Shearsman 62: Belinda Cooke reviews Eugenio Montejo

Shearsman 62

Belinda Cooke

reviews Peter Boyle's translation of Eugenio Montejo

Eugenio Montejo: The Trees. Selected Poems 1967-2004
(translated by Peter Boyle; Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2004. 150pp, pb, £9.95 / $15.95).

Eugenio Montejo, born in Caracas in 1938, has published numerous collections of poetry in his own country and in 1998 received Venezuela's National Prize for Literature. However, in spite of his being one of Venezuela's leading poets, this collection is the first substantial translation of his work into English, and is thus long overdue. Montejo's poetry works powerfully on the emotions by way of its life-affirming qualities. He engages with both personal loss and the negative forces in Venezuela's history yet, ultimately his argument is pantheistic: individual death is insignificant in the face of our ongoing existence in a realm where past, present and future co-exist. The novel ways he reiterates this theme provides us with poetry comforting in the face our own mortality.

Montejo is fortunate in having the Australian poet Peter Boyle as his translator. Along with being personally extremely engaged with the poetry and the poet himself, he also avoids what for me are the greatest crimes of a translator: (a) the desire to reproduce the metre and rhyme of the original and (b) being straitjacketed by the literal meaning. As he says himself in his introduction, although he aims to keep close to the original, 'literal meaning is not always the most important sort of fidelity'. Throughout this collection, one encounters poetry in English. Boyle never misses a beat and at no point does one see him slipping unawares into 'translatese', clearly a poet at work.

Salt have provided a fine starting point for anyone who wishes to study Montejo's poetry further. Miguel Gomes, provides a scholarly introduction and a substantial bibliography. Gomes explores theories of time and space that are central to Montejo's work and places the poetry in its Venezuelan context as well as analysing some of the most powerful poems. My only reservation is that it is, perhaps, a little 'heavy' for the casual bookshop browser, and I would argue that Boyle's intro that follows is more personally engaging. This said I found Gomes' essay wonderful to go back to once I'd read the poems. Finally, the volume provides catchy extracts from Montejo's prose writings that provide insights into the nature of the writing process itself.

Montejo sees his poetry as 'a melodious chess game we play in solitude with God' but distances himself from the 'political ritual of churches', comments which capture the nature of a poetry that is spiritual but removed from any dogma. His subjects are wide-ranging: the essence of objects of the natural and domestic world, the dangers of consumerism, travel and cities, art, his relationship with family and culture. However, the backdrop is always the insignificance of our individual experience in contrast to life's continuity, our task simply to ensure 'that the song will endure'. As he says in 'September', 'life is more than life, only that counts'. In 'Earthdom' he expresses the need to be able to live with life's ambiguities:

To be here on earth; no more distant than a tree,
no more explicable:
thin in autumn, laden in summer
with what we are and are not, with shadow,
memory, longing, until the end

……… to be here on time at our table
even through the crumbs are bitter.

Elsewhere a sense of this belief in our endurance means there are no real endings as in 'The earth turned to bring us closer':

It didn't stop turning a single moment
as if so much love, so much that's miraculous
was only an adagio written long ago,
in the Symposium's score.

Death itself is frequently presented as a relatively minor event. In one poem he actually watches his own funeral, somewhat bemused. Similarly he presents his father apparently able to transcend his own death:

My dead father could scarcely believe that he was listening to them
but just then at the lightning's edge
his soul was moving
through distant stormclouds.

Objects both animate and inanimate are given fascinating treatment, repositories of all human experience: there are voices in the trees though the poet says 'I don't know what to do with this sharp deep sound'. This idea is captured wonderfully in 'Statue of Pessoa', 'the hours of mystery / folded over and over petrified in the marble'. In 'Table' he amusingly shows the table unable to act, 'What can a table do against the drift of things/against the atheism of all suppers, / of the last supper?' When he speaks of bird sound there is a Keatsian sense of its transcendental effect where the rooster's sound is the bird and more, 'Once again the song is outside, scattered in the black wind'.

His journeys through cities also reflect this ability to somehow 'cheat' time, as in 'Lisbon' where he feels the presence of those who have travelled before and those to come:

There's a shred of its twilight in the shadow
of whoever's just crossed its streets,
some shred that accompanies him through the world,
then slips away, its footsteps unrecognised.

Even when he speaks of lovers 'it was the earth which loved itself in them' so they 'would not be two corpses'. Thus there is a continuing interplay between the animate and inanimate in order to break down borders of time and space.

Finally though, if anything is outside all of this experience it must be the poem itself, captured in this glorious definition of what poetry is:

Poetry crosses the earth alone,
takes its voice from the suffering of the world
and asks for nothing—
not even words.

Arriving from a great distance at any hour.
it gives no warning.
It holds the key to the door.
As it enters it stops to gaze about at us.
Later it will open its hand and give us
a flower or a pebble, something secret
but so intense the heart beats
too fast. And we wake.

The two prose pieces that finish off the volume offer insights into the nature of writing poetry. The first, 'The white workshop' is a wonderful meandering through the notion of 'workshop', whether it is making bread, poetry in isolation, or the value of writers' workshops. In the process, with sensuous immediacy, he presents the reader with his memories of his father's bakery where he grew up. The second piece, 'Fragments', provides a collection of diverse observations on the writing of poetry. Here is one I particularly liked:

The poet tries to read God in his original language, convinced from birth that the foreign translations are of litte use.

If there can be said to be a weakness in Montejo's poetry it is that it seems driven by a single idea—how the individual's experience becomes just a fragment of some greater Whole. Yet it is his versatility as he engages with the theme that makes him such a rewarding poet, well represented by this substantial volume by Salt.