Dreamers Rise
An Open Notebook
And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight
Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate.
 Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) | |||||
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A sort of electronic broadside, composed of rants and reviews, conceits and speculations, and whatever else feels the need to be here. Issued as chance will have it. Short subjects (II) (Catching up on some odds & ends) 
One of my favorite book covers; a photograph by Lee Marshall, design by Gertrude Huston, published by New Directions in 1973. (Huston was the wife of publisher James Laughlin.) This is the original paperback version, which has since been replaced; I don't recall if I've ever seen the hardcover, which may be even more striking if the image, which continues onto the spine in the paperback, also wraps around onto the back cover. And it's more than just visually stunning; it's also, I think, wonderfully appropriate for both the title and the matter of the book. Here's part of what Donald D. Walsh has to say in his translator's Introduction: The three volumes of Residencia en la tierra were published in 1933, 1935, and 1947. Many of the poems in the first two were written when Neruda was on consular duty in the Far East, and his sense of alienation and isolation is evident in the hermetic and surrealistic images in some of the pieces. … The third volume, Tercera residencia, published twelve years after the second, shows a poet deeply affected by the Spanish Civil War and the murder of his fellow poet Federico García Lorca. …The sense of dislocation, of residing in exile in an alien world, is more than a matter of geographical separation, I think, even if some of the poems are clearly situated in Asia. A poem like “Walking Around” (the title is in English in the original), which begins “Sucede que me canso de ser hombre” (“I happen to be tired of being a man”) has no geography; it's about being alive, and aware, on a strange, sad, and beautiful planet. Many of the poems are laments — for people, for a lost and irretrievable unity (there is even a poem called “Unidad”). The stark lettering of the cover, the mountains towering hazily in the background, evoke both a breathtaking beauty and an immensity that completely overpowers our own scale. In fact, unless the three faint vertical lines that rise from the water in the foreground are part of a weir or something like that, there is no sign of human activity in the photograph at all. Walsh's translation seems to me to be quite good. He wisely doesn't attempt to do too much; he restates Neruda's verse in elegant English, but for the most part he doesn't go out of his way to dress it up or to interpret the more hermetical passages (and there are quite a few of those). Neruda can be lyrical and welcoming and he can be gnarled and remote; these poems run the gamut but in general they run toward the more difficult side of his art. (I've never particularly warmed to the third volume, with its extended polemical poems and its “Song to Stalingrad.”) In a book that runs to 359 pages of bilingual facing text, I tend to come back, over and over again, to the same fifteen or so poems, though there are probably at least as many equally good that I've just never spent enough time with. My list would certainly include “Unity,” “Joachim's Absence,” “Madrigal Written in Winter,” “Slow Lament,” “Ars Poetica,” “Burial in the East,” “Single Gentleman,” “The Widower's Tango,” “Only Death,” “Walking Around,” “Ode with a Lament,” and a handful of others, among them the magnificent “Sonata and Destructions,” which ends like this: Acecho, pues, lo inanimado y lo doliente, August 28, 2007 [ Permalink ]
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