Book of the Month
  

March 2003

Mónica de la Torre & Michael Wiegers (eds): Reversible Monuments. Contemporary Mexican Poetry.
(Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA, 2002. 675pp, pb, $20). ISBN 1-55659-159-4.
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What a wonderful book. The crazy thing about it is that this selection of poets (mostly) born after 1950 does not even have an equivalent in Mexico itself, where anthologies still tend to be dominated by grandees from an earlier generation (which is not to imply that those grandees should be overlooked; it's just that their absence clears the way for the sheer range of contemporary writing in Mexico to be seen). And not only does it include Hispanic poets; there are also indigenous writers (in the Zapotec, Tzeltal and Mazatec languages – just three of the ninety-plus languages of Mexico and far from the most widely-spoken: that accolade goes to Nahuatl, the Aztec language, and the multiple varieties of Maya). The selection rules were that the poets should be more or less from the latter half of the century, and should have published two collections by the end of that century. This does mean that new rising stars are excluded, but you have to establish your parameters somewhere. Given these parameters, it's no surprise that most of the poets were born in the 1950s (the exceptions are Gerardo Deniz, b. 1934 but only active as a poet since the 70s; Gloria Gervitz, b. 1943; Elsa Cross, b. 1946; Francisco Hernández, b. 1946; Antonio Deltoro, b.1947; Malva Flores, b. 1961; María Baranda, b. 1962; *Juan Gregorio Regino, b. 1962; Josué Ramírez, b. 1963; Jorge Fernández Granados, b. 1965; Ernesto Lumbreras, b. 1966; *Natalia Toledo, b. 1967; and Heriberto Yépez, b. 1974). Asterisks indicate writers in indigenous languages.

The book will take some time to read thoroughly, and the comments here are offered by way of an introduction. It's ridiculous to cherry-pick poets from this enormous book, but I'm going to say right away that an enormous impression was made on me straight away by Gloria Gervitz, Claudia Hernández de Valle-Arizpe, Alfonso d'Aquino and Verónica Volkow; as I read more of the book, still others are making a similar impact, and I'm beginning to wonder now if Elsa Cross isn't one of the great living poets – this after having bought a number of her books on the strength of this volume. (That's an indication of this book's impact: I've since bought 23 volumes by poets included here... it's getting a tad expensive.) It's like having maps rewritten, or indeed written for the first time. Essential reading. The translations are mostly high-voltage affairs, reading like poems in English, although there are the inevitable occasional lapses into translationese.

I'm especially impressed what I've seen here of Verónica Volkow's Arcanos (Arcana), but quotation of those texts is difficult. Here's something instead, translation first, from her wonderful poem En el valle de Zapata (The Valley of Zapata; translation by Margaret Sayers Peden):

It's like shooting sparks
the campesinos here would say, "It's huixtleando"
in their Spanish borrowed from the past
where you hear a "vide" or "trujeron"
in the same breath with "Fab" or "Volkswagen",
words that have been added to their lives
like plastic bags and tin cans
in the dirt and rock
where women have knelt for centuries to knead maize,
Spanish paralyzed like misery,
abandoned by history,
also like misery,
where the passing of time merely means more
torn plastic and bottle caps
in mud much older than the streets.		 Está chispeando,
los campesinos aquí dirían, "está huixtleando"
con su español mantenido en el pasado
donde se escucha un "vide" o "trujeron"
junto con "fab" o "volkswagen",
palabras que se han añadido a sus vidas
como las bolsas de plástico o los botes de lata
en el piso de tierra y la piedra
donde las mujeres se hincan a amasar el maíz desde siglos,
español paralizado como la miseria,
abandonado por la historia
también como la miseria,
donde el paso de tiempo solo arroja
pedacitos de plástico, corcholatas
el el lodazal más antiguo que las calles.

Volkow is in her late 40s. There's also Gloria Gervitz, about ten years older, with her vast, ecstatic, oracular poem Migraciones (Migrations – over 200 pages long in its recent edition), which is rooted in Jewish history and lore, the experience of immigration and the diaspora. I was so excited by the selection here that I hunted down a copy of the latest edition of Migraciones from Mexico – it took weeks to arrive, and the shipping cost more than the cover-price, but it was worth it. How do you excerpt from something that big? I offer a few lines only, translated by Mark Schafer:

Spiral of echoes
Reverberation
We are what we think
One thought after another
The cranes return
open the silence with their wings
sudden white flowers in an empty sky
At midday in the cities
when heat surrounds the mountains' amber breath
always to the south, in that place where nothing happens
I prefer to cling to what I invent and not to know what really exists
better to dream that I am dead than to die of the many dreams that invent me

Espiral de ecos
Reverberación
Somos lo que pensamos
Pensamiento atrás del pensamiento
Regresan las gullas
abren con sus alas el silencio
instantáneas flores blancas en un cielo vacío
En las ciudades al mediodía
cuando el calor rodea la respiración ámbar de las montañas
siempre hacia el sur, allí donde no pasa nada
prefiero seguir aferrada a lo que invento y no entender lo que sí existe
mejor soñar que estoy muerta y no morirme de los tantos sueños que me inventan

Then there's Carmen Boullosa, best known as a novelist, represented here by a fascinating long poem in very long lines, Jardín eliseo (Elysian Garden), which gathers enormous cumulative power as it rushes forward; and Coral Bracho, whose narratives are suffused with a sense of surrealism and magic realism, becoming glorious celebratory hymns. You'll note that my enthusiasm has been piqued by the women poets here most of all, and it surprises me a little that it should be so to quite this degree — not because I'm surprised that women write well, but simply because Mexico has tended to be a somewhat macho literary society, and I just could not find any of these fine writers in Mexico City's bookstores a few years ago. (Obviously I looked in the wrong places...) One of the four indigenous poets is a woman too, the Zapoteca Natalia Toledo. I've no idea how the originals are voiced, but it's worth seeing what they look like on the page. The translation is by Alberto Ríos:

Zenaida

     (chicken vendor)

The heart envies
the jail that holds you.
My red-moon skin
is a crucifix that tangles up
with the threads of the hammock,
a sea-silk knot
given to solitude
like the hands of a prisoner.
Your confinement
is an olive-tree leaf
where God hid.

Zenaida

     (gunaa rutoo bere)

Rachelú ladxiduá
lidxiguiiba nundiibi lii,
quidilada beeu naxiná
nácani tapa ndaa ni ricaxhiidi ne doo xti guixhe.
Ti bieque naxiaa xti nisadó
ni rusiguenda ne guenda riuu xtubi.
Sica ti bataná miati riuu ndaani lidxi guiiba.
Ra ze gu yoolo cá lá
nácani ti bandaga guie yaase
ra bicachilú Diuxi.

 

Or there's María Baranda's engagement with a narrative voice that seems to rise up out of uncertain myths:

There was time for the audience of the fish,
and the Scribes of law and doctrine,
in the hidden cadence of the calm night,
appointed the gods of the waters
seeking alliance with the icicles,
the soft assault of prayers.

And there was also a time
in which all the beings
from cities and villages,
from the long stretches of fresh earth,
enchanted the fire, the water,
and the warm lineage of winds.

There, men of clay
painted the shuddering of the ground,
the courts of the desert,
the thresholds of daybreak,
the road of the dogs.

They built the walls of the ancient mountains
with distance tattooed upon their chests,
like a voice with no master or legend,
or like the silence carried by men from far away.

There the flowers shrieked, the roses
that loved only the red verge of that night.
And for them, the men of time
listened to the message brought by the birds
                       of the North
and the beautiful song of its dead: 

Tiempo hubo para la audiencia de los peces,
y los Escribas de la ley y la doctrina,
en la cadencia oculta de la noche calma,
dieron el nombramiento a los dioses de las aguas
buscando la alianza de los carámbanos,
la suave acometida de los rezos.

Y tiempo hubo también
en que todos los seres
de ciudades y villas,
de los largos tramos de tierra fresca,
hechizaron la lumbre, el agua
y el cálido linaje de los vientos.

Allí, los hombres de barro
pintaron el estremecimiento de los suelos,
los atrios del desierto,
los pórticos del alba,
la calle de los perros.

Leventaron los muros de antiguas montañas
con la lejana tatuada sobre el pecho,
como una voz sin dueño ni leyenda
o como el silencio que llevan los hombres de lejos.

Allí, gritaron las flores, las rosas
que sólo aman el rojo filo de esa noche.
Y para ellas, los hombres del tiempo,
escucharon el anuncio de los pájaros del norte,
el bello canto de sus muertos:

(from Epistle of the Shipwreck / Epístola del náufrago, translated by Mónica de la Torre).

Lastly, one familiar female name was Elsa Cross. Not familiar enough, though, to judge by what I've read here. Her somewhat forbidding academic background (PhD in Philosophy, Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Religion at Mexico City's Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) does not get in the way of a beautiful group of poems in which myth intrudes frequently. Poet as shaman, perhaps.

Of the male poets in this volume, I was already familiar with David Huerta, the son of Efrain Huerta, a much-respected figure from an earlier generation. (David's younger sister, Raquel Huerta Nava, is also a talented poet, incidentally.) He is a very fine writer, of a kind that we just don't have in English any more. Bardic in tone, his poems are full of a rampaging 'I', and he's capable of great throwaway lines:

There are women, a bad dream of mine,
dead inside me, tossed like heads of hair.		 Hay mujeres, mal sueño mío,
muertas en mí – arrojadas como cabelleras.

(from Thirteen Propositions against Trivial Love, translated by Mark Schafer)

The work of Alfonso d'Aquino (b.1959), much more radical in form, resists quotation here, especially the poem that rains letters across the page – HTML was not designed for that, unfortunately – but his work is worth hunting down in the original.

Then there's beautiful work by José Luis Rivas, who has translated the Collected Poems of T S Eliot as well as St John Perse, Rimbaud and Walcott's Omeros. It's very tempting to see the shade of Perse in these poems:

There is a litany that grazes the crests of wave after wave as they unfold,
like the headlong flight of the sandpipers following the north of the storm.

Hay una letanía que roza las sucesivas crestas de la ola en su repliegue,
como vuelo de correlimos presuroso siguiendo el norte del temporal.

(from Marea roja / Red Tide, translated by Alistair Reid)

I have to say there isn't bad poet in the book, which must be a first for an anthology. Some make more of an impact on me than others, and I've tried to list some of them here, as well as to emphasise those that have caused me excitement, that frisson of discovery - you know, the prickle at the back of the neck, the shiver up the spine, when you realise you've found a real poet, one that has something new to say, a special way of saying it, and has that magical hold over the reader that only a true poet can aspire to. There are a lot of them here.

I may add more to this appreciation as I go over the book again.

Part of the above text first appeared as a review in Shearsman 54.
Text copyright © Shearsman Books, 2003.
Note: This book actually appeared in 2002 in the USA, but I only got hold of a copy in March 2003, hence its selection at this late stage.

The Book of the Month series was founded on the Shearsman website at the end of April 2003, with the aim of highlighting certain significant publications that the editor has found particularly exciting. Books of the Month have been selected for earlier months of the year, retrospectively, and one of the 12 chosen volumes will be Book of the Year in December 2003.

Mar