of poetry, one deriving from Neruda’s Canto general (1950) and the Odas elementales (1954) and the other from parra’s antipoemas which began to appear in the same key year of 1954.

2

Neruda and parra

Pablo Neruda (Chile, 1904–73)

Three factors are traditionally taken into account in explaining Neruda’s shift from the vanguardist thematics and diction of the first two Residencias to the more Americanist and populist poetry in and after Canto general. One is the formulation of the doctrine of Socialist Realism in Russia at the Moscow Writers’ Conference of 1934, a doctrine which took on a new lease of life after World War II. The second is, of course, Neruda’s reaction to the Spanish Civil War which in his own view was the key to his poetic development thereafter. The third is the evolution of politics and society in post-World War II Chile, in which a relatively small but growing middle class, perhaps 20 per cent of the population, was acquiring a leadership role in an ideo-logical and political struggle against the “Seventy Families” who spearheaded the landowning and commercial-industrial oligarchy. Initially this struggle appeared to be succeeding, with the victory of the only popular Front experi-ment outside Europe in 1936. however, after maintaining for a while an uneasy coalition with the Left, president González videla in 1948 outlawed the Communist party, to which Neruda had belonged since 1945, only to see the country turn to a general (Ibañez) in 1952. The economy stagnated and at least half the population of Chile lived below the poverty level. but despite setbacks, the Left was on the move and Neruda became its mouthpiece. It has been persuasively argued by hugo Méndez-Ramírez, in Neruda’s Ekphrastic Experience (1999), on Neruda and the Mexican muralists, that contact with them between 1940 and 1943 in Mexico was also an important factor.

The first objective indication of a change in Neruda’s poetics came with the publication of Tercera residencia in 1947 with its famous remark, dated March 1939, at the beginning of the poem “Las furias y las penas”: “El mundo ha cambiado y mi poesía ha cambiado.” Already in 1935, in the magazine Caballo verde para la poesía, Neruda had published “Sobre una poesía sin pureza” which pointed towards his later notion of the poet as artisan. The late 1930s and early 1940s reveal a process of development which culminated in the epoch-making Canto general at the exact mid-century. Arguably the most important moment of this development came with Neruda’s rediscovery of his American (and more specifically Chilean, roots). Méndez-Ramírez reminds

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us that “Neruda’s poetry … even as late as 1938, does not include America as a theme” (Méndez- Ramírez, 1999, 114), a point of crucial significance for Canto general. he goes on to point out that Neruda’s first Americanist poem is “un canto para bolívar” (1940). by this time he had already begun to prepare what was to become Canto general de Chile, which in turn was the germ of Canto general. This last, therefore, is as much the culmination of a process of change as the beginning of a new pattern visible in his poetry. however, an important turning-point came with the composition of Alturas de Macchu Picchu (1945), part Two of Canto general, after his visit to the place in 1943. All critics agree that the first five sections of Alturas hark back to the negative tone and manner of the first two parts of Residencia en la tierra. but section six: “Entonces en la escala de la tierra he subido” marks an obvious articulation. It represents more than just a change of mood and tone. On the one hand the densely figurative language of the first five sections eventually gives way to a much more directly comprehensible mode of poetic discourse aimed at immediate communication of meaning. On the other, Machu picchu increasingly comes to be seen as a source of Spanish American identity and at a more universal level as a symbol of the triumph of the collectivity over death. but the last cantos of Alturas, and especially canto xii, the climax, to which criticism has hardly done justice, insist that only by contributing the story of their sufferings, and thus raising the level of historical and political awareness of the readers, can the ancient Inca workers of Machu picchu achieve renewal of life in the here and now. With the call to action at the end, Alturas makes a full transition from the metaphysical to the political, and indeed to the revolutionary (Shaw, 1988).

The consequence was that, before long, Neruda repudiated both his earlier poetry, up to and including the first two Residencias, and the diction in which it was expressed. In a speech in 1949 in Mexico he declared that his “antiguos libros” belonged to a bygone period, implicitly one of decaying capitalism, and that in a new post-World War II era “No quise que el reflejo de un sistema que pudo inducirme hasta la angustia, fuera a depositar en plena edificación de la esperanza el légamo aterrador conque nuestros enemigos comunes ensombrecieron mi propia juventud”. he was thinking primarily of the Soviet union and its Eastern European satellites, but also, he makes it clear, of Latin America (Sanhuesa, 1971, 205). Four years later, in 1953, he alluded explic-itly to the shift away from vanguardist hermeticism which, as we saw earlier, was the chief feature of the times in poetry, saying: “El problema mayor de estos años en la poesía, y naturalmente en mi poesía, ha sido el de la oscu-ridad y la claridad.” he went on: “yo confieso que escribir sencillamente ha sido mi más difícil empeño … Me propongo ser más sencillo, cada día, en mis nuevos cantos” (Neruda, 1990, 18–19). As parra was to do in his 1958 talk “poetas de la claridad”, Neruda in his often-quoted “Los poetas celestes” (Canto general) now fiercely criticized the vanguardists:

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gidistas intelectualistas, rilkistas misterizantes, falsos brujos existenciales, amapolas surrealistas encendidas en una tumba, europeizados cadáveres de la moda, pálidas lombrices del queso capitalista … (Neruda, 1973, I, 479)

that is, the poets who did not accept the compromiso which he had embraced.

Loyola (1971) posits two successive phases in Neruda’s poetry in the years from near the mid-century to the late 1960s, with Estravagario (1958) as the watershed between them. The first phase is naturally that of Canto general itself, followed by Los versos del capitán (1952), Las uvas y el viento (1954), Odas elementales (1954), Nuevas odas elementales (1956) and Tercer libro de las odas (1957). The second runs from Estravagario through Cien sonetos de amor (1959), Canción de Gesta (1960), Las piedras de Chile (1961), Cantos ceremoniales (1961), Plenos poderes (1962), Memorial de Isla Negra (1964) up to La barcarola (1967). The difference, which has been accepted to some extent by other critics, such as José Carlos Rovira Soler (1991, 128), Jorge Edwards (1990, 87) and Luis Sáinz de Medrano (1999, 67) has to do with a change of mood derived from a deepened insight dependent on a number of factors, which modified significantly the positive and optimistic tone of Canto general and the immediately following collections. We recall that at least two thirds of the 231 poems which comprise the more than 15,000 lines of Canto general were written while Neruda was in hiding in different parts of Chile from the repression unleashed by the González videla regime during 1948 and early 1949. disgusted by the treachery of González videla to the principles he had accepted during the 1946 election, in which Neruda had helped to run his campaign, and profoundly moved by the solidarity of the common people who helped him to escape arrest and eventually to escape from Chile over the Andes, Neruda developed his fragmentary Canto general de Chile into a vast, largely historical, frieze, covering aspects of the history of Latin America from pre-Columbian times to the 1940s. Inevitably, given the circumstances in which much of it was composed, Neruda’s ideological stance as a recently joined member of the Communist party, and the growing Cold War polarization which was its context, the main organizing principle of the collection is the struggle between liberty and oppression, seen in largely crude, black and white, Manichean terms. These make some of its political diatribes unreadable today even by the most favourably inclined. It should be said at once, however, that this savagely aggressive tone was highly influ-

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ential in later protest poetry over which it cast a long shadow. In addition we need to remember that, while such poetry can seem grossly over-explicit to many readers, especially outside Latin America, it is not intended to be read critically. Like hymns and patriotic songs, these poems are expressions of a pre-existent set of values designed to strengthen and articulate what is already accepted. That is to say, their function is different from that of some other kinds of poetry. Just as an American or a French person hears his or her national anthem differently from the way it is heard by a foreigner, so those who have suffered oppression respond to protest poetry differently from those who only know libertarian societies.

The result is that the poem as raw statement often tends to prevail over the poem as a well-crafted structure and the poem as an aesthetically satisfying verbal artefact. Occasionally, as in “Miranda muere en la niebla (1816)”, we meet with a challenging poem, 46 lines almost without punctuation evoking episodes in the life of Miranda and his death:

… si en Trinidad hacia la costa el humo de un combate y de otro el mar de Nuevo y otra vez la escalera de bay Street la atmósfera que lo recibe impenetrable como el compacto interior de manzana y otra vez esta mano patricia este azulado guante guerrera en la antesala largos caminos guerras y jardines la derrota en sus labios otra sal … (Neruda, 1973, I, 407–8)

but in the main the poems are characterized by thickly layered, readily acces-sible imagery, largely visual and much of it symbolic:

… Cortés afila puñales sobre los besos traicionados (“Cortés”, ibid., 349)

eres pan y raiz, lanza y estrella(“Cuauhtémoc [1520]”, ibid., 377)

Túpac germina en la tierra. (“Túpac Amaru [1781]”, ibid., 398)

The conception is not strictly narrative, though processes of historical change are painted in with broad brush strokes, as when, in “La colonia cubre nuestras tierras” the conquistadors die off and “vino el mercader con su bolsita” (ibid., 392), and in “Las haciendas” the land is divided up into “haciendas y encomiendas” (ibid., 394). The historical development of Latin America is dramatized in terms of anecdotal presentation of individual historical figures (oppressors and libertarians) in chronological succession. Although the richly

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figurative language (against which the Colloquial School of poets will react) is fully within the reach of the average reader, this is not “popular” poetry, at least in the sense that Neruda presupposes a certain level of historical knowledge on the part of his audience. The poetic voice is sometimes that of a participant in the action, sometimes that of a deeply involved commentator for whom the common people are “brothers” and who on occasion addresses the reader directly on their behalf, unless, as in some of the poems of the section “La tierra se llama Juan”, they tell their own stories of hunger and injustice. We are not in the presence of an organized pattern governing the structure of Canto general. The collection grows by chronological accretion, designed to create its consciousness-raising effect by re-emphasis and rein-forcement of one overarching theme which we find throughout social poetry. We shall see it again in Cardenal’s “hora O”. It is that every set-back in the onward march of the common people towards liberty and justice fertilizes the ground for the next stage of the struggle. It is symbolized in the first poem of the section “Los Libertadores”, “Aquí viene el árbol”, in which the tree, representing in a typical nature-image the free people, survives and grows amid cataclysms. Equally symbolic is the blood of Caupolicán:

Más hondo caía esta sangre. hacia las raíces caía. hacia los muertos caía. hacia los que iban a nacer. (“El empalado”, ibid., 385)

And in the next poem:

La sangre toca un corredor de cuarzo. Así nace Lautaro … (“Lautaro [1550]”, ibid., 385)

The figurative language of Canto general is functional in the sense that it tends to relate man to nature systematically in terms of harmony/dishar-mony in order to reinforce the underlying dichotomy: liberty/oppression. While there is no Edenic postulate of a (lost) total harmony, or fall, the older, pre-Conquest native societies are seen as closer to nature than modern ones, although priestly and aristocratic oppression is often foregrounded. The use of organic nature-symbols (above all that of the tree) is regularly used to suggest that, with a change of mentality, implicitly via Socialism, a new harmony can be achieved. It is clear that at a deep level Neruda aspired to a kind of utopian holism. Frank Riess (1972, 88–104) shows that Neruda presents the Araucanian Indians as symbolizing a people whose close links to nature underlie their power to resist oppression. Much of the imagery in Canto general carries the implication that the process which led from the Conquest to modernity was not just a process of exploitation of both

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nature and the common people but one of contamination and perversion, which a better organization of society could reverse. but what Riess and other critics seem unwilling to take into full account is that recognizing the functionality of imagery is not just a matter of identifying the overarching patterns to which it corresponds, but is dependent on a consideration of its quality. Symbolic of the change in Neruda’s poetic outlook is the fact that what had been chaotic enumeration, expressive of a world of often unintel-ligible randomness, is now replaced by catalogues in which the elements are clearly related to one another in what is intended to be a technique of re-emphasis. but all too often in Canto general and the Odas Neruda’s flowing creativity leads him to create sequences of juxtaposed images which instead of reinforcing one another slide into banality:

… este organismo valeroso, esta implacable tentativa, este metal inalterable, esta unidad de los dolores, esta fortaleza del hombre, este camino hacia mañana, esta cordillera infinita, esta germinal primavera, este armamento de los pobres,salió de aquellos sufrimientos …

(“Recabarren”, Neruda, 1973, 447)

The effect is over-explicit. For that reason among others “Alturas de Macchu picchu” remains the anthology piece from Canto general. Too much of the rest is based on simple contrasts: common people/oligarchy, work/violence, liberators/oppressors, fertility/ destruction. As we approach the contemporary period, the poet’s compromiso in “La arena traicionada” and in “Que despi-erte el leñador” becomes so accentuated and the partisan tone so shrill, that parts of these sections (now that historical events have moved on) produce embarrassment and are little more than short–lived literary curiosities of the early Cold War period. We avert our eyes and turn with relief to the Odas.

Odes are celebrations, and the Odas elementales of Neruda are celebra-tions of the simple things of life which make it satisfying. Their publication in Argentina beginning in 1954 caused a minor sensation. Canto general had introduced a revisionist interpretation of the history of Latin America in which the native peoples and the masses play important roles and leading historical figures are seen in a different perspective. Now the three books of Odes and Navegaciones y regresos (1959), which completes the cycle, represent a revisionist approach to poetry and the poetic, pushing back the frontiers of what had been acceptable in “high art” poetry and colonizing

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new territory. The Odes still retain the “inspirational” quality of many of the poems of Canto general. Neruda’s poetic voice identifies itself afresh with the people and speaks to them and for them. Consequently, as in Canto general, the least readable Odes today are those in which the poet (naively, as we can see with hindsight) incorporates implicit utopian promises and aspira-tions into the climaxes of individual poems. having found a certain serenity in his attachment to the Communist party and in his relationship with his new partner Matilde urrutia, the poet confidently envisions the emergence of a new social order. In “Oda al edificio” (Odas elementales) the erection of a building becomes a collective endeavour:

erigir entre todosel orden … (Neruda, 1973, II, 55),

subordinating the individual to the group-task, which then comes to symbolize the construction of a new society:

El hombre … seguirá construyendo la rosa colectiva … y con razón y acero irá creciendo el edificio de todos los hombres. (ibid.)

In “Oda al cactus de la costa” (Nuevas odas elementales), the conclusion is explicitly spelled out:

… ésta es la moral de mi poema: donde estés, donde vivas … hermano, hermana, espera, trabaja … (ibid., 230)

Three things are missing in this kind of poetry. They are: irony, ambiguity and humour. The first two have no place in poetry of politico-social uplift. Their role is to deflate and complicate any simplistic vision of things. Their absence undermines Neruda’s claim to be a “realistic” poet; he is realistic in the Odas only in the sense that he dedicates poems to everyday things in familiar settings. but the tone in which he writes about them is not one

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of detached observation. Rather it is one of warm emotional involvement, optimistic anticipation of a better future and heavy emphasis on human soli-darity. The poet reaches out to things which provide a provisional reconcili-ation with life, while we relish the prospect of what seems to be imminent social change. Thus, in the deservedly famous “Oda a la alcachofa” (Odas elementales), the special appeal of the poem lies in Neruda’s exploitation of the artichoke’s appearance – like a hand-grenade. In the first half of the poem the vegetable’s martial daydream is emphasized, only to be brought down to earth as it is carried home, among commonplace items, to be cooked and eaten. The housewife’s hands convert a potentially threatening symbol into a culinary delight. but we notice that the contrast is heavily underplayed: from the very beginning the artichoke is “de tierno corazón”, it is “la dulce alcachofa”, even when it stands in a military rank. This is reality as we should like it to be. Similarly the cheap and not very nourishing tomato is turned into a memorable symbol of plenitude and abundance, while the olive and the humble onion are both described as miraculous. The word which best describes the poetic voice here is “benign”; the form of the poems is declara-tory (not, as we tend to believe great art should be – exploratory) and on occasion, sententious.

Not all the Odes by any means are celebratory. Since they were originally stimulated by an invitation to contribute a weekly poem to a Caracas news-paper (de Costa, 1979, 148), they turn into kinds of note pad, covering a wide range of subjects and tones, from the sentimentality of “Oda a una lavandera nocturna” (Nuevas odas elementales), to the sarcasm of “Oda a la crítica” (Odas elementales), and from whimsicality in “Oda a los calcetines” (Nuevas odas elementales) to the nostalgia of “Oda a la vieja estación Mapocho en Santiago de Chile” (Tercer libro de las odas). Like parra, Neruda was fully conscious that he was spearheading a change in Spanish American poetry:

yo me río, me sonrío de los viejos poetas (Neruda, 1973, II, 9)

he writes, in “El hombre invisible” (Odas elementales). Specifically, we presume, he was mocking the vanguardists whom he accuses of excessive self-centredness and ignorance of the life of the common people. In their poems, he complains – self-servingly:

no pasan pescadores ni libreros, no pasan albañiles, nadie se cae

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de un andamio, nadie sufre … (ibid., 9)

but, unlike parra, as his “Oda a la sencillez” and “Oda a la poesía” (Odas elementales) make clear, his aim was not to jab his readers in the head or put them at risk on his rollercoaster: he was not at this time in the busi-ness of shattering their complacency. In both poems he emphasizes that his turn to colloquiality and simple diction was designed, not to disturb, but to come into closer emotional contact with his fellow men and women, to bring them “campanas”, joy-bells, and “pan”, nourishment of the spirit. Once again Neruda declared his allegiance to poetry as

utilitaria y útil, como metal o harina, dispuesta a ser arado, herramienta, pan y vino … (ibid., 154)

As the Odes declare on every page, it was by changing the pattern of his figu-rative language, not by severely limiting it (as we see in parra and Cardenal), that he wanted to get his feelings of solidarity and his yea-saying to the prospect of a better future. half a century later, we read the Odes with the uneasy pleasure that comes from contemplating a world which the poet tells us is warmer and more comfortingly hopeful than we know it to be. Canto general and the books of Odes are the works which influence a whole sector of left-wing, socially orientated poets after the mid-century including, among the better-known, the early dalton and Cardenal, as well as Gonzalo Rojas, Alvaro Mutis and Efraín huerta, if we are to believe Cobo borda (1986, 87). Subsequently Neruda wrote a great number of other works, in which we can see among other things a certain diminution of his enthusiasm for the extreme Left and a very obvious return to the love-ideal, especially in the Cien sonetos de amor. but by this time his influence had largely been internalized by the next generation.

Nicanor Parra (Chile, 1914– )

Several critics, including Ibañez-Langlois and Schopf (in Gottlieb’s anthology of essays on parra, 1993), taking their cue from parra’s own remark to Mario benedetti: “Neruda fue siempre un problema para mí” (benedetti, 1972, 303) have asserted that the antipoemas represent a conscious reaction against Neruda’s poetry around the mid-century. Writing of Neruda’s shift of poetic outlook in Canto general (1950) and Las uvas y el viento (1954) Federico

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Schopf writes categorically: “Ciertos rasgos esenciales de esta concepción nerudiana de la poesía … despertaron un rechazo implícito y casi sistemático en la búsqueda y la producción literaria de poetas como Nicanor parra” (Schopf, 1993, 144). It has also been alleged that much later, in Estrava-gario (1958), Neruda got the message and introduced more down-to-earth humour into his poetry. For the moment, however, we see parra reacting against the “hermeticism” of vanguardism generally (and the first two sctions of Residencia en la tierra); the ideological thrust of Neruda’s poetry in Canto general and after; Neruda’s romantic concept of the poet as an Olympian bard, prophet and visonary, leading the masses to victory over oppression and injustice; and, connected to that, his solemnity of diction and sometimes fustian grandiloquence.

In complete contrast parra created and popularized the figure of the antipoeta. using, we notice, a reference to his own poem “El peregrino”, he wrote

El antipoeta ha llegado a ser – ha sido empujado a ser – un sujeto marginal, descontrolado, excéntrico, que recorre frenéticamente las calles en busca de comunicación y conocimiento. Su soledad, su frustración, la inutilidad de sus esfuerzos – ante la realidad impenetrable, ante su propia interioridad – le hacen caer en un desastroso estado mental.

(quoted in Molina, 2005, 183)

We need to look closely at the language of this statement, replete as it is with meaning. The antipoeta is a socially marginalized figure, lonely and frustrated, desperate to understand the reality around him and to be able to make meaningful contact with others, but unable to do so. Exterior reality and his own interior reality resist his efforts to make sense of them and leave him deeply troubled. In an interview in 1972 with patricio Lerzundi, parra developed his view of antipoesía, creating a further distinction, this time not between the antipoeta and the bard, but between poetry which was concerned with beauty and hence with goce estético, and poetry which was concerned with life. here he explained his reference to Aristophanes in “Advertencia al lector”.

I found I had to admit [he declared] that what, ultimately, I didn’t like was the Greek spirit. Geneerally, for the Greeks poetry and art were a hymn to beauty not a hymn to life. Fortunately (this I know a posteriori), next to the spirit of Aristotle, who is a typical classical spirit, is that of an anti-Aristotle, Aristophanes. At the time I felt much closer to Aristophanes.

(Lersundi, 2005, 152)

This led him, he affirms, to two standpoints which he expresses together in

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the phrase “life is in the vernacular”. That is to say, on the one hand, “What the antipoet looks for is not, fundamentally, beauty, but life, life in flesh and bone”. On the other hand, in order to figure forth lived reality, the antipoeta must abandon any specialized poetic diction as well as musicality: “it seems to me that music blocks the achievement of a poet’s ultimate purpose.” This purpose has to do essentially with bEING (in capitals in the text). Musicality leads to what parra called in the interview “sing-song”. To express life as it really is, and to explore being “what has to be done, it seems to me now, is to capture the speech rhythm of our people” (153).

What, then, are the characteristics of the antipoemas which parra created, partly in opposition to Neruda’s all-pervading influence? First of all, the antipoemas are strongly nihilistic and anti-romantic: they consistently de-bunk ideals and hopes, especially those connected with love, sexuality and femininity. Next, they tend towards narrativity and the incorporation of “anec-dote”, pseudo-real-life incidents, which had been all but banned from “high” poetry since at least the second decade of the century. The notion embraced by Iván uriarte (1980, 325) that it was Cardenal who first brought narrativity back to Spanish American poetry and handed it on to Enrique Lihn, Roque dalton, Fayad Jamis, Jorge Enrique Adoum, Antonio Cisneros and Carlos María Gutiérrez, among others, is quite simply wrong. For, despite the fact that Cardenal was writing narrative historical poetry in the late 1940s, it was parra who was primarily responsible for the reintroduction of narrativity as such via the great success of Poemas y antipoemas, years before Cardenal came on the scene with “hora O”. Thirdly, the poetic voice tends to be that of an isolated, alienated, marginalized lower-middle-class anti-hero, who is at first tricked, humiliated, exploited and victimized but later becomes more reactive. So far as content is concerned, there is a prominent element of absurdist social criticism and satire (which conflict slightly with the basic nihilism) but underlying this is an unmistakable sense of anguished insight accompanied by feelings of solitude and lack of communication with others. Thus while it may be true that “No hay héroe trágico en la antipoesía”, as Rosa Sarabia asserts (1997, 60), this should not be taken to imply that parra stands aside from the cultural crisis of the West in our time. On the contrary, in her study of what she regards as the prevailing irony in the antipoemas, Sarabia presents it along with scepticism as parra’s “arma de defensa ante un mundo absurdo, cruel e ilógico” (ibid., 74), “un mundo sin recuperación” (ibid., 75). Rowe adds the very important point that parra’s antipoetry reveals a strong sense of the limitations of language itself “So that the speaker’s confidence in the faithfulness of his own words is also grotesquely corroded” (Rowe, 2000, 39) however this cannot be carried too far; the antipoems are not “critical” poetry in paz’s sense of the word as Rowe seems inclined to suggest (ibid., 41). If they were, their general ideological impact and frequent satirical intention would be undermined. Finally, although the antipoems are clearly

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intended to jog the reader into some form of new awareness, it is impor-tant to recognize that parra, here in direct contrast to paz, has no patience with the idea, borrowed most recently from the Surrealists, that poetry may offer an alternative form of knowledge. In “Advertencia al lector” (Poemas y antipoemas) he is the first to admit that “Mi poesía puede perfectamente no conducir a ninguna parte” (parra, 1969, 37). This is a most important affirmation in the context of the times.

At the technical level, we notice a marked change of tone and diction from that of the vanguardists, with heavy use of irony, cynicism, sarcasm, anti-climaxes, irreverence, burlesque and parodic humour including black humour: “un humor que no produce catarsis”, as Sucre puts it (Sucre, 1975, 312). Colloquiality replaces solemn poetic utterance. Musicality is at a discount. Imagery, which had been regarded as the very stuff of poetry by the vanguardist poets, plays a reduced role, but there is plenty of new symbolism. The tendency of all poetry to take the form of a climactic sequence is some-times accentuated by use of sting-in-the-tail mechanisms, though at other times there is a contrasting use of anti-climax or a deliberate avoidance of organic unity of structure in favour of a special kind of chaotic enumeration. What we cannot miss, as we read the antipoemas in the context of poetry in Spanish America since the 1920s, is an obvious change in the implicit pact between the poet and the reader. We are no longer challenged to figure out the meaning, or startled by strikingly unexpected imagery. The relation of the poet with the reader is almost collusive, at times confessional, but also at times defiant. These characteristics do not appear all at once and they evolve with parra’s successive collections of poetry. As has frequently been pointed out (though never developed) parra himself asserted in his interview with Leonidas Morales that Poemas y antipoemas contained Neoromantic and post-modernista poems as well as Expressionist ones such as “desorden en el cielo”, “Oda a unas palomas”, “Autorretrato” and “Epitafio” which he thought of as more brutal, bitter and aggressive than the rest (Morales, 1991, 104). These, especially the last, are interesting distinctions and one would like to know more about what parra understood by Expressionism and how it related in his mind with antipoetry. Even so, critics are agreed that Poemas y antipoemas represents a new start, after the false start of parra’s first, imma-ture, collection Cancionero sin nombre (1937).

parra’s early mature poetry contains three separate strands: traditional poems, antipoems and poems which use the folkloric model (such as those of La cueca larga). The traditional poems (which persist in parra’s later work) at this stage clearly represent a transition away from vanguardismo. described by Tomás Lago (Lago, 1942, 9) as belonging to “un realismo neorromántico”, they already include two of the major features of antipoesía: non-hermetic diction and narrativity. Characteristic are the poems which appeared in 1942: “hay un día feliz”, “Es olvido” and “Se canta el mar”. The last, superbly

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analysed by Juan villegas (1977, 183–206) is openly anecdotal, that is, based on an actual experience of parra’s boyhood, an experience which in familiar, traditional fashion (and in standard hendecasyllables) the poet raises to the level of a universal revelation. The diction, as Rowe points out (2000, 33), is already striking. Sometimes it is clear and direct, to the point of prosaic-ness:

partí con él y sin pensar llegamos A puerto Montt una mañana clara (parra, 1969, 25)

the tone is relaxed and conversational, broken by chiefly conventional imagery – “El mar que baña de cristal la patria” (ibid., 26) – and simple acoustical effects, such as the repeated “a” sound in the line just quoted, or the allitera-tive effect of the “s” sounds in:

Sin que en mi ser moviérase un cabello ¡Como la sombra azul de las estatuas! (ibid., 26)

but elsewhere in the poem it is more conventionally “poetic” and non-collo-quial, as when parra uses three adjectives placed before the noun “espuma” so that the effect is one of unexpected shifts of register. There is no ironic presentation of the narrator. On the contrary, he is shown appealingly in the one simile which looks forward to antipoetic diction:

Era mi corazón ni más ni menos Que el olvidado kiosko de una plaza. (ibid., 25)

charmingly emphasizing his lack of emotional self-awareness. If we glance at the varied rhythmic and acoustical treatment of the hendecasyllables in “Se canta al mar”, for example, the climactic line “La vOz del mAr en mi persOna estAba” (ibid., 26), with its studied balance and musicality, and compare it to the no less efective but rhythmically and acoustically different “Sobre la hAz ondulAnte de las Aguas” (ibid., 25), we recognize a poet fully in command of the medium he was to deconstruct so successfully in the antipoemas.

Six years later, in 1948, after marriage, fatherhood and a trip to the united States in 1944, parra published “La víbora”, “La trampa” and “Los vicios del mundo moderno” (Poemas y antipoemas) which mark a major turning-point in his work. We can see this quite clearly if we notice that in the seventy-three lines of “La víbora” there is not a single simile or metaphor, so that, paradoxically, the entire poem becomes a symbol of a non-poetic world: a world of reversed values. Mereles Olivera sees the poem as exploring parra’s relationship with the muse of poetry (2003, 64–5). This is a possible, but in my view less satisfactory reading than one in which love is presented as not

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merely irrational but degrading. Instead of ennobling, it brings out the less estimable side of human nature. The poem also illustrates parra’s use of anti-poetic symbolic spaces: a boating pond in a park and a popular dance-hall. The effect is to reduce the love relationship to banality, just as la víbora’s actions reduce emotional and sexual contacts to mere ploys to avoid satisfying the lover. After line 30 the poem begins to include nightmare symbolism: the circular room near the cemetery where the love-making takes place, and the rats which invade the bedroom. These serve to pre-empt la víbora’s offer of a love-nest in line 62, and lead to the climax in which the relationship is suddenly revealed to be an adulterous one and the lover ground down to a level on which his need for rest and food is far more basic than any desire for romantic dalliance. In total contrast to what was to emerge as Neruda’s tender romanticism in the Cien sonetos de amor (1960) and to paz’s mystique of sexual love as a major component in breaching the “wall” separating us from “la vida más vida”, parra strips away all illusion. however, it is note-worthy that in his interview with Mario benedetti in 1969 he said: “A mí me parece que el sexo es lo que hace marchar el mundo … Tal vez esto esté en la base de la antipoesía, y explique de alguna manera el goce sexual extremo que se pone en algunas líneas” (benedetti, 1972, 59).

Another area where, as we have noticed, parra confronts illusion is with regard to the poet’s self-image as a figure with privileged insight or even with a mission. Neruda, we recall, before his embrace of Marxism, saw himself in “Sonata y destrucciones” in the Residencias as a sentry, keeping an eye on life while others relaxed. Later, he re-invented his role as that of a char-ismatic leader of the masses. paz, throughout most of his poetic career, saw himself as a visionary, seeking on behalf of mankind, or at least his readers, a new level of existential understanding through the gnoseological power of poetic activity. by contrast, in “hay un día feliz” (Poemas y antipoemas) parra checks himself even for allowing an emotional reaction to stem from his vision of life’s absurdity (“vamos por partes, no sé bien qué digo”; parra, 1969, 21). by contrast, in “Autoretrato” (ibid.) for example, we see a kind of resigned self-deprecation, together with an element of bitter humour. Instead of belonging to victor hugo’s symbolic “phares”, or darío’s “Torres de dios, poetas”, the poet in parra’s work is a figure of fun, at best ambiguous (“Epitafio”; ibid.) at worst “en un desastroso estado mental (“El peregrino”; ibid.) Repeatedly parra warns the reader that he is confused and unable to articulate any reliable message about the human condition, except that it is unbearable.

parra’s poems themselves, however, tell us otherwise. All the major critics have emphasized that they contain important satirical elements, and satire is by definition judgemental. Not for nothing does Eduardo parilla (1997, 127) assert that “la antipoesía fue y sigue siendo un proyecto ideológico radical”. Certainly parra has more questions than answers. This is why he describes

36 dONALd L. ShAW

himself at the climax of “El peregrino” as “un árbol que pide a gritos se le cubra de hojas”, that is, which begs to be offered some certainties. but their absence does not leave him in a state of apathetic detachment. On the contrary. At the end of “Manifesto” (Otros poemas), he writes advocating

Contra la poesía de salón La poesía de la plaza pública La poesía de protesta social. (parra, 1969, 214)

An important aspect of antipoesía, in effect, is its attack on the bourgeois establishment in Chile. As parra himself expressed it: “esa es precisamente la finalidad última del antipoeta, hacer saltar a papirotazos los cimientos apolil-lados de las instituciones caducas y anquilosadas” (Neruda and parra, 1962, 13). So, despite his underlying nihilism, parra feels compelled to denounce and ridicule certain aspects of society and indeed to express his hostility to those writers who remain detached:

palabra que da pena ver a los premios Nacionales de Literatura silenciosos y gordos: satisfechoscomo si en Chile no ocurriera nada.

(“Chistes para desorientar a la policía”; parra, 1983, 142)

While practically all the major critics have noted that parra’s poetry contains clearly defined social attitudes, what has not been made entirely clear is that his outlook is, as we might expect, dualistic. On the one hand, certain aspects of Chilean society are shown up as grotesquely absurd, and the poet reacts with anger; on the other, different aspects are seen as ridiculous and treated satirically. It is necessary in other words, to distinguish between the diatribes in which the poet’s frustration and hostility explode, and the more genuinely amusing and caricaturist poems in which the poet makes fun of the lower-middle-class individual in a highly stratified, hypocritical, appear-ance-obsessed social environment. both types of poem depend on their use of the grotesque; but it functions in different ways. In the diatribe poem, for example, “Momias” (Versos de salón), the tone is one of indignation and disgust. This is quite unlike vallejos’s Trilce LXXv accusing his acquaint-ances in Trujillo of being spiritually dead. vallejos’s tone is one of distress; parra’s is contemptuous:

una momia conversa por teléfono Otra momia se mira en el espejo. (parra, 1969, 92)

The whole poem is an amplification of his picture of the pathetic representa-

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tive of the lower middle-class in “preguntas a la hora del té” (Poemas y antipoemas):

Este señor desvaído parece una figura de un museo de cera. (ibid., 19)

Ironically, this example of pseudo-intelligence asks himself questions about reality and ultimate values but without interest, merely in order to pass the time till the tea (with toast and margarine – not butter!) is ready. In “Los vicios del mundo moderno” (Poemas y antipoemas), after listing a large number of deplorable aspects of modern life, parra is dismissive. There is nothing to be done: “La suerte está echada” (ibid., 58). The poet can only stand aside and, while visually proclaiming his rejection of conventional social standards (of hygiene), smile pityingly at the antics of his fellow citizens:

Cultivo un piojo en mi corbata y sonrío a los imbéciles que bajan de los árboles. (ibid.)

here the grotesque surfaces in its true twentieth-century sense, as an expres-sion of a deep sense of disharmony and alienation in the poet; one which offers a new and disturbing perspective on reality. It reveals a world which is absurd but not funny. The diatribe poems present, in Wolfgang Kayser’s words: “an unimpassioned view of life on earth as an empty, meaningless puppet play” (Kayser, 1981, 186) in line with parra’s well-attested nihilism. but in a more satirical vein we have poems like “El pequeño burgués” (Versos de salón) which mock the recommended patterns of behaviour for the social climber by substituting ludicrous absurdities which, it is implied, the socially inept reader will be unable to recognize for what they are:

preguntarle la hora al moribundo … presentarse de frac en los incendios. (ibid., 115)

but, as we smile at the caricatured recommendations, the repeated “y tragar cantidades de saliva” reminds us that the only valid requirement for breaking into the middle class from below is the ability to swallow endless snubs and humiliations. poems in this category illustrate the combination of the grotesque with humour, so that the effect is comic, but at the same time disturbing. The quality of the comedy is affected: the satire is robbed of any gaiety or lightness of touch and is brought close to black humour.

It is presumably his satirical intention which allowed parra to assert, in his interview with Morales in the early 1970s, that his humour is not depressing but healthy (Gottlieb, 1993, 369; also in Morales 1972, 218). however, around 1970 he also told Elisabeth pérez-Luna (in Flores and Medina, 1991,

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27 and 29) that his poetry arose from “un estado de angustia o desesperación que conduce necesariamente a la creación” and that he was not a very opti-mistic person. Angustia is indeed a word which recurs frequently in criticism of parra (Flores and Medina, 1991, 118; parilla, 1997, 31; Ibañez-Langlois, 1993, 14, etc.). For this reason a key word in his Obra gruesa is abismo. It has two sets of associations, in both of which it symbolizes the absence of solid ground under our feet, that is, lack of existential security. One set is psychological and spiritual. This is the abyss inside ourselves, an abyss of darkness, mystery and despair, which neither faith, love nor reason can illuminate. It corresponds to what Neruda in poem 5 of the Veinte poemas de amor called “mi guarida oscura” and what paz in “La caída” (Libertad bajo palabra) called “el abismo de mi ser nativo”. The other set of associa-tions is existential. It sees life as an abyss, separating us one from another, and over which we are forced to cross as on a tightrope, terrified of falling into the depths. both sets are implicit in parra’s reference at the climax of “Recuerdos de juventud” to “el abismo que nos separa de los otros abismos” (parra, 1969, 48). In the second of “Tres poesías” he calls on the abyss for answers to ultimate why-questions;

Es absolutamente necesario Que el abismo responda de una vez. (ibid., 108)

but clearly there is no reply. This is what has caused critics like Ibañez-Lang-lois and Schopf to emphasize the “nihilism” and “pure negativity” of much of parra’s poetry. parra himself has reacted in two different ways. In one mood he attempts to offset consciousness of the abyss with assumed frivolity, describing himself light-heartedly as a “danzarín al borde del abismo” (“yo pecador”; La camisa de fuerza) and again as “bailarín al borde del abismo” (“Test”; ibid.). Similarly he counsels his aspirant to the bourgeoisie to cultivate the ability to “bailar un vals al borde del abismo” (“El pequeño burgués”; Versos de salón). The repetition of the image must be significant. In “Mujeres” (ibid.) he signals his impatience with women who associate sex with existential despair (“La que sólo se deja poseer / En el desván al borde del abismo”; parra, 1969, 101) and in “La víbora” (Poemas y antipoemas) describes his lover’s metaphysical questions as “necias preguntas”. but in another mood, that in which God does not exist (“Composiciones” [Versos de salón]), the world is presented as falling to pieces and death becomes mean-ingless annihilation (“Soliloquio del individuo”; [Poemas y antipoemas]; “Total cero” [Tres poemas]).

This is the deepest level of parra’s most familiar poetry: that in which the poet, as Ibañez-Langlois says, “hurga sin cesar en la herida religiosa” (1993, 30). It is also the level which most brings to mind some of the poetry of vallejo. but whereas vallejo’s references to God are always deeply serious,

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revealing the peruvian poet’s painful awareness that what he wanted to believe was not reconcilable with his experience of human suffering, parra reacts with bitter humour which testifies to his inability to contemplate with detached serenity a world in which “la vida no tiene sentido” (“Soliloquio del individuo”; parra, 1969, 64). his technique is one of sarcastic anti-climax. In “La cruz”, for example, he begins with seven lines of re-emphasized emotional attraction to the idea of conversion. The acoustical effects of some of the lines reinforce the effect:

TArde o temprAno llegaré sollozAndo A los brAzos de la cruz … ¡vEN como ella me tiENde los brazos?

but what follows is a sneeringly degrading image:

por ahora la cruz es … una mujer con las piernas abiertas. (parra, 1969, 191)

Similarly in “Agnus dei” (La camisa de fuerza) the poet with mock solem-nity repeatedly intones the familiar “Cordero de dios que lavas los pecados del mundo” only to follow it with a wisecrack (“dame tu lana para hacerme un sweater”), until at the climax, he once more contrasts sacred and profane love:

Cordero de dios que lavas los pecados del mundo déjanos fornicar tranquilamente (parra, 1969, 172)

The truly sacred moment is that of the orgasm. The climactic poem of this group is, of course, the parody of the Lord’s prayer, “padre nuestro”. The poet commiserates, in a slightly patronizing way, with a God who is plainly not almighty. The poem is like a development of the second stanza of valle-jo’s “Los dados eternos” from Los heraldos negros, with its final line: “y el hombre sí te sufre: el dios es él” (vallejo, 1986, 105).

but instead of being an outcry, parra’s poem adopts a tone of mocking pity. As in the above mentioned cases, the humour derives from the unex-pected. There it was the juxtaposition of conventionally taboo sexual refer-ences in a religious context. here it is the role-reversal: instead of being the Comforter, God is comforted by man; instead of being omnipotent, he is soothed by man’s recognition that he just has too much to contend with; instead of forgiving mankind, he is forgiven.

In this context it is important to notice the difference between simple inversion of the Christian conception, whereby God, instead of being good, is wicked, or where the kingdom of this world is set above the next world,

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and the use of parody, irony and humour (Shaw, 1987). In the first case it could be argued that simple inversion attests the central position which the Christian frame of reference still occupies in Western culture. In the second, however, we seem to detect an altogether less spiritually involved stance. In parra’s poetry, as we have seen, there is clear evidence of serious existential malaise. his use of humour in dealing with religious topics perhaps should be seen as a kind of safety valve or a psychological mechanism for avoiding spiritual distress. As he writes in “Lo que el difunto dijo de sí mismo” (Versos de salón):

… no fui payaso de verdad porque de pronto me ponía serio ¡Me sumergía en un abismo oscuro! (parra, 1969, 131)

The typical antipoema is essentially serio-comic, the function of the humour being to prevent the content from becoming portentous or pompous, but without compromising its real significance. We can glance at two examples. The theme of “preguntas a la hora del té” (Poemas y antipoemas) is the futility of abstract questioning. We recall the climax of “palabras a Tomás Lago”:

piensa, pues, un momento en estas cosas, En lo poco y nada que va quedando de nosotros, Si te parece, piensa en el más allá, porque es justo pensar y porque es útil creer que pensamos. (ibid., 46)

One of man’s noblest faculties, thought, is presented as a merely useful illu-sion. It keeps us happy, but in reality we are just fooling ourselves. parra figures forth this theme in “preguntas a la hora del té” first by degrading the thinking individual: he is “desvaído”, looks like a wax doll and peers (symbolically) through broken blinds. The value-questions which he asks himself are denuded of significance by the mockery of the questioner who, instead of being idealized (as in Rodin’s Thinker, for example) is seen with contempt. The questions, all of which are unanswerable, are debunked first by the frame: the patronizingly contemptuous opening and the conclusion which suggests that all thought is cut off by a piece of toast and a cup of tea, a dreary parody of Epicureanism. They are further debunked by the poet’s commentary on the questions. To the first two he responds via the symbolism of the death knell: life, existence in time, is the real problem, not abstrac-tions. To the third he replies directly “no se sabe”, but people build sand-castles, symbols of ephemerality, mere “constructs” of reality. They pretend that what has no stability will last, and act as if it can be relied on. The

NERudA ANd pARRA 41

final question provokes the response that the only certainty is change and flux. The climax word of the poem is the unamunesque “niebla”: asking ultimate questions only makes us realize that we have no clear vision of any answers. In “El peregrino” (Poemas y antipoemas) parra assumes the mantle of a pilgrim: one who journeys towards a goal which he or she believes will fulfil a spiritual need. The poem begins with ten lines of appeal to the reader. One would have been enough. but the poet’s extended call for atten-tion implies that others are so obsessed with their own affairs that they have no time to pay heed to the poet’s longing for some sort of cosmic expla-nation. For paz, as we know, that explanation could possibly come from a combination of the mental and the erotic, which combine to open a path to “la vida más vida”. but parra proclaims himself sexually and intellectually frustrated, and compares himself to a sick patient fed inadequately by a drip. The happy, Edenic, harmonious sense of life which he calls “el jardín” is contaminated by disgusting insects associated with filth and decay. What is it that produces the contamination? Clearly it is awareness. In the last stanza others are protected by a “seventh sense” which allows them to move through life freely, to enjoy its “jardines” without asking themselves questions. but the poet, who cannot even formulate the questions beyond longing for “un poco de luz” about “algunas materias”, and who sees a bicycle, a bridge, a car, symbols of meaningful movement and connection with other people and places, while he remains “embotellado”, does not belong with them. he uses three climactic images reinforcing each other to express his frus-tration: a child crying for its mother, longing for (existential) comfort and security, a pilgrim stumbling over stones in his path and a tree calling out for leaves. This time the poem ends with a real climax and not an anti-climax: the desperate need for an answer to the irrational mystery of existence.

Much of what we have seen is summed up in “Advertencia al lector” in Poemas y antipoemas, which is in a sense parra’s “Arte poética”. From the beginning what is emphasized is impact: the key word of the first line is “molestias”. The antipoemas are intended to be enjoyed primarily not for their aesthetic appeal nor for their expression of human emotion, but for their challenge to complacency and their stimulus to thought. If the reader is upset, too bad. The poet’s role-model is Sabellius the second-century theo-logian who attacked the central dogma of Christianity: the Trinity. but, it is suggested, he did so as a humourist – just for fun! And his attack was based just as much on crazy self-contradiction as the dogma it pulverized (without effect). parra presents himself implicitly as attacking in the antipoemas a central dogma of traditional poetry, but doing it in a ludic, “fun” way, without setting up anything more sensible in its place and without expecting it to disappear. We know what the dogma is: it is the notion of the centrality of the poetic image dear to the (vanguardist) “doctores de la ley”. parra is satirizing a certain kind of Avant-Garde which pursued an unattainable ideal

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of beauty (“arco iris”) by means of an ultra-specialized diction (“torcuato”). In the third stanza parra seems to be comparing them contemptuously to obsolete thinkers and to moonstruck poets in the tradition of Lafforgue (such as Lugones in Lunario sentimental). The second part of the poem famously denies that the poet has any authorial intention or message. but it quickly goes on to become quite assertive. parra does not contradict the criticisms he reports: that his poetry expresses unconvincing emotion, is full of silly anger and is as unmusical as sneezing. Instead he nails his colours to the mast insisting that, like Aristophanes (but in a more up-to-date way), he stabs the reader symbolically in the head with his poems. The message is driven home by “La montaña rusa” in Versos de salón. before the antipoemas, parra asserts, Spanish American poetry was dominated by pretentious solemnity. Now he has turned it into a roller-coaster. It is exciting, but one reads it at one’s peril. The last point that needs emphasis in regard to “Advertencia al lector” is the now familiar relative absence of figurative language. but it is only relative; at key points, strategically positioned in the poem-as-process, parra makes functional use of it (“he decidido declarar la guerra a los cava-lieri della luna”; “pretendo formarme mi propio alfabeto”) and the whole poem reaches its climax in “entierro mis plumas en la cabeza de los señores lectores”. In this poem about poetry, each of the images is about writing poetry: what the poet does not want to do, what he wants to do and what effect he wants to achieve.

parra’s most original and influential poetry is contained in his Obra gruesa (1969). It contained his Poemas y antipoemas (1954), La cueca larga (1958), Versos de salón (1962), Canciones rusas (1967), as well as La camisa de fuerza (1968) and Otros poemas (1968) which included uncollected poems written between 1950 and 1968. Thereafter, he continued to bring out collec-tions of poetry, including Artifactos (1972), Poemas de emergencia (1972), Sermones y prédicas del Cristo de Elqui (1977), Nuevos sermones y prédicas del Cristo de Elqui (1979), El anti-Lázaro (1981), Ecopoemas (1982), Chistes para desorientar a la policía (1983), Poesía política (1983), Hojas de Parra (1985) and Poemas para combatir la calvicie (1993). but as Carrasco affirms: “El resto de su obra poética, también valioso, no resiste la comparación con sus antipoemas” (Carrasco, 1990, 22). The reason is clear. Initially parra’s iconoclasm struck home, while his use of a deliberately referential form of poetic diction, which reacted against (for example) paz’s suspicions about the adequacy of language (as when words are seen as “espejos rotos” in “Fábula” in Libertad bajo palabra), was refreshing, and sent much subsequent Spanish American poetry in a new, more relaxed, colloquial direction. but once the novelty effect wore off, triviality began to show through. In addition, parra’s nihilism proved difficult to sustain creatively. Although, in “No creo en la vía pacífica” (Poemas de emergencia), he was still writing:

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lo único que yo hago es encogerme de hombros (parra 1972, 58)

this was far from being the case. An increasing number of poems express indignation with social conditions, disgust with his fellow-Chileans, bitter-ness in the face of political intolerance and despair at the ever-worsening conditions of modern urban life, surrounded by smog, traffic and ecological catastrophe. All of these attitudes are valid, but we find ourselves not so much in the presence of poetry of ideas, as in that of accusation, denun-ciation and at times petulant-sounding protest. The most rewarding of his later collections is certainly Artefactos, which aims at the wit and brevity of epigrams. Some are memorable, such as

uSA donde la libertad es una estatua.

but the majority are hardly more than sarcastic outbursts:

Estupendo negocio: de país de poetas laureados a guarida de perros policiales.

(Guatapiques in Poesía política, 1983, 184)

or

Me pregunto con sobrada razón Qué hace la Sociedad protectora de Animales Que no se preocupa de nosotros.

(Chistes para desorientar a la policía in Poesía política, 1983)

In his interview with Morales, parra suggested that these mini-poems were intended to act like newspaper classified ads, grasping attention in the smallest number of words. he hoped that, like the antipoemas, they would “tocar puntos sensibles del lector con la punta de la aguja” (Gottlieb, 1993, 362). parra also compared them to bits of flying shrapnel propelled by the explosion of an antipoema like a hand grenade. We miss the self-deprecatory anti-hero and the energúmeno of the antipoemas, for, as parra explained, “el personaje también explota”. he asserted that the antipoemas had done their work and needed to be disintegrated into these shorter, more punchy, pieces. but it is doubtful whether such minimalism is fully successful. The essential parra, from the point of view of literary change, is the parra of the 1950s and 1960s.

3

borges and Cardenal

I have attempted to show that the the mid-twentieth century constituted a watershed in Spanish American poetry. This is confirmed by two more important facts of literary history. The first is that borges was now about to begin writing a significant amount of poetry again, after having all but aban-doned the genre since 1929. The second is that in 1954, the year which saw the first volume of Neruda’s Odas and the publication of parra’s Poemas y antipoemas, Ernesto Cardenal began to write his first major poem, Hora O.

Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina, 1899–1986): Later poetry

paul Cheselka (1987, 125) writes:

by the time borges published El Aleph in 1949, he had already thoroughly explored the short story as a vehicle for elaborating and seeking fresh perspectives on his basic themes, and was ready to make poetry his first priority again – poetry would dominate borges new literary production during the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s.

A curious feature of borges criticism, which Cheselka notes, is that despite dozens of books and more than two thousand relatively recent articles in learned journals, this later poetry has hardly been studied in detail and in fact only a handful of publications deal with it at all. Cheselka rightly criticizes Zunilda Gertel’s Borges y su retorno a la poesía (1969) for its inaccura-cies, but his own book, though useful, deals exclusively with the thematics of borges’s later collections and has nothing whatever to say about their contents as poetry or about any influence which borges may have exercised on later poets. This pattern of neglect must be significant. It suggests two things. First, that borges’s later poetry is largely read for what it says, and is often thought of as interesting primarily in relation to his prose. Second, that his shift of outlook, especially with regard to poetic diction, set him apart from the mainstream developments in Spanish American poetry after the mid-century. As a result, although Carlos Cortínez could write in 1978 “A estas alturas me parece incuestionable que el máximo poeta hispanoameri-cano vivo es el argentino Jorge Luis borges” (Cortínez, 1983, 43), after the 1950s borges exists as a poet in a kind of splendid isolation.

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between 1930 and 1958, apart from beginning a radical revision of his earlier poetry, the eventual result of which has been amply documented by Tommaso Scarano (1987), borges published only twenty-one new poems, or an average of less than one a year. by far the most memorable of these was “poema conjetural” (1943), collected along with some of the others in El otro, el mismo (1964). In it we can already recognize some of the features which distinguish the mature poetry of borges from that of his first three collections. At one level, this is a matter of thematics. We are now far away from the suburban street scenes in the late afternoon, the restrained emotions and quiet reflexions of the bulk of the poems in Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), Luna de enfrente (1925) and Cuaderno San Martín (1929), and even further away from the manifestos of Prisma I and II and the accompanying poems. And yet, as borges himself hints in the prologue, Fervor prefig-ured aspects of his later work. “Inscripción sepulcral”, with its evocation of Colonel Isidoro Suárez, one of borges’s military forebears, looks forward to “poema conjetural”, whose narrator, Francisco Narciso de Laprida, was another warrior ancestor who died fighting gaucho insurrectionaries in 1829. barbarous death in the backlands of Argentina, though in a different moral context, unites Laprida with Facundo Quiroga of “El General Quiroga va en coche al muere” from Luna de enfrente, while the death of another soldier relative and family icon, Isidoro Acevedo, is the theme of the poem of that name in Cuaderno San Martín. “poema conjetural”, through an incident of family history, illustrates two important borgesian themes: his sense of Americanness (and specifically of argentinidad) and the notion of a man reaching the centre of his personal labyrinth and coming face to face with destiny and death. Emilio Carilla in his excellent commentary on it (Carilla, 1963) regards it as possibly borges’s best poem.

More important than the theme is the poetic tone and the diction. The pattern, if it is a pattern, that we are attempting to trace in this book is one of a reaction against the theory and practice of high vanguardismo. As we see in parra’s antipoetry, Cardenal’s exteriorismo, and poesía coloquial, this was in part a shift of themes and content, but more especially it involved a change in attitude towards poetic diction. A parallel but different change of attitude to the language of poetry is what we find also in the poetry of borges in the 1950s and later. It is already prefigured in “poema conjetural”. At the heart of the matter is borges’s change of mind about the creation and role of metaphor after his earliest ultraísta manifestos. This has been amply docu-mented and studied by Allen phillips (1965), Zunilda Gertel (1969), pietro Taravacci (1982), Martha-Lilia Tenorio (1992) and Mercedes blanco (2000), and is crucial to the understanding of his later poetry. In a nutshell, at the beginning of his career, borges broadly accepted three propositions about the metaphor in poetry which were characteristic of high vanguardismo. These were, first, that the metaphor was the “elemento primordial” of all poetry

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(“proclama”, Prisma I, Loewenstein and Shaw, 2002). Second, that it was necessary to change the attitude of his fellow poets towards metaphor so that it ceased to be what it had been in Argentina up to and including the poetry of Lugones. The old metaphors had been “descriptive”, that is, they compared like with like, the familiar with the familiar; whereas borges demanded what he called “veraz” or “eficaz” metaphors. Third, that such new metaphors would extend our vision of reality as well as possessing greater originality and beauty. underlying this conception of the metaphor, which has clear similarities to huidobro’s, and which is at the centre of high vanguardismo, is the unspoken assumption (later openly voiced by paz) that the new type of metaphor expressed a level of poetic insight which was in some mysterious way cognitive. It represented an alternative path to a form of truth, via the poet’s subliminal mind.

Almost at once, however, probably as early as 1924 and certainly by 1928 in El idioma de los argentinos, borges had changed his mind and had aban-doned both the idea that metaphor was the essential element in poetry and the idea that the best metaphors were “inéditas”. Nonetheless it was only with his return to poetry in the 1950s that this change of mind became critically important. blanco and others have pointed out that borges began to insist on his shift of opinion in the short story “La busca de Averroes” (1947, collected in El Aleph, 1949), in the essay “Nathaniel hawthorne” (1949, collected in Otras inquisiciones, 1952) and in “La metáfora” (in the second edition of Historia de la eternidad in 1952). Now borges had decided that all really good metaphors were variations on a very limited range of compari-sons (“ensueño-vida, sueño-muerte, ríos y vidas que transcurren” and the like [“La metáfora”]). These universal, paradigmatic metaphors, borges now believed, had accumulated over time deeply encrusted poetic resonances. The task of the true poet was to utilize what blanco perceptively calls “ciertos vocablos mágicos en los que la historia de la poesía ha depositado un sedi-mento de poeticidad” (blanco, 2000, 27) or what borges himself was to call in “Rubaiyat” (Elogio de la sombra) “unas pocas imágenes eternas”. Every-thing else is mere “palabrería”. Why did borges change his mind? We may conjecture that it had to do with a decline of confidence in what the metaphor, viewed as the primordial element of poetry, could achieve. When he came back from Spain and published the manifestos of ultraísmo, he seems to have believed, as a number of writers on metaphor such as Max black (1962) and paul Ricoeur (1977) have affirmed or implied, that metaphors could open up new dimensions of reality. but then he came to the conclusion that this was perhaps an overstatement of the case. he decided that poetry was an aesthetic act rather than a cognitive one: it cannot tell, it can only allude. It is never more than a threshold experience, and can only communicate an immanence of revelation, as he argued in 1950 at the end of “La muralla y los libros”, the first essay in Otras inquisiciones (1952). In Leopoldo Lugones (borges, 1965,


97) he wrote: “La realidad no es verbal y puede ser incomunicable.” Since we cannot know the real, language of any kind, even poetic language, can only suggest it. Although blanco shows conclusively that borges’s new view of the creation and role of metaphor in poetry is not exempt from ambigui-ties and minor contradictions, she asserts that in practice two major results follow. The first is that “en los libros de poesía de borges … (posteriores a El hacedor) reina lo que podríamos caracterizar como una severa economía o parquedad en el uso de la metáfora”(blanco, 2000, 33). The second is that, with regard to the short stories, “Lo que de algún modo reemplaza a la destronada metáfora en estas ficciones es la alegoría” (ibid., 29). It is argu-able that such a view is at times equally applicable to the later poetry, in the sense, at least, that (since an allegory is an extended symbol) symbolism comes to the fore.

“poema conjetural”, as Julie Jones points out, is a browningesque dramatic monologue, a form which “has never caught on in Spanish verse” (Jones, 1986, 208). To that extent it is already original. Its theme is dual, both American and universal. On the one hand, it illustrates the grand old theme of the triumph of barbarism over civilization, as Laprida, a lawyer, intellec-tual and signatory of the Argentine declaration of Independence, is killed by the gaucho cavalry of the local caudillo, Aldao, during the civil disturbances which followed the Wars of Independence from Spain. but more importantly it celebrates this death as the moment when Laprida reaches the centre of his own labyrinth and, coming face to face with his ironic destiny, discovers who he really is. The first twelve lines of this forty-four-line poem contain no figurative language. This is a most important datum. borges has several times expressed his admiration for the anonymous Sevillian poet who wrote the “Epístola moral”, for him the best poem in Spanish. he has emphasized as one of its great qualities that the opening lines are completely unadorned. but then in line 13 of “poema conjetural” borges begins a comparison of Laprida’s death with that of Jacopo del Cassero in dante’s Purgatorio, a simile designed to ennoble and universalize the episode. The other meta-phorical expressions correspond to those mentioned by blanco: personifi-cation

La noche lateral de los pantanos me acecha … oigo los cascos de una caliente muerte que me busca (borges, 1974, 867)

in which “lateral” and “caliente” function as tiny metaphors within an already metaphorical context, “encapsulados en una palabra” as blanco puts it (blanco, 2000, 34), like “ruinosa tarde” in line 28. Finally we have standard, but low-key, metaphors:

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el laberinto múltiple de pasos … la recóndita clave de mis años … el espejo de esta noche … (borges, 1974, 867–8)

We notice that these are not variants of some archetypal “platonic” meta-phors, but neither are they obtrusively new and original. but surely they are what borges called “eficaces”. Just as important, they are not exclusively central to the poem’s technique. At least equally important are the acoustical and rhythmical effects beginning with the unforgettable line 1: “ZUmban las bAlas en la tArde Última” (ibid., 867), in which the tonic accents fall on u–a//a–u to create a beautifully balanced line, followed by the alliteration and the repetition of the syllable “en” (viento, cenizas, viento) in line 2, which has a quite different and contrasting rhythm to line 1. Line after line exploits such effects – “de sANgre y sudOr mANchAdo el rOstro” (ibid., 867) –until the final line with its telling contrast of “i” and “a”: “el IntImo cuchIllo en lA gArgAntaA” (ibid., 868).

To ram home his change of stance, borges published in El hacedor (1960) his famous “Arte poética”, like “poema conjetural” in standard hendeca-syllables, but now even more traditionally organized into seven quatrains in each of which the rhyming words are identical, as if to emphasize the lack of any need to seek original rhymes. The poem rehearses some of the paradigmatic metaphors which borges had listed in his prose declarations: río–tiempo, sueño–muerte, día–tiempo, in order to illustrate his mature conviction that proper poetic diction is at once “immortal”, because it uses words which time has encrusted with poetic resonance, and “poor”, because these words are in themselves commonplace. Nonetheless borges affirms what paz reiterates in “La poesía” (Libertad bajo palabra, 1988a) that poetry is cognitive and leads to at least one form of knowledge – self-knowledge: “nos revela nuestra propia cara”. The climactic quatrian repeats the theme of the poem as a whole: poetry is ever the same, because based on a limited set of metaphors, and ever different, because the true poet can give them a new intonation. but as blanco cogently remarks, the key phrase of “Arte poética’ is “el arte es una Ítaca”, which she rightly perceives is “un brillante y erudito hallazgo metafórico” (blanco, 2000, 31), contradicting borges’s afirmation that diction in poetry should be “poor”. This does not, of course, mean “simple”. borges is at pains to point out in the prologue to El otro, el mismo that it means seeking “la modesta y secreta complejidad” (borges, 1974, 858) which is what makes writing about his technique in the later poetry difficult.

Whether or not “poema conjetural” allegorizes, through the victory of the barbarous gauchos, borges’s hostility to the military junta which had just seized power in Argentina (Williamson, 2004, 266), it is an important poem for another reason. That same year, 1943, saw the publication of borges’s


retrospective collection Poemas 1923–1943, consolidating his poetic past. “poema conjetural” (1943) and “La noche cíclica” (1940) (both published in El otro, el mismo [1964]), in their technique and diction portend those of “Arte poética” years later in El hacedor (1960) and announce the new direction. What is slightly confusing about this period in borges’s poetic production is that poems from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s appear in El otro, el mismo, whereas poems from the 1950s and 1960s had already appeared in El hacedor almost four years earlier. Thus, with the exception of the first handful of poems in the later collection which are transitional, the poems in El hacedor and El otro, el mismo should be read together. In what follows we shall concentrate on these two collections, since they illustrate the main point at issue here: the shift in borges’s poetics which produced them. The later collections still await systematic exploration.

As we reread the two crucial collections from the early 1960s we see again that they are not conventionally “lyrical”. borges himself said, with his usual – at times deceitful – candour: “If I could sing, I would sing, but I lack a voice” (Cortínez, 1986, 38). They belong, for the most part, to poetry of ideas; reflective, thoughtful poems about poetry and borges’s poetic aspi-rations, about aspects of the past in Argentina, britain or Scandinavia which were especially meaningful to him, about his own moods, experiences, fail-ures, and most of all his failure to achieve happiness, about features of the human condition, life’s enigmas, time, death and what it might mean, about the mysterious attachment he feels to his country and finally about the two most positive aspects of his outlook: his attachment to the ethical criterion and moral courage (more implicit, since borges is not a moralist) and his admiration for physical courage (remarkably explicit). The problem is that they are not coldly intellectual. Again borges has asserted categorically: “Without emotion there is no poetry possible” (Cortínez, 1986, 44). So, as yurkievich puts it, these poems tend to contain “las resonancias emotivas de una idea” (yurkievich, 1984, 71). It follows that among the critical ques-tions concerning borges’s later poems are: how does he succeed in investing ideas with emotional overtones so that their appeal is not just to the mind, and how does he do it without resorting, like Orozco, to a heavy overlay of metaphorical diction?

It should be said at once that there are well-known poems which are almost completely abstract and intellectual, such as “El golem” (El otro, el mismo). This is a narrative poem inspired by the first book which borges read in German, Meyrink’s Der Golem, in which a rabbi from prague magically creates a (sub)human being only to repent of doing so. In the prologue to El otro, el mismo, borges explains that the poem is an allegory of “la relación de la divinidad con el hombre y acaso la del poeta con la obra” (borges, 1974, 857). The only hint of feeling is the reference in the sixteenth stanza to the rueful tenderness with which the rabbi contemplates his “penoso hijo”.

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This is necessary in order to soften the impact of the climactic lines by the suggestion that God may not totally reject fallen humanity or the poet his always less-than-perfect poems. but we are not intended to identify emotion-ally with the poem at all. If we were to do so it would have to be either with the rabbi (but he is treated ironically), or with the Golem (but he is presented as mentally retarded). The pleasure of the poem is in the odd orginality of the story itself and in our mental response to the sly question at the end

¿Quién nos dirá las cosas que sentía dios, al mirar a su rabino en praga? (borges, 1974, 887)

Formally speaking, the poem follows a strictly logical four-part pattern: an introduction suggesting on the authority of plato that the name can create the thing; the story itself of the Golem’s creation and its pathetic inadequacies; the rabbi’s realization of his error and folly; and the analogy with God and mankind. The only significant images in this 72 line poem are those of “La herrumbre del pecado” in stanza three and

esta red sonora de Antes, después, Ayer, Mientras, Ahora … (ibid., 886)

in stanza 9, unless we accept the description of the Golem as “el aprendiz de hombre” in stanza 12 as an image. The versification, as so often in the later poetry (which borges, being blind, had to keep in his memory until it was finished) takes the form of eleven-syllable quatrains, with rather obvious rhymes, except where borges in stanza 10, allows himself the not-quite-serious “numen/volumen” and “Golem/Scholem”. And yet this does not strike us as being a prosaic poem (though borges did once say to Sobejano, who may have been hinting at the vogue for “colloquial” or “exteriorist” poetry, “prosaic-ness is one of the poetic mediums, I think, if it’s used carefully”; Cortínez, 1986, 49). Why not? borges’s inclination was usually to assert that what is poetic is impossible to describe or define, but sometimes, especially when challenged about his post-1920s view of metaphor, he also asserted that what was poetic was, not metaphor, but what he called “cadences” (“what really matters are the cadences”; ibid., 10). I take this to mean certain rhythmical and acoustical patterns which distinguish poetry from most prose. We saw some acoustical examples above in “poema conjetural”. here in “El golem” I should like to emphasize rather borges’s mastery of the hendecasyllable: his ability to ring the changes on its rhythms, including a rather prominent use of encabalgamiento to bond lines together or to shift the caesura about, as in:

Adán y las estrellas lo supieron En el jardín. // La herrumbre del pecado … (borges, 1974, 885)


compared with:

Sobre un muñeco que con torpes manos labró, // para enseñarle los arcanos … (ibid.,)

We notice an obvious difference in rhythm between “En que el pueblo de dios buscaba el Nombre” (ibid.), in which there is only one tri-syllabic group, “buscaba-el”, and the next line, “En las vigilias de la judería”, with its four monosyllables and four-syllable “judería”. This flexible pattern of changing rhythms is perhaps what allows borges to create the “cadences” which make his poetry immediately recognizable as his.

borges’s reflctions in these two collections on the grandeur and futility of poetic activity form a category apart, and a glance at them is a necesses-sary preliminary to further commentary. “La luna” (El hacedor) reminds us that we do not need the periphrases of Lugones or Güiraldes to allude to the moon; the word ‘luna” itself is enough:

El secreto, a mi ver, está en usarla Con humildad (borges, 1974, 820)

as borges does in “A un viejo poeta” (El hacedor), when, mindful of his often quoted line from Quevedo “y su epitafio la sangrienta luna”, he refers to a moon tinged with red as “acaso el espejo de la Ira” (ibid., 823). Quevedo’s old metaphor, famous enough to have become standard, is subtly renewed, according to borges’s new views on figurative language. On the wider issue of poetry itself this group of poems reveals borges’s ambivalence of outlook. “A Luis de Camoens”, “Ariosto y los árabes” (El hacedor), “A un poeta menor de la Antología” (El otro, el mismo) and other poems celebrate the triumph of poetry over time, even if, as in the last case, it is as a mere histor-ical fragment. but borges, always the sad sceptic, was profoundly committed to recognizing the ultimate futility of all effort (“los afanes son engaños” [“A la efigie de un capitán de los ejércitos de Cromwell”] El hacedor). In terms of poetic creation this is in part because of the nature of poetry itself which, as we have seen, can never transmit the real. “El otro tigre” (El hacedor) a crucially important poem in this connection, reminds us that a lifetime of obsession with tigers has only produced

un tigre de símbolos y sombras, una serie de tropos literarios … un sistema de palabras humanas y no el tigre vertebrado … (borges, 1974, 824–5)

And yet the effort of creation must continue. For, as “una brújula” tells us,

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everything in the universe may represent a secret divine language of which the poet may be able to see shadowy examples, which, if successfully turned into poetry, might correspond to real reality: “El otro tigre, el que no está en el verso” (ibid., 825). Insofar as any individual poet can convert the shadowy sign into even one unforgettable line he earns immortality. This is borges’s supreme aspiration:

dar con el verso que ya no se olvida (“In memoriam A R” [El hacedor], borges, 1974, 829)

Que mi nombre sea nadie como el de ulises pero que algún verso perdure …

(“A un poeta sajón” [El otro, el mismo], ibid., 906

but in “Mateo, XXv, 30” and in “baltasar Gracián” (El otro. el mismo) (which borges [Cortínez, 1986, 43] asserted was a self-satire) he reveals, perhaps over-modestly, his awareness that the aspiration (like his aspiration to happiness) has not been fulfilled.

borges’s criticisms of Gracián as a poet – that he had no music in his soul, no real sense of beauty and above all no love either of God or woman – hint at his fears about his own poetry. They were, of course, largely ground-less, except as regards love of God, which is not a necessary ingredient of great poetry. direct expressions of human or sexual love are rare in borges’s poetry. I have referred elsewhere to the unpublished thirty-two-line poem on the death of his father which exists in the borges Collection of the Alderman library of the university of virginia and its reduction to sonnet form in “A mi padre” in La moneda de hierro (Loewenstein and Shaw, 2001, 141–58). The two poems are intimately connected to “baltasar Gracián” by their climaxes, in which borges’s father is granted at his death a vision of the platonic arche-types which, the poet suggests, was probably denied to the Jesuit poetaster. What is symbolic of borges, however, is the fact that he did not publish the longer poem, and waited almost forty years to bring out the cut-down version. Clearly he regarded the longer version as over-emotional, with its climactic outcry: “¡papá no me dejes, contigo quiero ir adonde vayas!” (154), so unlike his own restrained ideal, which was to be, like his favourite poet, Emerson, “full of emotion” but at the same time “cool” (Cortínez, 1986, 11), exactly what we find in the sonnet version.

This makes the two sonnets entitled “1964” (El otro, el mismo) referring to a failed love affair (when borges was sixty-five), so moving in their open emotionality. Suddenly, striking imagery reappears, contradicting borges’s stance in “La luna”. The moon is now:

… espejo del pasado Cristal de soledad, sol de agonías (borges, 1974, 920)


the warmly physical happy references to “mutuas manos” and “las sienes / que acercaba el amor” are replaced by the cold, tormenting abstractions of “la fiel memoria” and “los desiertos días”. but the sonnet is spoiled by the melodramatic verbs “te desgarra” and “te puede matar” of the climax. Not so in the second sonnet where time (in which each instant is an Aleph) and death:

ese otro mar, esa otra flecha Que nos libra del sol y de la luna y del amor … (ibid.)

console the poet, but cannot beguile his nostalgia for places associated with happy fulfilment. Are the “humble” metaphors in the second quotation more “efficacious” than those in the first? borges would presumably argue that they are. Once more we notice the shifting rhythmical patterns of the hendecasyl-lables; the contrast in the first sonnet, for instance between

ya no hay una Luna que no sea espejo del pasado

with its encabalgamiento emphasized by the acoustical repetition in una/Luna, and the superbly balanced line “Cristal de soledad, sol de agonies”, with its remarkable sound effect al–ol–ol and the contrast between the tonic accents falling on the same “a” sound in the first half of the line and on “o” and “í” in the second half.

The reference to death as a consolation and as an event which may bring a vision of the archetypes (i.e. of real reality), as in “Everness” and “El mar” (El otro, el mismo), contradicts Angela blanco’s notion that for borges death was always strange and incomprehensible (blanco Amores de pagella, 1984, 93). Those who heard him talk about it would probably agree that with his conscious mind he normally endorsed what he wrote in “El despertar” and “Los enigmas” (El otro, el mismo) that death would hopefully bring “olvido”, total oblivion: “Quiero beber su cristalino Olvido” (“Los enigmas”, borges, 1974, 916) (we note the capitalization of the word). In that sense, because it brings release from awareness, death, as he suggests in “blind pew” (El hacedor), is a treasure awaiting us. but even in “Los enigmas” he identifies “el muerto” with “el misterioso”. In other poems, such as “El hambre” (El otro, el mismo), he sees death and time as the two great curses of human existence. Are there consolations? In “A quien está leyéndome” (ibid.,) he reflects that, as we are in any case no more than dreams and shadows, we lose little by death’s inevitability. but the real opponents of time and death are epic courage, as expressed in “Alusión a la muerte del Coronel Fran-cisco borges (1833–74)” (El hacedor), in which his ancestor’s last hour is

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described as “amarga” but also as “vencedora”, and literary creativity, such as that of the creator of the first sonnet (“un poeta del siglo XIII” [El otro, el mismo]) or that which dictated the “cantar de hierro” of the ancient North-umbrian in “A un poeta sajón” (El otro, el mismo).

Time rather than death, however, is the great mystery. borges succeeds in investing this abstraction with emotion by linking it to the mystery of the self, to memory and to destiny, both his own and ours. In “una brújula” (El otro, el mismo), historical time is seen as the manifestation of God’s designs, his “words”, which are (because we are not programmed to understand them) an “infinita algarabía” into which fits each of our lives, they being, in their turn, enigmas, uncrackable codes or patterns of chance events and hence agonizing. And yet, in this splendid sonnet, the compass symbolizes human longing for meaningful direction, ironically subverted by the two final images which present it as like a clock seen in a dream, something imprecise, and as like a bird shifting a little as it sleeps, that is, as having the potential for upward soaring flight, but merely dreaming instead. Two of borges’s most moving poems in this category are “Adrogué” (El hacedor) and “Límites” (El otro, el mismo). “Adrogué” nostalgically evokes a house with a large garden where the borges family spent many happy holidays. The main part of the poem moves from concrete features of the garden: flowers, the pond, statues, so familiar that the poet could find his way among them even in pitch darkness, to the evanescent perfume of the eucalyptus trees emerging from the past and conveying the atmosphere far better than language could. Then we move to details of the house itself and its one-time inhabitants, all, to the poet, unforgettable. but the climactic stanzas relegate these beloved memo-ries to the irrecoverable past and the poet is left contemplating the mystery of time’s passage which suddenly changes the tone from nostalgia to anguish:

… no comprendo cómo el tiempo pasa yo que soy tiempo y sangre y agonía. (borges, 1974, 842)

We are flesh and blood creatures condemned to contemplate how time steals from us the “humildes y queridas cosas” which once constituted our happi-ness, while leaving us the dolorous memory of them.

The theme of “Límites” is the same, but the tone this time is more dramatic, since the emphasis is not on the survival of memory to remind us of what we have lost, but on the loss itself, in the sense that each day we may see, do or even recall something for the last time in our lives. In this case the probability that our lives are governed by shadows, dreams and empty forms is no longer a consolation for the fact that

… para todo hay término y hay tasa y última vez y nunca más y olvido. (borges, 1974, 879)


unlike Neruda, borges can find no immanent meaning in life through social action, nor can he share Cardenal’s belief that an immanent solution to life’s injustices is at the same time in line with a trascendental plan, nor parra’s ability to respond to the sense of the abyss with black humour. If, on occa-sion, as in “Otro poema de los dones” (El otro, el mismo), he can rejoice in the positive aspects of the human condition, despite his awareness that reason imposes only a dream of order on life’s chaos and that human wisdom is a mere verbal construct, yet at the centre of his outlook is a feeling of irrecoverable loss. The same word that had appeared in “Adrogué”, “vedado”, reappears in “Límites”: we are progressively shut out from what once was. “Adrogué” was focused subjectively, but one of the chief features of “Límites” is the way it moves from “yo” to “nosotros” and then to “te” before returning to a “yo” which has now assumed universal representativeness. All great poetry, borges insisted, comes from unhappiness (Cortínez, 1986, 10). “Límites” leads us to suspect that for him supreme unhappiness was not emotional frustration, which “1964” tells us “tal vez no importa”, but recognition of the way in which the time and space of past experiences and even our former selves gradually become forbidden territory to ourselves as we are now.

It seems odd that if the personality is perhaps illusory, reason likely to be a dream and all effort probably ultimately futile, the ethical criterion should survive unchallenged by borges’s scepticism. yet it is so. but this is one abstraction of the several that obsess borges which he does not attempt to deal with in his poetry. his heroes are men of physical courage, not of moral integrity, although such integrity is implicit in “un hombre oscuro que se muere en la cárcel” (borges, 1974, 873) at the climax of “página para recordar al Coronel Suárez, vencedor en Junín” (El otro, el mismo). The key statement comes in “A Carlos XII” (ibid.): “no hay otra virtud que ser valiente” (borges, 1974, 908). Although the courage symbolized by a sword (“A una espada en york Minster” [ibid.]) is described as “vano al fin”, since death is unconquerable, several poems celebrate valour, including certainly the valour of the “orilleros” (“la secta del cuchillo y del coraje” [“El tango”, ibid.]).

In the end, however, what prevails is the vision of God’s “extraño mundo” (“El” [El otro, el mismo]) and exploration of its often desolating strangeness is what continues to inspire borges in his remaining collections of poetry. Of these the odd one out is Para las seis cuerdas (1965) which contains a handful of poems mimicking milongas, the popular old-fashioned songs which meant a good deal to the not very musical borges and which some of us whose classes he visited in the uSA heard him sing to astonished students. Like “El tango” and “Los compadritos muertos” (El otro, el mismo) they reveal nostalgia for a past buenos Aires (which perhaps never was), when men were men. The broader background is provided by “¿dónde se habrán ido?” (Para las seis cuerdas) where borges reveals that he saw these

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orilleros as the last descendents of the gaucho irregular cavalry which helped to liberate Argentina from the Spanish and by “A Manuel Mujica Lainez” (La moneda de hierro) where he associates his

nostalgia de ignorantes cuchillos y de viejo coraje (borges, 1976, 49)

with a heroic fatherland he and Mujica Lainez once had, but which has now been lost. These milongas are linked too with hilario Acasubi, whom borges thought of with admiration as combining heroism and poetic creativity.

borges’s last poetic collections and collections containing poems, Elogio de la sombra (1969), El oro de los tigres (1972), La rosa profunda (1975), La moneda de hierro (1976), Historia de la noche (1977), La cifra (1981) and Los conjurados (1985), though containing many memorable poems, still await serious critical analysis. The essays by Julio Alazraki (1977), Guill-ermo Sucre (1970), Thomas Lyon (1986), Alice poust (1986) and Miguel Enguídanos (1986 [on La cifra]) are not very helpful and have not been followed up significantly.

Ernesto Cardenal (Nicaragua, 1925– )

Cardenal’s early poetry, republished as La obra primigenia de Ernesto Cardenal: Carmen y otros poemas (2000) reveals a gradual shift away from more conventional Surrealist and vanguardist influences towards a sparer mode of expression. Stephen White has helpfully studied the origins of Cardenal’s production in his Modern Nicaraguan Poetry (1993), with partic-ular reference to the influence of pound, and shown how Cardenal learned to incorporate aspects of Spanish American history into his poetic work. In a sense, Cardenal stands equidistant between Neruda and parra. On the one hand he is writing, for the most part, deeply committed Americanist poetry on themes which are familiar to us from Canto general. We need only think of “Sandino” in “Los Libertadores” or “La united Fruit Co.” from “La arena traicionada” to see Cardenal join hands with Neruda. On the other hand, in terms of using diction which is sparing of imagery, Cardenal is close to parra. In fact, in an interview with Raúl bañuelos (in Flores and Medina, 1991, 22), parra declared: “El lenguaje de Cardenal está muy cerca del mío, o al revés. El es también un poeta del habla, él se considera un exteriorista, pero eso es otro nombre para la antipoesía.” This is a half-truth at best. but it makes an important point. When, in the instructions given to students of poetry in the “Taller de poesía” at Solentiname in the 1980s, Cardenal insisted that “hay que escribir como se habla” (Mantero, 2003, 188), he was echoing parra’s words in “Manifesto” (Otros poemas):


Nosotros conversamos En el lenguaje de todos los días No creemos en signos cabalísticos. (parra, 1969, 211)

Also to bañuelos (in Flores and Medina, 1991, 21) parra said: “Mis deudos son … con el habla de mi país. Eso es lo que más cuenta en la antipoesía, y yo traté desde muy temprano de pasar de la lengua escrita al habla.” To the extent, then, that Cardenal descends from Neruda and parra (though of course not exclusively), his work is representative of the next stage of Spanish American poetry, in one area.

The problem of dealing with much of Cardenal’s poetry is already familiar to readers of the later Neruda. It is that of how to balance the impact of this kind of politically committed poetry of statement against the traditional desire to see poems as aesthetically satisfying verbal artefacts. We find ourselves in a somewhat similar position to that of readers and critics who try to bring the criteria they have become accustomed to applying to boom fiction to novels like Skármeta’s La insurrección, Isabel Allende’s De amor y de sombra or novels of resistance from Central America such as those of Manlio Argueta or Sergio Ramírez. The fit is bad. As daly de Troconis puts it (1982, 10), Cardenal emphasizes “las funciones prácticas del lenguaje … las funciones referencial, expresiva y conativa”, and this makes some of his poetry difficult to analyse satisfactorily by conventional standards, especially outside Latin America. There, as we have suggested, it is likely to be read differently by people who have not experienced life under authoritarian regimes and with whom its protest and denunciation do not resonate in the same way as they may do inside Latin America. It is not enough to assert, as, for example, committed critics like hernán vidal have done, that bourgeois, Western readers simply read this kind of writing wrong (vidal, 1984, 4–27). Nor is it adequate to say that this kind of writing has to be judged only according to its own priorities and objectives. Cardenal himself, in his well-known “Epístola a José Coronel urtecho” in La santidad de la revolución, while accepting:

La poesía como poster o como film documental o como reportaje (Cardenal, 1983a, 260)

nevertheless approves Chairman Mao’s dictum that

el arte revolucionario sin valor artístico no tiene valor revolucionario (ibid., 257)

The difficulty is to identify valid and functional poetic techniques in poetry which, like parra’s, deliberately avoids specialized diction and which uses

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figurative language both sparingly and in a way which marks a return to deliberately unchallenging imagery by using familiar referents instead of strikingly new ones. In the first seventeen lines of Hora O, for example, which create our first impression of the poem, the only figurative language consists of two similes, both of which contemptuously describe presidential palaces in terms of confectionery. We can readily imagine the stream of meta-phors which Neruda would have used or the hermetic imagery which vallejo might have employed even in his late committed poetry. Cardenal’s strategy is instructively different. Instead of challenging us to figure out the meaning of the languaje, as vallejo did when he described the Spanish Republican hero, pablo Emilio Coll, in “himno a los voluntarios de la República” as

Coll, el paladín en cuyo asalto cartesiano tuvo un sudor de nube el paso llano (vallejo, 1986, 282),

what Cardenal does at the start of Hora O is to challenge us to figure out the treatment of time which zigzags about from 1937 to 1860 (the death of William Walker) and then to 1954 and Somoza, backtracking in between to 1899, 1926 and 1940, so that we are compelled to rethink the modern history of Nicaragua. The function of this shifting among different dates is to act as a prelude to understanding how the poem will then proceed to offer us an interpretation of the historical process in question. This interpretation, as in Neruda, is dominated by the macro-metaphor of the poem as a whole which is made explicit in the lines: “La hierba tierna renace de las cenizas” (Cardenal, 1983a, 70) and “La hierba verde renace de los carbones” (ibid., 75). In other words, each failed rebellion is always followed by a rebirth of revolutionary activity. Once we perceive this, we realize that the poem begins by evoking a period around 1937. This is followed by a flashback to the origins of the earlier Sandino rebellion. Later we find references to the uprising under báez bone and this in turn is seen implicitly as prefiguring a successful rising against Somoza. The poem is structured, that is, around the myth of the Left, in which history is governed by a law of inevitable progress, which can be traced in this case to economic forces set in motion by the united Fruit Company after 1899. Against these Sandino was unable to prevail, but his failure released a revolutionary spirit which in the end despite all setbacks, will overcome dictatorship based on economic colonialism. This is an unambiguous vision of linear historical development totally opposite to that of parra, for example. It postulates a pattern of cause and effect which is perfectly intelligible, at the opposite pole from the “infinito juego de azares” (borges, 1974, 460) which was the basis for borges’s historical vision, or the futile circularity we see in García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad. It provides the skeleton of the poem, which falls into two parts separated by the death of Sandino and the last words of Walker. The second part is further


subdivided into “April”, the month of burning (= repression), followed by an implicit “May” in the last twenty-eight lines with the promise of renewed revolutionary activity. The other metaphorical principle of Hora 0 is that of the superiority of nature to man-made conditions. Thus the united Fruit Company is associated with the destruction of nature by manufactured weapons: “sus bananos son bayoneteados” (Cardenal, 1983, 59), and Somoza and his allies are always connected to cablegrams, telephones, cars, trucks, aeroplanes and so on, their symbolic spaces being palaces, while Sandino and his men are always associated with nature, animals, birds, the earth and peasant life and their symbolic space is the mountains. Similarly Sandino is associated with natural light while the oppressors are surrounded with darkness, or at best artificial light. This in turn illustrates Cardenal’s consistent incorporation of simple contrasts which produce the effect of implicit commentary, such as that of the prisoners digging Sandino’s grave while the conspirators dine with him at the palace. We notice too Cardenal’s direct intervention in the poem to mention his own part in the 1954 uprising. What also repays study is the functional use of striking acoustical and rhythmical effects, from heavy alliteration to internal rhyme, insistent repetition of words and syllables and sometimes splendid examples of combined rhythm and sound:

un hArapo levantAdo en un pAlo de la montAña (ibid., 62)

los hOMbres sin moverse y moviéndose sus sOMbras (ibid., 64)

la glorIA no es la que enseñan los textos de la historIA (ibid., 71)

We need to recall that although Cardenal engaged in revolutionary activity before he became a Trappist novice in 1957, he himself insisted that he came to Marxism through his religious training: “yo me he politizado con la vida contemplativa … yo he llegado a la revolución por el Evangelio.” (Cardenal, 1976, 20). We can see the process developing in the “poemas de la trapa” (in Gethsemani Ky; 1960) especially “En la noche iluminada de palabras …” (Cardenal, 1983a, 77). Once more the technique is based on a simple contrast between the garish neon lights outside the monastery in the small hours of the morning together with what they symbolize – bodily pleasure, immediate gratification and outward cleanliness – and the lights in the monastery chapel which are implicitly associated with spirituality and inward cleansing of the spirit. The climax contrasts the worldly people outside who correspond to the foolish virgins of the biblical parable, with the monks inside, who correspond to the wise ones. To Eduardo Elías and Jorge valdés (1987, 42) Cardenal remarked that at the beginning of his career, he wanted to write religious poetry but his early religious training with the Jesuits made it impossible. under the influence of Thomas Merton in Kentucky he discovered how to fulfil his aspiration, but already we see in the “poemas de la trapa” and the

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twenty-five Salmos (1964) the emergence of a collective, political dimension interacting with the private spiritual one. The result is not quite stable. Tradi-tionally in Christianity, sin and salvation tend to be seen in individual terms and progress in the last resort as providentially directed. but in Cardenal, as barrow points out (1999, 563) “sin is institutionalized” and in fact often collectivized. Thus a certain tension is set up between a providentialist vision in which liberty and progress are gifts of God, and Cardenal’s later vision, after his conversion to Marxism following his stay in Cuba in 1970, in which they are the outcome of revolutionary activity, seen as a human expression of God’s will and of brotherly love. In Salmo 4 God is invoked as “dios de mi inocencia” (Cardenal, 1983a, 112) and in “Salmo 16” the statement appears: “No hallarás en mí ningún crimen” (ibid., 153). Sin is thus prima-rily projected onto the oppressors. The notion of Original Sin has conven-iently disappeared, at least in its traditional form. The emphasis has shifted from a God who judges the individual and from “Mi pecado está siempre delante de mí” of the “poemas de la trapa” (ibid., 77), to a God who judges social organization from the standpoint of the oppressed, a God who is “el defensor de los pobres” (“Salmo 9”, ibid., 116), “El dios que existe es el de los proletarios” (“Salmo 57”, ibid., 123). The primary interest in the Salmos is not individual redemption but collective liberation. The basic themes of the collection are the reality of oppression, outcry for God’s intervention and praise of God’s handiwork in the universe (implicitly as a sign of his power to intervene). The Salmos, like so much of Cardenal’s poetry, resist close textual analysis. They borrow familiarity and impressiveness from their models in the bible and impact from their enunciation of moral values and libertarian aspirations which are shared by the readership. Their form and structure are unchallenging and reflect in their immediately recognizable pattern the stability of a world governed by divine providence. The basic technique is one of simple contrast and repetition/intensification, reflecting the moral difference between the behaviour of the oppressors and the poetic voice, which is sometimes a “yo” and sometimes a “nosotros”, but always the voice of the downtrodden:

hablan de paz en sus discursos mientras aumentan su producción de guerra.

hablan de paz en las Conferencias de paz y en secreto se preparan para la guerra.

(“Salmo 5”, Cardenal, 1983a, 113)

“Salmo 5” is in fact paradigmatic. We notice the rare but striking use of pointed imagery which needs no decoding. The oppressors:


hablan con la boca de las ametralladoras. Sus lenguas relucientes Son las bayonetas … (ibid., 113)

There is a sudden change of rhythmic pattern from the above to the thumping accents of:

CastIgalos oh diOs MalOgra su polItica ConfUnde sus memorAndums ImpIde sus progrAmas. (ibid., 113)

Finally, the psalm ends, unusually, with a climactic image: God protects whoever is not fooled by propaganda:

Lo rodeas con tu amor como con tanques blindados. (ibid., 114)

The climactic line turns the tables on the oppressors, asserting that God’s weapons are quite as powerful as theirs. Those critics who have discussed the Salmos (including José promis Ojeda, 1975; Lilia dapaz Strout, 1975; Eduardo urdanivia bertarelli, 1984; and Geoffrey barrow, 1999) do little more than comment on their content: their rejection of biblical quietism, the concretization and historicization of the biblical message and the reduction of diction to the level very often of pure enunciation or what barrow calls “plain and declarative” language (barrow, 1999, 70).

Cardenal’s most frequently anthologized poem of religious inspiration is “Oración por Marilyn Monroe”. It is, in essence, a moral allegory, in which Marilyn, the empleadita and orphan, becomes Everyman and Everywoman, so that the poem transcends Latin American reality and calls on all Western readers to repent. It goes from “ella” (Marilyn) to “Tú” (God) and then to “nosotros”, who must assume collective guilt. The vital section is that in which “ella”, “Tú” and “nosotros” all figure together; it contains the key lines:

Ella no hizo sino actuar según el script que le dimos – El de nuestras propias vidas – y era un script absurdo.

(Cardenal, 1983a, 125)

We are responsible for making her act out our dreams; we all collaborated in the collective charade; her life and death mirror ours. Two extended images express the artificiality of modern life as symbolized in Marilyn. In one, her love affairs with the rich and famous are revealed for what they were: mere

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screenplays. In the other, there are ritzy, high-life experiences, but she is merely a lonely onlooker. The celluloid dream catches up with her and then with us. At the climax of the poem, the telephone, the symbol of communica-tion, becomes, as in parra, the symbol of inability to establish any meaningful communication unless God intervenes. This is Cardenal’s most universal poem. It calls for Christian charity, love, not revolution. but for Cardenal the two became inseparable. In that sense, another image in the poem, that of Christ driving the money-changers (the representatives of capitalism) from the Temple, cannot be overlooked.

by now Cardenal (who emphasized in an interview with Cuban students in the early 1970s [Cardenal, 1979, 633] that his earlier poetry was not neces-sarily published in the order in which it was written) had elaborated his doctrine of exteriorismo. he asserted

La poesía exteriorista expresa las ideas o los sentimientos con imágenes reales del mundo exterior: usa nombres de calles o de lugares, nombres propios de personajes con su apellido, fechas, cifras, anécdotas, citas textu-ales, palabras y giros de la conversación diaria etc.

(Cardenal, 1979, 636)

but he insisted that exteriorismo went beyond poesía conversacional in the sense that it also included other elements of diction, such as technical and scientific terms, reportage, quotations from historical and documental sources and the like. As Rowe correctly emphasizes, “Like parra, Cardenal opens up the boundaries of the poem, to let in what was previously excluded” (Rowe, 2000, 120). In his 1987 interview with Elías and valdés Cardenal added his voice to those of Neruda and parra in distancing himself from poesía hermética or what he had earlier called “una plaga: el subjetivismo lírico-onírico” (benedetti, 1972, 120). Such poetry, he now declared, was perfectly justified, but “no se puede dar un mensaje social o político al pueblo en un discurso hermético” (Elías and valdés, 1987, 47). political poetry must above all communicate. The critical question is: how? That technique was the key is revealed by Cardenal’s statement in the early 1980s: “La única clase que me hubiera gustado dar era la de composición de poesía: enseñar las técnicas que yo había aprendido.” he went on to declare that the masses of popular poetry thrown up by the Sandinista revolution were bad, because the writers had not been trained to write tecnically effective poetry. (Cardenal, 1983b, 10 and 15–16). Several critics (including paul borgeson, 1981, amplified in borgeson, 1984, ch. 4; Robert pring-Mill, 1980; and Jorge valdés, 1986) have attempted to characterize Cardenal’s poetic technique, but it still stands in need of extensive and systematic treatment if we are to meet the challenge of parra’s statement to benedetti in 1969 which in many ways sums up the problem of critics when faced by Cardenal’s poetry:


pienso que la poesía política es desde luego necesaria, pero desde el punto de vista estético, poético estricto, parecería que está condenada a operar con elementos más fungibles que la otra. Tal vez sea ésta una de las razones por las cuales la poesía política por lo común no logra concretarse en obras realmente duraderas. (benedetti, 1972, 47)

In “Epistola a José Coronel urtecho” (La santidad de la revolución) and elsewhere, Cardenal has paid generous tribute to Ezra pound’s poetics, primarily in two respects: inclusivity, the capacity of poetry to incorporate all aspects of reality and human experience, together with the need to sharpen language, to give it conciseness and pin-point exactitude, in contrast to the inflation and devaluation of language, its deliberate contamination and misuse by the spokespeople of capitalism: “de ahí que nuestro papel sea clarificar el language” (Cardenal, 1983, 254). This is basic. It goes together with the limitation of figurative language, which is reserved by Cardenal, as we have seen, chiefly for special effects as when in “Oración por Marilyn Monroe” in one of hs most memorable lines, he speaks of her as “SOla como un astro-nAuta frente a la nOche especial” (ibid., 124), combining a fine simile with superb rhythmical and acoustical balance. It is this kind of effect that pring-Mill presumably had in mind when he described Cardenal as using “the full range of more traditional or rhetorical effects” (pring-Mill, 1980, xxi). Some of those traditional effects we have already seen. Exteriorist or documental poetry necessarily privileges visuality: direct reflection of the real outside the poet’s mind, with verifiable references to details, though of course such details are carefully selected to figure forth the poem’s message. Along with visuality go contrast and unexpected juxtaposition, as means of organizing the visuality so as to create an implicit commentary, often ironic or sarcastic, such as the contrast between Somoza on his white charger and the vomit of his drunken supporters on which the horse’s hooves slip (“Marcha triunfal” [Poemas sueltos], Cardenal, 1983a, 43). Another example is the contrast between the serene beauty of Lake Nicaragua followed by:

el guardia borracho en la acera con el garand bala en boca apoyándose en el garand para no caer, el obrero borracho acostado sobre el lodo de la calle cubierto de moscas y con la portañuela abierta.

(“Epistola a José Coronel urtecho”, Cardenal, 1983a, 260)

To benedetti (1972, 102) he explained that he had learned from pound that violent juxtapositions produce by superimposition what the latter called an “ideogram” or third (implicit) image.

Along with striking juxtapositions of this kind, goes a systematic use of encabalgamiento in which the end of a line left “in the air” draws attention

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to the beginning of the next, creating a variety of effects, which may be sarcastic, as in:

[El general] pasa debajo del arco triunfal de papel … (“Marcha triunfal”, Cardenal, 1983a, 43),

or Somoza gordo lleno de condecoraciones como un árbol de navidad.

(“Oráculo sobre Managua”, ibid., 213)

or re-emphatic, as in:

una flauta triste una tenue flauta como un rayo de luna

(“Economía de Tahuantinsuyu”, ibid., 163)

or to create an effect of colour and movement:

y la gallinita-de-playa de color café y alas amarillo limón, zancadita camina sobre los nenúfares acuáticos.

(Canto nacional”, ibid., 195)

The language, as we know, is referential and colloquial, even to the extreme (“Medallas color caca” [“Marcha triunfal”, ibid., 43], or “Mi tierra … es de otros jodidos” [“Epistola a José Coronel urtecho”, ibid., 255]). but this does not preclude splendid rhythmical and acoustical effects:

Lago con luna La luna sobre el lago y el agua color de luna

(“Canto nacional”, ibid., 194)

combines incremental re-emphasis, alliteration and repetition of vowels to create a musical effect. Or we find the opposite – feísmo: “La luna riela sobre la mierda” (“Oráculo sobre Managua”, ibid., 210). We equally find cumulative enumeration, as in the Neruda of Canto general, often designed to produce a knock-down effect by emphasis on the same theme:

El banco del Espíritu Santo dentro del vaticano – banco di Santo Spiritu – la Esposa de dios hecha puta, emputecida la esposa Generale Inmoviliare parte del patrimonio de la Santa Sede


mejor dicho Generale Inmoviliare filial del vaticano y vittorio veronesse, así se llama el hijo de su mama presidente de la Acción Católica y el banco de Roma la iglesia se acuesta con cualquiera. y más de la mitad de los obispos de Nicaragua eran apóstatas y su Excelencia pendejísima aquella noche triste noche, ungió con óleo trémulo en el estadio el pobre viejo, a la hija de Somoza reina del ejército. (“Oráculo sobre Managua”, ibid., 222)

Every reader of Cardenal is struck in addition by his use of typographical devices to underline certain effects, either simply visual, such as the final lines of El estrecho dudoso:

… la mano de sangre en el muro todavía pintada se iba hundiendo y hundiendo en el agua. (Cardenal, 1985, 170)

or of contrast, or of crescendo or diminuendo, and perhaps most notably his use of capitals for extra emphasis as in “Economía de Tahuantinsuyu” (in Homenaje a los indios americanos) where the beginning references to money are repeatedly capitalized to draw attention to the fact that the Incas did not have a money economy. Similarly in the middle of the poem the description of the joyful celebration of harvest in the Inca empire is followed by five lines of capitals referring to a collapse of sugar futures in capitalist North America.

One of the most fruitful approaches to Cardenal’s technique has been that of valdés (1986) (following pring-Mill (1980)) who explores cinematographic effects. Since Exteriorist poetry privileges reference to concrete objects in the outside world, visuality, as in film, is fundamental. hence it is profitable to examine the visuality of Cardenal’s poetry in terms of visual montage (the juxtaposition of different objects in meaningful relation to each other), flash-backs and flash-forwards, close-ups, medium distance description and broad panoramic shots, as well as changes of angle.

Initially Cardenal had not been particularly interested in the Indian heritage of Central America, but after encouragement by Merton, he turned, like Neruda, to this theme and published El estrecho dudoso (1966), a poem of epic inspiration on the conquest of the region, Mayapán (1968) and Homenaje a los indios americanos (1969). The last two were later incorpo-rated into Los ovnis de oro (1988). All three represent the last phase of his poetic work before his “second conversion” to Marxism in Cuba in 1970. One of the functions of the epic is to provide a foundational myth which

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may transmit national values to its audience. This is the case with El estrecho dudoso. based on canonical historical sources, which are heavily quoted in the poems, it contrasts the greedy, feuding conquistadors with selfless figures like Las Casas and Antonio de valdivieso, who voice the values of justice and civilization. These, Cardenal prophesies, will ultimately prevail. A sub-theme of the text is provided by transparent references to Nicaragua under the heel of the Somozas and the contemporary struggle against ever-renewed tyranny. Like a sector of the New historical Novel in Spanish America, El estrecho dudoso deliberately deconstructs “official” history, re-presenting it from a new ideological viewpoint, no longer that of the victors, but rather that of the vanquished, the victimized and the oppressed. Inevitably in the process, the Indians, whose leaders’ voices we hear frequently, tend to be idealized. We see the result in Los ovnis de oro. Russell Salmon, in his introduction to the bilingual edition (Salmon, 1992, xxvii) remarks succinctly that the collection uses “a post-conquest myth of origin [i.e. of Incarrí, a new peruvian Messiah-figure] now seen as hope for the return to order”. The poems in Los ovnis de oro describe alternative native American communities from both the past and the present, which reject materialism, competition and capitalism and which base their outlook and life-style on contrasting spiritual, values. Sarabia (1997, 131) rightly points out that Cardenal makes a conscious effort to avoid overpraising the Indians’ adherence to these higher ideals and reminds us that the poet also presents the “contracara, el militarismo y la desarmonía corpori-zada en huitzilopochtli, al que la voz le pone el mote de ‘nazi’ ”. Even so, the aim is to awaken the reader to greater awareness of the degraded society in which he or she is now living, and to the possibility of redeeming modern life by collaborating with social change, if necessary by revolutionary activity. In this way what Cardenal sees as God’s evolutionary design for human progress will be furthered. Thus the collection begins with an idealized description of the life of a community of Kuna Indians in Central America, seen, like Santa Mónica in Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos, as an island of peace, co-operation, equality and simple spirituality on the margin of modern life. but, unlike Santa Mónica, which is recognizably evolving towards modernity with its inevitable complications and compromises, Mulatupo is presented idyllically as a place where “vivimos como dios quería que viviéramos” (Cardenal, 1992, 8). The theme of the poem, that:

Lo tradicional era revolucionario El progreso capitalista, retroceso (ibid., 28)

is developed in “Economía de Tahuantinsuyu”, which emphasizes the contrast between life for the Indians under the Inca regime in peru and life there today. paradoxically, then, there was no money economy and no individual crime (theft, prostitution), no institutional crime (corruption) and no crimes


against humanity (slavery), whereas now, in a money economy, the Indian is pauperized and degraded. Cardenal uses his familiar acoustical and rhyth-mical effects to point up his message. While Inca society represented “La sociedad sIN dINero que soñamos” (Cardenal, 1983, 158), the modern peru-vian Indians

Son cenizas son cenizas que avIENTa el vIENTo de los Andes. (ibid., 159)

The main ideological punch of the poem emerges when Cardenal takes issue with the Neruda of “Alturas de Macchu picchu”, who had presented the Indians under Inca rule as slave-labourers:

Neruda: no hubo libertad Sino seguridad social. (ibid., 161)

While admitting that this was a “Stalinist”, authoritarian society, Cardenal emphasizes both the material benefits in which everyone shared and the spir-itual underpinning of the Inca empire:

pero sus mitos No de economistas! La verdad religiosa y la verdad política eran para el pueblo una misma verdad. (ibid., 161–2)

having dealt with the past and the present, the poem finally turns to the future, to ask whether such a comunismo agrario could be re-established and, as if in response, evokes in the final lines an Indian mummy preserved in a museum with a bag of maize still clasped in its hand. In “Tahirassawichi en Washington” (Los ovnis de oro) a pawnee chief visits the uS capital and there voices the beliefs and religious principles of his tribe, its nature-worship and connected symbolism, its collective and family values and its preference for dream/visionary knowledge over scientific and technological knowledge. The State department ignores him.

What is important here is not so much the fact, which is obvious to all critical readers, that Cardenal deliberately plays down the ambiguities and conflicts, the human shortcomings common to Inca and pawnee society (and all other societies), but the notion of order, which Salmon rightly places at the centre of Los ovnis de oro. The structure of the poems in the collec-tion reflects the opposite of a world of cosmic disorder and unpredictability of high Modernism, symbolized by borges’s notion of “un infinito juego

68 dONALd L. ShAW

de azares” (borges, 1974, 460). Cardenal enjoys a double concept of order. One element is dialectical materialism with its explanation of things in terms of the basic economic and class substructure conditioning the cultural superstructure. The other is the Christian concept of a providential order in which cosmic evolution reveals the finger of God on the controls. It should perhaps be mentioned that this dual conception of a cosmic order has not enjoyed the vatican’s endorsement, nor does it meet with the approval of such a Marxist-influenced critic as dawes (1993). but the outcome is that in Cardenal’s poems the medium reflects the message: the poems are architec-turally conceived, orderly structures. They may lack elements of conventional punctuation (“Tahirassawichi en Washington”, for instance, does not use commas) and the pattern is one of free verse, but the logical nexuses linking the sections of the poems together are normally all in place or easily supplied. under the influence of a positive ideology (in contrast to the frequent use of chaotic enumeration in the earlier generation) formal order has returned to poetry. This is a historically important shift: “a ‘change of attitude’ in which the world appears as comprehensible, accessible and alterable”, as Claudia Shaefer appropriately puts it (1982, 173).

Cardenal’s is a world of comprehensible causes and effects which are part, as we have suggested, of a cosmic plan. While much of Los ovnis de oro is focused on the past, usually in a contrastive relationship with the present, Cardenal, as a revolutionary poet, is necessarily orientated towards the future. In his vision of it, he is, as has often been noticed, influenced by the work of pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French paleoanthropologist and philoso-pher of science. We can see the direction of his futurology in a poem like “Condensaciones y visión de San José de Costa Rica” (La santidad de la revolución, 1976, later incorporated into Cántica cósmico[1989]). It is based on the notion of the mutual attraction of of all components of cosmic matter from the electron to the largest heavenly bodies. This gravitational force is seen as God’s love expressed in movement, and producing “condensations”, when, for example, interstellar gas condenses into stars. This physical process is in turn presented as the model for the gradual absorption of different soci-eties into one world-society. A feature of the process is the ocurrence of “disturbances” which accelerate the condensations. In human societies these can take the form of revolutions. Even unsuccessful revolutionaries like Che Guevara fit into the pattern, like the first fish to try to establish life on land. Cardenal’s visit to San José offers him a vision of a society in which every-thing manifests the love-principle. In line with his evolutionary-revolutionary credo, he prophesies that this principle will overcome the contrary principle of competition and exploitation as the revolution extends itself universally. As Sarabia points out (1997, 137), it is this prophetic tone which distinguishes much of Cardenal’s poetry from that of other socially orientated poets.

In terms of its structure “Condensaciones” is an extended simile relating


world evolution to cosmic evolution, prefigured in the two opening similes which humanize the stars:

Como alegres bulevares iluminados o poblaciones vista de noche desde un avión.

(Cardenal, 1989, 81)

As always in Cardenal, the similes compare the familiar with the familiar. The development of the extended simile includes the usual use of stark contrast, once more with Wall Street as the chief obstacle to the harmonious evolutionary process. Rhythmical and acoustical effects emphasize strategi-cally important lines:

es una atracción entre los cuErpos, y la atracción se acelEra cuando se acErcan los cuErpos (ibid., 81)

y dANzaron delANte de los dOs bisOntes. (ibid., 82)

The whole poem is structured as a carefully orchestrated sequence rising to a climax in the final words “la Revolución”.

Two other elements of “Condensaciones” merit mention. One is the notion of the emergence, as a result of the love-driven process, of “un hOMbre nuevo con nuevos cromosÓMos” (Cardenal, 1989, 84). The other, which is extremely relevant to Cardenal’s “Coplas a la muerte de Thomas Merton” (?1970), is the assertion:

Mas: “la revolución no acaba en este mundo” si no vencemos a la muerte. (ibid., 85)

Merton died by accident in 1968 and shortly thereafter Cardenal produced this elegy which he read during his visit to Cuba in 1970. based on the famous Coplas of Jorge Manrique, the Spanish medieval poet, lamenting the death of his father and the passing of his age, Cardenal’s poem, as María Elena Claro affirms (1972, 222) “presenta una antitesis a la poesía de Manrique”, visible in the opening lines:

Nuestras vidas son los ríos que van a dar a la muerte que es la vida. (Cardenal, 1971, 196)

It is interesting to compare Cardenal’s approach to human mortality with those of vallejo and Neruda. All three poets perceive the life of the average man as a death in life, characterized by lack of awareness (vallejo, Trilce LXXv; Neruda, “Alturas de Macchu picchu”, Canto III). Cardenal writes:

70 dONALd L. ShAW

Soñamos en perezosas sobre cubierta contemplando el mar color diakirí … (ibid., 197)

paladeamos un manhattan como dormidos … (ibid., 197)

un traje sport para ser jóvenes, para alejar la muerte mientras nos inventan el suero de la juventud el antídoto para no morir … (ibid., 201–2)

but whereas vallejo and Neruda attempt to seek a non-transcendental response to the problem of death (vallejo in “Masa” [España, aparta de mí este caliz]; Neruda, with his distinction at the beginning of “Alturas de Macchu picchu” between “una muerte pequeña” and “la poderosa muerte” of whoever contributes to the onward march of the proletariat) Cardenal joyfully accepts death as union with the great and everlasting All:

La muERte es una puERta abiERta al univERso … … y no al vacío. (ibid., 199–200)

hence the tone of this elegy is the opposite of sad; it is a celebration, not a lament, symbolized by the image of Merton’s last plane journey:

La ventanilla del gran jet lloraba al despegarse de California de alegría! (ibid., 210)

“Coplas” has inspired the most lucidly argued critique of a major Cardenal poem so far (daydí-Tolson, 1984). In it, daydí-Tolson makes a number of assertions which are relevant to a wider range of Cardenal’s mature poetic works. The main one is that there is an objective discrepancy between the poet’s aim of direct communication and the kind of readership which is implicit in the poet’s language. It is argued that, unlike the Salmos, “Coplas” requires an “informed” reader, familiar with Cardenal’s intellectual interests, ideally capable of appreciating the intertextual references to Manrique’s poem and capable of understanding the words and phrases in English. In addition daydí-Tolson affirms that the poem lacks a clear pattern of development, while the language employed constitutes: “un discurso divagante, inconexo y estéticamente inefectivo” (daydí-Tolson, 1984, 26). With respect to the first part of this critique, it might be mentioned that Claro, on publishing the poem in the Revista Chilena de Literatura, felt constrained to add no fewer than eighty-nine footnotes in a journal aimed at a cultured academic audience.

BORGESAND CARDENAL 71

ButonemightarguethatthisisnotacomprometidoworklikethepoemsofHomenaje a los indios americanos,butamuchmoreuniversalworkandonewhichtakestheformofanepistletoahighlyculturedrecipient.Theaimofcommunicationdoesnotapplyinquitethesameway.However, thesecondpartofthecriticismhastobetakenmoreseriously.UnlikeHora O,“Coplas”does not have an overarching key metaphor which imposes a measure ofstructuralunityonthepoemasawhole.Itconsistsofaseriesofshortjuxta-posedmeditationsonMerton’sdeath,governedbythreethemes:deathastheachievementoffinalauthenticityandasunionwiththecosmicforceoflove;the inauthenticity of life in time; and Cardenal’s serene acceptance of hisfriend’spassing,twiceexpressedbytheuseofthesimple“o.k.”.Ratherthanconstituting a climactic sequence it is like a set ofmusical variations heldtogether by the strikingly unexpected tone of yea-saying.While adjectivessuchas“divagante”and“inconexo”seemratherharsh,acarefulscrutinyofthe diction of “Coplas” reveals some contradiction between the referenceswhichseemtoimplyaculturedreaderandtheexcessiveemphasisandrepeti-tion which we notice, for example, in lines 358–92. Clearly Cardenal wasattemptingtoadapthisExterioristtechniquetotheexpressionofasubjectivereactiontoMerton’sdeath.Theattemptdoesnotquitesucceed.

“Condensaciones”nowfiguresascantiga8ofCántico cósmico(1989),acollectionofforty-threecantigas,whichhadbeenwrittenat intervalssincethe late 1950s, and which develop Cántico’s basic contrast: between theharmonious evolution of the cosmos according to physical principles andthe barbarism and cruelty of capitalism, as evidenced by the behaviour ofWallStreetanditsLatinAmericansatelliteregimes.Incantiga29Cardenalasserts plainly “nohayorden en estos cantos” (Cardenal, 1989,336).Thissamecantigacouldserveasamodel for theunderstandingof the thrustofthecollectionasawhole.Itre-expressesinpoetictermsthepresentstateofresearchintoquantumphysicsandtheoriginsoftheuniverseandoflifeonearth,stressing the idea that itsconclusionsareas“mystical” inasenseasreligiousinsights,butaskingthekeyquestion:“¿Acasosomosotracosaqueunordenenelcaos?”(ibid.,341).TheanswerforCardenalis,ofcourse,inthe affirmative. Developing the blue-print of “Condensaciones” he quotesTeilhard de Chardin’s assertion: “El cosmos es materia espiritual” (ibid.,348).Repetitiouslyandover-explicitly,Cántico cósmico insists thatweareliving“Enununiversoconsentido”(ibid.,79),butoneinwhichcapitalismreducesustolivingin

laciudaddelasvidassinsignificadodondelasalmassondiskettes (ibid.,372)

BythetimeCardenalwaswritingCántico cósmicohispoeticstylewassetandhis influenceestablished.AlreadyPring-Mill (1992,70)notes thatLos

72 dONALd L. ShAW

ovnis de oro had not “pioneered any fresh stylistic approaches”, and this is equally true of Cántico cósmico which really has to be judged primarily on its content. What makes it a centrally important work in relation to its times is its astonishingly confident proclamation of a dynamic law of cosmic evolution which contains immense possibilities and promises relief from the emotional fears and intellectual difficulties which have beset the intellectual minority in the West since Romanticism. For this reason, in the best chapter (chapter four) of her otherwise rather too descriptive book, Mereles Olivera (2003) points up the contrast between Cardenal and parra as poets who stand at the opposite poles of reaction to the human condition: “En parra hay una duda, un ansia existencial. En Cardenal hay una respuesta” (215). We live in an age of anxiety and mental strain more intense even that that of the victo-rian intelligentsia, who felt the first onset of the modern mind-set. Like them we see around us an intense will to believe, which for many people made Marxist dogmatism an acceptable alternative to a world without absolutes, and born-again Christianity popular in the united States and elsewhere. This is the appeal of Cántico cósmico – poetry as revelation – and this consti-tutes its historical importance. After the doubt and despair of vallejo and the Neruda of the first and second parts of Residencia en la tierra, after the “nihilism” of parra, it enunciates a comforting doctrine of inevitable scientific and spiritual progress based on general laws and apparently real principles of universal validity. It stands as a monument to an intense desire to escape from the modern dilemma and to a frankly old-fashioned apostolic conception of the poet. Time will tell whether Cardenal’s assurance was justi-fied. The omens, however, are not good.

While he was writing Cántico cósmico, Cardenal published a number of other poems and sets of poems, including the clandestine Canto nacional (1972), Oráculo sobre Managua (1973), Tocar el cielo (1981), Nostalgia del futuro (1982), Vuelos de victoria (1984) and Quetzalcóatl (1985). Subse-quently he brought out La noche iluminada de palabras (1991), Telescopio en la noche oscura (1993) and Las ínsulas extrañas (2002) as well as prose works and volumes of memoirs. It seems likely, however, that his reputation will rest primarily on the earlier poetry which launched exteriorismo and on Cántico cósmico.

before leaving Cardenal, it is appropriate to mention a factor which affects all left-wing poetry in Spanish America from Neruda onward and which it is always necessary to bear in mind when considering the question of the author’s intentionality. Cornejo polar has made the important point that Cardenal was a poet’s poet, in the sense that his poetry made him the link between the “objetivismo narrativo” of contemporary british and North American poets, as well as brecht, on the one hand and Spanish American poets who moved in that direction following his example: “el autor de Salmos se conviert[e] en el nexo entre la precoz experiencia mexicana y caribeña y


la que años después tendrá como escenario el sur del continente” (Cornejo polar, 1998, 15). yet repeatedly, like the later Neruda, Cardenal has insisted on his desire to write for “the people”. but even in the twenty-first century “the people” in Spanish America are often barely literate and frequently far too poor to buy books of poetry even if they were available outside the cities. In other words, the readership, especially for poetry, except on special occa-sions such as poetry readings in poor or rural areas or workshops for the man in the street (or field), is likely not to be of “the people” at all, but of the urban middle class, the bourgeoisie, who are among the objects of attack (and who paradoxically enjoy being attacked while not taking the attack too seriously). For that reason it is hardly necessary to adopt a poetic style which appears to be reader-friendly and non-challenging. Interestingly, in “Talleres de poesía” Cardenal went even further, declaring that in 1977 he had thought that “no podía hacer que [los campesinos] entendieran mi poesía, aunque siempre había tratado de hacerla popular, porque muchas de sus palabras no eran del vocabulario de los campesinos” (Cardenal, 1983b, 11). Later he discovered that they could be brought to understand any kind of poetry. There is food for thought in all this about the real need for “poesía clara” on the part of “the people” and about the real motivation for turning to it on the part of poets.

4

OrOzcO and daltOn

What the foregoing account of the work of some of the major figures in Spanish american poetry around and immediately after the mid-twentieth century seems to illustrate is that two different attitudes towards the produc-tion of poetry faced each other. One emerges directly from Paz and has been admirably studied by thorpe running in The Critical Poem (1996). the other connects with neruda’s Odas elementales, the view of poetic language espoused by Parra, and the practice of cardenal, explored by alemany Bay in Poesía coloquial hispanoamericana (1997). to see the difference in a nutshell, all that is necessary is to contrast Parra’s 1958 essay “Poetas de la claridad” with Paz’s “¿Qué nombra la poesía?” (1967) in Corriente alterna (1986b). at the extreme it is the difference between poetry which deliber-ately aims to adapt everyday referential language to its intentions (although this aim involves a number of tricky issues) and poetry which questions its own power over language. cardenal, for example, representing the first of these patterns, sums up his outlook in his interview with alemany Bay, when he says: “dejé la hojarasca de metáforas y de adjetivación innecesaria, y creé una poesía más simple, más directa, más comunicativa, más clara y, por lo tanto, de mayor acceso al lector” (alemany Bay, 1997, 197). On the other hand, Paz maintains, with the overstatement typical of manifestos that “la poesía moderna es inseparable de la crítica del lenguaje” and that in modern poetry external referents disappear and “la referencia de una palabra es otra palabra” (Paz, 1986b, 5). thus we are left with a current of poetry which is ultimately affirmative of the meaningfulness of language, confronting one which manifests the suspicion, to put it at the minimum, that language is arbitrary, a system of “pure” signs in which the word merely interacts with other words and “ya no designa y no es ni ser ni no-ser” (6).

Paz, therefore, as running cogently suggests, finds his main historical place as a major influence on Spanish american poetry after 1950 as “a bridge between earlier tendencies and the most recent movement” (running, 1996, 30). this last would presumably include “poesía crítica” and “poesía coloquial” though, one suspects, in the latter case more by reaction against the view, which had originally surfaced in 1956 in El arco y la lira, as the assertion that “el pensamiento ve con desconfianza las palabras” (Paz, 1986a, 29). What Bécquer in the first of the Rimas had called “el rebelde, mezquino

OROZCO ANd dALTON 75

idioma” and darío “la palabra que huye” (“yo persigo una forma …”, Prosas profanas), now threatens to go once more the way it had gone at the end of huidobro’s Altazor and lose all contact with the signified. Speaking of a group of Chilean poets of the 1960s – Waldo Rojas, Gonzalo Millán, Manuel Silva, Floridor pérez, Jaime Quesada and the perhaps better known Oscar hahn – whose work parallels that of Roberto Juarroz (Argentina), Juan Luis Martínez (Chile), Alejandra pizarnik and Alberto Girri (both from Argen-tina), Carmen Foxley writes:

Todos estos poetas trabajan en la convicción del carácter ilusorio de la referencialidad” and goes on to assert that in all their work: “tiene un lugar destacado la permanente problematización y cuestionamiento del propio quehacer, es decir, una elucidación metapoética que atraviesa todas sus trayectorias. (Foxley and Cuneo, 1991, 13)

Thorpe Running (1996) tends to play down the the fact that a poem which questions its own validity as a verbal artefact falls inevitably into paradox. Words under poetic pressure may only be able to express a fleeting, uncer-tain and/or ambiguous meaning, but if poetry is not to lapse into silence, a residual communicative function must survive. The difficulty is that, in attempting to cut itself off from any referent in exterior reality, while at the same time not trying to create an alternative, symbolic reality, self-critical poetry such as that of the poets mentioned above, tends to turn in on itself and move towards a dead end.

At the other end of the spectrum, therefore, we find a conscious reac-tion against the disengagement of language from the notion of referentiality and the assertion of its power to get meaning across. paz, in Los hijos del limo (1974, 137) attributes to Lugones and López velarde ‘El gran descu-brimiento: los poderes secretos del lenguaje coloquial”. González and Treece quote, of all people, Oliverio Girondo, one of the patron-poets of the Argen-tine avant-garde, who nonetheless in “Lo que esperamos” (Persuasión de los días 1942) could express the hope that in the near future:

usaremos palabras substanciosas, auténticas … … palabras simples, de arroyo, de raíces que en vez de separarnos nos acerquen un poco …

(quoted in González and Treece, 1992, 117)

For Alemany bay (1997), poesía conversacional/coloquial was the leading

76 dONALd L. ShAW

tendency during the 1960s and marks, as parra had declared in relation to his group of poets in the late 1930s, a conscious reaction against vanguardist hermeticism. Once more we notice poetry leading the way to literary change. by contrast, in fiction the 1960s were the key decade of boom experimen-talism. The “new realism” of poesía coloquial, which no longer questioned either reality or language in view of the need for “una comunicación de emergencia” (benedetti, 1972, 17) did not emerge as the dominant mode in the novel until the rise of the post-boom in the mid-1970s. We should not overlook the fact that what in Spanish America is called “colloquial” or “conversational” poetry is part of a wider movement of reaction against the immediate past of the genre, which includes, for example, “The Movement” in british poetry. We see this attested, for example, by Robert Conquest’s call to his fellow poets “to be empirical in [their] attitude to all that comes” and to “maintain a rational structure and comprehensible language” (quoted in bradford, 2005, 137). In 1956, the Times Educational Supplement referred to “the triumph [in poetry] of clarity over the formless mystifications of the last twenty years” (TES, 13 July 1956); exactly what parra was to claim two years later in “poetas de la claridad”. In North America among the first poets to abandon metre and use conversational speech were William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. They have been followed by a large number of others, most notably perhaps Frank O’hara, Randall Jarell, Elizabeth bishop and John Ashbery. Like Conquest in britain, we find William Stafford rejecting difficult diction and, in his case, stating unequivocally: “When you make a poem, you merely speak or write in the language of every day” (quoted in Gray, 1989, 234). how different from pound’s assertion that “There are few fallacies more common than the opinion that poetry should mimic the daily speech” (pound, 1973, 41)! Not surprisingly we find Colin Falck entitling the third chapter of his American and British Verse in the Twentieth Century (2003), “The Triumph of Talk”. As in Spanish America, this tendency, though for a time dominant, has not gone uncontested. halpern, in his Everyday and Prophetic (2003) postulates a “tension between the prophetic voice and the everyday voice in postwar and contemporary American poetry” (3). Nor is this the only tension. Within it we have the stand-off in the 1980s between the “New Formalist” and “Language” poets on the one hand, and the older “Free verse”, colloquialist practitioners on the other. Lynn Emanuel (1998, 279) writes:

free verse, as it is characterized in the formalists’s discussions, is poetry dominated … by what is seen as a set of unexamined assumptions about the relation of form to “meaning”, to “content.” Free verse is debased verse, common without being popular, a poetry that, simultaneously, is middle-brow, academic and culturally illiterate. It is a verse that partakes of notions of both a pop culture and a lingua franca.

OROZCOAND DALTON 77

There are signs of similar tensions in contemporary SpanishAmericanpoetry.ItisunfortunatethatJillKuhnheim’sotherwiseenlighteningSpanish American Poetry at the End of the Twentieth Century,doesnotdealwiththemdirectly.TheydeservethesamekindofcriticalattentionthattheyhavebeguntoarouseintheUnitedStates.

Olga Orozco (Argentina, 1920–99)

WritingapprovinglyofhisownCanto ceremonialintheprefacetoPropios como ajenos Antonio Cisneros observes “Los poemas del libro estabanllenos de vida vivida” (Cisneros, 1991, 10). It seems clear that one of hisaims was to make his poetry (at least seem like) a direct transcription oflivedexperienceandthusinasense“realistic”.WerecognizerightawaythesimilarityofCisneros’soutlook to thatofParra,whodeclared toBenedettiin the early1970s that “poesía esvida enpalabras” (Benedetti, 1972, 51).OlgaOrozco’spoetrystandsalmostattheotherextreme.ConcerningOroz-co’spoem“Esbozosfrenteaunmodelo”fromthecollectionLa noche a la deriva(1984)whosethemeispoeticcreation,JillKuhnheimassertsthat inOrozco language is always in some sense “erróneo” “because it can neverreferdirectlytoanobject(themodel,livedexperience)butmustbeindirect,figural,inthiscasemetaphoric”(Kuhnheim,1996,58).ThisisnotthesameassayingthatOrozcoendorsesthe“critical”attitudetowardslanguagewhichRunning(1986)andFoxleyandCuneo(1991)explore.Butwhatitdoesmeanis thatOrozcoisnotacolloquialpoet.That iswhysettingherworkbesidethatofDaltonillustratesinsomewaysoneofthedichotomieswhichwefindinmodernSpanishAmericanpoetry.

Asweknowinter aliafromVirginiaWoolf’sdescriptionofLilyBriscoe’spaintinginTo the Lighthouse,Modernism(notmodernismo)soughtamoreelusive reality, turning away from mimetic realism and striving for a newformallanguage,notcompletelyabstractandnon-representational,butusingrealistelementsinadifferentway,whichsometimesexpressesourfragilityand contingency in the face of nature and time. It may postulate realitieswhicharebeyondthereachofrationalismormeredirectobservationandlookbehindappearancesforsomethingnotfullyperceptibleorpresentable,some-thingwhichtranscendsnormalcognition.AnobviousexampleisCortázar’snotionofa“yonder”,a“kibbutzdeldeseo”,aninvisiblerealitytobestrivenfor,whichprotectsusfromhorroranddespairinthefaceoflife’shostilityormeaninglessness.Thismysteriousrealm,whichforCortázarisinthefuturetobediscovered,forOrozcowas,atfirst,tobeevokedfromthepast.HerpoetryisfullyintunewiththeculturalcrisisoftheWestinthetwentiethcentury,inthesense that itpostulatesanescape fromBorges’s“inasible”and random(therefore “atroz”) reality though amysterious empathywith another level

78 dONALd L. ShAW

of reality from which we can receive enigmatic messages. As Julieta Gómez paz puts it: “Olga Orozco ha vivido rememorando un paraíso, buscando en el Caos un divino orden perdido” (Gómez paz, 1977, 51). Much of Oroz-co’s earliest poetry reads like an extended commentary on what Clarissa thinks about in virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: “the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death” (Woolf, 1925, 153). but, as Gómez paz and Melanie Nicholson, among others, recognize, in the later poetry of Orozco the attempt to recover a lost unity, to reach a reconciliation with the human condition, fails. Nicholson writes:

the later books are characterized by a darkened tone or a more pessimistic approach to the metaphysical problems presented … At the heart of all Orozco’s work we discover the conviction that truth or reality always resides elsewhere, and that the human endeavor to regain this lost paradise, or to cross the threshold into absolute being, is doomed to failure.

(Nicholson, 2002, 20)

Essentially, then, at the centre of Orozco’s poetry there is a stubborn desire to break out of or transcend what the poet feels are limitations imposed by time, space and the various inadequacies of human knowledge and percep-tion. It is this which constitutes the most universal aspect of her work. Evelyn underhill, in her famous and much reprinted Mysticism postulates “three deep cravings of the self, three great expressions of man’s restlessness”. One is the universal craving for love; another is the craving for inward purity and perfection. The third is “the longing to go out from his normal world in search of a lost home, a ‘better country’; an Eldorado, a Sarras, a heavenly Sion” (underhill, 1930, 126–7). This well describes Orozco’s principal aspi-ration. In that sense the main thrust of her poetry is comparable to that of paz. paz, we remember, used the symbol of the “muro” to express the limitations which cut us off from “la vida más vida” and explored different strategies for creating a “puerta” in the wall that would open the way to more authentic living. Orozco uses much the same symbol. In “En tu inmensa pupila” she apostrophizes night, clearly the dark night of the soul, as “horadando los muros” (Orozco, 2000, 161). The earlier reference in the poem to “la casa” reveals that these are the walls of her “home”, her refuge, as was the case in “Maldoror” in Las muertes (1952). In the case of both Orozco and paz, as well as of Cortázar in prose, the striving to reach a harmonious interpreta-tion of the modern human condition, and its failure, illustrate the impasse which seems to lie behind much of the “high” literature of the West in our time, and the concomitant longing to believe that the creative imagination is a form of revealed cognition which can point a way forward through the use of a special kind of language, a logos believed to possess redemptive


potency. This is the most fruitful way to approach Orozco’s poetry. Nichol-son’s discussion of the contribution of gnostic, magical and esoteric notions to the poet’s attempt to explore new avenues of knowledge which are neither religious in any orthodox sense nor rationalistic, and which do not depend on normal conceptions of cause and effect, represents an important step forward in Orozco criticism. Orozco herself asserts in her declaration “La poesía” that the creative act

se convierte … en arco tendido hacia el conocimiento, en ejercicio de transfiguración de lo inmediato, en intento de fusión insólita entre dos realidades contrarias, en búsquedas de encadenamientos musicales o de fórmulas casi matemáticas, en exploración de lo desconocido a través del desarreglo de todos los sentidos, en juego verbal librado a las vari-aciones del azar, en meditación sobre momentos o emociones altamente significativos, en trama de correspondencias y analogías, en ordenamiento de fuerzas misteriosas sometidas a la razón, en dominio de correlaciones íntimas entre el lenguaje y el universo. (Orozco, 2000, 235)

The origins of this view go all the way back to hume and Kant, and were dominant in English Romanticism, especially the poetry of Wordsworth and Shelley, both of whom held that imaginary activity is not mere autonomous creativity. Imagination, they believed, could be the source of knowledge of objective reality. Thus the truths of fact, “scientific” truths were not neces-sarily different from or in conflict with truths obtained via poetic insight. It needs to be pointed out however that poetic imagination and intuition can really only teach us about the human world. It is highly questionable whether they can tell us anything about the physical world, still less about meta-physical questions. Nevertheless, it is clear from Orozco’s interview with Sauter that from childhood on she believed strongly in the paranormal and accepted that she had a visionary gift. Its relationship to her poetry is clear. “El poeta”, she declared, “escarba en lo desconocido, escarba en lo que no tiene explicación lógica … hay un pie que está en la tierra pero con el otro está tanteando el vacío para ver dónde lo apoya” (Sauter, 2006, 112).

The first phase of Orozco’s poetic production comprises her first two collections, Desde lejos (1946) and Las muertes (1952), since critical opinion, represented especially by Cristina piña (“Estudio preliminar”; piña, 1984, pp. 13–63), María del Carmen Tacconi (1981) and Juan Liscano (“prólogo” to Orozco, 1975, pp. 73–101) tends to see in Los juegos peligrosos (1962) what the first of these calls “un hito fundamental”.

pues en él [piña explains] tanto como el lenguaje alcanza la maduración definitiva y su punto más alto de tensión semántico-simbólica, se plantean

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en toda su amplitud y complejidad las experiencias metafísicas que están en el origen de su poetizar y se ensayan todos los recursos para superar la contingencia. (piña, 1984, 35)

We should bear in mind also that between Los juegos peligrosos and the next poetic collection, Museo salvaje (1974) there is a twelve-year gap, which suggests that Los juegos represented a high point of creativity from which Orozco was not ready to move for more than a decade. In that decade, however, she published in 1967 the prose pieces of La oscuridad es otro sol, which is of such crucial importance that Elba Torres peralta largely bases her book La poética de Olga Orozco (1987) on it and in her article “Algunas consideraciones sobre la poética de Olga Orozco”, insists that it “contiene todas las claves de la poesía de Olga Orozco” (Torres de peralta, 1988, 33). Subsequently, piña posits “un cambio fundamental en la dirección del impulso poético” (piña, 1984, 41), though she is less willing than Nicholson to see the change in terms of a darker vision.

There has been little serious study of Orozco’s earliest collections apart from Colombo’s (1983) pioneering but brief commentary on figurative language in the first three. piña notes that Desde lejos prefigures aspects of the poet’s later work but emphasizes a diference of tone: here it is merely melancholic and elegiac; later it will become more dramatic and tragically intense (piña, 1984, 28). This is certainly true, but there is much more to be remarked upon. Tacconi writes: “El pilar fundamental del gnosticismo es un mito que explica el origen de la condición humana como la pérdida de un estatuto ontológico superior a causa de una falta en un tiempo primordial” (Tacconi, 1981, 116). If it is the case, as it undoubtedly is, that gnostic notions play an important role in Orozco’s later work, we must notice that this “Fall” from a lost para-dise, from innocence, from an original unity with the godhead or an Edenic existence into a world of mere contingency dominated by time and death, has already taken place when Orozco’s poetry begins. From the title of her first collection, and the first poem, the poet envisages a distant realm from which she has become separated but with which she remains in contact through “distantes mensajeros” who, however, cannot reunite her with it:

yo los había amado, quizás, bajo otro cielo pero la soledad, las ruinas y el silencio eran siempre los mismos “Lejos, desde mi colina”. (Orozco, 2000, 5)

The landscape evoked in several of the poems of Desde lejos is essentially symbolic. Its function is to express the fallen world visited by the mysterious messengers who represent the poet’s residual, sub-rational, sense of loss and longing to recover her place in the happy land where can be heard


los pasos clamorosos de una alegre estación, el murmullo del agua sobre alguna pradera que prologaba el cielo el canto esperanzado con que el amanecer corría a nuestro encuentro.

(ibid., 5)

The ultimate symbol of that happy land is the garden, as we know from one of Orozco’s best-known late poems “pavana para una infanta difunta” (Mutaciones de la realidad) in which she reassures her dead friend and fellow poet Alejandra pizarnik “en el fondo de todo hay un jardín” (ibid., 150), a belief that Orozco clung to with her conscious mind, however much her creative, subliminal mind doubted its existence. The surroundings in Desde lejos contrast with the garden image of hope and joy. The poems are set in “esa región de pena” characterized by “desolados médanos” around “la casa abandonada” (“Quienes rondan la niebla”). The elements associated with the countryside: “cardos”, “arena”, escarcha”, “niebla”, “viento”, “polvo”, “la crueldad del médano”, “el triste sopor de lentísimos cielos” and the like combine to create a paysage état d’âme which figures forth

el triste decaer de las cosas terrestres que solamente dejan en nosotros derrumbe y soledad.

(“Flores para una estatua”, ibid., 16)

but the poet is not as yet anguished by the existential situation which underlies the evoked landscape. her melancholy is alleviated by two factors in particular. One is the sense that the fall from a lost happiness is not a breaking of all bonds with it. Repeatedly Orozco alludes to shadowy connec-tions: “mensajeros de un mundo perdido” (“Lejos, desde mi colina”; “Flores para una estatua”), “seres que fui”, “hijos de nuestra imagen” (“Quienes rondan la niebla”), “pálidos seres”, “sombras” (“un pueblo en las cornisas”), former selves, shades of the beloved dead, mysterious beings who beckon towards better things:

nos están conduciendo hacia el amanecer de las colinas (“Quienes rondan la niebla”, Orozco, 2000, 6)

custodian, impasibles, nuestra eterna esperanza (“un pueblo en las cornisas”, ibid., 9)

or simply teach us to endure (“donde corre la arena dentro del corazón”). “Cortejo hacia una sombra” is Orozco’s “Non omnis moriar”. This last, climactic poem of Desde lejos suggests that the joys and sorrows of this life survive in another realm with which we remain mysteriously in touch:

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desde lo más callado de nosotros emigran esos lentos cortejos para poblar, lejanos, la inviolable comarca donde habita nuestro propio destino (ibid., 33)

and somehow call to us and condition our earthly lives with the promise that we shall yet recover a lost unity of personality. however, Tina Escaja, in one of the rare commentaries on Orozco’s earliest work (Escaja, 1998, 33–47), points out the ambiguous treatment of death in Desde lejos: “por un lado, la muerte es indicadora de la reintegración con la unidad perdida tras el nacimiento … Sin embargo … existe más como posibilidad que como deseo, imponiéndose siempre el elemento de búsqueda y de misterio” (40–1).

The other factor offering consolation is love: “¡Oh amor! Toda la fuerza oscura de la tierra está en ti” (“Entonces, cuando el amor”, Orozco, 2000, 24). but time and death are unconquerable enemies. Interspersed with the fleeting sensations of connections with our lost selves and lost happiness, or of the potential for reliving times of joy, are indications that only death will reunite us with the past or that hopes are fools. “Cabalgata del tiempo” hammers home the message that “Todo ha de ser en vano” (ibid., 28) and “Cuando alguien se nos muere” reintroduces from “Las puertas” the symbol of the “pesadas puertas” (ibid., 30) which shut us out from fulfilment.

These are densely written poems which yield up their layers of meaning slowly and require much rereading. but they provide a springboard to under-standing Orozco’s developing poetic personality and bring us into contact with some of her recurring symbols and rather hermetic diction. In particular the theme of death in Desde lejos prepares us for Las muertes (1952) a series of poems on figures chiefly drawn from literary sources whose lives the intro-ductory poem “Las muertes” tells us were exemplary in the sense that they rose above the mere pursuit of happiness and self-gratification; they lived by a higher law:

no conocieron ni el sueño ni la paz en los infames lechos vendidos por la dicha (Orozco, 2000, 37)

So when Orozco writes that “sus muertes son los exasperados rostros de nuestra vida” (ibid., 37) she is using the word “exasperados” in its etymolog-ical sense of “rendered harsh”. Their acceptance of their harsh destinies has hidden meanings for us. Some of them, like Lautréamont’s Maldoror or the biblical prodigal Son are rebellious spirits. Others, like dickens’s Miss havi-sham, or Carina, from a play by the belgian writer Fernand Crommelynck, are victims. Melville’s bartleby is a mysterious onlooker contemplating life impassively. Conrad’s Waitt is at once grandiose and contemptible. Each represents a different facet of human behaviour. We, the readers, are chal-lenged to figure out and admire the different ways in which they transcend


our petty preoccupation with life’s easy satisfactions. They illustrate what the poet calls, in the final poem of the collection, “Olga Orozco”, where she indirectly hints at sharing in the same human category to which they belong, her love of “la heroica perduración de toda fe” (ibid., 51).

perhaps the easiest case to understand is that of Maldoror, the post-byronic decadentist figure of cosmic revolt. The poem begins with a contemptuous invocation of the petty bourgeois reader, as someone whose “sed cabe en el cuenco exacto de la mano”, that is, as one who has no difficulty in coming to terms with any existential uneasiness he or she may experience, and whose complacency in the face of life will be endangered by coming under the spell of Maldoror. The extended image Orozco coins to ridicule the average sensual person’s trivial dicha is characteristic of the creativity of her diction:

ese trozo de espejo en que te encierras envuelto en un harapo deslumbrante del cielo (Orozco, 2000, 42)

The average reader’s happiness is seen as no more than a reflection his or her narcissistic self-image; this the petty bourgeois wraps round him or herself like a celestial comfort blanket though it is in fact no more than a gaudy rag. Maldoror, by contrast, symbolizes an utterly subversive power, beyond good and evil, lonely, tormented, luciferine, endowed with the power to overturn all conventional values: “desertó de dios y de los hombres” (ibid., 43). Orozco presents us with a figure of metaphysical insurrection like those explored by Albert Camus in L’Homme révolté, a figure whom she finds admirable in spite of his melodramatic satanism, because of his acceptance of solitude, effort and suffering on behalf of a pattern of beliefs and behaviour which radically challenges our complacency about the human condition. because of this he is able to rise above what Orozco calls, in “Quienes rondan la niebla” in Desde lejos, “esa región de pena” (Orozco, 2000, 6) – our reality, if we really understand it – associated with “llanto”, “congoja”, “muros”, “ruinas”, “desamparo”, “soledad”, “sombra” and “tinieblas”, the key words of her (especially early) poetry. but it is important not to overlook that at the end of “Maldoror” this cosmicly rebellious figure is seen with fear. When Orozco writes “Él sacude mi casa”, the tone is one of apprehension. We know that in Orozco, as in paz, light is always a positive symbol of hope and yea-saying. but Maldoror “me desgarra la luz” and “roe con la lepra la tela de mis sueños”. his footstep is “una llaga sobre el rostro del tiempo” (ibid., 43). These images of destroying a safe refuge, tearing away a protection, of “lepra” and of “llaga”, reveal that Orozco could not embrace cosmic rebellion and a totally nihilistic vision of life. She needed “luz” and “sueños”.

Alongside Maldoror, the figure evoked in “El extranjero” “no pedía amor ni otro exilio en el cielo” (Orozco, 2000, 40). Faithful to himself, he asks for neither love nor for salvation. he is a stranger in the everyday world because,

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like Christoph in “Christoph detlev brigge” he has achieved final anguished insight, symbolized as reaching the most distant room

aquel en que la vida, lo mismo que una amante desechada, escondió entre las manos los cristales de su rostro trizado.

(ibid., 41)

One of the most illuminating articles to have been published on Orozco is Cristina piña’s “‘Carina’ de Olga Orozco: un análisis estilístico”. In it, piña defines the theme of “Carina” as “una apasionada celebración del ser humano en su dimensión absoluta y, consecuentemente, como una negación extrema de la contingencia” (piña, 1983–4, 59). What this means is that, just as bartleby symbolizes in Las muertes “la orgullosa prescindencia”, Maldoror “el mal sin concesiones” and Carlos Fiala “el mero ‘estar’ sin preguntas”, Carina symbolizes “el amor absoluto traicionado” and exemplifies “el heroismo ontológico” (ibid., 60). In contrast to her are set “las gentes”, “ellos” and, in line 24, an implicit “nosotros” who, as piña puts it, comprise “todos los que aceptan la contingencia del mundo humano, frente a los cuales se yerguen los personajes sedientes de absoluto, cuyo sacrificio Olga Orozco celebra en este libro”(ibid., 66). The whole poem is built around this contrast, just as “Maldoror” is built around the contrast between the complacent conformity of the petty bourgeois and the subversion of all conventional values symbol-ized by Maldoror. “Carina”, with its exaltation of a love which refuses all compromise with a fallen world, what the poet calls “la cenagosa piel del día en que me quedo” (Orozco, 2000, 38) and which merits only “asco” and “desprecio”, is Orozco’s most strikingly romantic composition.

Las muertes, then, is important for what it tells us about Orozco’s inner priorities at this time. The elite minority, with whom Orozco identifies herself, the collection suggests, must be ready to transcend conventional bourgeois moral and religious values, to rise, like Miss havisham, even above love itself, to accept marginalization and differentness in order to remain true to its own ideal. Clearly such a stance can be interpreted in social terms, both general in relation to Western society as a whole and specific in relation to the Argentine society by which Orozco was surrounded. but Kuhnheim’s asser-tion, on which her entire approach to Orozco is based, that “The exploration of the representation of subjectivity in Orozco’s poetry, then, is an integral step towards our understanding of the social and political processes of this time period in Argentina” (Kuhnheim, 1996, 18) seems to get the emphasis wrong.

Ten years separate Las muertes from what seems in retrospect, to be, Oroz-co’s first fully mature collection Los juegos peligrosos (1962). Nicholson (2002, 18) points out that it is also the first collection which uses systematic allusions to the occult. Such allusions are present from the opening poem “La


cartomancia”, in which the poetic voice addresses a “tú” who is perhaps the poet’s non-visionary self yearning for some sort of explanation or insight, and warns that

lo que quieres ver no puede ser mirado cara a cara porque su luz es de otro reino. (Orozco, 2000, 55)

The speaker’s stance is that of one possessed of a deeper vision manifesting itself through a reading of Tarot cards. The card belonging to “tú” bears the sign of the world, that is, of Everyman, poised between good and evil, salva-tion and destruction. The teller announces the arrival of a mysterious being or force, announced by hounds whose baying marks the rending of a veil, who will displace the normal personality of the hearer. It seems that this being may bring answers though they are not to be revealed at once. We sense that the evocation of someone calling throughout life “con una llave rota, con un anillo que hace años fue enterrado” (ibid., 55) is a reference to the hearer’s frustrated yearning for some way of unlocking the door to cosmic understanding. The third stanza, however, contradicts the second, suggesting that the newly arrived being is no more than a familiar part of the hearer’s own personality and only symbolizes her longing for an all-embracing

poema en que todo fuera ese todo y tú – algo más que ese todo – (ibid., 55)

but instead of illumination, the hearer only receives “estériles vocablos”. The new arrival seems to represent the hearer’s adverse fate which “hila deshilando tu sábana” (ibid., 56). Its heart is a “mariposa negra”. To defend herself she must beware of water, love and fire, which perhaps symbolize indifference, emotional vulnerability and uncontrolled passion. At all events love is seen negatively in terms of its potential to bring hurt and suffering – “un brillo de lágrimas y espadas” (ibid., 56); as creating

una prisión de seda donde el amor hace sonar sus llaves de insobornable carcelero (ibid., 56)

and as a river of fire, which leads the teller to prophesy that only hopeless shipwreck awaits the hearer and her partner.

death, however, “la Emperatriz de tus moradas rotas” (Orozco, 2000, 57), is a darker threat than unhappy love. her power, which is greater than that of love “sepulta la torcaza en tinieblas” (ibid., 57). yet, strangely, in this zigzag poem, which is not structured wholly logically, although destiny rolls the dice in a world implicitly of pure randomness, and death has marked down its victim, the teller asserts that “la partida es vana”. The penultimate stanza

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returns to emphasis on the inescapable suffering that life involves: there is no justice and no talismanic protection against the “espadas, oros y bastos” (ibid., 57) which, as life shuffles the cards, bring with them only cruelty, deceit and violence. but at the climax, in a clear reference to the bethlehem story, the Three Kings arrive (mysterious messengers from elsewhere, once more) who will escort the hearer for the rest of her days. The key note of the collection is this alternation of life-rejection and sybilline references to another realm which might make sense of the here below.

The notion that there is no talisman that can protect us against life’s onslaught is developed ironically in “para hacer un talismán”. The poem centres, like vallejo’s famous “Los heraldos negros”, on the blows which life inflicts on us. Existence is seen as “la intemperie”

donde el viento y la lluvia dejan caer su látigo en un golpe de azul escalofrío … donde la oscuridad abra sus madrigueras a todas las jaurías

(Orozco, 2000, 67)

the poet affects to advocate acceptance of all the harm that experience brings as a form of ascesis, or self-training in suffering, symbolized by the process of subjecting the heart to every kind of pain (loss of love, disenchant-ment with former aspirations) until all hope has been extinguished. At the end of the process the poet is called upon not to conceal but to exhibit the heart’s wounds like a beggar his sores. In a telling image these afflictions are compared to the sound of a spoon scraping an empty plate. Clearly there is a sense in which all the poems we are reading in this collection correspond to the showing off of the heart’s wounds. At this point we assume that the message of the poem (heralded by its title) will be that this training in stoi-cism will convert the heart into a talisman which will protect its owner from whatever tortures life can subsequently impose. but the conclusion is ironi-cally anticlimactic and ambiguous. Accumulated experience may steel us and cause the heart to become “más fuerte que las armas y el mal del enemigo” (ibid., 68), and to be ever on guard against them. but vigilance is necessary to prevent such acquired fortitude from contaminating and even destroying other parts of the personality.

Two of the poems in Los juegos peligrosos allude to specific blows of fate which the poet has had to suffer. “habitación cerrada” reflects a failed love affair, while “Si me puedes mirar” evokes the death of the poet’s mother which looms so large in Orozco’s prose work La oscuridad es otro sol (1967). A prominent role in Orozco’s symbolic system is played by doors, keys and enclosed spaces where walls or partitions hem in and limit vision. here in “habitación cerrada” (Orozco, 2000, 77–79) the threshold of love’s magic chamber, now overgrown with grass, attests to the end of the relationship and


the poet seems to be asking herself how, with her ability to “mirar más lejos” and to read with apprehension “los signos del humo”, she could fail to take on board the experience of loss. Even if her key, like a torch which has fallen into the water, can no longer perform its function of opening “la última puerta del amor”, what lies behind the door, the deepest level of self-discovery, is implic-itly attainable. The central section of the poem contrasts the poet blooming like a flower in a hothouse, with her partner “envuelto en hielo”. Now both have lost both the ecstasy and the pain of love, the end of which the poet associ-ates with crime and betrayal. but just as amid life’s brutal contingencies we can receive mysterious whispers from another realm, so the poet suggests that, even as lifelessness – life without love – spreads out around her like ripples in a lake into which a stone has fallen, still “algo vibra / algo palpita”. The end of the poem accumulates images of sound: “susurro”, “zumbido”, “rumor”, “llamado”; or a sensation of touch, “roce”, which reverberate in the poet’s emotional emptiness (“Tú, la deshabitada”) like a voice in an empty house, but which will still reach the consciousness of her ex-lover.

“Si me puedes mirar” similarly ends on a note of hope that in some else-where after death (“en algún otro lado”), the poet’s mother is still trying to play her maternal role of holding the family together and soothing her daugh-ter’s wounded spirit. Tacconi correctly emphasizes (1981, 118) that “la poeta ha asumido la vida como una condena desde el momento en que se separó de su madre”. The idea of a Fall, of an exile from paradise, of compulsion to remain in the sinister “bosque alucinado”, the dark “galerías de este mundo” where the poet can only ask despairingly:

¿qué gran planeta aciago deja caer su sombra sobre todos los años de mi vida? (Orozco, 2000, 69)

are all subsumed in the loss of the mother-figure. The poem begins with the image of the poet tearing down the darkness of death like a curtain which separates her from her mother, but in vain. She remains cut off, forced to remain in the here below, where a series of images: “estatua de arena”, “puñado de cenizas”, “los pies enredados … sin poder avanzar” convey her sense that without her mother’s support, her personality is crumbling and that she is held back from moving on with her life “acaso porque no supe aprender a perderte” (ibid., 68). The centre of the poem begs for her mother’s help and evokes the happy past, which now contrasts with the present “en que roen su rostro los enormes agujeros” (ibid., 69). Returning to a favourite image the poet asks: “¿dónde buscar ahora la llave sepultada de mis días?” (ibid., 69) and alludes afresh to the dark force (“alguien que se enmascara”) which threatens her day by day. Extending the image, she speaks of guarding a door which her birth could not close, a clear reference to the survival of mysterious connections with a prior existence. but her mother’s voice is missing from

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the chorus of messages from that pre-birth past. yet the poet believes that her mother is still engaged with her life.

The final poem of Los juegos peligrosos, “desdoblamiento en la máscara de todos”, ends with one of Orozco’s most often quoted professions of faith. Once more it begins with an evocation of a “tierra de nadie” and a “sendero que no sé adónde da” (but clearly it leads to the mysterious realm). A succes-sion of characteristically ambiguous images expresses the pilgrimage of the human soul in search of “una tierra extranjera” from which one can hear “un lenguage de ciegos” and leads to the suggestion that the human situa-tion which the poem evokes is universal. We are each of us “el rehén de una caída”, part of “una lluvia de piedras desprendida del cielo”; if not trailing clouds of glory from an earlier life, as Wordsworth wished to believe, at least participants in a the passion Story of a gnostic lesser God:

Cualquier hombre es la versión en sombras de un Gran Rey herido en su costado. despierto en cada sueño con el sueño con que Alguien sueña el mundo. Es víspera de dios. Está uniendo en nosotros sus pedazos. (Orozco, 2000, 85)

When Orozco asserted to demetrio Torres Fierro that “hay en mi poesía una búsqueda de dios” (Torres Fierro, 1986, 202) it is this “vision of spiritual reintegration” (Nicholson, 2002, 35) that she was referring to. She herself told Sauter:

yo tengo fé, tengo fé en la perduración de mi alma en el más allá, en que hay una unidad de alma, de que todos somos uno en definitiva … para mí lo contrario de la vida no es la muerte, creo que la muerte está entretejida con la vida … queda lo que se llama muerte que no es lo contrario, que es una continuidad impensable porque no se sabe cómo es, en definitiva.

(Sauter, 2006, 115)

The great question hanging over the rest of her poetry is whether this ever represented more than an aspiration.

We stand in need of a systematic study of the often contradictory imagery and symbolism connected with this aspect of her poetry. So far, the best account of Orozco’s use of metaphor in her first three collections is Stella Maris Colombo’s Metáfora y cosmovisión en la poesía de Olga Orozco (1983) which attempts to link Orozco’s often long, complex, extended metaphors to her cosmovisión, which Colombo sees as less ambiguous and less negative than other critics. What Colombo shows is that Orozco stands at the oppo-site extreme from borges in regard to her use of metaphor, in the sense that,


while borges came to advocate “poor”, that is, familiar, metaphors, Orozco uses complex, original metaphors which “forman cadenas o se imbrican unas dentro de otras, en un desarrollo que no reconoce más límites que los de la estrofa … e incluso, la totalidad de la composición” (Colombo, 1983, 15). Colombo’s argument rest on the contention that Orozco’s metaphors are not, as it were, simply “poetic”, that is, decorative or aesthetically pleasing, but that they are essentially functional and meaningful: “vehiculizadoras de los núcleos temáticos fundamentales” (ibid., 24). Especially in Los juegos peli-grosos, which she regards as Orozco’s first fully mature collection, Colombo asserts that

los temas vertebradores de los conjuntos metafóricos sean los enigmas de la existencia – la dualidad cuerpo/alma, la multiplicidad del yo, los peligros del mundo, el amor, el recuerdo, la soledad – los misterios de la muerte y del más allá” (ibid., 30)

In this way by studying the meaning of a number of selected metaphors, symbols and key words (“polva”, “sombre”, “musgo”, “muro”, “puerta”, “viaje”, “rueda”, among others), Colombo is able to explore Orozco’s existen-tial outlook. but her insistence on the ideas that Orozco’s figurative languge is essentially content-packed, “predicativa, portadora de significación” (ibid., 49) and in general that “la metáfora abre una nueva dimensión de la realidad” (ibid., 12) eludes the more difficult question of how far such language is charged with “goce estético”. The whole question of the contrast between borges’s theory and practice of metaphor, and Orozco’s, cries out for further study.

In his review of Museo salvaje (1974) Marcelo pichón Rivière writes that it is a “canto de amor al cuerpo humano” and links Orozco with Surrealism, not because of any acceptance on her part of automatic writing, for example, but because she reveals herself to be “continuamente atenta a los llamados del inconsciente, a esas bestias de su naturaleza interior” (pichón Rivière, 1974, 68). piña, more cogently, modifies Riviere’s judgement, recognizing that, rather than being a “canto de amor” Museo salvaje conveys the impression of a love–hate relationship of Orozco with her body and describes the collection as a “minuciosa y exasperada exploración de la propia ‘envoltura terrestre’, que tanto como enfrenta a la poeta con su terrible y drámatica limitación, le revela su naturaleza de microcosmos y, por tanto, su sacralidad” (piña, 1984, 41). Museo salvaje contains eleven poems and six pieces of poetic prose, chiefly dedicated to ascribing symbolic meaning to the functions of different aspects of the body, as follows: “Mis bestias” (prose): the viscera; “Lugar de residencia”: the heart; “El continente sumergido”: the head; “Esfinges suelen ser”: the hands; “parentesco animal con lo imaginario” (prose): the hair; “En la rueda solar”: the eyes; “El jardín de las delicias” (prose): the

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sex; “plumas para unas alas”: the skin; “En el bosque sonoro” (prose): the hearing; “El sello personal”: the feet; “Animal que respira” (prose): the respi-ratory system; “Tierras en erosión”: the tissues; “Mi fósil”: the skeleton; “duro brillo, mi boca” (prose): the mouth; and “Corre sobre los muelles”: the blood. The overarching theme of the collection is the way in which the body – “este saco de sombras cosido a mis dos alas” (“Lamento de Jonás” Orozco, 2000, 91) – stands ambiguously between the desert, the shipwreck, the exile, the broken stair, the looming abyss (“Mi fósil”), which refer to this life, and the poet’s unchanging hope of a salida, an “acceso a las altas transparencias” (“duro brillo, mi boca”) which will mark the overcoming of her fallen state. In this collection the body and its functions always remind the poet that she is in a permanent state of being “in between”. perhaps the most bitterly ironic of these poems, given that it implies the word, the poetic Ding an sich, is the prose poem “duro brillo, mi boca”. here there is no triumphant exaltation of “palabras que son flores que son frutos que son actos”, as in paz’s famous “himno entre ruinas” (paz, 1988a, 306), in which poetry may redeem a fallen world, but only a question whether from “las canteras del verbo, las roncas fundiciones de la poesía” (Orozco, 2000, 107) can be extracted a means of access to that which will transcend both question and answer. The implicit conclusion is, as ever, ambiguous. The mouth, the poetic voice, is “este oráculo mudo” (ibid., 107), always promising a poten-tial answer (oráculo) but never able to articulate it (mudo).

For borges in “El Sur” (Ficciones) the cat is a “magical” animal because it lives in a perpetual present and unlike human beings has no sense of time. For Orozco, her cat, berenice, was magical in a different way, in line with the ancient Egyptian belief in the cat as a sacred animal “misteriosa incarnación de lo trascendente” as piña puts it (1984, 46). In Cantos a Berenice (1977), the cat becomes a living symbol of Orozco’s will to believe in another, higher dimension which makes sense of this life. Most poems, as we know, are struc-tured as climactic processes, so that it is often useful to read back from the end. In “Canto 4” the climactic line is “pero ¿qué fuiste entonces, antes de ser ahora?” (Orozco, 2000, 114). We are being invited to accept the idea of the transmigration of souls. berenice is presented as having brought across time a message from the other side:

Que eras, por otra parte, la emisaria de una zona remota donde el conocimiento pacta con el silencio y atraviesa los siglos arrastrando como boa de plumas la nostalgia, lo atestiguaba ya tu ser secreto, vuelto en contemplación hacia las nubes de la sabiduría, suspendida en tus ojos como una lluvia de oro, más acá del recuerdo, más allá del olvido. (ibid., 114)


As always, the diction is ambiguous. As Liscano asserts “En el caso de Olga Orozco hay siempre una actitud sacerdotal antigua, mágica, de femineidad esencial, oracular y sibilino” (1983, 89). “Conocimiento” and “sabiduría” tempt us with the implication that there is a knowable answer to the enigma. but the “knowledge” has made a pact with silence and the wisdom is (as before) mute, merely imputed to the cat’s gaze, and even then situated vaguely somewhere between what is recalled and what is forgotten. In “Si me puedes mirar” (Los juegos peligrosos) it had been the poet herself who stood sentinel at the door to the beyond. Now it is berenice, “con tu aspecto de estar siempre sentada vigilando el umbral” (ibid., 115), but neither of them can unlock the door and cross the threshold.

As we read and reread Orozco’s poetry we see that each time she approaches an affirmation she draws back. Everything is governed by “acaso”, “tal vez” or “como si”. unlike borges, who could contemplate reality with serenity, recognizing that if there are hints of a mysterious pattern or order underlying its apparent randomness, a secret cosmos behind the chaos, a catalogue at the centre of the Library of babel, we are not programmed to perceive or under-stand it, Orozco clings to the hope of a cosmic explanation. As a result, she uses a “language that works back and forth upon itself and never quite rests in closure” (Kuhnheim, 1996, 80). The same critic goes on:

her poetic subject is constituted in a dialectical process in which the self is both subject, in control, articulating its desires, and object, at the mercy of laws and forces beyond her control. She may be consistently frustrated, her chance of success negated, but not with self-destruction of annihilation as a result. (ibid., 81).

This is a cogent statement of the case, but there is room to doubt whether at the deepest level what is being described is in fact a dialectical process, for the term implies progress, and that does not seem to occur. As in the case of unamuno, Orozco’s ambivalence is both the theme and the inspiration of her poetry, and in the same way, to have resolved the spiritual dilemma in which she found herself trapped would have blocked the fount of her creativity. At one level, she longs for an answer. At another level, she knows the answer but cannot accept it. At a third level she needs to cling to the question in order to go on writing. dilemmas of this kind, we have already suggested, are not normally resolved; we grow out of them. They tend to remain at the back of the mind, but cease to torment us. Writers, however, as we know, for example, from the case of Azorín in Spain, run a great risk if they resolve their deepest problems. Their work may never be the same.

This perhaps helps to explain why two already familiar sets of forces confront one another in Cantos a Berenice. On the one hand, we have berenice herself and all that she symbolizes in terms or secret insight trans-

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mitted across the centuries, with which the poet wills herself to identify, presenting berenice as an alter ego. On the other hand, as both Kuhnheim and Nicholson recognize, death and silence combine to contradict any posi-tive message which the insight might bring. One of the most gnostic poems of Cantos a Berenice is no. vI, which at first sight seems to be directed at berenice herself, but which on closer inspection reveals itself as directed at the imperfect lessser God or demiurge responsible for the universe and the human condition. The poem opens with the recognition that the deity in question could simply have relapsed into forgetfulness of his creation and allowed himself to be submerged in the sea of vague memories of other possible divinities existing in man’s collective subconsciousness. but instead this lesser Creator dug out of his stock of “sombras congeladas” (formerly existent beings) the components of the black cat berenice, “ese saco de carbón constelado (Orozco, 2000, 116), who was then thrown into the on-going life of this planet, envisaged as a moving train. The gnostic element in the poem resides in the unexpected climax: berenice, on being sent into our world:

en algún lugar dejó un agujero por el que te aspiran y al que debes volver. (ibid., 116)

how are we to understand this strange affirmation? It seems that the creation of berenice in the intermediate realm between this world and the world of ultimate unity with the highest Godhead (the final gnostic aspiration), and her being sent to earth, created what we should now call a “wormhole” linking the intermediate realm and the abode of final unity. This being said, the final words of the poem are baffling in the extreme: “un agujero por el que te aspiran” seems to imply that, almost as a reward for having created berenice and sent her as a messenger to our planet, the demiurge will be drawn up through the wormhole to the lost gnostic home of bliss, equivalent to the Christan paradise. That the verb “aspiran” is in the indicative and not the subjunctive puts this into the category of a statement of fact, but the use of the present and not the future tense could imply a cyclic, repeated process. Is this what we are to make of “y al que debes volver”? In its characteristically sybilline way, the end of the poem appears to suggest that that the demiurge (and hence his creation?) is subject to a cyclic pattern of absorption into the Godhead and return to the intermediate realm, just as berenice is subject to an endless succession of transmigrations.

We cannot fail to notice that in Canto vIII, although berenice is presented as a sort of messenger, she herself is plainly not aware of the import of her message. Thus she too questions certain objects “por si acaso sabían”. The paradox of this situation is intensified in Mutaciones de la realidad (1979) and can be seen in the contradictory reactions of both Kuhnheim and Nicholson to the collection. On the one hand Kuhnheim refers to “an impasse, a ‘failure’


full of possibilities” and insists that “Orozco’s negativity is an opening, an opportunity to hear the unspoken, the marginalized, the voice ‘del otro lado’” (Kuhnheim, 1996, 26). but at the same time she is compelled to write that “Closing on a note of failure is a constant in Mutaciones de la realidad. Every poem is an attempt at some kind of union or conjunction, each time unachieved” (ibid., 32). Nicholson (2002, 68) echoes the same thought. but the only way in which the impasse is full of possibilities is to the extent that it goes on generating moving poems about the impasse itself. Nevertheless, the opportunity to hear a voice from the other side is never realized. It is always merely a hope. As Orozco admitted to Sauter “no encuentro nunguna respuesta” (Sauter, 2006, 126)

One of the most original poems in Mutaciones de la realidad is “Objetos al acecho”. unintentionally it develops a theme already used by pacheco in poem 10 of El reposo del fuego II:

los objetos imponen su misterio, se remansan, nos miran fijamente, nos permiten luchar porque no avancen ni se adueñen de nuestro mundo (pacheco, 1980b, 46)

Orozco, in her poem, senses in familiar domestic objects in her house, her symbolic refuge. They threaten the “pequeña certeza cotidiana”, her hard-to-hold-on-to feeling of existential security which her home symbolizes, as “Los objetos adquieren una intención secreta” (Orozco, 2000, 148). The evil force which is never far from her mind recruits her household things into a hostile conspiracy to destroy her fragile spiritual peace. They threaten to drive her from the “irreconocible paraíso / recuperado a medias cada día” to the abyss of despair. They illustrate afresh the notion that behind the mansedumbre of our surroundings lie in wait what in “pavana para una infanta difunta” Orozco calls “los invasores”. Apart from “pavana” the most important poem in Mutaciones is “densos velos te cubren, poesía”. Its theme, like paz’s “La poesía” in Libertad bajo palabra, is poetry as a form of cognition:

Algo con que alumbrar las sílabas dispersas de un código perdido para poder leer en estas piedras mi costado invisible … … un indicio como de un talismán que me revierta la división y la caída. (Orozco, 2000, 154)

And as in paz this is simply a mystique, an act of faith not based on any evidence outside the (possibly wishful) intuition of the poet. In the first two lines of the poem, Orozco uses the images of “este volcán que hay debajo de mi lengua” and “esta espuma azul que hierve y cristaliza en mi cabeza” (ibid., 153) to express her understanding of the fact that poetry does not

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emerge from voluntary speech-acts or from the conscious intellect, but from mysterious regions of the subliminal mind which cannot be pinned down and come (as if!) from another world. She presents herelf as desperately seeking from the poetic imagination “una señal” which will intimate an “eclipse” of time (which we know is one of her two great enemies, the other being death) or, using the same image as paz, open a fissure in the “muralla” which bars the way to true insight. but the third and fourth stanzas recognize that no illumination comes. Next comes a reference to delphi, the site of an oracle, where the pythia, the priestess, inspired by vapours issuing from the earth, uttered prophecies from the other world of the gods. Orozco clearly wishes to identify herself with a modern pythia. but the delphic oracle has been lost and she cannot “asir el signo”; its “astillas de palabras” (ibid., 154) dissolve into nothingness.

And yet, and yet: some cognitive poetic intuition may emerge like an island from the waves or a boat from the sea-mist. The climax of the poem returns to the idea that the poet’s hands have been cut off so that she cannot write, her eyes dazzled so that she cannot see, and her hearing drowned out by noise. hence her words, far from uttering hidden truths, are no more than “un puñado de polvo”. This is a deeply pathetic poem, like some of unamuno’s in which he cries out against the silence of God in the face of his entreaties. Similarly “Esbozos frente a un modelo” in La noche a la deriva develops the idea expressed in Orozco’s “La poesía” that the poet is always trying desper-ately to “traducir un texto cuya clave cambia de código permanentemente” (Orozco, 2000, 236). here she is trying to reproduce a “model” from mate-rials which are ever-changing. And yet a mysterious inner force compels her to keep trying. We notice the ambiguity: the model exists, but she is denied a clear, unchanging vision of it, and even then putting it into words would be hard. Like borges, she is in a double bind: on the one hand the model is, as he would say, in a favourite word, “inasible”; on the other, language is inad-equate to describe it. The poem accumulates symbols of frustration: “busco a tientas”, “una engañosa huella en el tapiz”, “un cuenco … a la espera de que se precipite la visión”, the model is “imposible y cruel, que cambia de figura y de color cunado lo rozo” (ibid., 162–3). but (as usual, there is a but) she has to go on with the poet’s duty to try to say the unsayable.

Another important and often quoted poem is from Mutaciones: “pavana para una infanta difunta”, which is addressed to Orozco’s friend and fellow poet Alejandra pizarnik, who committed suicide in 1972. paradoxically it is Orozco’s most positive poem from this period and contains the line which, as she told Alicia dujovne in 1978 (piña, 1984, 273), became almost a mantra for her, “frente a cada desastre”: “en el fondo de todo hay un jardín” (Orozco, 2000, 150): a consoling vision of an Edenic, prelapsarian locus amoenus like paz’s “otra orilla” or Cortázar’s “yonder”. We recall that parra makes use of the same image (“andar por los jardines”) in “Cartas a una desconocida”


and “El peregrino” (Poemas y antipoemas) but in the latter, he writes with typical bitter realism that “el jardín se cubre de moscas”. While in Orozco’s evocation of a beautiful elsewhere there grows “la flor azul del sueño de Novalis”, in parra’s garden what grows is “una rosa llenas de piojos” (“Oda a unas palomas”, parra, 1969, 33). Near the root of the contrast between these two contemporary Spanish American poets are their different concep-tions of poetry and its power to scrutinize the arcane. For Orozco the possi-bility always appears to remain that somehow poetry can pierce the cloud of unknowing, while for parra it may well simply be “un espejismo del espíritu” (“Los vicios del mundo moderno”, ibid.). To look at Orozco and parra side by side as poets is to understand more clearly what each of them stands for in the recent history of Spanish American poetry. but what links both of them to the modern cultural crisis is their joint sense of the “abyss”: the spiritual emptiness surrounding Western humanity.

As in almost all of Orozco’s major poems, what strikes us is the extraordi-nary richness of the figurative language, in complete contrast to the relative paucity of it in mainline “Colloquial” poetry. practically every line of “pavana” contains an image, some of them extremely challenging (this is uncompro-misingly “high” literature), connected to the diction of the vanguard and to borges’s early insistence on the metaphor as the “elemento primordial” of poetry. The poem begins with a metaphor, that of Alejandra as a “centinela” which links her to Orozco, who had so described herself in “Si me puedes mirar” (Los juegos peligrosos) and to Neruda, who considers himself a “vigía” in “Sistema sombrío” in the first section of Residencia en la tierra. Alejandra too stood guard, presumably at the threshold of the “other side”, but though clear-eyed she was weaponless, defenceless against the fast multiplying horde of “invasores insolubles”: negative intuitions which attacked her when she faced the blank page and unravelled to the very end the fabric of her person-ality (explored herself in depth). So she “fell through the crack” into the darkness of death. The next lines assert the difference between “closing one’s eyes” (relying on intuition) and “opening” them (viewing reality with the conscious mind). The first opens the mind to the entire universe, presumably including the “other side”; the second brings awareness of the uncrossable border between the rational and the intuitive realms and leaves us on this side in “la intemperie”. To try to explore that border takes you nowhere. Alejandra is now presented as sleeplessly exploring the inconsistency of reality (partly contingent, partly mysterious) like a projectile piercing through obscurity, trying to understand herself (and her ontological situation) but tempted by suicide, seen as an ugly but lovable angel of death. Are there spells to offset the pain of having been born into the here-below? Can one bribe messengers to reveal the future (that awaits us after death?)? Now comes the assertion of the existence of the garden and Novalis’s flower, but it is a cruel and treach-erous bloom and to pluck it involves death.

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The centre of the poem expresses figuratively Alejandra’s heroic struggle to cut the flower and make it part of herself, despite the risk. A succession of metaphors of effort and sacrifice culminates in images of the devastating effect of poetic activity in which even the evocation of dawn, the symbol of hope and renewal, is bought at the price of the poet’s blood and in which Alejandra shares with Orozco a despairing sense of “la inanidad de la palabra” (Orozco, 2000, 150). As we approach the end of the poem, the light of hope and the potentiality of finding meaning through writing are destroyed. Alejandra is seen as a traveller begging to pass through the door to the other side but prevented from doing so by symbolic forces: her great shadow which seeks another shadow, perhaps a reference to her life overshadowed by insight and longing for death (but is the implication that suicide may have closed the door?); her sense of a world which is perhaps totally random and hence existing under the outspread wings of a hideous insect, symbolic of the oppo-site of divine providence; or the sea of annihilation in which all is shipwreck. but the poem’s climax repeats oracularly that she will find her garden and closes with the words of Christ to the daughter of Jairus “Get up, my child”, just as previously in “El pródigo” (Las muertes) she had written of a voice bidding the prodigal Son: “Levántate. Es la hora en que serás eterno” (ibid., 51). The words in each case testify to a profound will to believe, almost (but not quite) indistinguishable from belief itself.

This groping after a response from the Other Side remains the central theme of Orozco’s last two poetic collections, La noche a la deriva (1983) and En el revés del cielo (1987). piña, who remains perhaps Orozco’s most insightful critic, suggests that in the first of these Orozco finds “una recon-ciliación con el propio destino” (piña, 1984, 50). but this seems more than dubious. “por mucho que nos duela”, on the death of a friend, is full of familiar negative imagery:

Mis ojos sólo registran el ardor de una inmersión sin fin en el vacío inexorable. Mis palabras son como vidrios transparentes trizados contra un muro

(Orozco, 2000, 183)

“El presagio” contains the sinister symbol “un gran pájaro negro” falling onto the plate (presumably intended to hold the bread of life). The poem reaches its climax with the assertion that there is no “escondite posible” (from anguished insight). One of the most memorable poems in En el revés del cielo is “Catecismo animal” which begins with a series of frightening images descriptive of the human condition, typical of which is the one which describes us as “Suspendidos en medio del derrumbe por obra del error” (ibid., 204) – the error of a gnostic demiurge. Only obscure hints are vouchsafed to us of a God completing himself in his creation. The adjec-


tives which follow – “oculta”, “secreta”, “perdido”, “inalcanzable” – along with the telling line “pero no hay quien divise el centelleo de una sola fisura para poder pasar” (ibid., 204), express afresh the poet’s sense of inability to reach the “otra orilla”. The succession of verbs as the poem nears its climax: “reclamo”, “pido”, “abogo”, “apelo” similarly convey her revulsion against an existence in which there is neither rest, nor permanency, nor insight; but only death releases us from mere contingency.

Orozco’s poetry, which mainly takes the form of psychic monologues, illustrates mankind’s yearning for transcendence in a post-Christian age. It reminds us afresh that, like fiction (we think of the symbolic interpretation of Asturias’s El Señor Presidente and Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, of Roa bastos’s Hijo de hombre, of Lezama Lima’s Paradiso, Marechal’s Adán Buenosayres, Arguedas’s Los ríos profundos and donoso’s El lugar sin límites, to mention only obvious examples of major novels with deep religious undertones), one area of poetry in Spanish America in the second half of the twentieth century continued to present the cultural crisis of the West as basically connected with the loss of spiritual values. Sauter (2006, 254) associates Orozco with Mallarmé and paz in the sense that all three are to some degree “visonary” poets, with part of their roots in Surrealism. In her interview with Sauter, Orozco denies the link, but accepts that some of her dream-like imagery might be similar to some Surrealist diction. The really common element, she claims, is the will to believe in parallel realities (Sauter, 2006, 133). This remains the key to her work.

Roque Dalton (El Salvador, 1935–75)

Orozco’s poetry is essentially concerned with vision and not with circum-stance. Thus it is at the opposite end of the poetic spectrum in the 1960s in Spanish America that we find Roque dalton, an aggressively Marxist, revolutionary poet, whose allegiances illustrate rather well the contradictory imperative facing poets in the years corresponding to his creative period. In the cases of Neruda and vallejo, it can be argued that their commitment to Marxism was at once philosophical and sentimental, arising, we suspect, as much from the private psychological need expressed in the first two sections of Residencia en la tierra of Neruda and Los heraldos negros of vallejo as from political involvement. They were not active revolutionaries engaged in the armed struggle, despite the fact that vallejo suffered brief imprisonment to some extent because of his outlook, and Neruda participated in non-violent political activity and spent time in hiding and in exile. Rather their allegiance to Marxism illustrates their need for a self-transcendent myth. dalton, on the other hand, was the real thing. he believed in insurrection, went for training in vietnam, and in the end lost his life in the struggle. he was not alone;

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there are, of course, other examples of politically active poets, notably Javier heraud in peru, as we see from references in Cisneros (cf. 137 and 154 below). but dalton is the supreme example of the genuinely revolutionary poet. As a result the bulk of criticism has tended to concentrate on his compromiso. This is clearly his most important contribution to Spanish American poetry in the last half of the twentieth century. but it tends to obscure the fact that there are really two daltons, one of whom is a highly hermetic, post-vanguardist poet. This aspect of his work has been rather neglected. It poses challenging problems to the reader and stands in need of further critical attention. The other dalton is the revolutionary, highly explicit poet, whose work stands at the opposite pole from that of the practitioners of “critical” poetry. It is this dalton who finally won out. In the composite interview (1966 and 1969) printed in Recopilación de textos sobre Roque Dalton (García verzi, 1986), dalton contemptuously dismisses most of the non engagé Spanish American poetry of his time as conformist, ideologically debilitated, full of petty bour-geois prejudice and basically inoffensive. by this time he had gone through a period of admiration for Neruda, but had largely sloughed off his influ-ence, while remaining a devotee of vallejo. “Me siento cerca”, he asserted, “de poetas latinoamericanos como Juan Gelman, Enrique Lihn, Fernández Retamar, Ernesto Cardenal” (ibid., 62). Like the last of these he had found collage, anecdote, references to actual flesh and blood people and a certain informality of diction essential to the kind of deeply committed poetry he felt urgently called upon to write by his experience of politico-social condi-tions in his country and elsewhere in a Latin America dominated by North American economic, political and cultural imperialism. At the same time, while accepting the efficacy of poesía coloquial, he recognized its inherent danger of falling into banality. A comparison of some of his best work with some of what we find, for example in Robert Márquez’s Latin American Revolutionary Poetry (1974) underlines the point.

It is, as is often the case, instructive to glance at influences (or poetic preferences). Apart from vallejo and Neruda (and the impact of prose writers, such as Joyce and Faulkner, plus the cinema), dalton mentions three French poets, henri Michaux, Saint-John perse and Jacques prevert. We notice imme-diately the contrast with paz’s regular references to Rimbaud and Mallarmé, for example, among so many others. but this is not the only illuminating contrast. If in fact paz’s work formed a bridge between his generation and later ones, it is essentially because of his optimistic conviction that at its best a poem is an “acto”, an active force which can alter people’s outlook, change their mentality. This is something in which all committed poets must believe. but this did not mean for paz that poetry must commit to an ideology. Although he believed in the cognitive power of poetry, expressed through its imagery in the widest sense of the word, that is, in poetry as a special form of truth-telling, it is clear from his chapter on imagery in El arco y la lira (paz,


1986a) that he saw poetry as exploratory of reality, not as declaratory. The order in reality, which he often identified with the identity of opposites, was something mysterious and hidden, and language was sometimes a barrier to finding it. This cannot be the case in Marxist, revolutionary poetry, which is why paz, after a few poems connected with the impact on him of the Spanish Civil War, abandoned engagé poetry. Much of the poetry we immediately tend to associate with dalton is not exploratory. One of his most important and revealing statements is that in which he affirms “lo que espero seguir siendo hasta morir: un poeta revolucionario que tiene sí verdadera conciencia de los problemas de su tiempo y que sabe positivamente que ha encontrado una verdad, esta vez sí, definitiva” (García verzi, 1986, 39). In Marxism, that is, like vallejo and Neruda amongst others, he found an alternative, non-supernatural pattern of belief to offset his earlier Catholic convictions.

What borges rejected completely, in favour of a mere “preference”, a distant hope that some positive ethical principle might just be present amid the chaos of the universe; what paz, influenced by Indian thought, tried to find in his version of holism; what Cisneros found in a return to Christianity; what pacheco does not seem to have found; dalton found in Marxism. At bottom, it not only offered the hope of social transformation; it counter-acted the notion of human existence as mere contingency, without ultimate meaning. For many people the crunch comes with the need to contemplate death, which to borges usually meant simple oblivion. We only need to consider the contortions of figures like unamuno or Orozco to cling to belief, or reread, for example, pacheco’s “Épocas” (from Siglo pasado), to perceive examples. Marxism seemed to offer a way out. From a bourgeois point of view, a weakness of dalton’s poetics, like that of Cardenal, is that, despite his ironic cast of mind, he could not at first bring himself to contemplate seriously the possibility that this “definitive truth” might be no more than a mental construct which, as pring-Mill points out approvingly of Neruda “le ha permitido reducir el caos de la experiencia humana a una visión orde-nada del ser y del existir” (pring-Mill, 1979, 264). dalton’s mind-set was for a long time that of a man converted from the Catholic dogmatism of his youth to Marxist dogmatism, albeit mitigated by humour, irony and cari-cature, including self-caricature. Later, as we shall see, his views evolved somewhat.

dalton published an early, uncompromising declaration of principles in 1963, under the title of “poesía y militancia en América Latina”. by this time he had published La ventana en el rostro (1961), the first, incomplete, edition of El turno del ofendido (1962) and El mar (1962). Los testimonios (1964) and what was intended to become Textos y poemas muy especiales/personales (a collection which has not survived as such) were in prepara-tion. In his essay, dalton makes a number of assertions which are essential to the understanding of much of his past and future work. It is clear that he

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found himself caught between two not quite compatible standpoints. One was the traditional view that the creative imagination was cognitive, that it “otorga un conocimiento primario de lo real” (dalton, 1963, 15). It puts man in contact with “eternal” and “transcendental” reality. Alongside this was the view that the ultimate justification for poetry was its formal beauty, its power to transmit aesthetic pleasure. Without this, dalton affirmed, it is not poetry. The other standpoint is more interesting to us. It is that beauty is not a fixed concept, but varies according to historical circumstances and is rooted in social considerations.

This last notion allows dalton to try to conciliate the standard view of poetry with his inner imperatives: to endow his poetry with “contenido nacional” and with revolutionary ideology (what he chooses to call “expresar la vida” [dalton, 1963, 12]), as well as creating beautiful verbal objects. hence dalton defines the poet as a man deeply aware of his “profundo conocimiento de la vida” and, at the same time, of his “propia libertad imaginativa” (15). The poet must live intensely and observe minutely the life and society of his country. he must nourish his work with “la realidad nacional” in order to transform the latter from a revolutionary perspective; he must understand and incorporate into his own work its cultural tradition; and finally he must take an active part in revolutionary activity and the dissemination of a “scientific” Marxist-Leninist outlook. however, this must not restrict his poetic activity to the creation of a “mero instrumento ético” (15), that is, to mere militancy and propaganda. his poetry must be artistically valid, though opening itself to every aspect of life, from the struggle of the proletariat to the beauty of colonial architecture, to sexuality, to childhood imagination and even to prophecy. In practice, it may on occasion descend to mere agit-prop verse, but without losing sight of its “civic duties” (18), it should always strive for “expressive form”.

In all of this, the opening of the essay reveals, dalton was uneasily aware that what he was advocating could be interpreted as an attempt to concil-iate a Marxist vision of poetry, as an essentially social activity marked by accessible diction, with survivals of a bourgeois, traditional (in reality post-vanguardist) view of it, as a source of beauty and abiding truths sometimes expressed challengingly. This dichotomy was to dominate the bulk of his poetry in a way which much of the criticism of it, obsessed with his compro-miso, fails to bring out adequately. Six years later, in a well-known interview with Mario benedetti in Los poetas comunicantes, dalton implied that he had resolved the dichotomy in his outlook in 1963, “debido a la insistencia en lo nacional” and thanks to a more mature political outlook. “Esto”, he affirmed, “me obligó a ir cargando mi poesía de anécdotas, de personajes cada vez más individualizados.” This had led to an increase in narrative elements and finally to “mi poesía más ideológica, más cargada de ideas” (benedetti, 1972, 19–20).


Let us glance briefly at a few poems which express dalton’s view of poetry and the poet’s task. We may begin with “Arte poética” from El turno del ofendido (1962) published when the poet was twenty-seven. It is one of the clearest examples of vallejo’s influence on dalton. “El hombre” in the first section of the poem is the “hombre humano” of so many of vallejo’s poems from Los heraldos negros onwards. he is viewed with deep compassion, and seen as the innocent, suffering victim of both a human condition and a social situation which is unintelligibly hostile:

El hombre usa sus antiguos desastres como un espejo … ese hombre recoge los hirientes residuos de su día acongojadamente los pone cerca del corazón y se hunde … en sus profundas habitaciones solitarias.

cree que la cama es un sepulcro diario … (dalton, 1983, 63)

This is the negative vallejan vision which the peruvian poet’s acceptance of Marxism at the conscious level was not enough fully to overcome. Thus the contrast between the vallejo of Trilce and Poemas humanos and the benign, confident, comradely Neruda of the Odas elementales is very pronounced. The truer Marxist in this case is Neruda, since the doctrinaire believer in this creed must regard existential pessimism and the cultural crisis of the West as illustrations of the inner putrescence of capitalism. Marxists must believe in the inevitable triumph of the proletariat, guided by the party, and in man’s ultimate, utopian destiny. dalton, like Neruda, but unlike vallejo, took this for granted, as we see from his poem “Karl Marx” in El turno del ofendido. It is interesting to compare this poem with with that of Cisneros, also on Marx, “Karl Marx, died 1883 aged 65”, from Canto ceremonial contra un oso hormiguero (1968) published, that is, in the same decade. In Cisneros’s poem, Marx is the “aguafiestas” who shattered the complacency of the victo-rian bourgeoisie. In dalton’s poem, however, Marx stood for something quite different: “le corregiste la renca labor a dios” (dalton, 1983, 89), that is, the traditional Christian world-view dominated by awareness of Original Sin, guilt, fear of death bringing God’s judgement, and recognition of life as a vale of tears. The opening lines of dalton’s “Karl Marx” evoke aspects of Marx’s life, his symbolic “ojos de león”, study, marriage, poverty, journalism, and hope amid the dark night of nineteenth-century capitalism. The climax insists on the last: by overturning not just the capitalist, but also the tradi-tional Christian world-view, Marx brought hope and, in the climactic line: “la felicidad que sigue caminando” (ibid., 89).

It is this which explains the two contrasting parts of “Arte poética”. The negative vision of the first section of the poem refers to “el hombre”, the

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isolated, lonely, alienated individual. but the positive vision of the second section refers to “los hombres”, the collectivity. The next point worth noticing is the way dalton presents “angustia” at the beginning. This section of the poem moves surprisingly from the abstract to the concrete, not the other way about. The words desastres and desastrosas, due to the repetition, are the key words initially. disasters are a mirror which reflects the human condition to the anguished individual. The alienated individual, in solitude, hugs his “hiri-entes” misfortunes to himself, and, like the characters in Mann’s The Magic Mountain, is compared to someone wasting away with tuberculosis, then a killer disease, and trying vainly to fight back. The images in the third stanza show him smoking without pleasure, counting the cobwebs on the ceiling (a useless activity to kill time), hating both beauty and himself, and seeing his bed as a tomb. Only then does dalton add poverty and hunger. The clear implication of this arrangement is that these last are the real problems.

The second part of the poem emphasizes man as part of the community. Such men accept both good and evil (sol and asesinatos), they rejoice in food rather than lamenting their hunger, they laugh, they have children, they accom-plish difficult tasks (“parten las piedras”), they sing and joke and overcome the salt sea (of infertility and symbolic shipwreck), they colonize páramos, they reject crime, despair and hatred (we notice the image “la atroz guadaña” which associates hatred and death) and exalt love (human solidarity). At the climax, the poem repeats the trilogy of despair, crime and hatred. These exist; but the poet must be on the side of optimism (implicitly with respect to the common man, the proletariat), which is postulated primarily as a concomi-tant of human solidarity. poetry, then, should not just explore the anguish of the human condition (as in Eliot’s The Waste Land, Neruda’s first two parts of Residencia en la tierra or vallejo’s Trilce, for example), but carry a utopian message of hope, as in Neruda’s Odas and in Cardenal’s Canto cósmico. hence dalton’s angry rejection of borges (“de un revolucionario a J. L. borges” in Un libro levemente odioso), not just because he naively accepted videla and pinochet, but because of his sceptical and on the whole negative world-view. Similarly dalton in “Arte poética 1974” (Poemas clandestinos) rejects Mallarmé’s famous statement that poetry is made with words and not with ideas. The clear implication is that Marxist writing must be ideological and contribute to the onward march of the working class.

“de nuevo acerca de las contradicciones en el seno de la poesía” in Un libro levemente odioso develops dalton’s earlier expressed opposition to non-committed poetry. The opening line links Salvadoran poetry at the time with the false democracy of the country, and suggests that most poets have sold out to the establishment. They are willing to “corromper la juventud” “con sus párpados”, that is, by what they do not see. Their poetry is thus a “trompeta de burdel” sounded towards the horizon (i.e. instead of a clarion call to the workers). We can presume that the cow about to disintegrate refers


to bourgeois society and that line 5, “pero ducha en el póker de los siglos” (dalton, 1983, 388), refers to poetry as highly adaptable to the outlook of the holders of power throughout the ages. The key words in the poem are plainly the repeated “simular” and “emboscada”. dalton accuses the non-politically involved poetry of his time and place of being insincere, that is, of advocating values in which the poets themselves do not believe, and of hiding from danger. So we can interpret “el poeta simulará una espléndida mudez” (ibid., 388) as meaning that the poets of whom dalton disapproves pretend to have nothing committed to say, but use flashy rhetorical diction instead. The rest of the second stanza seems to refer to the modern crisis. I assume that dalton is suggesting that the (false) poet feels that the crisis on which he is crucified is a minority problem restricted to the city dwellers (the cultured intelligentsia), whereas in dalton’s view it is not a spiritual one, but a socio-economic one involving every stratum of society. dalton seems to see his fellow poets as prophet-victims of a creed he rejects, prettied up and Americanized (“con bello chaleco de jazzista”).

The difficulty of this whole poem, and of the third stanza in particular, shows that dalton was writing for a sophisticated target-audience, unlike the Neruda of the Odas. he implores other poets to “storm” (to rage). This will be the real source of pleasure in poetry and will bring salt, that which gives savour, to the desert of modern sensibility. Stanza 4 suggests that when a poet does not weep (at injustice) he is merely a pitiful entertainer, dodging his duty and reducing poetry to a joke. In the image which follows, poetry is seen as both ass’s milk, to bathe in which was thought to preserve beauty, and as the guiding star we all long for. Finally the poet recognizes that he himself has been guilty of frivolity in his work, which threatens his real posi-tion as a sentinel, keeping watch on life while others sleep (i.e. are supinely indifferent). It is worth noting in this connection that Neruda, in the first section of his Residencia en la tierra, similarly describes himself as a “vigía”, which is the same thing, and Orozco begins her famous “pavana” on the death of her fellow poet Alejandra pizarnik by presenting her as a “pequeña centinela”. All three characterize the role of the poet as that of being more alert than the rest of us. The tongue of the frivolous poet is compared to the swollen tongue of a hanged criminal. dalton feels that to put himself back in that category would be to join a pack of imprisoned “lobos frágiles”, sheep in wolves’ clothing, who are in any case safely penned up and constitute no threat to the establishment. The climax of the poem repeats that prostituted, insincere poetry, which hides from danger, makes one’s hair stand on end. “Ars poética 1970” (Un libro levemente odioso) has been helpfully analysed by Chiquillo in her unpublished thesis on dalton and other poets (2001). She shows that dalton had receded from his earlier conviction that poetry had a privileged access to truth. Now it is no longer seen as: “el mapa perfecto para explicar la teoría molecular” (dalton, 1989, 59) (i.e. ultimate reality).

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It is now seen as connected rather with emotion, with absurdity and tragedy as elements of the human condition, as well as with blindness and aspiration (rather than certainty). At the climax of the poem, poets mock all cognitive theories. dalton had come a long way since 1963.

In “historia de una poética” (Poemas clandestinos) the tone is quite different. Whereas the poem we have just glanced at is clearly aimed at a sophisticated readership, able and willing to puzzle out what dalton is getting at, this one deliberately uses comic colloquialism

puesiesque esta era una vez un pueta … … mero feyito y pechito y retebuena gente …

(dalton, 1983, 496)

to satirize a spare-time, self-deceiving, role-playing, wannabe poet who in fact earns his living from bourgeois commercialism (he is actually a book-keeper) and the oppressive legal system (he has a second job in the law-courts). he is however, not an emboscado as in the previous poem. he shares dalton’s aspirations to liberty and justice (at weekends), but without real ideological engagement and without being able to resist ornamentation of crude reality in the (old, bad) modernista tradition (he calls maize “bread” and rotgut rum “wine”). posing no threat to the establishment, he enjoys the esteem of the standard critics. but suddenly reality steps in to raise his consciousness. The substructure (the economy) governs the superstructure (the production of poetry, in this case). deprived of paper he gives up hermeticism and love poetry (like dalton) and turns to agit-prop in favour of the revolution. The poem ends with a crude insult to those who turn up their noses at this sort of poetic activity in which slogans, which act on the masses, are seen as more important than (the wrong kind of) poetry. The poem seems to reflect indi-rectly aspects of dalton’s own evolution.

dwight García, in one of the best essays on dalton, sees a progressive rejec-tion of the Nerudan influence so prominent, for example, in La ventana en el rostro: “desde el nivel del léxico y el de la sintáxis, en que son frecuentes las enumeraciones extensas de sintagmas nominales, usualmente metafóricos, hasta el de la configuración de un hablante profético” (1995, 245). Clearly Neruda, far more than vallejo, initially provided dalton with his springboard into poetry. his depressive self-presentation in “Reparo”, for example,

Fugitivo del ruido y de las sombras ¿desde qué lágrima no vengo? (dalton, 1980, 51)

seems borrowed directly from Neruda’s Veinte poemas de amor. The list of his aversions in “palabras ya dichas”:


profesores de gélida corbata y bolsa llena … canallas de cocktail, pulcrísimos posgraduados del odio, maniquíes ausentes, atildados exaltadores de la indiferencia y los puñales … (ibid., 62)

has an unmistakable Nerudan ring. Above all, as García indicates, there is a clear imitation of Canto general in “Cantos a Anastasio Aquino”, a poem admirably analysed by Chiquillo (2001–2, 223–38), especially in the section “pausa para el machete”. Inevitably, what we are drawn to in La ventana en el rostro is not the introspective love poetry, so much of which seems derivative, but the prison poems at the end, and especially the moving “Elegía vulgar para Francisco Sorto” (a prisoner for nine years), which initiates the poems of “personajes individualizados” prominent later.

What the more sophisticated critics of dalton, like John beverley and Iliana Rodríguez, emphasize is not so much the simple revolutionary commit-ment which dalton tended to foreground in his essays and interviews, as the elements of irreverence, humour and irony, which eventually relate both to himself and sometimes to revolutionary endeavour and often lift his work into a different category from that of more solemn advocates of revolutionary heroism and sacrifice. beverley in particular (1990, 130) reminds us that what it meant was that his target audience was often the intelligentsia like himself, “not the people”. dalton’s poetry charts among other things the formation of an active revolutionary, one who, as one of his most famous late poems insists, is prepared to kill for the revolution as well as suffer for it (“viejos comunistas y guerrilleros” in Poemas clandestinos). but the process includes some gentle debunking. As Iliana Rodríguez writes, à propos of dalton’s novel Pobrecito poeta que era yo, published posthumously in 1976:

[dalton] wanted to strip political literature of all its elementary solemnity in order to de-sacralize it and convert it into a commonplace matter … every aspect of heroic life – courage, bravery, theoretical knowledge, sacri-fice, schemes, the sacred and above all the party organization – is subject to ridicule” (Rodríguez, 1996, 81–82).

Initially this humour satirizes his own grotesque situation as a law-student condemned to dry-as-dust studies, while at the same time being madly in love:

Lisa desde que te amo odio a mi profesor de derecho Civil … pobre de mí, querida …

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estudiandoDerechoconcarnedepresidio,negandoalcieloentremuchachosgordosquecreenfirmementeenlosrinocerontes (“PoemsinlawtoLisa”,La ventana e el rostro,Dalton,1983,24–25)

Inthetwo“Poemsinlaw”wefindanumberofelementswhichcanserveto introducemuchofDalton’s laterwork:humour,existentialandpolitico-socialfrustration,rejectionofbourgeoisacquisitivenessandmoral-legalisticvalues,longingforsimplicityandsincerity,thelove-idealandpolitico-socialcommitment. What we already notice at the level of diction is real crea-tivityintermsofimagery.Thetwokeystatementsinthepoemsare“estoy/completamenteherido”and“soymarxista”.Thereference toVallejo in theepigraph suggests that thewoundmightbe an existential, spiritualwound,but the rotund“soymarxista” implies thatalreadyDaltonhad resolved thecrisiswhichledhimfromCatholicismtohisnewideologicalstance,which,however,istemperedbyhumourandirony.Thereisinfact,despitetheinflu-enceofVallejo,notmuchevidenceofspiritualmalaiseinDalton.Whenhewrites,withVallejandryhumourandanticlimax,“soymarxistaymecomolas uñas” (Dalton, 1983, 26),we sense that his frustration is lesswith thehumanconditionthanwithsocialconditions.Thefirstofthe“Poemsinlaw”isbasedonadrollantithesisbetweenlove,whichisemotionalandfulfilling,andthestudyoflaw,whichisseenascrass,sterileandlife-denying:

teamomientrastodoshablandeloscontratosdeadhesión. (ibid.,25)

The language (“compraventos”, “hipotecas”, “propiedad raíz”, “contratos”)relates to the buying and selling of property and its defence, that is, to amajorpreoccupationofcapitalistsociety(andthatinacountrywhereonlyatinyminorityhadpropertyrights).Behindtheseconcreteissueslies“lateoríadecausa”,whichstandsfortheabstractcorpusoflegaldoctrinefromwhichpropertyrightsarederived.Wenoticehow,likeVallejo,Daltonbringssuchabstractionstolifebyusingunexpectedimagery.“Compraventas”areperson-ifiedashaving“rostrosdeventanasdecárcel”,mortgagesaredescribedashavingtuberculosis(whichinthosedayskilledbyslowdegrees),realestateis“asaltante”(highwayrobbery);legaltheoryiscomparedtoadarktunnelinwhichthecrickets(whichmakeanincessant,uselessnoise)arethecolourofblood,notthegreenofnature,andwhereroots(whichshouldnourish)dryupdeprivedofsunlight.BycontrastLisaispresentedthroughunchallenging,traditionalimagesdesignedtounderlinethedifferencewiththeearlierones.Theseproduceanintellectualresponseinthereader;theimageryrelatedtoLisaproducesanemotionalone.Althoughsomeoftheimagesarenovel,theyaregenerallyaccessible,but


mis manos descendiendo desde la flor del agua para salvar tu sangre de las aterias verdes de la grama (ibid., 25)

is suddenly different, difficult, a throwback to vanguardism, implying that the target audience was still the intelligentsia. In the second poem to Lisa, dalton uses a delicious image to express his disgust with his conformist fellow-students

muchachos gordos que creen firmemente en los rinocerontes. (ibid., 25)

We expect something like “que creen firmemente en los valores comerciales”, but what we get is rhinoceroses, big, ugly, lumbering creatures, the oppo-site of what is graceful or endearing. The reader’s subconscious associations damn dalton’s fellow students as philistines. by contrast, dalton presents himself as in tune with nature: gentle, simple and harmonious, using an image that parra had employed in “defensa del árbol” (parra, 1969, 15–16), “este muchacho que nunca hirió a los árboles”, in contrast to the destructive-ness of urban, bourgeois life. At the climax of the second poem to Lisa the poet is forced to go to bed with a treatise on customs duties (the opposite of free trade) instead of a woman. The next words, “y así”, tell us that the consequence is not just to accept but to swear to the idea that judicial murder is morally superior to criminal murder. All the criticisms of bourgeois society contained in the two poems culminate in this life-or-death, deeply human and universal image.

Throughout the rest of his work gentle self-satire occasionally offsets a profound sense of mission. We observe it, for example, in “Las promesas” (La ventana en el rostro) with respect to his philandering, in “hora cero” (Los testimonios) in connection with his doubts about his readiness to face death, or in “Saudade” (Un libro levemente odioso) with its characteristic reference to: “mi viejo traje de payaso” (dalton, 1983, 401). The next stage involves the passage from self-satire to satire of the bourgeois-conformist groups around him, notably in “dios lamentable”, “Mecanógrafo” and “Los burócratas” (El turno del ofendido) which satirize both ends of the middle class. In “dios lamentable” we recognize a upper-bourgeois rentier whose wealth is based on primary products, cotton and coffee, i.e. on exploitation of the peasantry, worried about crop prices, advancing age and his relations with his manservant and mistress, combined with hastío and feelings of inferiority. behind all is religious indifference and a business-orientated attitude to the Church. he is introduced via a symbolic setting, underlining his self-indul-gence, with a hangover, drinking a hair of the dog, ordering his lunch. Signifi-cantly, unlike, say, Fuentes’s Artemio Cruz, he is not shown as an oligarchic,

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reactionary tycoon. The emphasis is on his insecurity, emotional and spiritual emptiness and sense of inadequacy by comparison with his mistress, since he is an advenedizo, a duck among swans, while she is genuinely upper-class. he is a pathetic rather than an evil figure. Above all, the climax of the poem has to do with his lack of spiritual values, not his lack of social responsibility. Again, as in “La segura mano de dios” dalton avoids the too explicit, the too obvious. Like vallejo in Trilce LXXv and Neruda at the beginning of “Alturas de Macchu picchu”, dalton emphasizes inner hollowness (but in this case of a well-defined class representative) rather than oppressiveness: we see another level of insight behind the social one.

In “Mecanógrafo” and “Los burócratas” dalton attacks the conservatism, narrow-mindedness, servility and self-interest of a privileged petty-bourgois class which was still small enough to be bought in by the oligarchy and was thus a politically non-decision-making, “client” group, by choice wholly subordinate to the upper echelon. The selection of imagery and the structure of the poem, based on re-emphasis, are designed to express the refusal of the typical white-collar worker to become involved with what dalton regarded as the unbearable state of society. The emphasis in “Mecanógrafo” (a man doing what we think of as a girl’s job, already a signal to the alert reader of underdevelopment) is on the typist’s triviality of mind. In the first section of “Mecanógrafo”, the typist makes his daily trip to the office, and in the second section arrives and sets to work. What links the two is the repeated “No te importa”: the typist has no sense of solidarity with others, of sociabilidad. dalton uses contrasting symbols: the destruction of flowers by naughty chil-dren and the jail where revolutionaries and misfits rot, then the invasion of Cuba and the suspension of the next soccer match, to show that the typist cares nothing for either deadly serious events or trivial ones. his values are all wrong. What matters to him is keeping in with his superiors and having a secure job. The symbol of it, his typewriter, produces the most striking image of the poem: “rutilante como un ópalo en la barriga de un gran pez” (dalton, 1983, 68). The function of this isolated image is to emphasize the symbolic importance to him of this machine, around which his life and privi-leges revolve. The odd reference to a fish perhaps suggests that the typist is trapped in society like Jonah in the whale, where the typewriter, like a beautiful jewel consoles him for his role. dalton contrasts his attachment to it with Chopin’s dedication to love and creativity. This lack of love in the end is the typist’s great shortcoming. The poem could have ended at this point with “no te importa / nada”, but instead as the climactic image we have the enigmatic: “hondo es el pozo” (ibid., 68). presumably it referes to the depths of human indifference and selfishness of the middle class.

In “Los burócratas” dalton is not attacking the traditional oligarchy, but the middle class which has sold itself to the oligarchy. What is interesting is that here and in “dios lamentable” he presents both the upper-bourgeois


figure and the bureaucrats as advenedizos. In “dios lamentable” the central figure feels ashamed of his childhood and the fact that his mistress comes from the real upper class. here the bureaucrats are ashamed of their working-class origins. What this implies is that in Central America the relatively new bourgeoisie betrays its working-class roots. In the poem’s opening images, dalton rivals parra in terms of sarcastic put-down of the pequeño burgués. Later the splendid “sufren síncopes al comprobar que sus hijas se masturban” (dalton, 1983, 92) captures unforgettably their narrow-minded hypocrisy. They are flagellated for vanity, cult of appearances, lack of real culture, ultra-conservative sexual attitudes combined with indifference to moral principles. As we see from “Los escandalizados” they are utterly lacking in a sense of humour (humour being essentially subversive). but the climax of the poem emphasizes that their worst shortcomings are snobbery and lack of inter-class solidarity. Alongside the white-collar class, dalton satirizes the clergy in “Lo que me dijo un anarquista adolescente” (El turno del ofendido), suggesting that they could be put to good use as horses to save gasoline.

As time went on, dalton was often unable to preserve the detachment which humour and satire require. In a range of poems, in which rage and contempt replace humour he attacks those forces which align themselves against the revolution: traditional Catholicism, military and dictatorial goven-ments, the reactionary habit of mind and half-hearted commitment. At the end of his career, in Poemas clandestinos satire is reserved for “revisionists”, who reject armed struggle in favour of gradualness (“parábola a partir de la vulcanología revisionista”).

It should be noted at this point, however, that these and other committed poems constitute only a small part of his output until very late in his career and that, as Lara Martínez reminds us in his introduction to En la humedad secreta (1994, xxiv–xxv), the anthologies of dalton’s poetry, which are the most available sources of it for the general reader, have been manipulated in such a way as not to do full justice to his many-faceted production. dalton is far from being just the poet of indignation at the fate of his country and the treatment of its inhabitants, the scourge of the political system, the selfish petty-bourgeoisie, the clergy and the revisionists, and is himself the impris-oned victim of an oppressive regime. he is also a man “herido gravemente de vida” (“La noche v” in El turno del ofendido, dalton, 1995, 143), the poet of loneliness and exile, of self-scrutiny (even self-pity), of anguish (“Arte poética”) and laughter (“Los escandalizados”, both in El turno del ofendido) and always of the search for love.

It is plain, then, that two poetic voices are heard in El turno del ofendido and for a long time later. One is clearly engagé, designed to arouse anger in the reader, to induce rethinking of his or her allegiance to the current state of society and to encourage commitment. This poetry does not challenge the reader, except ideologically. The other voice is quite different. It is that

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of a hermetic poet in the vanguardist tradition, whose goal is complex self- expression at whatever cost to immediate comprehensibility. “Casida”, for example (in El turno) implies a totally different pact with the reader from that of “Los burócratas”. The difference is in the diction. This is not to say that the imagery in the more committed poems is banal. but when we turn to

Crujid de amor los dientes en el lecho mortal su clima cálido en la desnudez como los territorios del rocío … (“Casida”, dalton, 1983, 41)

it is only after a very close reading that we can figure out – provisionally – that this is a slightly masochistic poem on the delicious suffering involved in loving sexuality. The untitled “No soy sólo el que habla” in Los testimonios further illustrates the confluence of two distinct poetic traditions: vanguardist and comprometida. The poem’s theme, that his diction is familiar “como el espejo querido”, is contradicted by the lines which assert that the layers of meaning:

se hacen carne del ojo único faro baño del destino (dalton, 1995, 213)

in which it is not only the absence of punctuation which makes interpreta-tion difficult.

This is not just a case of different poetic registers for different themes. In Los testimonios there are moving love poems, such as “La memoria” and “Asela” in which the imagery is traditional, comparing the familiar with the familiar, while others, such as “Atado al mar” contain baffling metaphors. One side of dalton’s poetic personality inclined him to reject specialized diction and even to include coarse everyday expressions in his poetry (“Las feas palabras” in El turno del ofendido). Near the end of his life it caused him, as we have mentioned, to reverse Mallarmé’s famous dictum and proclaim in “Arte poética 1974” (Poemas clandestinos):

poesía por no haberte ayudado a comprender Que no estás hecha sólo de palabras. (dalton, 1983, 486)

but at the same time, the other side of his creative mind remained deeply rooted in the kind of hermetic expression which implies a quite different relationship with the reader.

This was a time when, both in poetry and in prose fiction, the past and the mythology of the Latin American Indians, in the Andean region and Central America especially, were being explored in search of the roots of nation-ality. dalton embarked on some anthropological study during his exile in


Mexico in 1961. We already know that two years later he was advocating the incorporation of national themes into poetry. This produced poems related to the conquest of Central America such as “un héroe (1524)” and the sub-sections of Los testimonios entitled “Recreaciones libres sobre temas nahuatl y mayances” and “La raíz en el humo”. Their tone contrasts sharply with the bitterness and sarcasm of poems like “Cine” which evoke modern El Salvador.

We lack detailed, sophisticated studies of the thematics and especially the technique and diction of dalton’s poetry. Such research would have to centre on symbolism and imagery primarily, since the poems are oddly lacking in easily recognized rhythmical and acoustical effects, or what we normally think of as musicality. It would pay particular dividends in respect of Taberna y otros lugares (1969) which won him the Casa de las Américas prize and is regarded as his most mature creation. In it he once more insists on the saving grace of humour: “prefiero sabedlo la locura a la solemnidad” (“La verdadera cárcel”, dalton, 1983, 306), but the collection enjoys its high status among dalton’s works partly because of its mordant vision of the reality of El Salvador in the 1960s and partly to the poet’s actual (and symbolic) impris-onment, which produced “poemas de la última cárcel”. The poet rejects his country’s passive acceptance of tyranny – “madre durmiente que haces heder la noche de las cárceles” (“El alma nacional”, ibid., 265) – and in a well-known sequence of poems uses the voices of an immigrant English noble family to express his despair and frustration:

Este país es una espina de acero. Supongo que no existe sino en mi borrachera pues en Inglaterra nadie sabe de él. (“Sir Thomas”, ibid., 275)

One after another, the members of the family voice their contempt for the society around them, the trash which passes for culture in San Salvador, and their nostalgia for home:

El señorío es miserable aquí: ¿Quién oyó hablar de estos príncipes grasosos casi-negros de grandes pies indomables?

(“Lady Ann”, ibid., 277)

Their only acceptable guest, the bishop, shares their disgust with “la cultura meridional”, while benignly contemplating the symbols of the Catholic tradi-tion brought over from Spain. but as the characters speak, the poet undercuts their reliability as observers and subtly creates a counterpoint between their weaknesses, snobberies and prejudices and their critique of their surround-

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ings. yet one of dalton’s finest and most ironic love poems is spoken by “Mathew” (subtitled “Salmos”, ibid., 283–4). It captures superbly the hurt and ambiguity of a failed relationship. Instead of celebrating, as is usual (and banal), the joys of requited love or the sorrows its opposite can bring, this extremely original poem is about the masochistic pleasure that can be extracted from being in love with someone who is like a mirror image of oneself but who rejects one, probably for that very reason. This is a contorted poem, full of paradoxical humanity and insight into the bitter-sweetness of love’s failure. It accumulates binary oppositions: dolor/fiesta, silencio/canto, distancia/puentes, golpe/fruto, herir/comunicar in which the speaker tries to bend suffering back on itself and turn it into a source of fulfilment. Instead of bewailing his rejection, the poetic voice celebrates it as a source of under-standing of both the self and the other. his pain is seen as an enriching experience for both of them. This is an example of the “other” dalton at his very best and deserves a high place among the relatively few memorable love poems written around this time by major poets in Spanish America.

The second group of prison poems (after those of La ventana en el rostro) reveals afresh dalton’s ability to use complex and difficult imagery to evoke the experience of incarceration. One of the most original of these poems is “huelo mal”. It accumulates olfactory metaphors to express the poet’s discouragement:

huelo a color de luto … huelo a viejo desorden hecho fe … … a hueso abandonado cerca del laberinto

culminating in “huelo a cuando es ya tarde para todo” (dalton, 1983, 301–2). As in some of vallejo’s best poems, the challenging language converts something conventionally unpoetic (body odour) into a symbol of universal feelings of misery.

Taberna y otros lugares also contains the best of dalton’s “poemas de personajes”. Like “Elegía vulgar para Francisco Sorto” (La ventana en el rostro), “La segura mano de dios” uses a murderer as a symbol of human injustice. both poems invoke “casos límites” designed to overturn conven-tional moral values. Instead of rejecting the two criminals, we are invited to respect them and even admire them, and thus withdraw our allegiance from what dalton regarded as legalistic safeguards whose purpose was to prop up (in the case of El Salvador) an authoritarian regime. The critical question is why the second of these poems is so much more mature and successful than the first. If we look at the adjectives in “Elegía vulgar” we find, for example, “calcinada música” and “innumerable llanto”, but most of the adjectives are prescriptive (“hermoso”, “limpio”, “grande”, “maravilloso”) which tell us what to think of Sorto. The dual theme of the poem is cruelty confronted by


the invincibility of the human spirit, presented from the outside (in the third person), pre-empting our judgement as readers. “La segura mano de dios”, with its curiously ironic title (from an ex-Catholic Marxist), implying that the murder described was, in a sense, God’s handiwork, is quite different. In the first place, it is in the form of a first-person monologue by the humble hand-yman who stabbed the old ex-dictator of El Salvador, hernández Martínez, to death. Now, that is, the story is presented from the inside. The narra-tive element, the colloquial language, the absence of obtrusive imagery and the curious tone of mingled resentment and remorse combine to produce a model example of testimonial poetry. yet, unlike most of such poetry, it gains immeasurably (from the point of view of a bourgeois critic, at least) from two characteristics which are not common in committed literature: ambiguity and irony.

The ambiguity can be perceived in the first adjective “pobrecito”, applied by the murderer to his victim. It is followed by a series of comments which suggest admiration for the dead general. The ironic originality of the poem derives from the fact that hernández Martínez was not assassinated by a political adversary but by a servant whom he had offended by spitting on him. Near the end of the poem the killer does mention explicitly the political dimension of his action, but declares “yo no me doy cuenta de eso” (dalton, 1983, 272). Why, unlike borges’s Avelino Arredondo, who assassinated uruguay’s president Iriarte borda in 1897, is he not shown as admirable? We can only assume that, several years after the “Elegía vulgar”, dalton had realized (for the nonce) the danger inherent in committed literature: banality, predictability and over-explicitness. hernández Martínez is not assassinated for his bestial crimes as president, but by a nobody for a banal reason. Instead of making us reflect complacently on the punishment of a crime, the poem compels us to take account of something far more profound and universal: the absurdity and irony of events in general. The irony in the end relates to the notion of a providential universe, which the killer both accepts – and questions.

“Taberna” itself marks the peak of dalton’s experimentalism: a long, accu-mulative collage, composed of scraps of conversation overheard in a prague beer cellar in the late 1960s. described by dalton in the foreword as “una especie de encuesta sociológica furtiva”, it contrasts the frivolity of a cosmo-politan gathering in a Soviet-bloc setting with the poet’s inner sense that the lack of revolutionary awareness of the speakers constitutes a threat to his own convictions. his thoughts on his attraction to his girl-friend create a running counterpoint and add a further element of ambiguity to the atmosphere, since love is often held by convinced Marxists to gain greater authenticity in a socialist society.

For the complicated chronology of dalton’s later work it is necessary to consult Lara Martínez’s introduction to En la humedad secreta. In the later

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collections: Poemas clandestinos (posthumous, 1980), Un libro rojo para Lenin (posthumous 1986) and Un libro levemente odioso (posthumous, 1988) dalton continued to reflect, as we have seen, on the art of poetry as the poetry itself became more consistently political in inspiration. Its final phase coincides with his decision to return to the armed struggle in El Salvador, after a period of additional training in vietnam. To this phase belong his most explicitly committed poems, those of Poemas clandestinos, and his last comment on the poet’s task “historia de una poética” which, with an element of self-satire, suggests that the only true poetry is to be found in revolu-tionary slogans and in guerrilla activity. We see an example, among many, in “vida, oficios”. dalton announces the growth in himself of “la nueva vida”, the sense of himself as a representative of the new socialist man. Like Neruda in the Odas elementales, dalton expresses the process in terms of simple, unchallenging, basic symbolism. his sense of renewal is seen as a “sol con raíces que habré de regar mucho”, an illumination, but one which requires continuous cultivation; as

Pequeño y Pobre Pan de la solidaridad bandera contra el frío, agua fresca (dalton, 1983, 486)

and as comfortingly maternal, something to be hugged to his heart. It shields him from despair and a sense of failure and supports his will to carry out the “oficios”, the tasks of the political activist, which in the end, as the poem circles back to its beginning, renew collective life. “dos religiones” contrasts supernatural religion with the “religión positiva / que surge del alma de la revolución” (dalton, 1995, 614). All dalton’s revolutionary writing culmi-nates in these simple, direct, colloquial poems, designed not so much to produce aesthetic pleasure as to raise the reader’s consciousness and affirm the need for action now, rather than reliance on comfortable gradualness. They challenge the reader ideologically, but not intellectually. yurkievich writes:

La percepción se despersonaliza, el registro desciende de tono, las metá-foras escasean, el lenguaje se vuelve menos traslaticio, sólo se permite algunas trasposiciones irónicas. Se produce un pasaje del psicologismo al sociologismo que implica un cambio de poética, de visión y de versión.

(1977, 567)

They are the high-water mark of committed poetry in the 1970s. When dalton was murdered, for unclear reasons, by a faction of his own guerrilla movement, Central America lost prematurely its greatest recent poet apart from Cardenal.

Critics seem to be agreed that “Colloquial” poetry, which dominates the


best-known sector of dalton’s work was the characteristic poetic form in the 1960s. In fact, as late as 1977 José Emilio pacheco could write: “El realismo coloquial (ya nadie quiere llamarlo antipoesía) es la línea avasalladoramente dominante” (1977, 34). Associated with it, according to Samuel Gordon (1990), are (apart from parra, Cardenal and dalton) Enrique Lihn, Mario benedetti, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Antonio Cisneros, Juan Gustavo Cobo borda, Juan Gelman and José Emilio pacheco. In connection with the last of these, daniel Torres has written:

Las tácticas que se emplean en este tipo de poesía en prosa son: la enumer-ación o listado, el tono prosaico o coloquial, la insistencia o la repetición, la renovación de un cliché o su recontextualización y el abandono de los signos al lector (contrario a la poesía tradicional que siempre llamaba la atención autorreferencialmente sobre sí misma)” (Torres, 1990, 19–20).

5

pacheco and Cisneros

José Emilio Pacheco (Mexico, 1939– )

pacheco is regarded by some as the foremost Mexican poet after paz, as well as being an important prose writer. From the outset, however, we may feel a certain surprise at finding him categorized alongside poets like Cardenal, Fernández Retamar and dalton. The kind of adjectives commonly used to describe his poetry: “meditative”, “introspective”, “philosophical”, “sceptical” and “ironic” seem to set him apart. Indeed, if we perceive, with Alemany bey, colloquial poetry to be closely associated with overt political commitment and protest (1977, 85–6), pacheco does stand apart. Though such elements are present in some of his poems, his commitment is of a different kind.

Like dalton’s, pacheco’s poetry has it roots in that of the previous genera-tion Rocío Oviedo writes:

Si se puede señalar que efectivamente la poesía de pacheco tiende al prosaísmo e incluso al tono coloquial, también habrá que afirmar que su poesía no carece de sistemas experimentales, incluso en la intertextualidad y los espacios y la manera cubista. (Oviedo 1963, 62)

She goes on to emphasize “la aceptación del hecho cotidiano en su anécdota y el retorno a lo histórico frente a un presente amenazado por el devenir que no conlleva un sentido de progreso” (ibid., 71). hence derive prominent elements of scepticism, pessimism and irony. For his part, Gordon (1990) asserts that pacheco distances himself from other conversational poets by virtue of the fact that his poetry is “extremadamente culta y hasta cuasi polí-glota, cargada de nostalgias por el canon elevado del Establishment anterior” (265).

All his critics recognize that pacheco’s first mature collection was No me preguntes cómo pasa el tiempo (1969), which won Mexico’s prestigious National poetry prize. This was his third award in the last half of the 1960s, the others being the Enrique Lihn prize in 1966 and the Magda donato prize in 1968. All the same his previous two collections Los elementos de la noche (1963) and El reposo del fuego (1966) were apprenticeship works, despite the favourable remarks on their maturity by vargas Llosa (verani, 1987, 15) and

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Oviedo (1976, 39). Some of the key words: “polvo”, “incendio”, “fuego”/“ceniza”/ “calcinarse”, “ruina”, “devorar”, “desgastar”, “roer”, and references to allied sensations: “olor de azufre”, “color de sangre”, “verdean espesa-mente pútridas las aguas”, “ojos de cólera mirándonos” already prefigure and symbolize what both Friis (2004, 438) and Monasterios (2001, 66) recognize as one of the basic themes of pacheco’s future poetry: time’s destructiveness. One of the most forward-looking of his early poems in Los elementos de la noche is “Árbol entre dos muros” in which the presentation of the tree, a positive, natural symbol, between two walls (material, man-made, negative symbols) creates a contrast which the rest of the poem develops in terms of a second one between light and darkness:

Sitiado entre dos noches, pozos de agua que espera, el día nace … (pacheco, 1980b, 15)

in which sunset, the close of day, brings a sense of impermanence, intro-ducing the theme of time’s destructiveness.

The first stanza establishes the positive pole, daylight at dawn: “Alza su espAda de claridAd” (ibid.). The tonic accents on the same vowel empha-size the crucial opening image of fighting back against negativism, decay and dissolution, reinforced by the next images, again expressed in strongly acoustical language,

mar de luz que se levANta, afilÁNdose vaso en que vibra el resplANdor del mundo. (Ibid.)

but in stanzas 2 and 3 the process is reversed:

Mientras avanza el día se devora … El día impenetrable y hueco empieza a calcinarse … Nada persiste contra el fluir del día (ibid., 15–16)

so that finally the world is surrounded by a “muro de tinieblas”. One of the key words in the poem, recognizable through repetition, is “devorar”: both daylight and its opposite, the sunset, “devour” themselves, or as the verb “calcinarse” suggests, burn themselves up. All that is left are ashes. here we meet an early example of the theme of disintegration which runs right through pacheco’s poetry. The poem does not reveal logical sequence. Much of stanzas 2, 3, 4 and 5, expand this process of replacing daylight and splen-dour with darkness and on-going, threatening time. but within the process are references to two positive elements. One is love, in stanza 3, which is ambiguously associated with moonlight and with an island which is some-

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times there and sometimes not, and a hidden coin – a symbol of worth. The other positive reference is to “el sol que no muere al apagarse” (ibid., 16) even though it is devoured as it sets. here the symbolism of the title is clari-fied: the sun is compared to a tree floating on its own sap, that is, supported by its own inner lymph (which rises and falls with the seasons, as the sun rises and sets). At the poem’s climax, the beloved is associated with this symbol (“tu eres la arboleda”) which appears to triumph over the angry voice of thunder. This then is really a love poem, rare in pacheco’s later work. but what is more important is that it also introduces the notion of a cyclic pattern in which all reality is subject to destruction and restoration.

This is what makes poem 15 of El reposo del fuego II essential to our understanding of pacheco’s outlook:

Rumor sobre rumor. Quebrantamiento de épocas e imperios. desenlace. Otra vez desenlace y recomienzo. (pacheco, 1980b, 48)

disintegration gives way to unity, only to be followed by disintegration afresh. Once we grasp this principle we can interpret more confidently other poems which illustrate the alternation of manic and (more often) depressive phases of pacheco’s mental processes.

Along with disintegration go ageing, death, forgetfulness, the evolution of all things in a downward spiral, and additionally the inability of words to express the poet’s vision. Examples of the depressive phase in pacheco’s early poetry are the title-poem of his first book of poems: “Los elementos de la noche” and “Tarde enemiga”, from the same collection. In “Los elementos de la noche” the night is clearly the dark night of the soul. The poem’s semi-symbolic language parallels that of “Árbol entre dos muros” (“roer”, “derrumbar”, “destrucción”, “noche”, “ceniza”, “calcinar”). In “Tarde enemiga” time emerges once more as the key concept, this time expressed via a splendid image of its ambiguity:

el tiempo abre las alas con mansedumbre y odio de paloma y pantera (ibid., 21)

and when it does, “nada permanece”. In the same collection, pacheco’s atti-tude towards historical time emerges and begins to include “la revisión crítica del pasado mexicano” (O’hara, 1982, 16), not unlike some of what we see in Cisneros’s poems on the past of peru. So Olivera Williams can correctly stress that “Su poesía debe pues estudiarse como un cuerpo agónico en continuo crecimiento” (1992, 245). The best account of these two early collections is to be found in Ronald Friis’s José Emilio Pacheco and the Poets of the


Shadows (2001), chapters one and two. What we perceive is that these are early poems, dominated by youthful pessimism, the expression of which is slightly too explicit. At the same time we recognize a certain insecurity in the diction, which oscillates between difficult images and recherché adjectiviza-tion on the one hand, and the beginning of colloquialism on the other.

It is appropriate at this point to mention briefly pacheco’s views on poetry, as expressed in a number of noteworthy poems. These include poem 13 from El reposo del fuego, “decaración de varadero”, “Job 18.2”, “desertación sobre la consonancia”, “Conversación romana”, “Mejor que el vino”, all from No me preguntes cómo pasa el tiempo, “Francisco de Terrazas”, “un poeta novohispano” and “h & C” from Islas a la deriva (1976), “del último Juan Ramón” from Desde entonces (1980), “una defensa del anonimato” from Los trabajos del mar and “Las vocales” from El silencio de la luna (1994). There are others which, along with those just mentioned, are more than sufficient to merit extensive treatment separately. So far, only a beginning has been made by Carmen Alemany bay (2001) in a useful article on pacheco’s comments on poetry in Islas a la deriva. It would be interesting to compare the results of a fuller investigation with the views of paz and those of some of the other poets mentioned in this book. We must begin with the epigraph from “Árbol entre dos muros”, which is a quotation from Tristan Tzara, affirming categorically something of crucial importance for the present study: that language is referential and not simply an arbitrary sign-system, as paz now and then seems to hint that it might be. poem 13 from El reposo del fuego II is directly related to this statement. At the beginning are a series of images (of cold, of the ant, of the wind, of a rodent) which carry associations of causing a crumbling of solid things, of their splitting and being carried away in minute quantities. The next reference is to the “garden”, which we know from parra and Orozco is a positive symbol. but now in the garden (= ideal-ized reality) summer is giving way to autumn, the dying season of the year, associated with decay and the onset of winter. Sap, thought of as a source of vitality, clots in the trees’ hardening arteries as they go into hibernation. These images are intended to reinforce each other and unite to form a poetic system replete with meaning. At this point the appearance of the poem, its typographical lay-out, changes significantly. The last three lines,

y no es esto lo que intento decir. Es otra cosa (pacheco, 1980b, 48)

rhythmically broken, tell us what borges knew: that language, although refer-ential, is inadequate to fully express reality.

In “declaración de varadero”, the theme is not so much the inadequacy of language in general as the inevitability of change in poetic diction. The

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first section of the poem refers to the physical death of the great Nicaraguan poet Rubén darío, from whom, as borges eventually admitted, all subsequent Spanish American poetry stems, and then to his cultural death as poetry moved on from modernismo. Each poetic movement is followed by a period of “parricide” by younger poets and its diction becomes “hojarasca”. This is colloquially expressed at the end of “Conversación romana”:

Acaso nuestros versos duren tanto como un modelo Ford 69 – y muchísimo menos que el volkswagen (pacheco, 1980b, 90)

but a century after darío’s birth, pacheco can record that modernismo had been a fertilizing force, opening the way for vanguardismo and post-vanguardismo:

Removida la tierra pueden medrar en ella otros cultivos. (ibid., 75)

Still, like that of modernismo, the diction of later poetry will gradually become out of date:

Las palabras son imanes del polvo. Los ritmos amarillos caen del árbol. La música deserta del caracol. (ibid., 75)

The end of the poem proclaims pacheco’s awareness that poetry disinte-grates and recreates itself like the rest of reality. but the final image of the poem is positive: it suggests that out of destruction can come “fuego” and renewed “energía”. The idea is that the tree which has been struck by light-ning preserves a hidden potential for fire which can be relit by friction (as in primitive fire-making). In other words, the friction of the poet’s mind working on past poetry can produce renewed fire. “desenlace y recomienzo” is the law governing all things.

In any treatment of the development of poetry in Spanish America after modernismo, “disertación sobre la consonancia” merits mention. Luis Antonio de villena in fact describes it as “el más original entre los metapoemas de pacheco.” (villena, 1986, 38). The first part of the poem, deliberately phrased in colloquial and prosaic language, contains the straightforward affirmation that poetry in the previous fifty years (i.e. since the end of modernismo) had ceased to conform to the traditional definition of poetry. This, we notice, is a


very radical assertion: that the very nature of poetry changed (by implicaton, with vanguardism). The second part goes on to suggest that a new, broader “redefinición” of poetry “que amplíe los límites (si aún existen límites)” (pacheco, 1980b, 79) is needed to do justice to modern poetry. The key word of the climax (which comments afresh on traditional poetry criticism), “razon-ablemente”, confirms what we already know. up to the end of modernismo poetry itself reflected a rationally comprehensible world and could therefore be read and commented upon rationally (recognizing its logical nexuses, its coherence and harmonious structure). but now, the poem suggests, the world to which modern poetry corresponds is not rationally comprehensible, and therefore rational approaches can only lead to non-recognition of it as poetry. It is important to notice what “disertación sobre la consonancia” does not say about modern (i.e. including pacheco’s) poetry. It does not suggest that modern poetry has any privileged access to an alternative form of cognition, or that it offers thereby any possible solutions to our spiritual dilemmas. Nor is there any indication that beauty or aesthetic pleasure plays any role in recent poetry. The emphasis, which is noteworthy, is exclusively on poetry versus intelligibility.

yeats’s “Things fall apart, the centre will not hold” (“The Second Coming”) is constantly echoed in No me preguntes cómo pasa el tiempo. In “1968 III” pacheco writes, borrowing a famous phrase from Karl Marx: “La fluidez lucha contra la permanencia; lo más sólido se deshace en el aire” (pacheco, 1980b, 72), and in “Conversación romana”, “Algo se está quebrando en todas partes (ibid., 89), while in “declaración de varadero” we find “Lo que se unió, se unió para escindirse” (ibid., 75), and in “venecia: “Todo lo unido tiende a separarse” (ibid., 88). We think again of Orozco’s assertion in her essay “La poesía” that part of the poet’s task is to try to “vislumbrar la unidad en un mundo fragmentado” (Orozco, 2000, 237). but unlike his Argentine colleague, pacheco seems to have little faith that this can be achieved. hence the disenchanted ending of “Conversación romana”. Rome, we recall, is a symbolic place: the Eternal City. but the emphasis in the middle of the poem is on its degradation and decay (“ruinas que serán ruinas”). There, even pollen, the source of beauty, is contaminated. The city symbolizes our age in which all lasting values have been reduced to “chatarra”. how does this apply to poetry? It, too, is likely to be scrapped after a few years. hence, in “Mejor que el vino” pacheco affirms that direct experience of love and sex is better than evoking them in verse.

All of this tells us that for pacheco this is not a poetic age, the devalu-ation of eternal verities (what the picture of Rome, full of filth and litter, symbolizes) has brought with it the devaluation of the poet’s role. Alemany bay stresses the recurrence in Islas a la deriva of the image, derived from Rimbaud, of the poet “que al igual que un marinero con su barca a la deriva, se encuentra desorientado, abandonado” (Alemany bay, 2001, 32). Epecially

122 dONALd L. ShAW

in Latin America: “Francisco de Terrazas” and “un poeta novohispano” from Islas a la deriva (1976) deal with the struggle of the Third World, a cultur-ally colonized figure, striving to find a true poetic identity. These too are poems which are important for coming to understand the position of poets in Spanish America. behind the colonial poets in question stands the figure of the modern poet who has two choices: either to write what his political masters want (“panegíricos, versos cortesanos”) or to try to find, in a situ-ation of cultural dependency, some authentic poetic stance (though in the end even this will merely gather dust). “h & C”, also in Islas a la deriva, reinforces pacheco’s pessimism:

– Nada es lo que parece – Entre objeto y palabra cae la sombra (ya entrevista por Eliot). (pacheco, 1980b, 182–3)

The outlook is the same as before: although language is referential, there is a “sombra”, a discrepancy between the word and the thing, which makes writing poetry tricky. but in the Third World there is a further difficulty:

el imperio nos exporta un mundo que aún no sabemos manejar ni entender. (ibid., 183)

but poetry somehow survives. In “del último Juan Ramón [Jiménez]” the binary oppositions on which the poem is based are resolved positively. Once more “desenlace” is followed by “recomienzo”. The last poem is this repre-sentative group “una defensa del anonimato”, is ambiguous. poetry is still defined negatively as “esta mueca de náufrago”, using an image dear to huidobro (for example in “Monumento al mar” [Últimos poemas”, huidobro, 1976, vol. I, 589–92]) and to the young Neruda of the “Canción desesperada” at the end of the Veinte poemas de amor. Nonetheless it is also

ese lugar de encuentro con la experiencia ajena … (pacheco, 1983, 97)

This is the key element in the poem emphasised by the acoustical effect of “una fORma de amOR que sólo existe en silencio” (ibid., 98). In a disin-tegrating world, poetry creates secret links between people who otherwise would know nothing of each other and offers us the comfort of recognizing out common humanity. “una defensa del anonimato” makes two more note-worthy points. One is that poetry (in the tradition of colloquial poetry) has now extended its range and covers


todo aquello (relato, carta, drama, historia, manual agrícola) que hoy decimos en prosa. (ibid., 97)

This repeats and amplifies the way in which pacheco defines his poetry in the preface to Tarde o temprano: “poesía, un medio fluido y conciso para decir lo mismo que se dice en prosa” (1980b, 11). The other is that the poetic experience includs the active reader: “No leemos a otros: nos leemos en ellos” (1980b, 97). Appreciation of poetry depends in part on shared life-experience.

In the end, after a lengthy experience as a poet, pacheco recovered cautious confidence in poetic creation. In two poems “postal de berkeley para Jorge Guillén” (Los trabajos del mar) and “Los vocales” (El silencio de la luna) he uses images which suggest the triumphant survival of poetry. In “postal” the image is the familiar, natural one of the taproot of a tree piercing deeper and deeper into the soil (i.e. away from the light). but this is interpreted as a means to “anclar” the tree, to give it strength and fixity. In the second stanza the “sombra” from which the root draws strength rises up above the ground as sap and creates the lush, green foliage:

por la raíz la sombra asciende al árbol y se vuelve hoja de luz en la rama. Así la poesía (pacheco, 1983, 92)

In cognate fashion in “Las vocales” the vowels rebel against the poet and bury themselves in the computer, leaving the poet, in a reminiscence of “postal”, feeling like a dead tree, unable to put forth leaf-poems. he recognizes that the word, language, is an “anguila fugitiva entre las manos” (pacheco, 2004, 124), but without it:

somos polvo y mudez crustácea, guijarros que rezongan incomprensibles al desplomarse en el abismo si tiempo. (ibid.)

In the second part of the poem, as the sap rises in the tree, so the vowels rise up from the bowels of the computer:

vuelven de entre los muertos las vocales y renovadas por el descenso a ultratumba se alzan entre su servidumbre de consonantes y por fin me devuelven la palabra. (ibid., 125)

In each of these two poems of pacheco’s maturity there is the implication

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that poetry in some sense is rooted or buried in the subliminal mind (as in bécquer’s famous third Rima), but wells up ever-renewed. On this positive note we may leave pacheco’s poetics.

One would like to think that pacheco perceived the notions of disintegra-tion and reconstitution which play such prominent roles in his outlook as a dialectical process taking place in reality, leading to some ultimate synthesis, but what we seem to be left with is an endless cycle. This is what so often governs the choice of his subject matter, imagery, symbolism and vocabulary. Clearly there is no room here for the senses-flattering imagery of modern-ismo. In “declaración de varadero” (pacheco, 1980b, 74–5), as we have seen, pacheco makes gentle fun of darío’s rebellion against the poetic tradition of his day, which was to be overtaken in turn by another rebellion and so on. Nor is there room for the often semantically overloaded, “unique” imagery of the vanguardists in the wake of huidobro. pacheco has no confidence at all in the notion that some spark of new cognition may be generated by a truly innovative metaphor. pacheco is less sure than Neruda, for instance, that meaning inheres in the poet’s vision:

Miro sin comprender, busco el sentido de estos hechos brutales.

(El reposo del fuego, I.4, pacheco, 1980b, 38)

This does not mean that he is unable to join in the social protest and criticism associated with colloquial poetry. The bitter poems alluding to the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968 and the satire of North American cultural and economic imperialism in “ya todos saben para quien trabajan” (No me preguntes cómo pasa el tiempo, ibid., 74) witness to the contrary. but it does mean two things. One is that “los hechos nos exceden” (“Transparencia de los enigmas”, ibid., 63): words cannot do full justice to reality. The other is that any attempt to make them fit experience is condemned, like everything else, to be ephem-eral. Time destroys poetry or turns it into a system of cryptograms for future readers to decipher rather than to enjoy. Nonetheless the poet paradoxically perseveres. If he cannot speak for the ages, he can be a witness to his own times:

Tenemos una sola cosa que describir: Este mundo. (“Arte poética I”, pacheco, 1969, 117)

It is clear that a very strong North American influence was operating in the collections of the late 1960s and 1970s. Edward halsey Foster (1992, 93) reminds us that William Carlos Williams had advocated for poetry the language of “the daily press”, but while the style might appear prosaic, it must contain “a hidden sweetness”. This is the problem pacheco faced in


his mature work: to write in direct, referential language both about the here and now of Mexico (and Latin America) and about his disenchantment with the human condition. This last was not absolute. The title-poem of Irás y no volverás (1973) refers afresh to the heraclitan notion that we can never return to the past, since on the one hand it is unknowable (“Enigma” in Irás y no volverás), and on the other, both the place and the returning subject will have changed. but in “Contraelegía” (ibid.) he wrote, in another mood: “y sin embargo amo este cambio perpetuo” (pacheco, 1980b, 125). Since the alternative would be immobility and lifelessness. Fourteen years later in El silencio de la luna (1994) we find the idea given an ironic twist in “Retorno a Sísifo”. The symbol of Sisyphus eternally rolling his stone uphill was a favourite of the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier. he used it to represent human progress. The stone keeps rolling backwards, but never quite so far back as before, so that continuous effort brings a slow gain. Carpentier, that is, was concerned to warn against the illusion of fast, revolutionary change. pacheco, however, is less sanguine. First of all we notice that, as is implicit in “Autoanálisis” and the much later “Camino de imperfección” from Siglo pasado, the struggle forward is not just against external obstacles but rather “contra la piedra y Sísifo y mí mismo” (pacheco, 2004, 23), that is, against external obstacles (la piedra), constant failure (Sisyphus) and the poet’s self. With deeper insight than Carpentier, pacheco recognizes that the real struggle for (moral, political, economic, social) progress begins with ourselves. The technique of the lines once more increases their impact: the rocking balance of “ComiEnza la batAlla que he librAdo mil vEces” contrasts effectively with the very different rhythmical pattern of “contra la piedra // y Sísifo // y mí mismo”. Secondly we must attend to the repetition of “inútil” in the last, climactic line. We expect “Sin este drama sería inútil la vida”, suggesting that it is by carrying out what Carpentier called man’s “tarea”, his self-appointed task on behalf of others, that life becomes purposive. but in pacheco’s “Sin este drama inútil sería inútil la vida” (pacheco, 2004, 23) the first “inútil” cancels out the second. The poem, that is, ends with a bitter paradox: to pursue this useless task gives (an appearance of) meaning to life.

Irás y no volverás continues to illustrate pacheco’s tendency to alternate between taking the abstract human condition as his theme and commenting directly or indirectly on today’s realities. “urbana, Illinois” reminds us of the way his poetry often tends towards the epigrammatic – short poems built around one image:

El muñEco de niEve en el jardín se deshace cuando la tiErra emErge del inviErno En un jardín más vasto somos todos

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figuras contrahechas esperando nuestra disolución. (pacheco, 1980b, 125)

We notice the skilful use of the short second line, emphasizing the key verb, between lines 1 and 3 which enclose it in an acoustical pattern of “e” sounds under tonic accents holding the two lines together. “Más vasto” (rather than “más grande”) emphasizes, again acoustically, the contrast between the real and the symbolic gardens, while the shift from the two hendecasyllables of lines 4 and 5 to the shorter last line marks the disconsolate climax.

We see indirect commentary in the sarcastic use of the past to refer to the ignominy of the present, as in “Moralidades legendarias” in which members of the patrician class in ancient Rome gossip, grumble and strike humani-tarian attitudes before kicking their coachman awake so that they can

Ofrecer mansamente el triste culo al magnánimo César. (pacheco, 1980b, 118)

The reference to grovelling before presidential power by the oligarchies in Latin America is transparent. Another method is to use animals to satirize aspects of human behaviour. Like Aesop, pacheco does not hesitate (alas!) on occasion to ram home his meaning. Of the owl, he writes

de cuál sabiduría puede ser símbolo Sino de la rapiña, el crimen …

(“El buho”, Irás y no volverás, ibid., 129)

pacheco’s critique of the human condition hovers between attributing respon-sibility for evil to human behaviour, as we have seen, and a more metaphys-ical awareness of a tragic pattern inherent in life itself. Thus in El reposo del fuego II, numbers 11 and 12, alongside “ferocidad”, which may refer to human action or to time’s ferociousness, we find that light, normally (as in paz) a positive symbol, is an ally of time in a process in which all things tend towards death (no. 11). poem 12 develops the deep pessimism of poem 9:

Nuestra moral, sus dogmas y certezas se ahogaron … (ibid., 46)

All comforting ethical (“moral”), spiritual (“dogmas”) and intellectual (“certezas”) supports have crumbled and man’s life on earth is seen as a parody which insults the notion of a paradise. We have no answers to ultimate why-questions:

alguien pregunta … y no hay respuesta:


¿para qué estoy aquí cuál culpa expío es un crimen vivir …? (ibid., 47)

Neither art nor love, among the great existential supports of darío and paz, offer comfort. “The New English bible” (Irás y no volverás) contains a declarative, logically constructed, tripartite pattern: the lover, post coitum tristis, in a squalid hotel, reads the desolate words of Ecclesiastes. but (“y sin embargo …”) the Song of Solomon’s exaltation of erotic love comforts him. At the climax a balance is struck: love is as strong as death; but passion is cruel and destructive. In “José Luis Cuevas hace un autorretrato”, in the same collection, the painter is Everyman; what he paints in his self-portrait is what time does to all of us

Mi desolado tema es ver qué hace la vida con la materia humana

his theme in the picture is man’s struggle against the hostility of time and life itself. but there is also a sub-theme: the ambiguity of the very self which is thus victimized:

Los ojos que contemplo ¿son los ojos de quién …? (pacheco, 1980b, 119)

Like borges, pacheco accepts that we can understand neither the reality of the self, nor the workings of the reality outside the self. The former theme had already appeared in another epigrammatical poem from No me preguntes cómo pasa el tiempo. There we are reminded of the vallejo of “Los heraldos negros” in “Autoanálisis”:

he cometido un error fatal – y lo peor de todo es que no sé cuál. (ibid., 79)

We are burdened with an irrational sense of guilt which poisons our happi-ness and which we do not comprehend. pacheco returns to the theme of the impossibility of self-knowledge in “Camino de imperfección”:

En tantísimos años sólo llegué a conocer de mí mismo La cruel parodia, la caricatura insultante – y nunca pude hallar el original ni el modelo.

(pacheco, 2000, 39)

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Over-explicitnessisclearlyadangerwhichhoversoverPacheco’spoetry.We are as far away from the chaotic enumeration which Neruda used toexpress theworldof thefirst twopartsofResidencia en la tierra inwhichorder had been lost, as from the mere juxtaposition of novel images in arhythmical pattern which the early ultraístas and creacionistas sometimesadvocated. Pacheco’s poems tend to be tightly but simply structured,withclear logical nexuses, culminating in a sometimes heavy-handed climacticidea or assertion. In “Insistencia” (Islas a la deriva [1976]), for example,thefirststanzaintroducesthesoftly,silentlyfallingsnow;thesecondstanzaaffirmsthattheprocessiscyclic:thesnowmelts,risesaswatervapourandthen falls again as snow.The third stanza warns us that we cannot expectsuchafate:

serástierraSeráspolvoenquebajeaapagarselanieve

(Pacheco,1980b,171)

Onlythephrase“bajeaapagarse”liftstheclimaxjustabovebanality.In“Lasectadelbien”(ibid.)thetripartitepatternisrepeated.Apriesthasavisionof the horror of existence; he confesses; he is denounced andburned as aheretic.Buttheclimaxhereisunexpectedandironic:

…fueareunirseconsuDios-queeselamor–enelinfierno. (ibid.,162)

Everythingbuildsuptothefinalparadox.SomeofthepoemsofIslas a la deriva(1976)revealacertainsameness

of technique:a logicallyarticulatedstructurerisingtoaverbalpirouetteattheend.AgainweseethatthebesettingtemptationforPachecoisinfacttheepigram,thestriking,oftenironic,phraseeitherinisolation:

Yasomostodoaquellocontraloqueluchamosalosveinteaños“Antiguoscompañerossereúnen” (Pacheco,1980a,27)

orformingthestinginthetailofashortpoem.Weareconditionedbyearlierpatternsofpoetrytoexpectthatthepoemwillleaduptoaclimacticmeta-phor.ThissometimeshappensinPacheco,asin“Cocuyos”(Desde entonces)inwhichthefireflycapturedinthemorningisdescribedasan“estrellaheridaenlaprisióndeunamano”(Pacheco,1980a,32)orin“JardíndeniñosVIII”(ibid.)wherethepoetborrowsHobbes’sfamousphrasetoexpressthepossi-bilitythateachnewbornbabecouldcontain

elmicrobioobaciloquepuedefermentarnosenlobosdenuestrossemejantes. (ibid.,81)

PACHECOAND CISNEROS 129

But just as often the climax of the poem is an accusatory or affirmativestatement:“Lascartastardannosécuántosmeses”(“Todotienesuprecio”,Irás y no volverás,1980b,133).Thereissometimesbleakhumour,aswhenin “Miseriade la poesía” (1980b, 146–7) thepoet confesses the futilityofprotestpoemswhichremainlargelyunread.Thereisindignation,pathos(asin“Losjuguetes”inIslas a la deriva(1980b,177–8),inwhichtoyssymbolizea childhood now lost for ever) and horror, for example, at thememory ofHiroshima(“Lospájaros”,1980b,187–8).But there is littleambiguity: thepoetdeclares,ratherthansuggests,hisreactions.Thusin“‘Cristoenlacruz’por El Bosco” (Los trabajos del mar, 1983, 58–60), after an implacabledescriptionofthecorrupthumanitywhichElBoscoshowsswarmingaroundChristonhiswaytoGolgotha,Pachecomakeshispoint:“Sólotenemosquereconocernos”(Pacheco,1983,60).

With advancing age, and very explicitly in Desde entonces (1980a)Pachecoexpressesanever-deepeningawarenesof“elhorrordeestarvivo”(“Losconspiradores”,Pacheco,1980a,217).Inthelate1970sand1980sthisisthedominantinhiswork.Itarisesfromthetwodifferentsourcesalreadymentioned.Oneishumanevil:

LaimagendelMalsegúnafloraenelgestohumano

(“‘Cristoenlacruz’porElBosco”,Pacheco,1983,59)

the other is the abstract horror of the human condition itself, above all itssubjectiontotime,decayanddeath.Welackasystematicstudyoftheimages,symbolsandkeywordswhichPachecousestocommunicatehisbittervisionof “lo que irrealmente llamamos la realidad” (“Prosa de la calavera” Los trabajos del mar,ibid.,36),butwithsomeofthemwearealreadyfamiliar:sand, dust, the desert, rats, ants, a bookneverwrittenor unread, the ever-changing waters of a river, the sea, rain, shipwreck. These are words ofstronglynegativeconnotation.WenoticetheemergenceinDesde entoncesofoneofBorges’skeyadjectives:“atroz”.Poemafterpoeminthetwocrucialcollections,Desde entoncesandLos trabajos del mar,recordman’sdedica-tion toproducing ecological catastrophe, toviolence, torture and injustice.Wefindthesymbolicfigureoftheapeinitscageinthezoo,theraggedIndianbeggingattheentrancetothemetro,thebabycryingaloneinthenight,thewoundedwildboar left todieby thehunter. In the faceof theseexamplesof desamparo, poetic activity seems to Pacheco often useless. Repeatedlyhequestionsnot thepossibilityofpoetry–aswe sawsomeChileanpoetsweretemptedtodo(FoxleyandCuneo,1991)–butthepointofaddingyetanotherbooktothosealreadyinexistence(“Losdemasiadoslibros”,Desde entonces),orhisabilitytomakesenseofwritingwhen

130 dONALd L. ShAW

Mientras escribo llega el crepúsculo. Cerca de mí los gritos que no han cesado no me dejan cerrar los ojos

(“Fin de siglo”, pacheco, 1980a, 213)

Once more in “Gustave Flaubert 1821–1880”, in Los trabajos del mar, he confesses that we as readers can never know what the writer “intentó decir (ni él lo sabía)”. And yet pacheco never accepts Running’s idea of the “crit-ical” poem in which language itself is subjected to critical appraisal. For him, language remains referential and genuinely communicative, albeit not a perfect medium. hence:

… todo escritor debe honrar el idioma que le fue dado en préstamo, no permitir su corrupción ni su parálisis, ya que con él se pudriría también el pensamiento.

(“Gustave Flaubert 1821–1880”, pacheco, 1984, 93)

despite the ambiguity of the word, which, as pacheco fully realizes,

sirve lo mismo a la revelación y el encubrimiento

(“Jardín de niños 13” pacheco, 1980a, 241)

poetry survives:

la poesía se halla en la lengua, en su naturaleza misma está inscrita. (ibid., 14, 242)

Words can convey meaning; literature can have a cognitive and truth-telling function. The writer, like the eternal child

Intenta inventar las historias que ajusten los fragmentos del gran rompecabezas: la realidad y ordenen sensación e impression. (ibid 16, 243)

The earthquake in Mexico City in 1985 seemed to pacheco to confirm tragi-cally what he had been writing about since at least 1968 “todo lo que era firme se derrumba” (“Las ruinas de Mexico”, II, 5, pacheco, 1986, 18). The familiar symbols of dust, ashes, rats flies and ants reappear in this bitter


elegy for Mexico City, in whose destruction pacheco, in whom the moralist is never far below the surface, sees a warning of impending world-destruction to which man’s blindness and folly contribute. In much of the rest of Miro la tierra we meet again the themes of the evil that men do (“Caín”) and the abstract evil of life itself:

la vida invulnerable que vuelve siempre. para encenderse y seguir ardiendo se nutre de muerte y fuego. (“La salamandra”, ibid., 51)

yet, paradoxically, we also find repeated references to “la verdadera vida” (paz’s “la vida más vida”; Cortázar’s “kibbutz del deseo”, Orozco’s “unity”), the dream aspiration to find a harmonious, meaningful existence, which expe-rience of life’s hostility cannot shake.

El silencio de la luna (1994), which won the Premio José Asunción Silva in 1996 shows pacheco in middle age commenting, often sardonically, on the errors, illusions, follies and crimes of mankind now and in the past. Inevitably we are conscious of a certain didacticism, at times relieved by ironic humour, as in “Mercado libre” where pacheco deftly deflates the conventional vision of the cock lording it over the henroost, and replaces it with that of a bird only too conscious of his role as a producer of breakfast eggs and Kentucky Fried Chicken. A darker humour prevails in “un reo bendice a Torquemada”, “El gran inquisidor”, “El padre de los pueblos” and other similar poems in which instutionalized opression attempts to masquerade as beneficial. At the beginning and end of the collection, pacheco turns to symbolic life-styles and outlooks, those of prehistoric man and circus performers and freaks, to comment on modernity. One of the collection’s most significant poems is “Adolesenescencia: Matthew Arnold se despide en la playa de dover”. The reference is to one of the great landmark victorian poems of spiritual distress, Arnold’s “dover beach” (1867), which compares the receding tide at dover to the receding tide of Christian faith and hope. pacheco’s poem addresses a mysterious “Niña” and gives thanks that, as an “emigrante del pasado” at the end of the twentieth century (he was sixty-one), he had found her and had been able to glimpse her for an instant before foundering like a ship and sinking into adolesenescencia. The maritime metaphor appears at the begin-ning of the poem with the assertion:

naufraga el siglo último y único que me tocó. (pacheco, 2004, 98)

Since the girl comes from Rome, and the poem is specifically related to “dover beach”, it is possible that she symbolizes traditional (Catholic) faith. perhaps we may tentatively suggest that the poet is voicing the realization

132 dONALd L. ShAW

that his generation may have been the last to have had sight of a world which could still be thought of as fatherly and providential, before the new century ushered in a world without (religious) confidence (“Comienza / otro mundo implacable” (ibid.) – a post-Christian world. Much earlier, in poem 14 of El reposo del fuego II, pacheco had written

Tierra, tierra ¿por qué no te conmueves? Ten compasión de todos los que viven (pacheco, 1980b, 48)

and in “La secta del bien” (Islas a la deriva) he had suggested that “[e]l horror del mundo” (pacheco, 1980b, 161) could not be reconciled with the existence of a loving God. This is pacheco’s “diablo mundo” poem par excellence in which he affirms that all is in the power of

el gran usurpador al que venera la ceguedad cristiana (162)

The theme persists in Desde entonces with “Cerdo ante dios”:

¿dios creó a los cerdos para ser devorados? … Si dios existe ¿por qué sufre este cerdo? (pacheco, 1980a, 211)

A better poem is “Épocas” from Siglo pasado:

Morimos con las épocas que se extinguen, inventamos edenes que no existieron, tratamos de explicarnos el gran enigma de estar aquí un solo largo instante entre el porvenir y el pasado. (pacheco, 2000, 31)

The echo of darío’s famous “Lo fatal” is audible. It underlines again the on-going importance of the spiritual crisis of the West as a theme in modern Spanish American poetry, which will surface again when we comment on Cisneros’s (re)conversion to Catholicism and the significance in this connec-tion of his collection Las inmensas preguntas celestes (1992).

In Ciudad de la memoria (1989), El silencio de la luna (1994) and La arena errante (1999) we have the sensation that pacheco was revisiting earlier themes or seeking new symbols to express a Weltanschauung which had long since reached full maturity. A large number of poems in Ciudad de la memoria are meditations on symbolic objects or events: a sea shell, autumn leaves, frost, salt, a raindrop, old rags, copulating insects, ashes, a changeless mountain, a hailstorm, a piece of pottery, a knife. Each of these provides pacheco with a prism through which to contemplate an aspect of


human existence, usually bitterly and ironically. but in “Lluvia de sol” we find a rare reference to feminine beauty as the justification for yea-saying. The longest poem-sequence in this category is “Live bait”, in which worms dug from the sand to sell to anglers symbolize mankind:

gusanos de sangre que se afanan y reptan por la noche. (pacheco, 1989, 56)

We wriggle on life’s hook until death swallows us. And yet we cling to “nuestra inmisericorde madre la vida … terrible, absurda, gloriosa vida” (ibid., 58, 59).

Reflections on love are rare in pacheco’s poetry. In La arena errante we find them in “¿Qué fue de tanto amor?”, “Adán castigado” and the poetic prose of “Melusina”, the witch lover. In each case love is seen as a “breve paraíso” which momentarily fills our emptiness, only to crumble into dust like all other human things. Siglo pasado (2000) confirms pacheco’s pessi-mism. Its usually short, pithy poems reject the gagetry of the present day:

Me gustan mi laptop y mi laserprinter. pero soy como soy y no son para mí

(“página”, pacheco, 2000, 16)

recognizing that we are sojourners in an existence which we do not under-stand (“Epocas”), contributing to historical processes inevitably destined for future ruin (“Esclavos”), bloodthirsty (“Lanza griega”) and morally degraded (“Orden de los reptiles”). One of the most outspoken poems in the collection, given its date of publication, is aptly entitled “Milenio”. In it pacheco writes a broad denunciation of the utter corruption of Western capitalistic society, adopting the voice of one of those familiar street-prophets of the imminent end of the world. After the presentation of the situation in the first three lines, the body of the poem is a vast, twenty-line catalogue of the ills of present-day society. It establishes a violent contrast between the exploiters of a system based on profit and credit card debt, the worshippers of “la deidad de la usura y el oro plástico” (ibid., 38) – that is, the stock-holders and beneficiaries, on the one hand, and the victims, the socially marginalized, the old, the sweated labourers, the drug addicted, the juvenile prostitutes and so on, on the other. The climax suggests that the Last Judgement may be nearer than we think. This is not part of pacheco’s abstract critique of the human condition in a non-providential world, but a wide-ranging, concrete attack on Western society, which, as the first lines of the poem tell us, people refuse to face. Clearly the implicit answer here, valid for much of pacheco’s mature poetry of social criticism and protest, is not the recovery of positive ideals and beliefs but the need for concientización, heightened politico-social aware-

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ness, and action. At a second level, “Milenio” can be read as part of pacheco’s reaction to the situation in Latin America, where the problems of poverty and moral degradation are apt to seem greater than in North America or Europe. “Milenio”, in other words, combines the two sides of pacheco’s critique of Western society. The broader one is directed against the threats presented by modern life in general, illustrated by poems like “Ser sin estar” (No me preguntes cómo pasa el tiempo), with its warning against modern technology, and “Fin de siglo” (Desde entonces) which clearly foreshadows “Milenio”. For many of the evils denounced, the North American way of life is seen as chiefly to blame. The other side is a more specific critique of Latin America, and Mexico in particular, as in “Las ruinas junto al mar” (Islas a la deriva), “desmonte” (Desde entonces) and numerous other poems.

The insights of Siglo pasado are into a world threatened with ultimate destruction by forces, from floods to termites, with which our follies merely co-operate. In these latest collections we see what we have come to expect: inward-looking poems on timeless features of human destiny, with ageing and death more prominent as pacheco grows older, alongside more outward-looking ones criticizing humanity’s stupidity, cruelty and disastrous misuse of the world’s resources.

Surveying pacheco’s poetry retrospectively after the publication of Miro la tierra (1986), Michael doudoroff (1989) helpfully reviews the following characteristics: absorption of everyday reality, dark vision, the theme of the insubstantiality of experience in time, ironic judgements of human conditions using playful meditations on the animal kingdom, humour, ethical concerns, a bitter view of history, incursions into the testimonial mode, intertextuality, the theme of ecological balance, concern with social justice and acceptance of poetry as a vehicle for truth. Like all critics after J. M. Oviedo (1976), doudoroff mentions, in relation to technique, “the flattened voice” which, though using conversational language “conceals a craft no less demanding than that of the most purified symbolist” (doudoroff, 1989, 267) “experimenta-tion with typography” (269), visual orientation and participation in the move away from musicality typical of the colloquialists. What we miss in doudor-off’s article is any really significant commentary on pacheco’s diction and especially its characteristically sparing use of figurative language. For hugo Rodríguez Alcalá (1976), who was out of sympathy with this aspect of colo-quialismo, it constitutes a serious flaw, limiting his poetry at times to “pura, lacónica trivialidad” (58). pacheco’s fellow poet Gabriel Zaid sharply disa-greed (1977) but he fails to do much more than contradict his opponent. The only critic to have made any headway in the direction of analysing pacheco’s poetic language is debicki in his chapter on the poet in Poetas hispanoameri-canos contemporaneous (1976), but his treatment is restricted to the earliest collections. Sadly, this promising avenue of approach has not received much further critical attention. In the new century pacheco’s leading position in


contemporary Mexican literature has been attested by a large number of awards which make him, as has been said, “el escritor más homenajeado del país” (pineda Franco, 2004, 364). These include, in addition to those mentioned above: the José donoso prize (2001), the Octavio paz poetry Award (2003), and the Alfonso Reyes prize, plus the pablo Neruda Ibero-American poetry prize, both in 2004. Like Cisneros he taught for many years in a number of universities outside Mexico, most notably in the university of Maryland, of which he holds the title of distinguished professor, alternating with work at the National Institute of history and Anthropology in Mexico City.

Antonio Cisneros (Peru, 1942– )

Although he underwent a religious conversion in the late 1970s, Cisneros is to some degree an exception within the group of poets we have been consid-ering in that he does not seem to have been consistently affected by what I have suggested in this book is an important component of the cultural crisis of our times. Only occasionally in his poetry do we find references to ultimate why-questions, to spiritual malaise, to the apparent randomness of reality or to a yearning for a more authentic existence. When, for instance, he dedicates a poem to vallejo (“En defensa de César vallejo y los poetas jóvenes” in Agua que no has de beber [1971]) it is to praise the latter’s origi-nality in the context of the peruvian literary establishment of his time, his defiance of official critical attitudes and his insistence on retaining his crea-tive freedom, rather than to underline what vallejo called the “vacío / en mi aire metafísico” (“Espergesia” in Los heraldos negros). Julio Ortega (1996, 11) identifies a sense of “loss” emerging even in Cisneros’s earliest poetry, Destierro (1961) but it is not, directly at least, a loss of existential confi-dence. Nevertheless, peter Elmore (1998, 25) correctly associates him with the impact in Spanish America of Anglo-Saxon poetic Modernism (pound, Eliot, Lowell), the beatnik poets, and parra, Cardenal and pacheco. We also recall that Cisneros’s undergraduate thesis was on his fellow peruvian poet José María Eguren, who clearly influenced his earliest work. his return to religion and what we make of its impact on his later poetry, notably in Las inmensas peguntas celestes, are highly significant. but more so, in some ways, is his role as a poet concerned with revisionist views on peruvian history, as a critic of peruvian society and his role in it, and as a consciously Third-World poet as a result of his experiences in Europe.

published while Cisneros was still an undergraduate, Destierro expresses his reaction to an unhappy love affair chiefly, as was to be the hallmark of his later poetry, through a series of symbolic references, in this case to the sea, the port, the beach, sand and salt. The house which sheltered the lovers represents a temporary refuge, in which the lovers experienced

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tiempo sumergido en la sal. (“Solo/una antigua linterna”, Cisneros, 1996, 26)

That is: love, which gives savour to life, overcomes the passing of time. but the affair comes to an end. The house now only exhibits “arcos muertos”, while birds, symbolizing the lovers’ feelings and desires, are replaced by “ferrocarriles”, the agencies of separation. Some of the symbolism (e.g of blood on the beach) seems forced and melodramatic. but, for example,

he llevado mi corazón salino hasta la niebla (“para que tu voz”, ibid., 35)

conveys the pathos of lost love with real originality. What is most striking about this early collection is the absence of anecdote. There is no exploration of the love affair itself. All attention is focused on the symbolism. In relation to the later work we also notice the absence of both humour and irony.

In the introduction to his personal anthology Propios como ajenos (1989) Cisneros describes David (1962) as “La historia del rey bíblico, contada desde la perspectiva del común” (Cisneros, 1991, 8), mixing old and new diction and aiming at ironic demythication. The result is not quite satisfying; the reader is distracted from the themes of the collection: the contrast between the distant king and the peasants, for whom his loves and battles are mean-ingless, and the silence of God which seems to render vain david’s struggles and triumphs, by an overload of inappropriately difficult symbolism. david himself is treated ambiguously, as we see symbolically, according to Elmore (1998, 28), in the alternation of first- and third-person verbs. however, the underclass viewpoint prefigures later developments in Cisneros’s poetry. Neither of these two initial collections seems to find quite the right balance between diction and content.

Comentarios reales (1964), awarded peru’s premio Nacional de poesía, marks the beginning of his mature poetry. It reflects the most important aspect of the New historical novel in Spanish America: the rewriting of “official” history along more honest and realistic lines. Comentarios reales, the poet explains (Cisneros, 1991, 9), was designed to “revisar la historia burguesa, tradicional, desde la poesía”. Aligning himself with Neruda and Cardenal, Cisneros reveals the dark side of the Conquest, the colonial period and the Wars of Independence. Rather than as heroes, the conquistadors are presented as greedy, hypocritical and oppressive exploiters of the common people. The colonial authorities treat the sons of the common people as cannon fodder, while the people themselves are dominated by lecherous and inquisitorial priests and a superstitious, arrogant ruling class. This is poetry in the grand old civic tradition. The paradigmatic poem is “descripción de


la plaza, monumento y alegorías en bronce” where a snidely ironic descrip-tion of a monument to a hero and to the nation’s supposed patriotic values is seen as daubed with bird-droppings and contrasted with the heavily armed, present-day riot police whose role is to defend the oligarchy against any attempt by the people to assert the values the monument embodies. Other significant poems celebrate the sacrifice of Tupac Amaru, torn to pieces by the authorities after a failed rebellion, and the modern-day insurrectionary figure of Javier heraud, shot down by the army in 1963.

The reader outside Latin America may not receive this kind of poetry in quite the way it is perceived by those who have endured oppressive regimes. Imagery that seems over-explicit to many English, Spanish or North Ameri-cans readers has an immediate impact on Irish Republicans, basque sepa-ratists or many Spanish Americans. but not all the figurative language is of this kind. In line with the practice of other colloquial poets, Cisneros uses imagery sparingly, in the context of a pattern of diction which is for the most part directly referential. but often it gains increased effectiveness for that very reason, as when, speaking of the conquistador Almagro’s armoured troops in the tropical heat, he writes:

y el sol con sus abrelatas destapó a tus soldados

(“Cuestión de tiempo”, Cisneros, 1996, 53)

or, evoking the exploitation of the natives in the mercury mines,

Así moliendo y masticando los metales, cada noche recostaba las costras de mi cuerpo sobre arañas.

(“Canción de obrajes, bajo el virrey Toledo”, ibid., 54)

adding the acoustical effect of alliteration and repeated syllables to the striking images themselves. The speaking voice in many of these poems is that of a member of the underclass, reflecting what Cisneros, much later, in his interview with Roland Forgues (Forgues, 1988, 259) called “la otra cara de la historia, la voz de los vencidos”. In two poems heraud stands as a symbol of the brutal repression of dissent in the peru of the 1960s. This is a bitter and pessimistic collection, underlining the sad internal state of peru, the external threat to humanity from the uSA with the h-bomb (“Los científicos”, not included in Poesía reunida) and the cruel indifference of a non-benevolent God. Only the epilogue, calling for more struggle, and for more committed poetry, offers an unexpected note of hope. In his interview

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with Julio Ortega, Cisneros suggested that the collection did not quite come off, partly because his attempt to rewrite peruvian history was over-ambitious and partly because he failed to integrate his personal and domestic life into the wider historical approach (Ortega, 1984, 32).

In 1965 Cisneros took up his first university teaching post at huamanga in the Andes, a part of peru he hardly knew. To Forgues (1988, 250) he said that his experience there “contribuyó, en gran medida, a que yo cambiase mi idea del mundo”. Already politicized (he had been expelled from the conserva-tive universidad Católica for undergraduate subversiveness), he now became radicalized and contributed to guerrilla literature with “Crónica de Chapi, 1965”, a narrative poem in irregular metre describing an ambush by guer-rillas of an army patrol commanded by an officer who was responsible for the massacre of 200 local peasants. It corresponds to one of his definitions of poetry as “testimonio de la realidad” (Forgues, 1988, 253) and to Ortega in 1984 he declared that it arose from “mi experiencia directa del contacto con la guerrilla” (Ortega, 1984, 36). here there is little sign of the disil-lusionment visible in Comentarios reales. Although Cisneros avoids drama-tizing the actual fire-fight, the poem’s conclusion suggests that the deaths of the soldiers and the ignominious flight of the captain offset the fate of the “hermanos muertos”. Like Cardenal in “hora O”, though on a much smaller scale, Cisneros privileges direct narrative, based on black and white contrast between the local landowning class:

don gonzalo carillo – quien gustaba Moler a sus peones en un trapiche viejo (Cisneros, 1996, 103)

along with the “jauría” of soldiers who protect its interests, and the heroism of the guerrillas

Sin más bienes que sus huesos y las armas, y a veces la duda como grieta en un campo de arcilla. También el miedo. (ibid., 104)

From huamanga Cisneros moved to the university of Southampton on the south coast of England (1967–9). by this time, he was already familiar with much modern poetry in English, which he described to Forgues (1988, 253) as “una poesía más vital, más directa, más coloquial, más conversacional y además con humor”, qualities he clearly wished to emulate. Later he was to publish a bilingual anthology, Poesía inglesa contemporánea (1975). While in Southampton he saw published his most successful collection of poetry, Canto ceremonial contra un oso hormiguero (1968), which won the pres-tigious Cuban Casa de las Américas prize and by 2000 had gone into five editions. Among other things, it sealed his adherence (with reservations) to


the Left, for example, in “Karl Marx died 1883, aged 65”, whose theme is the contrast between the comfortable bourgeois-dominated world of his great-aunt in 1902 and the world of (hoped-for) revolutionary change which Das Kapital advocated. The first part of the poem contains images of stability and technical progress supported by the values of right-thinking people. but in the second section (ironically maintaining the industrial imagery) Marx is seen “Moliendo y derritiendo en la marmita los diversos metales”, that is, manufacturing his ideology from different raw materials, with the result that

los caballeros pudieron sospechar que la locomotora a vapor ya no era más el rostro de la felicidad universal (Cisneros, 1996, 77)

The old conventional ideas of morality and progress are undermined, and the poet gives thanks to the “viejo aguafiestas”.

“In memoriam” reminds one irresistibly of Wordsworth’s “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”. Cisneros, speaking for many in his generation, recalls the glory days of his youthful belief in the Cuban Revolution and his hopes for belaúnde Terry’s Acción Popular” party: “yo estuve con mi alegre igno-rancia, mi rabia, mis plumas de colores” (1991, 80).

Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution seemed to offer new hope. In the poem he (and the revolution) are seen at first as “apenas un animal inferior, invertebrado” then as “un mamífero joven”, i. e. as able to nourish its young (successive Latin American revolutions), then as a splendid creature with “brillante pelaje” and finally as “un animal noble y hermoso” but “cercado entre ballestas” (i.e. threatened by the uSA and its subservient Latin Amer-ican states [Cisneros, 1996, 86]). Meanwhile in contrast, the bourgeois estab-lishment in peru is seen as consisting of hard-nosed businessmen: “hombres del país donde la única Torre es el comercio de harina de pescado” (ibid., 86.) They are ironically presented as so many Odysseuses (homer’s figure of cunning, unscrupulous resourcefulness), setting sail on the sea of commerce “hasta llegar a las tierras del hombre de provecho” (ibid., 87) even if this involves (as in García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad) hushed-up massacres of alleged subversives. but the end and climax of the poem prophesies that the alternatives to revolution are war, famine and plague. “In memoriam” is one of Cisneros’s most important poems and would have to be included in any anthology of Spanish American poetry of the 1960s. It also reminds us that in the last half of the twentieth century there were three categories of left-wing poets. The first included Neruda and Cardenal, who were comfortable expressing their commitment to the revolution in their work and raising the level of revolutionary consciousness without joining in the armed struggle. The second included men like heraud and dalton, who participated in the

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fighting. The third, which perhaps resonates most widely, includes poets like Cisneros, who believed in the revolutionary ideal but who felt shame at their inability to throw off bourgeois conformism and exchange the pen for a weapon.

The title poem of Canto ceremonial, which Cisneros surprisingly dropped from his personal anthology (but not from Poesía reunida), perhaps because of its extreme tone, uses the symbol of an ant-eater to attack the degeneracy, hypocrisy and love of malicious gossip which characterize, in the poet’s view, the bourgeois society of Lima. The main anatomical feature of the ant-eater is its enormously long, sticky tongue. There are six references to the tongue in the poem, one of which describes it as

granero de ortigas manada de alacranes bosque de ratas veloces (Cisneros, 1996, 78)

but above all three times it is presented as a Tower of babel

que se desploma sobre el primer incauto. (ibid., 78)

The ant-eater is seen, not as an animal, but as a fat effeminate homosexual, with soft plump hands, posturing at ladies’ lunches, in cahoots with other homosexuals and lesbians and submerging the city in an ocean of slobber. Nor was Cisneros impressed with britain. In “Medir y pesar las diferencias a este lado del canal (universidad de Southampton)”, he attacks his host country, complacent in its island, its intellectuals happily inhabiting “La Torre de las Tazas de Té” (ibid., 94) from which they smugly contemplate their fine cars and tend to accept that beyond the nearby hills lie “el caos, el mar de los Sargazos”: the world of benighted foreigners incapable of imitating Anglo-Saxon orderliness. The university is seen as a bastion of “seguridad y belleza” and “olvido conveniente”, producing self-satisfied attitudes, just as eggs in filth produce flies. In contrast with the other side of the channel, with what Cisneros saw as the left-wing intellectual ferment of France (this was 1968, we recall), british intellectual life is viewed as collaborating with capitalist materialistic values, symbolized by “las grúas altas y amarillas” building new office blocks. but the climax of the poems reminds us that the gods of the developed West (progress and the profit motive) are also those of contemporary peru. This stay in britain revealed to Cisneros that he was a Third-World poet. To Ortega in 1984 he asserted “Canto ceremonial real-mente es producto del choque de culturas” and that it included “la relación del buen salvaje con el mundo desarrollado” (Ortega, 1984, 36). It was, and was to remain, a highly critical relationship.


Again this is civic poetry in the grand old Spanish American tradition, aimed at withdrawing the reader’s allegiance from prevailing corrupt values. Returning to criticism of his own country in “Crónica de Lima”, Cisneros sees the city as still under the spell of its colonial past. Four symbols are prominent: the sea, the mist, the air and the river. All are negative. The sea, associated with destruction and decay (“mástiles rotos”, “ruedas inmóviles”; Cisneros, 1996, 81) seems to symbolize, like the relatively unchanging climate, uncertainty and the promise of change unfulfilled. The salty air is corrosive. The river, dried up, promises revewal that never comes. Nothing is lush or green. The deforested hillsides are covered with festering shanty towns. The symbol of individual aspiration is a rusty needle (something that cannot sew together a society torn apart). The poem ends with the poet futilely skipping stones across barranco harbour, unable to escape his ambiguous memories of life in the capital, or to feel any sense of achievement.

Cisneros’s sense of frustration and misery (and even remorse and guilt) was intensified by the birth of his son diego. “Entre el embarcadero de San Nicolás y este gran mar” asks pardon of the newborn child for bringing him into an existential situation in which the gods never reply to our questions with “un palmoteo amable” (Cisneros, 1996, 85). The poet observes ironi-cally the ingenuous dalliance of a pair of young lovers which contrasts with his insight. Nature (the sea, the wind, sunset and the fall of night) expresses life’s hostility. The crane is another negative symbol, its hard, lifeless, metal structure contrasting with the lovers’ warm tenderness. Like other poems in the collection, reflecting the rejection of obtrusive musicality of much “collo-quial” poetry, this poem contains no obvious rhythmical or acoustical effects. Its rhetoric is understated. The questions to which the implacable gods return no answer include the deliberately commonplace: “¿he apagado la luz de la cocina?” (ibid., 85). The poem relies for its effect on the alteration of focus from the poet to the young couple, whose behaviour acts as a counterpoint to his mood. This is the main structural principle. Within it the contrast between the Great bear constellation, associated with the young lovers, and the other symbols which help to figure forth the poet’s thoughts, reinforces the more implicit contrast between the poet himself, hardened by his adult insight, and his son’s lack of existential awareness (as yet). Cisneros writes in the first person, but just once uses a pronoun in the second person plural, significantly in the poem’s most striking image: “¿Qué polvo de hierro se arremolina en nuestro corazón?” (ibid., 85). This is a deeply moving poem, full of function-ally effective symbolism and original imagery. It illustrates borges’s mature view of poetic diction, which is valid for the bulk of post-vanguardist poetry: the poet’s task is not to strain after totally novel, “unique” imagery, since all poets ring the changes on a limited stock of metaphors. but the true poet recombines material (the sea, the wind, the stars, nightfall, birds) which has already acquired a centuries-old poetic gloss, so as to make it new.

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The disconsolate, life-rejecting mood of “Entre el embarcadero …” is not really typical of Cisneros. Rather, in a group of poems from Canto ceremo-nial he reproaches himself (and implicitly us) for failure to break the bonds of habit, self-indulgence and mental sloth. In two of his most memorable poems, “poema sobre Jonás y los desalienados” and “Apéndice sobre Jonás y los desalienados”, the symbol of such failure is living, like Jonah, in the belly of a whale. One is immediately reminded of a cognate image in paz’s “hacia el poema” in section Iv of Libertad bajo palabra, where he writes:

damos vueltas y vueltas en el vientre animal, en el vientre mineral, en el vientre temporal. Encontrar la salida: el poema. (paz, 1988, 295)

In a cogent commentary on these Jonah poems Raquel Chiquillo identifies the “desalienados” with “un grupo de personas que han optado por cierto conformismo” but goes on to point out that the poem “es a la vez colectivo y personal” (Chiquillo, 2004, 229). In effect it moves from “los hombres” in the abstract, to “nosotros” and finally to the poet himself as an individual. The central image of the poem, which Chiquillo, commenting on its originality, rightly calls a “hybrid image” (228) since it involves the mechanical and the organic, the human and the animal, is that of constructing a periscope out of whale parts, so as to be able to see beyond the imprisoning (but protective) belly (= peruvian middle-class society). This would be the equivalent of paz’s “salida”, since paz regarded poetry as insight. “Apéndice”, however, suggests that to rebel against life inside the whale is potentially very dangerous, since life outside exposes the rebel to being hunted down like a rabbit. The poet opts for safety. “Soy el favorito de mis cuatro abuelos” and “La araña cuelga demasiado lejos de la tierra” reinforce the message of the Jonah poems. Once more they contain symbols of acceptance of alienation and refusal to under-take active engagement. The poet, like Carpentier in Los pasos perdidos, recognizes the temptation to give in to “las vacaciones de Sísifo” instead of being up and doing in an imperfect world.

The Jonah poems and “La araña” illustrate the risk involved with so much “colloquial” poetry. In each case the poem is a development of a single symbolic metaphor. If the metaphor is striking enough and really extends itself in satisfying directions, the poems succeeds. The spider is less successful than the whale as a symbol because the similarity of the insect and the poet is worked out more mechanically. The language of direct, unam-biguous comparisons presents no challenge to the reader precisely because it is so direct and unambiguous that we realize that we are on the brink of banality; whereas the success of the Jonah poems derives in no small part from the highly original figurative language, much more in evidence here than elsewhere in Cisneros’s poetic work.

In the prologue to Propios como ajenos Cisneros described Canto ceremo-


nial as mixing solemnity with slang and as evincing “optimismo socarrón” (1991, 10). This is hardly accurate. The language, typical of “Colloquial” poetry, is often deliberately commonplace, rather than slangy. In “El arco iris”, for example, we read:

Cuando estaba en el baño ví los siete colores – más o menos – desde un ojo de buey, y a pesar del gran frío corrí hasta la barranda (Cisneros, 1996, 89)

hardly inspiring as poetry, but designed to keep the rainbow symbolism close to the real-life situation. The symbol itself is not one of optimism. The poem is based on Genesis 9: 1–17, in which God establishes an alliance with Noah as the representative of mankind, and offers the rainbow as a sign of peace and goodwill between himself and man. The poet refers to the offer sarcasti-cally – “Qué oferta tan amable” – and to the rainbow as “buena cosa” and “un Arco de primera calidad” (ibid., 89), which promises “días fastos” and “noches propicios”. however, as so often in Cisneros’s poems, structurally speaking there is a shift, marked by the word “pero” or, as here, “mas”. prefigured by the almost always negative symbol of the sea (“revuelto mar”, “estas aguas más negras y revueltas que el pellejo de un oso” and so on), the saccharine promises of the rainbow are replaced by a vision of the descent from it of “fieros arcángeles del juicio”, threatening presences whom the poet tries to ignore, not (as we sense) wholly successfully. urdanivia bertarelli’s assertion that the poem contains a “mensaje de paz y de establecimiento de un pacto nuevo” (1992, 98) is a misreading.

Agua que no has de beber, published in 1971 in Propios como ajenos carries the date 1966, perhaps referring to the date of writing. It contains further criticism of peruvian society of the kind visible in Canto ceremo-nial. “Sexología nacional” evokes the episode of Odysseus and Nausicaa in homer’s Odyssey to satirize the prudery of middle-class peruvian girls in Cisneros’s time. “Las calaveras en el aeropuerto de Ayacucho” returns to the image, first used in “paracas” (Comentarios reales), of skulls buried in the earth. Once more they represent the futile sacrifice of lives in the historic past of peru in order to produce the merely material and technological progress symbolized by the modern airport, situated near the site of the last of the great battles of the Wars of Independence in 1824. In the introduction to Propios como ajenos, Cisneros is rather dismissive of this collection. Still, it announces a certain shift in his poetry. up to this time, the symbolism, which as we have seen is the dominant technical feature, is in the main accessible and the tone direct, even on occasion over-explicit. In Agua que no has de beber, by contrast, we begin to find, though still combined with straightfor-ward language, symbols which present serious difficulties of interpretation. This is particularly the case in three of the movements of “una muchacha

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católica toca la flauta” and in “parábola (botánica)”. The first of these seems to contain an explicit rejection of God’s oversight of human affairs:

Ojo de dios que miras y quieres ser mirado … tú no has de salvarme … … no te miro … Sal de mi templo, viejo, apártate, go home. (Cisneros, 199?, 120)

The fourth movement of the poem appears to develop the idea of the temple as the whole of creation. but it is now a broken temple, with closed doors, outside which waits a thin, nervous horse, which may perhaps symbolize the poet’s sense of alienation from a world dominated by self-gratification. Sex, the second movement seems to suggest, resolves some of the differences of outlook which separate the sexes. The third movement, one of Cisneros’s most popular poems (“para hacer el amor”) defines with sly humour the ideal conditions for love-making, in tune with a collusive nature, but out of sight of Christian morality. It also forms part of a wider movement in recent Spanish American literature generally which was memorably expressed by Gustavo Sainz in his 1969 novel Obsesivos diás circulares. “Si no podemos hacer la revolución social”, Sainz writes, “hagamos la revolución moral” (Sainz, 1969, 203). If people could be persuaded to withdraw their allegiance to bourgeois standards of propriety and morality, that would perhaps represent a step towards getting them to give up their allegiance to bourgeois social and political values and hence raise their potentially revolutionary consciousness. This is a notion that should always be borne in mind when explicitly sexual aspects of contemporary Spanish American literaure such as “para hacer el amor” are in question. In this connection also, we notice that, after Destierro, there are practically no unambiguous love poems in Cisneros’s work. With Agua que no has de beber we are in the 1960s, the central decade of the boom novel, one of whose major features is the absence of any confidence in love as a support for existence. Sex, on the other hand, is promoted as a major force helping to overcome the otherness of one’s partner. “Tercer movimiento (affettuosso)” [sic] (“para hacer el amor”) belongs to this pattern of outlook. Its final line, “Es difícil hacer el amor pero se aprende” (Cisneros, 1996, 123), seems to suggest that the sexual relationship goes beyond the merely physical. Interestingly, hart selects this poem, which he describes as “elegant”, and one which “teases the reader playfully”, as an example of the postmodern in Cisneros’s work, relating it to the mythological figure of the satyr, which he argues has associations of sexuality, performativity and quotidianization. “What is most significant about this poem”, he writes, “is the way it manages to take the topos of love and quotidianize it, but without letting love slip into pornography.” (hart, 2005, 579). In his conclusion, he emphasizes verbal playfulness as an outstanding aspect of peruvian postmod-


ernism. This is certainly correct, but it is not the whole story so far as love and sexuality in Cisneros are concerned.

In fact, the significance of El libro de loco amor (1972), which reflects the collapse of Cisneros’s first marriage, lies primarily in the ambiguous treat-ment of the love relationship. This is especially visible in “para este aniver-sario de bodas”, in which the allegedly 350 positions for making love are reduced to three and associated, as in the ninth of Neruda’s Veinte poemas de amor, with a voyage to the Enchanted Isles. but, as so often in Cisneros, the second part of the poem debunks or contradicts the first: all is reduced to the position of the corpse in the grave. Similarly in “Canción con estilo prestado” human sexuality is contrasted with that of insects who unrestrictedly:

se enredan bajo un árbol del bosque bajo el aire (Cisneros, 1996, 171)

whereas our sexuality, associated with enclosure and beds, is related to oceans (depth, violence, passion) which may meet, but also may not. Marriage in “Sobre mi matrimonio II” is reduced to unwanted wedding presents and the spousal relationship is compromised by the wife’s irrational apprehensive-ness. If, as Ortega not very convincingly suggests (1996, 11), Cisneros’s poetry “se definía por su exploración de la incertidumbre en pos de unas respuestas suficientes”, love, matrimonial or otherwise, does not seem to offer one of the answers.

El libro de Dios y de los húngaros (1978), and the poet’s conversion, clearly do indicate a new-found direction. In the meantime, in Como higuera en un campo de golf (1972), Cisneros touched bottom. The collection, which according to peter Elmore (1998, 259) marks an impasse in the life and work of Cisneros, reflects a deeply unhappy period in the poet’s life which left him

más solo que una higuera en un campo de golf. (“postal para Lima I”, Cisneros, 1996, 144)

Symbolic of the collapse of his world is the fate of his dream-house in punta Negra (“La casa de punta Negra”). Formerly a source of joy and fulfilment, now, under

este mal sol más frío que un cangrejo (ibid., 142)

it is a fallen empire. The poet defines himself at this time in these terms:

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soy yo quien sembró el árbol tuvo el hijo escribió el libro y todo lo ví arder cien años antes del tiempo convenido.

(“homenaje a Armando Manzanero”, ibid., 184)

In hospital in Nice (March 1971) he recalls ironically bécquer’s most famous Rima, “volverán las oscuras golondrinas”, the harbingers of spring, but they become

esas aves seguras aleteando sobre alguna ambulancia que no llegará a tiempo. (“Canción hospitalaria I”, ibid., 187)

Like paz, Cisneros sees a “muralla”, a wall cutting him off from life’s happi-ness: “nada conoces atrás de la muralla” (“Canción hospitalaria II”, ibid., 188); even the green hills of pleasant memories from the past are fading.

Como higuera … combines subjective poems like these, expressive of the poet’s depression, with others in which his inner malaise is manifested as biting satire. Curiously, in Cisneros’s 1989 personal anthology many of the poems in this second category have been dropped in favour of themes of the poet’s loneliness and sense of futility. Like parra’s “Autoretrato”, “Muchos escritores tienen que dedicarse a la enseñanza” reveals Cisneros’s frustration in his academic role. The underlying simile compares his teaching of litera-ture to illustrating the anatomy of the cow to apprentice butchers till the end of time. but other negative influences are operating. In “Londres vuelto a visitar” the poet uses the analogy of sea-creatures moving onto land for the first time to express the difficulty of moving forward towards a new pattern of life. In London he recalls past happiness:

Allí está la casita donde íbamos a ser felices como chanchos

(“Londres vuelto a visitar”, Cisneros, 1996, 175)

only to realize that now

mi casa son las viejas maletas arrastradas por trenes y aeropuertos.

(“Crónica de viaje”, ibid., 190)

London and Nice are linked to Lima by the image of steel bars closing round the poet with a grinding noise. In “Tres églogas”, nature adds further symbols of misery (rain, wind, a wintry sun). These are confessional poems. unlike borges, paz or pacheco, Cisneros does not seem to find himself ill at ease


with the human condition or existence in general, but rather with his own life. unfortunately self-pity is not a very profitable poetic theme.

We turn with relief to poems whose tone is aggessively satirical. In “En el Rijk Museum los turistas alemanes celebran a Margarita de parma” the Third-World poet is heard reminding us that imperialism, oppression of minorities and racism have long characterized the history of Europe. Enoch powell, the racist british politician, is set beside the seventeenth-century duke of Alba; the arrogant mentality of white superiority is set beside that of Spanish dominance in the Netherlands. The complacent bourgeoisie of London, Amsterdam and berlin go to bed to dream of Nazi behaviour during the wartime conquest of Eastern Europe. “La caza del liebre 1887” evokes nineteenth-century british aristocrats devoted to blood sports and the exploi-tation of the Third World. The title is significant. We should, of course, have expected “La caza del zorro”. but presentation of Third-World countries as defenceless victims is better served by the hare than by the (cunning) fox. “Fin de temporada en el Mediterráneo” ridicules rich weekend sailors on the Côte d’Azur, mothballing their pleasure boats for the winter and hurrying off to check their blood pressure and blood sugar. Two of the best of these satires are “denuncia de los elefantes (demasiado bien considerados en los últimos tiempos)” and “Soneto contra uno que llamó sátrapa a Mao, aventurero al ‘Che’ y a Carmichael racista”. In the first, Cisneros quotes passages from Edgar Rice burroughs’s Tarzan novels in which elephants save the lives of (white) Tarzan and Captain Campbell from (black) savages, contributing to notions of white superiority and to the white imperialism which has reduced the African hinterland to a white man’s playground. More effective, because more ironic, is the “Soneto” which mocks the pseudo-liberal, cuddling up to famous personalities of the Left. The bulk of the poem lists examples of fellow-travelling; the sting is in the tail

Cómo te pesa el óxido en los ojos el musgo en las orejas – 50 y tantos años de antigüedad y miedo y un no saber qué pasa

(Cisneros, 1996, 183)

unlike some other post-colonial or anti-imperialist Spanish American writings these poems are self-standing. They are not produced specifically in protest against the oppression or exploitation of Spanish Americans by First-World countries. In any case, in “(Ilegible) al Tercer Auditor (ilegible) vecinos todos de la ciudad de Lima” Cisneros recognizes the probable uselessness of such writing. To Forgues he admitted that Como higuera “corresponde, efectiva-mente a uno de los períodos más graves de mi vida, de soledad, de tristeza, de falta de objetivos en la vida, de escepticismo personal, religioso, político y social”. but, he added, “ahora me he recuperado” (Forgues, 1998, 258).

Cisneros’s next collection El libro de Dios y de los húngaros (1978)

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follows what in the prologue to Propios como ajenos he called his “reen-cuentro fulminante con el Señor” (1991, 10). In his 1984 interview with Ortega he was at pains to insist that it was more of a “reconversión” in the sense that, since David, he had always alluded to religious themes in different ways. he also makes it clear that his rediscovered faith was, like that of Cardenal, completely reconcilable with his left-wing views, describing himself as having “trabajado codo a codo con los hermanos revolucionarios creyendo que estamos cumpliendo un verdadero precepto de Cristo” (Ortega, 1984, 42). Several of the poems in the collection chronicle the reconversion. The only one written close to the event was “domingo en Santa Cristina de budapest y frutería al lado” (predominantly in regular hendecasyllables, as if to emphasize the traditional theme). It begins with a series of contrasts (between the fruit and the machinery on the banks of the danube – there is another symbolic crane; between the priest’s traditional vestments and the microphone he uses; between the vernacular language of the mass and the poet’s ignorance of it). These contrasts surround the poet’s self-identification with the prodigal Son of the bible story leading to the triumphant “fui muerto y soy resuscitado” (Cisneros, 1996, 199). The word “ignoro” appears four times, as if to stress the unimportance of the poet’s lack of understanding of the world around him, in comparison with his rediscovery of the world of faith. but the poem ends on the same curiously ambiguous note that we recognize in Cisneros’s remarks about his political allegiances:

loado sea el nombre del Señor sea el nombre que sea. (ibid., 199)

It is possible that this phrase simply refers to the name of the Lord in hungarian rather than in Spanish, but one cannot be sure: doubt and certainty are nearly always interlocked in Cisneros’s mind. Thus, while his experience in hungary brought a renewal of faith at some level, it also caused him to have deep doubts about the political situation in the Eastern bloc countries in the 1970s, as we see from the dualities of “Celebrando otro aniversario del partido”. In “Ave negra en el invierno de Moscú”, a sinister symbolic raven takes the place of the Christian symbol of the dove; but by contrast in “Sofía” (= wisdom) the attractive faces of young girls fortify the poet’s faith. For once, all the images associated with them in the poem are positive. Equally unambiguous is “Ocupado en guardar cabras” in which the poet confesses his earlier mistakes and distorted vision. The second part of the poem rises to a telling climactic image:

Ocupado y veloz, no en tus negocios ni en los míos, Señor, navego hacia la mar


que es el morir. Ocupado y veloz como algún taxi cuando cae la lluvia y anochece. (ibid., 210)

The juxtaposition of the echo of Manrique’s ancient coplas and the modern image of a car speeding into the symbolic rainy darkness is highly effective. but augmenting the effect with a note of irony is the fact that the vehicle is a taxi, which the thoughtless passenger has hired to take him or her rapidly and in comfort in what is implicitly the wrong direction.

Several of the poems express the poet’s negative reaction to his surround-ings in budapest and his nostalgia for home. The danube in winter inspires the pounding lines:

piedra inmóvil, total, viento de piedra, aguas de piedra plana, piedra igual. barcas de piedra atadas a la piedra del viento plano y de las aguas planas.

(“dificultades para nombrar un río en invierno”, Cisneros, 1996, 207)

“Otras dificultades del invierno” uses the familiar symbol of migrating geese to convey the poet’s longing for peru.

It is clear that his refurbished faith did not fully solve Cisneros’s personal problems. In “Los helicópteros del reino del perú”, he confesses:

ya no sé cuando se levanta el sol ni para qué (Cisneros, 1996, 223)

and in “Addio, Londra, addio” he complains: “me han arrojado entre los arrecifes como un trapo” (ibid., 226). It is perhaps noteworthy that “después de corregir las pruebas de Amaru en la imprenta/1967” concludes with the same sinister symbol as “hampton Court” in Canto ceremonial: “y anochece” (ibid., 225).

Cisneros is never far from the dark night of the soul. “por Robert Lowell”, written on the death of his fellow poet Robert Lowell in 1977, who died alone in the back of a New york taxi, while his fellow men, man-made objects and nature remain indifferent, is clearly intended to symbolize the margin-alization of the creative artist in a philistine society. The poet’s fear of his own death is manifest in “Sólo un verano me otorgáis poderosas”, the title of which refers to the Fates. Like “Oh Señor, las cápsulas venados”, which refers obliquely to the poet’s diabetes, “Sólo un verano” is a prayer in which Cisneros invokes divine forgiveness for his unwillingness to forego the pleas-

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ures of life, symbolized by a plate of shrimps. he envisages death as an endless flat meadow (in contrast to the green hills which recur in several poems as a highly positive symbol) and confesses:

Me aterra esa pradera inacabable. Sigo a la vida como el zorro silente tras los rastros de un topo a medianoche.

(“Solo un verano”, Cisneros, 1996, 218)

This final image, in which life is identified with one of Cisneros’s most nega-tive symbolic creatures, and which yet arouses the poet to hunt for life’s fulfilment, re-emphasizes the ambiguity of his existential outlook.

La crónica del niño Jesús de Chilca (1981) has been hailed as one of Cisn-eros’s most original works. he told Ortega in 1984 that it was inspired by his need to “reflejar otra vez la realidad sociopolítica nacional” (Ortega, 1984, 33). In fact it is a testimonial work. It deals with the destruction of the small coastal village of Chilca. Cisneros laments the loss of the highly religious, traditional community which partly depended on irrigation canals dating from Inca times. Modernity is seen as an intrusive, exploitative presence. Some of the poems evoke the mentality of the villagers, their experiences and their sense of loss when the community is overwhelmed. The theme is the pathos which accompanies social change which is not necessarily for the better. Cisneros regards it as an innovative, experimental set of poems and, as usual in his work, sympathetic to the underdog. Marta bermúdez-Gallegos (1990–1, 123) stresses the destruction of “una utopía social”. but Albada Jelgersma (1999, 12 and 22), urdanivia bertarelli (1992, 114) and bueno (1992, 77) emphasize that the poems end hopefully. The sea provides food in the form of a whale, and there is the implicit possibility that the community can be rebuilt elsewhere.

One of Cisneros’s consistent aspirations has been to integrate poems about his personal life and those which reflect his more public stances in the same collection. This has not been very successful. Monólogo de la casta Susana y otros poemas (1986) has no overarching theme, though the debunking impulse is prominent. Susana’s monologue, like “holofernes lament” in El libro de Dios y de los húngaros reinterprets the biblical story in a deliber-ately undramatic way. both poems exemplify Cisneros’s tendency, visible since Comentarios reales, to undercut rhetoric, in this case biblical rhetoric, and downplay idealism (and even heroism). Judith’s murder of holofernes is presented as quite unnecessary; Susana’s defence of her chastity is made to seem a commonplace event on the part of a woman who reports:

Casta soy pero no hasta el delirio. (Cisneros, 1996, 262)


Cisneros enjoys puncturing the complacency of others. “heimat Film”, for example, makes delicious fun of the worst kind of German schmaltz, as revealed by films which exalt and sentimentalize German-ness:

Jarros espumantes de cerveza, danzas del Tirol, uniformes entrorchados pantalones de cuero, gorgoritos, sombreros con rabo de conejo. Más allá no existe nada que valga la pena. Tan sólo la ordinaria realidad.

(ibid., 268)

Everyday reality matters more to Cisneros than false national iconography. “Son cubano” harks back to José Martí’s famous defence of authentically American products in contrast to more refined, but less genuine, European ones. In terms of his own everyday reality, which he symbolizes in a self-indulgent cigarette, he contrasts it with that of health-besotted Germans, who jog every day and use up more than their fair share of oxygen. All of this shows us a poet who rejects polished-up, idealized reality and finds pleasure and inspiration in a reality which, however ordinary, is satisfyingly free from pretentiousness. This is just as true of the more personal poems of Monólogo. Even in regard to his own children, he recognizes that to foreground them in his poetry would be to risk falsehood (“hay veces que los hijos”) and is content to see them safe and sound in real life. his own everyday mood-swings can be seen in “dammerung” and “hay unas mañanas tan sólidas y frescas”. The first is down-beat, as dusk in berlin and a snatch of a song by bob dylan bring to his mind “los años que no quiero recorder” (ibid., 271),

whereas a fine morning reconciles him to life’s possibilities and brings the impossible day-dream of meeting Marlene dietrich in the park. Several poems deal with aspects of love, though carefully avoiding romanticization. “heavy Metal (a)” uses the by-now familiar, though here rather curious, symbol of a rat to express the gnawing sensation of deep emotion, but at the climax the symbol changes to that of a sweet water-melon. death is a reality which, however ordinary, can never be commonplace. In “Nocturno de berlín” the simple pleasures of life are offset by the huge symbolic fly which settles on the poet’s shoulder like a memento mori. The deaths of Lorca, pasolini, heinrich böll and Calvino, especially that of böll who was

el ejemplo (y la alegría) de aquellos que se toman sus traguitos y fuman cigarillos (“heinrich böll, ibid., 273)

that is, who enjoy everyday satisfactions like Cisneros himself, remind the poet that creativity is no safeguard against mortality.

In his interview with Manzari, Cisneros declared that he had always been anxious about questions like “¿Quién soy?, ¿Adónde voy? ¿y de dónde

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vengo?” (Manzari, 1998, 35) but now asserts that in Las inmensas preguntas celestes (1992) “lo único que quiero saber es adónde voy” (36). he went on to refer to the section of poems on bram Stoker’s Dracula contained in this collection and asked: “¿por qué he escrito sobre drácula?” his reply was: “porque la sensación de violencia y muerte está dentro, es una forma de expresarla” (37), but he also associates it with the atmosphere of violence and murder surrounding the period of the Sendero Luminoso guerrilla movement in peru. The link has been helpfully clarified by Albarda-Jegersma (1996). dracula, as herman notes (1997, 124), is presented as a threat to civiliza-tion itself. The story of dracula, therefore, can be interpreted in terms of a threat to society, such as is presented by violent insurgency. It is noteworthy however that at least since “Monólogo de la casta Susana”, as Cisneros stated to Zapata (Zapata, 1987–8, 37), he had been interested in “la maldad en sí misma”. Albarda-Jergesma points out in this connection that Stoker’s dracula “embodies both the seductive Eros and the deadly subversive Thanatos” (Albarda-Jelgersma, 1996, 20) and that he can be regarded as “the meta-phorical sign for the dangerous and deadly syntagma of Eros-Thanatos, the threatened eruption of sudden sociopolitical violence” (27).

urdanivia bertarelli has detected as early as Canto ceremonial contra un oso hormiguero a tendency in Cisneros to baffle the reader; “los poemas”, he writes, “se tornan herméticos, clausurados hacia la vertiente de quien los lee y abiertos solamente para el poeta” (urdanivia bertarelli, 1992, 95). This is the case in many of the poems of Las inmensas preguntas celestes, including the dracula poems. In an interview with Amanda Saldías, Cisneros stated “Es un libro más bien de corte metafísico, pero metafísico a mi manera: en el fondo, no puedo evitar ser burlón hasta cuando me pongo serio” (Saldías, 1994, 153). An example is “Requiem (4)”. The theme is the fear of death

esa travesía tan oscura y feroz como un mandril. (Cisneros, 1996, 293)

What calms and consoles the poet in the face of death has nothing to do directly with faith or spirituality; its is the thought of a dish of lamb with roasted potatoes

Sea el cordero Símbolo y consuelo. Agnus dei. (ibid., 293)

The totally unexected identification of the lamb on the plate with the Lamb of God and thus with the words of the mass at the elevation of the host symbolize the comforting notion that the fleshly pleasures of this life, rather than being sinful, are God-given gifts, the memory of which can support us


on our last journey. It will be “algo en la mano”: something to hold on to, a foretaste of God’s loving kindness. Thus Cisneros compares such a memory to

una bengala en medio de los fondos submarinos (ibid., 293)

something that will light up our last moments.The same theme is present in “Requiem (2)” in which “la cama bien

tendida” and “la manta leve y fresca” along with “el rostro amado” and “la mano amada” are associated with the liturgical “Kyrie eleison / Christie eleison / Kyrie eleison” (Cisneros, 1996, 291). And once more in “Taberna”, the warmth, light and comfort of a tavern in the evening turn it into a temple and symbolize the possibility of fending off the fear of death. A prominent characteristic of Las inmensas preguntas celestes is in fact the way that Cisn-eros juxtaposes very hermetic poems like “Requiem (1)” and “Funerales en la casa de té de yutai en pekín” with others in which simple things – “un buen vinito de burdeos / muy seco y saludable” (“Colinas de berkeley 1979”, ibid., 301), “leche fresca y fino requesón” (“una vieja serie de televisión”, ibid., 305), “esa falda de cuero / que te traje de Chile” (Aniversario de bodas”, ibid., 313) – offer in the last analysis promises that what we enjoy on earth suggests a wellbeing in store for us which offsets our haunting fear of death.

Looking back over Cisneros’s poetry, what strikes the reader most is the importance of symbolism in his work. As in so much “colloquial” poetry, with emphasis on narrative, exploitation of the rhythmic, acoustical and musical elements of poetic diction is at a discount. In that sense Cisneros’s poetry often seems rather bare. At the same time the structure of the bulk of his poems tends to be relatively simple, often based on a two-part development with the sections separated by “pero”, “mas” or an equivalent, so that, once the thematics have been taken on board, at the technical level we are left with little more than considerations of imagery and symbolism. Cisnero’s imagery, predominantly in the form of similes, is characteristically post-vanguardist, in the sense that there is, as we have seen, little straining after the new and unexpected. Except to some extent in Destierro and again in the late poetry, like tends to be compared with like in ways which the reader is not normally challenged to figure out. The effort is to find figurative language which is original without being obtrusively novel.

Thus in “de un soldado” (Comentarios reales) those who died in a battle for Spanish American Independence and were left for the scavenging birds to feast on are compared to “sobras”

Iguales al resto de otras cosas comestibles (Cisneros, 1996, 68)

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to underline the betrayal of the ideals for which they died. by contrast in “héroe de nuestros días” in the same collection, the image

Tener un héroe entre la casa, es como si una noche por buscar nuestros zapatos bajo el lecho tocásemos un cuerpo limpio y fuerte, con el cabello recien cortado (ibid., 73)

effectively emphasizes the surprise created by the presence of a man like Javier heraud amid our commonplace activities. At the same time the reference to his haircut keeps him from being an over-rhetoricized figure. Another deliberately banal reference (among many elsewhere) is seen in the first movement of “una muchacha católica toca la flauta” (Agua que no has de beber): “Gran coca-cola helada en las calientes rocas” (ibid., 120) to refer to the temptation to find relief in religiosity from the stress of modern life. Another way to “make it new” is to use references to modern technological development, in the tradition of Futurism. So we find in “Fatiga del haragán en la playa” (Agua que no has de beber):

este corazón como un batisfera bajo el peso de todos los océanos conocidos

(ibid., 127)

to express the poet’s universal emotional involvement, and in “Crónica de Lima” (Canto ceremonial): “el bosque de automóviles como un reptil sin sexo” (ibid., 82) (in which “bosque” as elsewhere in Cisneros’s poetry mean “a large number”). The opening of “Kensington, primera crónica” in the same collection combines different similes:

yo caminé … Como el más alto de los olmos … … alegre peatón sobre los cráneos de los ingleses muertos en la guerra … y brillaba como un árbol de moras en medio del verano, Cristo sobre las aguas, glorioso … (ibid., 88)

to figure forth the poet’s sense of superiority to the complacent English. Simi-larly in the second stanza we see him in the company of ex-colonials and Irishmen: “metiendo lagartos en el culo de la reina”. There is a well-orches-trated effect here of contrast between the more conventional comparisons with trees and with walking on water, and the less conventional images:


walking on the skulls of the dead and the insult to the Queen, which makes the latter (conveying Cisneros’s hostility to britain’s participation in two world wars and her imperialistic past) stand out memorably.

To Miguel Angel Zapata Cisneros said revealingly “para mí nunca ha sido fundamental el lenguaje en sí” (Zapata, 1987–8, 33). his figurative language is in fact often deliberately conventional (seguir “como un granadero a su bandera”, “más dura que un colmillo” (“A una dama muerta” Canto ceremo-nial, Cisneros, 1996, 90) “solo como un hongo” (“hampton Court”, ibid., 92); “sus palabras brillaron más que el lomo de algún escarabajo” (“paris 5e”, ibid., 93); “Te pareces … más alegre que los pastos en la estación/ de lluvias” (“Te pareces a la hija de algún cow-boy famoso”, El libro del loco amor, ibid., 168). The danger is banality:

veloz y pasajero como un italiano joven en un Alfa-Romeo (“A dedo hasta Florencia” Como higuera en

un campo de golf, ibid., 178)

los helicópteros parecen mil legiones de langostas

(“Los helicópteros del reino del perú”, El libro de Dios y de los húngaros, ibid., 223)

hundiéndose en las aguas como el sol del pacífico (“por Robert Lowell”, ibid., 227)

es como cuando usted se echa un chicle a la boca. (“En defensa de César vallejo y los poetas jóvenes”

Agua que no has de beber, ibid., 113)

however, as we saw in “héroe de nuestros días” this may be part of a prepared poetic effect. It is always necessary to analyse the function of an image or simile in Cisneros in the context of the poem as a whole from which it comes. A few images stand out as unexpected (but not difficult):

sus ojos, os diré que estaban llenos de ciudades (“Javier heraud”, Comentarios reales, ibid., 72)

el miedo que nunca te dejó como la ropa interior o los modales (“Sobre mi matrimonio 2”, El libro del loco amor, ibid., 165)

la duda como grieta/ en un campo de arcilla” (Crónica de Chapi, ibid., 104)

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or the simile which gives the title to a collection

más solo que una higuera en un campo de golf

(“postal para Lima” Como higuera en un campo de golf, ibid., 144)

A separate category is that of metaphors or similes which contain recurrent symbols, as, for example, in:

alacranes cantan bajo tu lengua

(“Consejo para un viajero”, Comentarios reales, ibid., 52)

estas aguas – más negras y revueltas que el pellejo de un oso

(“El arco iris” Canto ceremonial, ibid., 89)

los libros son adobes de una torre que nunca edifiqué(“homenaje a Armando Manzanero”, Como higuera

en un campo de golf, ibid., 184)

This last category serves to introduce the recurrent symbols themselves, without recognition of which some of Cisneros’s poems become more difficult to understand. An excellent article could be written about them. here we can only list some of the more obvious positive and negative examples, bearing in mind that many poems incorporate symbols, such as the watermelon in “heavy Metal (a)”, the plate of shrimps in “Solo un verano” or the hospital and sports centre in “hospital de broussailles en Cannes” (Como higuera en un campo de golf) which are specific to the individual poem. Among those that recur some of the most positive are drawn from nature: “colinas verdes”, “gordos pastos” and “fruto(s)” represent happiness; “laurel(es)” symbolize life’s rewards; “faro” light in the darkness of existence; “muchacha(s)” vivacity, life and hope brought by a new generation; “canto” also suggests happiness, along with references to wine, tobacco and food. perhaps the most positive of Cisneros’s recurrent symbols is “torre”. It normally stands for what is solid, lasting and important, sometimes sarcastically, as when in “In memoriam” (Canto ceremonial”) Cisneros describes peru as

el país donde la única torre es el comercio de harina de pescado (Cisneros, 1996, 86)

or in “Medir y pesar las diferencias a este lado del canal” in the same collec-tion “la Torre de Tazas de Té” stands for what Cisneros dislikes about Great


britain. Once in “Canción de negro” (Comentarios reales) it is a threatening element of a slave ship: “alta torre del velero” (ibid., 62). Whereas the refer-ence above in “homenaje a Armando Manzanero” shows the tower being used to signify the poet’s life-work, which he had failed to complete to his satisfaction. In “Sofía” (El libro de Dios y de los húngaros), the fact that the girls, representing vitality, are identified with “torres”, and the association of a tower with a glass of wine and a book to make up three symbols of life’s happier possibilities, clears up any doubt about its meaning.

Negative symbols are easy to recognize. “Rata” and “alacrán” along with “mosca(s)” stand out. Ruins, the rain and rough seas contrast with the green hills and lush grass that express Cisneros’s deepest longings. As we have seen, the fall of night provides a climax to a couple of poems. Corrosion and rust are equally obvious symbols. Less obvious is the “grúa”, the symbol of harsh, inhuman technology. Some symbols present almost insuperable diffi-culties to the reader, as in the fourth movement of “una muchacha católica toca la flauta” (Agua que no has de beber) which makes none of the conces-sions to the reader that we expect from “colloquial” poetry. As a rule the problem arises from, private, autobiographical references, not from exis-tential interrogation. This underlines what was said at the beginning of this section about Cisneros’s world-view. Only rather late in his work do we come upon poems like “Requiem 3” in Las inmensas preguntas celestes which does allude to abstract questions. Characteristically, the poet’s only answer is the symbolism of the “muchachas” in his household (his daughters) and the nearby lighthouse. The poet confesses that deep existential questions

me tienen dando vueltas como un zancudo al final de la tarde

(“Requiem 3”, Cisneros, 1996, 292)

another typical simile. Only death, in itself an unimportant event, will implic-itly solve the riddles.

Structually Cisneros’s poems in general offer few surprises. For the most part their build-up is logical, with intelligible connections either present or easy to infer. Two favourite devices are antithetical arrangement and repeti-tion of of significant phrases either for emphasis or to hold sections of the poem together. In the first category, that is, we notice words and expressions like “pero”, “mas” or “sin embargo” setting one part of the poem in contrast to the other. In the second category a prominent example is “domingo en Santa Cristina de budapest y frutería al lado”, the poem on his conversion in Libro de Dios y de los húngaros, in which the repeated “fui muerto y soy resuscitado” both emphasizes the theme and bonds the two stanzas each to each. The relevance is this: in the arts technique ideally contains its own metaphor. Chaotic enumeration, for example, suggests a random reality. The

158 dONALd L. ShAW

straightforward organization of most of Cisneros’s poems and the unchal-lenging nature of the bulk of his poetic diction suggest that, however full of “desencanto” (“Requiem 3”) his life has been, his existential outlook has remained relatively stable, particularly since his conversion.

6

Conclusion

As we survey the scene presented by Spanish American poetry after the mid-twentieth century, what strikes us most is the virtual absence of any critical framework within which we can situate all but the most famous of the indi-vidual poets. The critic’s situation is rather like that of someone hacking a way through a jungle which contains a few clearings here and there but remains basically unmapped. Occasionally he or she will meet someone who is simi-larly engaged and exchange a few cautious signals, before both proceed on divergent paths. The trees are many; the landmarks few; the danger of getting lost ever present. Thus, to take only a few prominent examples: González and Treece, in The Gathering of Voices (1992), deal with Neruda, Cardenal, dalton, parra, Lihn and a few others. William Rowe, in Poets of Contempo-rary Latin America (2000), includes parra, Cardenal, Gonzalo Rojas, Jorge Eduardo Eilson, Juan L. Ortiz, Ana E. Terán, Raúl Zurita and Carmen Ollé. Carmen Alemany bay, in Poética coloquial hispanoamericana (1997), looks primarily at Jaime Sabines, Roberto Fernández Retamar and Gioconda belli, with passing remarks on Mario benedetti and Enrique Lihn. Rosa Sarabia, in Poetas de la palabra hablada (1997), chooses Raúl González Tuñón, parra, Rosario Castellanos, Luisa Futoranski and Cardenal. Gustav Siebenmann in Poesía y poéticas del siglo xx en la América Hispana y el Brasil (1977), listed thirty-seven poets from and including darío, the latest being Sara de Ibañez, José Lezama Lima, paz, parra, Juan Liscano, Cintio vitier, Roberto Juarroz, Cardenal, Carlos Germán belli and Enrique Lihn. Mario benedetti, in Poetas de cercanías (1972), selects Claribel Alegría, Alvaro Mutis, paco urondo, Roque dalton, Juan Gelman, José E. pacheco, Nancy Morejón, Rubén barreiro, Circe Maia, pedro Shimose and Antonio Cisneros. Jill Kuhn-heim, in Spanish American Poetry at the End of the Twentieth Century (1996), cites Neruda, Cardenal, borges and parra but then extends the list to a dozen more recent figures of whom only Zurita has been mentioned so far. Thorpe Running, in The Critical Poem (1996), cites Octavio paz, Roberto Juarroz, Alejandra pizarnik, Alberto Girri, Jorge Luis borges, Gonzalo Millán and david huerta. perhaps the most useful brief panorama is that contained in the fourth chapter of Sonia Mereles Olivera’s Cumbres poéticas latinoamericanas (2003). One could extend the many references to individual poets which it contains, especially by reference to anthologies, but the point does not need

160 dONALd L. ShAW

to be laboured. There is really no consensus either about who the leading contemporary poets are or which categories of poetry they may belong to. The danger of trying to include too many poets is that the survey can become the equivalent of a section of a dictionary of literature with a certain amount of connective tissue. In such circumstances all one can do is to follow the existing trail as far as it leads and then try to extend it a little further in the hope that eventually a pattern will emerge.

As we examine the existing criticism a second conclusion becomes apparent. It is that, with very rare exceptions, the treatment of the poets tends necessarily to be descriptive and thematic. To move, however gingerly, in the direction of technique, to discuss diction, imagery, symbolism, key words, adjectivization, rhythmic and acoustical effects and so on requires space. It is not too much to say that, apart from the early borges, paz and parra (and even there the matter is debatable) there is hardly a poet among those mentioned above for whom we have anything like an in-depth approach, especially one based on the analysis of individual poems. If we wish to explore, for example, what borges meant when he accused the modernista poets of using merely “ornamental” imagery and asserted that the ultraístas’ imagery was “veraz”, we have virtually nowhere to look. We lack a systematic comparative account of how aspects of poetic diction evolved from early to late modernismo, of the contribution of transitional poets like Lugones or Tablada, of the revo-lutionary shift in the “ismos” and eventually in vanguardism. Ideally any study of this evolution would have then to include discussion of the turn against figurative language by poets like parra and Cardenal and its effect in their work and later, the modernization of diction in “colloquial” poetry and the impact of “critical” poetry which consciously examines the limits of what poetry can actually say. For the most part we have only fragmentary and impressionistic accounts, narrow in focus and tentative in their conclu-sions, generally as chapters in books on individual poets, a good but isolated example being paul borgeson’s fourth chapter of his Hacia el hombre nuevo (1984) on Cardenal.

In general, poetry tends to arise from the discontents of poets. Thus bene-detti: “No hay un solo poeta que esté conforme con el mundo” (Benedetti, 1994, 24). This includes their discontent with the poetic practice of their elders which suggests two extremely broad areas of classification. In one category fall poets whose main discontent is with the human condition in general, which they explore critically both to focus attention on the cultural crisis of our time and to seek possible ways to come to terms with the modern malaise. borges, paz and Orozco are obvious examples and many other poets participate in this trend, the title of Cisneros’s collection Las inmensas preguntas celestes being a clear illustration. Into the other category fall poets whose chief discontent is with the state of society and the political estab-lishment, particularly in their own countries, so that a large sector of their

CONCLuSION 161

work is to some degree comprometido, ranging from guerrilla poetry and the later poetry of dalton to significant parts of the work of parra, Cardenal and pacheco, all of whom have harsh things to say about conditions in their coun-tries. however, as previous chapters have illustrated, many, perhaps most, poets can fit into either category depending on where we look in their work. Even borges wrote poems which are directly critical of the Malvinas conflict. Still, the two-way tug of universalism versus especificidad is an important element in understanding recent Spanish American poetry.

The other general consideration concerns the concept which individual poets have of poetry itself. here paz’s writings both as a poet and a critic are of central importance. For, on the one hand, as we saw, he has been the leading advocate of poetry which is consciously aware of itself as language, as a system of signs in ambiguous relationship with any possible reality outside itself. yet, on the other hand, in contradistinction to borges, paz in much of the central period of his development seems genuinely to have believed not only that the creative imagination could express through language a special form of cognition, but even that words could be in some sense the equivalent of acts. This is a mystique which many, maybe most, poets intuitively share. If we glance, for example, at the papers read by a number of poets at the primer congreso de poesía escrita en lengua española desde la perspectiva del siglo xxi (Sandoval, 2000, vol. I) we see ample evidence that this is the case. Saúl yurkievich (Argentina) proclaims, in “de la apropiación poética” (35–9): “Atribuyo a la poesía una función gnómica. Ella aporta un vislumbre de la totalidad en acto” (36). Leonardo García pabón (bolivia) in “de la poesía como pensamiento” (45–8) refers to poetry as “un instrumento privilegiado de conocimiento” (46). piedad bonnet (Colombia) insists in “El quehacer poético y la ética de la autenticidad” (51–6) that the poet enjoys “una conciencia o tal vez … una intuición, que sus contemporáneos no poseen” (52). Samuel Jaramillo (Colombia) repeats the assertion “un papel para la poesía después del siglo xx” (61–4): “lo poético es … una forma de pensamiento. distinto al pensamiento racional … pero pensamiento con todos los alcances del término” (63). The virtual unanimity with which the poets assembled at the Congress, from eleven different Spanish-speaking countries, accepted this assumption, while largely ignoring the issue of poetry as a social force, as the expression of emotion or as productive of artefacts of beauty, underlines afresh that much Spanish American poetry at the end of the twentieth century was inseparably connected with the collapse of traditional overarching expla-nations of the human condition, and the resulting ache of modernity. Again, as we seek to establish criteria which help to differentiate among poets and groups of poets, the degree to which they profess confidence or otherwise in poetry as an alternative path to knowledge, or as influential as a public activity, rather than or in addition to, producing aesthetic pleasure, becomes highly relevant. At the same time, it is just as relevant to recall the distinction

162 dONALd L. ShAW

between different kinds of knowledge made above in relation to Orozco (see Chapter 4). The qualities of empathy, imagination and intuition to be found in poetry can teach us about ourselves and others, but wider claims than this seem to rest on an insecure foundation.

And yet, as Antón Arrufat asserts in “viejos fantasmas” (Sandoval, 2000, 103–11), with perhaps questionable historical accuracy but making a very pertinent point, only now have poets begun to give serious consideration to the poem as a verbal object: “Sólo a partir de nuestro siglo la poesía se refleja sobre sí misma, se hace cuestión de su propio ser” (108). precisely when poetry, under pressure from the modern dilemma, clings to belief in its unique possibility of transmitting redeeming insight, it turns a critical spot-light on itself. Once more, as Merlin Foster has shown in “Self-referentiality in the poetry of Octavio paz” (2002, 141–55), paz’s poetry and poetry criti-cism were highly influential in focusing both poet and reader on the process of creation, as well as the role and the limitations of language.

What this means in the end is that, when we examine trends in Spanish American poetry in the second half of the twentieth century, we have to take into consideration the question of degrees of referentiality. It follows from the heavy emphasis often placed, as we have seen, on poetry as cognitive, that in most areas of recent Spanish American poetry referentiality is not in doubt. politically committed poetry, poetry of testimony, social protest and social criticism, gendered poetry and much of colloquial poetry take referen-tiality for granted. but this is not the whole story. For we know from Thorpe Running’s The Critical Poem (1996) and Foxley and Cuneo’s book Seis poetas de los sesenta (1991) on Chilean poetry in the 1960s, that a number of poets set out deliberately to problematize the whole notion of referential language. On the other hand, as Kuhnheim points out (2004, 116–17), a current of neo-baroque poetry, represented by work of Néstor perlongher, Eduardo Espina and Coral bracho,

disarticulates language as a vehicle for communication, emphasising instead its other features … neo-baroque writing displays its own artifice and highlights the materiality of the signifier, its ‘literariness’, for the word is not mimetic or a transparent vehicle for meaning.

As long ago as the 1970s this current predictably came in for fierce criticism from Angel Rama in his Transculturación narrativa en América Latina (1987, 19) where he blasted the sector of criticism which “decidió ignorar la terca búsqueda de representatividad que signa a nuestro desarrollo histórico”.

In this context, it looks as though, rather than attempting to pick out a list of younger figures who in the early years of the twenty-first century seem likely to make a place for themselves in any future history of Spanish Amer-ican poetry, a wiser course might be to consider some criteria on the basis of

CONCLuSION 163

which it might be possible to situate both poets who reached their maturity after 1950 and their emerging successors. In the preceding chapters we have made reference to five such criteria. They are as follows:

1 The stance adopted by each individual poet on the question of universality as against specificity to Spanish America, with regard to thematics.

2 The stance adopted by each in the face of the Western cultural crisis.3 The stance adopted by each on the question of the poetic imagination

as an alternative form of cognition to rational knowledge.4 The stance adopted by each on the issue of specialized poetic diction

as against direct referentiality.5 The stance adopted by each with regard to his or her target audience.

It will be seen at once that these criteria are interconnected. Thus even a figure like dalton, whom we are apt to think of primarily as a committed poet deeply concerned with specifically Spanish American politico-social themes, derives a certitude, amid the crisis of Western confidence, from his Marxist beliefs. Similarly we cannot separate the degree of confidence which a given poet may feel in poetic insight as an alternative form of cognition to that of pure rationality, from his or her outlook about what poetry can or cannot say, whether about the human dilemma in our time or anything else. In turn, the use or avoidance by any poet of challenging imagery and symbolism is bound to reveal something about his or her view of an ideal reader. The other point which needs to be underlined, obvious though it may be, is that these criteria need to be used flexibly. We have seen, for example, how a poet like Cisneros can use, sometimes in the same poem, diction which rests on familiar associations and diction which resists easy interpretation. Nonethe-less, it remains the case that throughout the last half of the twentieth century in Spanish America, the view of poetic language associated with the mature borges and, in uneasy parallelism with it, the view of the “colloquial” poets that diction should be accessible, stand in contrast to the prolongation of vanguardist hermeticism, such as we often find in the non-committed poetry of dalton. part of what makes his poetry as a whole so fascinating to the critic (especially) is the coexistence of both trends in it.

The most obvious link between two of the above criteria is the one which relates the desire for universality with consciousness of the modern cultural crisis. We have seen how this consciousness generates a nostalgia for a lost “unity” in Orozco and pacheco. We can confidently assert that both in Spanish American fiction during and after the boom, and in Spanish American poetry after 1950, a central preoccupation is the search for an “order” which will makes sense of the human condition. It is, as we have suggested, aware-ness of the absence of such an order, such a “unity”, which made the actual

164 dONALd L. ShAW

poetry of the major vanguardist poets so different from what we might have expected given the youthful vitality and optimism present in many of the vanguardist manifestos. We have noticed that even a poet like parra, whose early work represents a clear turning-point in Spanish American poetry in the mid-twentieth century, remains deeply affected by the crisis of ideals and beliefs by which he was surrounded. All of Cardenal’s politico-religious ideology is a conscious response to the same crisis. Over and over again in Cántico cósmico, he dismisses the notion of a chaotic universe and insists on its divinely-created orderliness:

Sólo la vida crea orden y mantiene orden (Cardenal, 1989, 36)

Acaso somos otra cosa que un orden en el caos. (ibid., 341)

The shrillness of his insistence testifies to his intense awareness that the opposite view predominated in the culture by which he was surrounded. he was not alone. Claire pailler (1988), for example, has shown how wide-spread such awareness was among recent Central American poets, despite their more immediate social and political preoccupations. It bears repeating that, as we have seen, these preoccupations seem to have militated, to at least some extent, against the creation of poetry whose aim is the creation of patterns of words, rhythms and images which are intrinsically beautiful and designed to elicit aesthetic pleasure. As in modern North American poetry, we tend to conclude that not many poets are really committed to exploring the mechanics of verse. borges, as his lectures on the craft of poetry indicate, remains an exception. Similarly, it seems significant that these preoccupa-tions have made love poetry, traditionally one of the great currents of lyric poetry, less prominent than in the past.

Few convincing attempts have been made to see recent Spanish American poetry in terms of postmodernism, hart’s 2005 article being a rare excep-tion. but it is clear that, were any such attempt to be made systematically, it would have to be rooted in the recognition that, however one situates a given poet in some sort of poetic spectrum or line of development leading to or belonging to postmodernism, the role of his or her thoughts on the modern crisis would have to be seen as a crucial factor. In concluding, however, it is perhaps as well to mention that there are signs of a reaction against cultural pessimism, which may in the end come to be seen historically as part of the sensibility of a former period. We can detect in a book like Arthur herman’s The Idea of Decline in Western History (1997) a serious critique, from a humanist point of view, of some of the attitudes mentioned in the present work, which may be destined to prevail. Still, for the moment, they are part of the mainstream.

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Cuaderno San Martín 8, 45 El Aleph 44, 45 El hacedor 8, 47, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54 El idioma de los argentinos 46 Elogio de la sombra 46, 56 El oro de los tigres 56

El otro, el mismo 45, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55

Fervor de Buenos Aires 45 Historia de la eternidad 46 Historia de la noche 56 La cifra 56 La moneda de hierro 56 La rosa profunda 56 Leopoldo Lugones 46 Los conjurados 56 Luna de enfrente 45 Otras inquisiciones 46 Para las seis cuerdas 55 Prisma I & II 45Borgeson, Paul 62, 160Bowers, Katherine, 9Bracho, Coral 162Bradford, Richard, 76Brecht, Bertold 72Bueno, Raúl 150Bourroughs, Edgar Rice 147

Caballo verde para la poesía 22Calvino, Italo 151Camus, Albert 83

INDEX

178 INDEX

Cardenal, Ernesto 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 30, 32, 45, 55, 56–73, 74, 98, 99, 102, 115, 116, 135, 136, 138, 148, 159, 160, 164

Cántico cósmico 68, 72, 102, 164. Canto nacional 72

Coplas a la muerte de Thomas Merton 69, 70, 71

El estrecho dudoso 65, 66Momenaje a los indios americanos

65, 71 Hora O 26, 58, 71, 138

La santidad de la revolución 57, 63, 68

La noche iluminada de palabras 72 Las islas extrañas 72 Los ovnis de oro 65, 66, 67, 72 Nostalgia del futuro 72 Oráculo sobre Managua 72 Salmos 6 Quetzalcóatl 72 Telescopio en la noche oscura 72 Tocar el cielo 72 Vuelos de victoria 72Carilla, Emilio 45Carpentier, Alejo 66, 125, 142 Los pasos perdidos 66, 142Carrasco, Iván 42Carrera Andrade, Jorge 6, 7Casanovas, Martí 4Casas, Bartolomé de las 66Cassero, Jacopo del 47Castellanos, Rosario 159Castro, Fidel 139Caupolicán 26Cavafis, Constantino 7Chiles, Francis 12Cheselka, Paul 44Chiquillo, Raquel 103, 142Chocano, José Santos 8Chopin, Frederick 108Cisneros, Antonio 5, 6, 7, 11, 32, 77, 98,

99, 115, 132, 135–158, 159, 160, 163Agua que no has de beber 135, 143,

144, 154, 157Canto ceremonial contra un oso

hormiguero 101, 138, 140, 142, 143, 154, 155

Comentarios reales 136, 138, 143, 150, 153, 157

Como higuera en un campo de golf 145, 156

David 136, 148 Destierro 135, 144, 153

El libro de Dios y de los húngaros 145, 147, 150, 157

El libro del loco amor 145, 155La crónica del niño Jesús de Chilca

150Las inmensas preguntas celestes 132,

135, 153, 157, 160Monólogo de la casta Susana y otros

poemas 150 Poesía inglesa contemporánea 138 Poesía reunida 137, 140Claro, María Elena 69, 70Cobo Borda, Juan Gustavo 2, 7, 15, 30,

115Coll, Pablo Emilio 58Collazos, Oscar 3Colombo, Stella Maris 80, 88, 89Conquest, Robert 76Conrad, Joseph 82Contemporáneos 3, 9Cornejo Polar, Antonio 72, 73Coronel Urtecho, José 2, 7Cortázar, Julio 14, 19, 77, 78, 94, 131Cortés, Hernando 7Cortínez, Carlos 44, 49, 50, 52, 55creacionismo 5, 9, 128Crommelynck, Fernand 82Cuneo, Ana María 77, 129, 162

Dalton, Roque 5, 6, 11, 30, 32, 97–115, 116, 139, 159, 161, 163

El mar 99El turno del ofendido 99, 101, 107,

109, 110La ventana en el rostro 99, 104, 105,

106, 107 Los testimonios 99, 107, 110, 111 Pobrecito poeta que era yo 105

Poemas clandestinos 102, 104, 105, 109, 113, 114

Taberna y otros lugares 111, 112Textos y poemas muy especiales/

personales 99Un libro levemente odioso 102, 103,

107, 114 Un libro rojo para Lenin 114

INDEX 179

Daly de Troconis, Yrais 57Dapaz Strout, Lilia 61Darío, Rubén 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 14, 15, 35,

75, 120, 124, 127, 132, 159 Prosas profanas 14, 75Dawes, Greg 68Daydí-Tolson, Santiago 70Debicki, Andrew 134De Costa, René 3, 29Del Corro, Gaspar Pío 4Dickens, Charles 82Dietrich, Marlene 151Donoso, José 97 El lugar sin límites 97Doudoroff, Michael 134Dujovne, Alicia 94Dylan, Bob 151

Edwards, Jorge 24Eguren, José María 135Eilson, Jorge Eduardo 159Elías, Eduardo 59, 62Eliot, Thomas Stearns 7, 102, 122, 135 The Waste Land 102Elmore, Peter 135, 145Emanuel, Lynn 76Enguídanos, Miguel 56Escaja, Tina 82Espina, Eduardo 162Exteriorismo 62, 63, 72

Falck, Colin 76Faulkner, William 98Fein, John 13, 20Fernández Moreno, Baldomero 11Fernández Retamar, Roberto 11, 98,

115, 116, 159Flores, Angel 37, 38, 56Forgues, Roland 137, 138, 147Foster, Edward Halsey 124Foster, Merlin 162Foxley, Carmen 75, 77, 129, 162Friis, Ronald 117Fromm. Erich 13Frost, Robert 7Fuentes, Carlos 107 La muerte de Artemio Cruz 107Futoranski, Luisa 159Futurists 4

García, Dwight 104

García Huidobro, Cecilia 13García Lorca, Federico 151García Márquez, Gabriel 58, 139 Cien años de soledad 58, 139García Pabón, Leonardo 161García Verzi, Horacio 98, 99Gelman, Juan 98, 115. 159Gertel, Zunilda 44, 45Giordano, Jaime 5Girondo, Oliverio 3, 4, 75 Persuasión de los días 75Girri, Alberto 7, 75, 159Gómez Paz , Julieta 78González, Mike 11, 75, 159González Prada, Manuel 8González Tuñón, Raúl 159González Videla, Gabriel 22, 24Gordon, Samuel 115, 116Gottlieb, Marlene 30, 37, 43Gray, Richard 76Guevara, “Ché” 68Guillén, Jorge 7Guillén, Nicolás 9Gutiérrez, Carlos María 32

Hahn, Oscar 75Halpern, Nick 76Hart, Stephen M. 144, 164Heraud, Javier 98, 137, 139, 154Herman, Arthur 152, 164Hernández Martínez, Maximiliano 113Huerta, David 159Huerta, Efraín 30Hugo, Victor 35Huidobro, Vicente 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10,

12, 46, 75, 122, 124 Altazor 3, 5, 10, 75 Ultimos poemas 8Hume, David 79

Ibañez, Carlos 22Ibañez, Sara de 159Ibañez-Langlois, José Miguel 30, 38Iriarte Borda, Juan 113

Jamis, Fayad 32Jaramillo, Samuel 161Jarell, Randall 76Jiménez, José Olivio 2Jiménez, Juan Ramón 7Jones, Julie 47

180 INDEX

Joyce, James 98Juarroz, Roberto 75, 159

Kant, Emmanuel 79Kayser, Wolfgang 37Kuhnheim, Jill 6, 77, 84, 91, 92, 93,

159, 162

Lafforgue, Jules 42Lago, Tomás 33Laprida, Francisco Narciso de 45, 47Lara Martínez, Rafael 109, 113Lautréamont, Isidore-Lucien Ducasse,

Count of 82Leland, Christopher 4Lerzundi, Patricio 31Lezama Lima, José 97, 159 Paradiso 97Lihn, Enrique 11, 32, 98, 115, 159Liscano, Juan 79, 91, 159Loewenstein, Jared 46, 52López Velarde, Ramón 75Lowell, Robert 7, 135, 149Loyola, Hernán 24Lugones, Leopoldo 42, 75, 160 Lunario sentimental 42Lyon, Thomas 56

Madrid, Lelia 15Magis, Carlos 13Maia, Circe 159Mallarmé, Stéphane 13, 19, 98, 102Mañach, Jorge 3Mann, Thomas 102 The Magic Mountain 102Manzari, H.J. 151Maples Arce, Manuel 3Marechal, Leopoldo 97 Adán Buenosayres 97Mariátegui, José Carlos 4, 5Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 4Márquez, Robert 98Martí, José 151Martínez, Juan Luis 75Marx, Karl 101, 121, 139Masiello, Francine 4Medina, Dante 37, 38, 56Melville, Herman 82Méndez-Ramírez, Hugo 22, 23Mereles Olivera, Sonia 7, 34, 72, 159Merton, Thomas 59, 69, 70, 71

Meyrink, Gustav 49 Der Golem 49Michaux, Henri 98Millán, Gonzalo 75, 159Miranda, Francisco de 25Mistral, Gabriela 8 Lagar 8Modernism 67, 77Modernismo/modernista(s) 1, 2, 3, 8,

104, 120, 121, 124, 160Molina, César Antonio 31Monasterios, Elizabeth 117Moore, Marianne 76Morales, Leonidas 1, 33, 37Moran, Dominic 14Morejón, Nancy 159Mutis, Alvaro 30, 159Neruda, Pablo 1, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12,

13, 15, 17, 21, 22–30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 38, 55, 56, 64, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 95, 97, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 108, 114, 122, 124, 128, 136, 145, 159Alturas de Macchu Picchu 10, 15,

23, 27, 69, 108 Canción de gesta 24

Canto general 9, 10, 11, 13, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 64, 104

Cantos ceremoniales 24 Cien sonetos de amor 24, 30, 35 Estravagario 23 La baracarola 24 Las uvas y el viento 24, 30 Las piedras de Chile 24 Los versos del capitán 24 Memorial de isla negra 24 Navegaciones y regresos 27 Nuevas Odas elementales 24, 28, 29

Odas elementales 10, 21, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 74, 101, 102, 103, 114

Plenos poderes 24Residencia en la tierra 5, 12,17, 22,

72, 95, 97, 128, Tentativa del hombre infinito 9 Tercer libro de las odas 24, 29

Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada 38, 104, 122, 145

Nicholson, Melanie 78, 79, 88, 92, 93Novalis (Georg Freidrich Phillipp von

Hardenburg) 95

O’Hara, Edgar 118

INDEX 181

O’Hara, Frank 76Olivera Williams, María Rosa 118Ollé, Carmen 159Orozco, Olga 5, 6, 7, 49, 77–97, 99,

103, 119, 121, 131, 160, 162, 163 Cantos a Berenice 90, 91, 92 Desde lejos 79, 80, 81, 82, 83 En el revés del cielo 96 La oscuridad es otro sol 80, 86 Las muertes 78, 79, 82, 84, 96 La noche a la deriva 77, 94, 96

Los juegos peligrosos 79, 84, 86, 88, 89

Museo salvaje 80, 89 Mutaciones de la realidad 81, 92, 93Ortega, Julio 135, 138, 141, 145, 148,

150Ortiz, Juan L. 159Osorio, Nelson 3Oviedo, José Miguel 134Oviedo, Rocío 116

Pacheco, José Emilio 2, 5, 6, 7, 93, 99, 115, 116–135, 146, 159, 163

Ciudad de la memoria 132 Descripción de Piedra de sol 7

Desde entonces 119, 128, 129, 132, 134

El reposo del fuego 93, 116, 118, 119, 126, 132

El silencio de la luna 119 Irás y no volverás 125, 127, 129

Islas a la deriva 119, 121, 122, 128, 129, 132

La arena errante 132, 133 Los elementos de la noche 116

Los trabajos del mar 119, 123, 129, 132

Miro la tierra 131, 134 Tarde o temprano 123

No me preguntes cómo pasa el tiempo 116, 119, 121, 124, 127, 134

Siglo pasado 99, 125, 133, 134Pailler, Claire 164Palés Matos, Luis 9Parilla, Eduardo 35, 38Parra, Nicanor 1. 5. 6, 7, 10, 11, 21, 23,

29, 30–43, 45, 56, 62, 72, 74, 75, 77, 94, 107, 109, 115, 119, 135, 146, 159, 160, 164

Artefactos 42

Cancionero sin nombre 33 Canciones rusos 42

Chistes parRa desorientar a la policía 36, 42, 43

Ecopoemas 42 Hojas de Parra 42 El anti-Lázaro 42 La camisa de fuerza 38, 39, 42 La cueca larga 33, 42

Nuevos sermones y prédicas del Cristo de Elqui 42

Otros poemas, 36, 42, 56 Poemas de emergencia 42 Poemas para combatir la calvicie 42

Poemas y antipoemas 1, 6, 21, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 95, 107

Poesía política 42 Tres poemas 38

Sermones y prédicas del Cristo de Elqui 42

Versos de salón 36, 37, 38, 40, 42Pasolini, Pier Paolo 151Pasos, Joaquín 7Paz, Octavio 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12–21,

32, 33, 35, 38, 42, 46, 48, 74, 75, 78, 83, 93, 94, 98, 99, 116, 119, 142, 146, 159, 160, 161, 162

Blanco 16, 18, 19, 20 Corriente alterna 74 Días hábiles 17 Carta de creencia 19 El arco y la lira 15, 19, 74, 98 Hacia el comienzo 19 Homenaje y profanaciones 18 Ladera este 16, 18

Libertad bajo palabra 9, 15, 16, 18, 20, 38, 42, 48, 93, 142

Los hijos del limo 75 Luna silvestre 9, 12 Pasado en claro 14, 19 Piedra de sol 16, 17, 18, 19 Salamandra 18Pérez, Floridor 75Pérez-Luna, Elizabeth 37Perlongher, Nestor 162Perse, Saint-John (Alexis Saint Léger) 98Phillips, Allen, 45Phillips, Rachel 18Pichón Rivière, Marcelo 89Picón Garfield, Evelyn 2Piña, Cristina 79, 80, 84, 96

182 INDEX

Pineda Franco, Adela, 135Pinochet, Augusto 102Pizarnik, Alejandra 75, 103, 159poesía coloquial/conversacional 45, 62,

75, 95, 98, 114, 115, 116, 119, 122, 143, 153, 157, 160, 162

Postmodernism 164Pound, Ezra 7, 63, 76, 135Poust, Alice 56Pring-Mill, Robert 62, 63, 65, 71, 99Promis Ojeda, José 61

Quesada, Jaime 75Quiroga, Facundo 45

Rama, Angel 162Ramírez, Sergio 57Revista de Avance 4Ricoeur, Paul 46Riess, Frank 26, 27Rimbaud, Arthur 98, 121Rivera-Rodas, Oscar 2Roa Bastos, Augusto 97 Hijo de hombre 97Rodero Jesús 7Rodríguez, Iliana 105Rodríguez Alcalá, Hugo 134Rodin, Auguste 40Rojas, Gonzalo 30, 159Rojas, Waldo 75Rovira Soler, José Carlos 24Rowe, William 1, 32, 34, 62, 159Rulfo, Juan 97 Pedro Páramo 97Running, Thorpe 2, 74, 75, 130, 159,

162

Sabines, Jaime 159Sainz, Gustavo 144 Obsesivos días circulares 144Sainz de Medrano, Luis 24Saldías, Amanda 152Salmon, Russell 66, 67Salvador, Alvaro 1.Sandino, Augusto César 58, 59Sandoval, Pedro Sarmiento 161, 162Sanhuesa, Jorge 23Santí, Enrico Mario 9, 19Sarabia, Rosa 32, 66, 68, 159Sauter, Silvia 79, 88, 93, 97Scarano, Tommaso 45

Schopf, Federico 2, 30, 31, 38Schulman, Ivan 2Schwartz, Jorge, 3Segall, Brenda 12Shaefer, Claudia 68Shaw, Donald L. 23, 40, 46, 52Shelley, Percy Bysshe 79Shimose, Pedro 159Siebenmann, Gustav 3, 159Silva, Manuel 75Skármeta, Antonio 57 La insurrección 57Sobejano, Gonzalo 50Somoza, Anastasio 58, 59, 63Stafford, William 76Stoker, Bram 152 Dracula 152Suárez, Isidoro 45Sucre, Guillermo 2, 10, 16, 20, 33, 56Surrealism/Surrealist(s) 33

Tablada, José Juan 160Tacconi, María del Carmen 79, 80, 87Taravacci, Pietro 45Teitelboim, Volodia 8Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 68, 71Tenorio, Martha-Lilia 45Terán, Ana E. 159Torres, Daniel 115Torres Bodet, Jaime 3Torres de Peralta, Elba 80Torres Fierro Demestrio 88Treece, David 11, 75, 159Tzara, Tristan 119

Ulacia, Manuel 18ultraismo 8, 46, 128, 160Unamuno, Miguel de 20, 41, 91, 94, 99Underhill, Evelyn 78Urdanivia-Bertarelli, Eduardo 61, 143,

150, 152Uriarte, Iván 32Urondo, Francisco 11, 159Urrutia, Matilde 28

Valdés, Jorge 59, 62, 65Valdivieso, Antonio de 66Vallejo, César 1, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15,

36, 38, 69, 70, 72, 86, 97, 98, 101, 102, 106, 108, 127, 135España aparta de mí este cáliz 7, 70

INDEX 183

Los heraldos negros 39, 97, 101, 127, 135

Poemas humanos 7. 101 Trilce 5, 36, 69, 101, 102, 108Vanguard/Vanguardism/Vanguardists 1,

3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 20, 22, 23, 31, 33, 41, 45, 46, 76, 95, 97, 100, 107, 109, 120, 121, 124, 153, 160, 163

Vargas Llosa, Mario 116Verani, Hugo 3, 4, 5Vidal, Hernán 57Videla, Jorge Rafael 102Villegas, Juan 34Villena, Luis Antonio de 120Vitier, Cintio 159

Walker, William 58White, Stephen 56

Williams, William carlos 76, 124Williamson, Edwin 48Wilson, Jason 13, 14Woolf, Virginia 77 To the Lighthouse 77 Mrs Dalloway 78Wordsworth, William 79, 88, 139

Xirau, Ramón 7

Yeats, William Butler 121Yurkievich, Saúl 1, 7, 10, 12, 13, 15, 49,

114, 161

Zaid, Gabriel 134Zapata, Miguel Angel 155Zurita, Raúl 159

shaw, donald l. - [en] spanish american poetry after 1950

Documents

cardenal4 orozco

parra3 borges

after2 neruda

dalton5 pacheco

contents1 preliminaries