Manifesto Pau-Brazil 4

Houve um fenômeno de democratização estética nas cinco partes sábias do mundo. Instituíra-se o naturalismo. Copiar. Quadros de carneiros que não fosse lã mesmo, não prestava. A interpretação no dicionário oral das Escolas de Belas Artes queria dizer reproduzir igualzinho… Veio a pirogravura. As meninas de todos os lares ficaram artistas. Apareceu a máquina fotográfica. E com todas as prerrogativas do cabelo grande, da caspa e da misteriosa genialidade de olho virado – o artista fotógrafo.

(It created the phenomenon of aesthetic democratization in the five corners of the world. Naturalism instituted itself. To copy. Pictures of sheep that did not equal wool, did not render. The interpretation of the unwritten dictionary of the School of Beautiful Arts wanted to reproduce small copies… Then the pirogravura arrived. All the girls at home became artists. Then photography appeared. And with all the attributes of big hair, lice, and the mysterious ingenuity of the inverted eye – the artist-photographer.)

[The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Portuguese: Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, UFRJ) is the largest federal university of Brazil. It was founded in 1932, originally as “University of Brazil” (Universidade do Brasil), by gathering a number of previously autonomous institutions of higher education.By then, Rio was capital of Brazil and it was part of the government strategy to have qualified professionals in the country’s new economy. Some of the faculties and schools which form UFRJ date back to colonial times, such as the Escola de Belas Artes (School of Fine Arts) and the Faculdade de Medicina (Medical College). – i havent yet found the sigficance or influence of the School during colonial times –

Could also refer to the Escola de Belas Artes in Lisbon and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in France, promoting the Beaux-Arts tradition, and in architectur / urban planning particularly.]

[pirogravura: engraving device that uses fire to burn images onto wood. Not sure about its history in Brazil and whether or not it is a gendered art]

[no idea about the reference to big hair and lice. a portrait of someone particular?]

Na música, o piano invadiu as saletas nuas, de folhinha na parede. Todas as meninas ficaram pianistas. Surgiu o piano de manivela, o piano de patas. A pleyela. E a ironia eslava compôs para a pleyela. Stravinski.

(In music, the piano invaded the naked parlors, with a calendar on the wall. All girls became pianists. Then the pianola arrived, the piano of legs. The pleyela. And the Slavic irony composed for the pleyela. Stravinsky.)

[The pianola is a type of piano that plays music without the need for a human pianist. Instead, it is moved by mechanical, pneumatic or electrical means.

The Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky, spent fifteen years in close contact with pianolas of different kinds. He composed an original study for the instrument, planned it as part of the accompaniment to his ballet, “Les Noces”, and actually rewrote most of his major early works especially for piano roll.

Pianolas were well-known in Russia before the revolution, but it seems likely that Stravinsky first became aware of their real musical potential in Berlin in late 1912, where he joined Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes on tour, for the opening of “Petrushka” on 4 December. Arnold Schoenberg was in the audience that night, and was impressed, and four days later he invited Stravinsky to a performance of “Pierrot Lunaire” in the Choralion Saal at Bellevuestrasse 4. The Choralion Company was the Aeolian Company’s subsidiary in Germany, and its showrooms were full of pianolas. This visit clearly caused Stravinsky to think of using roll-operated instruments for his own music, because within a few days he had received a telegram from Diaghilev, reassuring him that pianola arrangements were not necessary for the rehearsals of the Rite of Spring, and a tart reply from the Parisian agency that supplied repetiteurs for the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, that its pianists were quite capable of mastering the complexities of his music.

A few years later, with his thoughts turning to “Les Noces”, he enquired of the Aeolian Company in London whether it would be possible to perforate pianola rolls for the accompaniment, and as a result of this contact, he decided to write a series of studies for the Pianola. In fact, he only completed one study, known nowadays as the “Etude pour Pianola”, written in 1917, but published and first performed in 1921.

“Les Noces” was one of the central works of Stravinsky’s life. It combined his feelings towards the Russia that he had left, and that had changed for ever, his religious beliefs, the musical discoveries that he had made as he travelled Europe, and not least his sense of humour. Initially he thought of arranging it for large orchestra and chorus, but he discarded this version in favour of a much more unusual orchestration. The full title of the work is actually “Svadebka” in Russian, “Les Noces Villageoises” in French, and is best translated as “The Village Wedding” in English. It is a wedding, not of the rich bourgeoisie, but of peasant folk, with all the excitement and mishaps that this entails.

So in trying to represent this peasant quality in music, Stravinsky combined a pianola, played in a deliberately mechanical way, two Hungarian cimbaloms, a harmonium, and a great deal of percussion.

During the 1920s, the firm of Pleyel, which was the major musical establishment in Paris, furnished Stravinsky with a studio in its headquarters in the rue Rochechouart. He was able to use this as an office, a studio for composition, a workshop for creating new piano roll versions of most of his early works, and as a pied-à-terre for entertaining guests, not least his future wife, Vera Soudeikina. In close co-operation with Jacques Larmanjat, Pleyel’s head of music rolls, he made new arrangements of Firebird, Petrushka, the Rite of Spring, the Song of the Nightingale, Pulcinella, Les Noces, and a host of smaller works.]

Manifesto Pau-Brazil 3

Uma sugestão de Blaise Cendrars : – Tendes as locomotivas cheias, ides partir. Um negro gira a manivela do desvio rotativo em que estais. O menor descuido vos fará partir na direção oposta ao vosso destino.

(Blaise Cendrars’s suggestion : – observe the flooding locomotive, when you leave. A crazy black handle diverts the rotating
line to stay. A minor lapse will make you leave in the opposing direction of your destination.)

[During this time period, the state of São Paulo was at the forefront of Brazil’s economic, political, and cultural life. Known colloquially as “locomotive pulling the 20 empty boxcars” (a reference to the 20 other states) and still today Brazil’s industrial and commercial center, São Paulo led this trend toward industrialization due to the foreign revenues flowing into the coffee industry.]

[Blaise Cendrars: born Frédéric Louis Sauser (1887 – 1961) in Switzerland, moved to Paris (involved with the parisian avant-garde – particularly Apolinaire – and spent many years travelling.

Cendrars’s first contacts with Brazil occurred in 1923, through his friend Fernand Léger, Cendrars met the Brazilian painter Tarsila do Amaral, who was in Paris studying with the French cubist constructivists accompanied by her lover, Oswaldo de Andrade, they became friends and hosted dinner parties in do Amaral’s studio where guests included both the major French modernists of the day and the rising generation of Brazilian writers, composers, and artists (Sergio Milliet, Anita Malfatti, Vicente do Rego Monteiro, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Victor Brecheret).

According to some sources it was through Oswaldo de Andrade that Cendrars made his first contact with Paolo Prado, the grand mécène of Brazilian modernism. Prado, who had studied literature in Paris prior to World War I, met regularly with Cendrars to discuss modernism and Brazilian culture at the Librairie Chadenat, a bookstore specializing in the history of the Americas located on the Quai des Grands Augustins.

Cendrars visited Brazil a few months later after securing assignments as a journalist from two French newspapers. After his arrival in Rio on 5 February 1924, Cendrars spent the next six months living with the Prados in São Paulo, traveling through the interior with groups of Brazilian painters and writers, and basking in the sun at his new acquaintances’ coffee plantations or fazendas.

Cendrars gave a lecture in 1924 (the same year as this manifesto, called “Modern Poets in The Totality of Contemporary Life” – i have not yet located this essay, but will post it when i do. Also, Cendrars wrote a poem called “The Metaphysics of Coffee” in 1927, which i hope to also post when i find it.]

Contra o gabinetismo, a prática culta da vida. Engenheiros em vez de jurisconsultos, perdidos como chineses na genealogia das idéias.

(Against gabinetismo, the cultured experience of life. Engineers instead of lawyers, absent like Chinese in the genealogy of ideas.)

[gabinetismo: ? – must be like bourgouesie…]

[Engineers: Perhaps refers to the valorization of industrialism in Brazil (and around the world) at this time.

Long before the first revolts of the urban middle classes to seize power from the coffee oligarchs in the 1920s, however, Brazil’s intelligentsia, influenced by the tenets of European positivism, along with farsighted agro-capitalists, dreamt of forging a modern, industrialized society—the “world power of the future”. This sentiment would later be nurtured throughout the Vargas years and under successive populist governments before the 1964 military junta repudiated Brazilian populism. Although such lofty visionaries were somewhat ineffectual under the Old Republic (1889-1930), the structural changes in the Brazilian economy opened up by the Great War would strengthen these demands.

The outbreak of World War I was the turning point for the dynamic urban sectors. Temporarily abating Britain’s overseas economic connections with Brazil, the war was an impetus for domestic manufacturing. In time, these structural shifts helped to increase the ranks of the new urban middle classes. Meanwhile, the Brazil’s manufactures and those employed by them enjoyed these gains at the expense of the agrarian oligarchies. World demand for coffee, a nonessential though habit-forming product declined sharply. Sixteen years later, world coffee demand would plunge even more precipitously with the Great Depression. Valorization, government intervention to maintain coffee prices by withholding stocks from the market or restricting plantings, would then prove unsustainable. By World War I, the reinstatement of government price supports would just foreshadow the vulnerability of Brazil’s coffee oligarchy to the Great Depression.

Paradoxically, economic crisis spurred industrialization. The depressed coffee sector freed up the capital and labor needed for manufacturing finished goods. The state of São Paulo, with its relatively large capital-base, large immigrant population from Southern and Eastern Europe, and wealth of natural resources, led the trend, eclipsing Rio de Janeiro as center of Brazilian industry . Industrial production, though concentrated in light industry (food processing, small shops, and textiles) doubled during the war, and the number of enterprises (which stood at about 3,000 in 1908) grew by 5,940 between 1915 and 1918]

A língua sem arcaísmos, sem erudição. Natural e neológica. A contribuição milionária de todos os erros. Como falamos. Como somos.

(Language without archaisms, without erudition. Natural and neological. A millionaire’s contribution of all errors. How we speak. How we are.)

Não há luta na terra de vocações acadêmicas. Há só fardas. Os futuristas e os outros.

(It does not fight in the land of academic vocation. It only has uniforms. The futurists and the others.)

[fardas: might also be costume?]

Uma única luta – a luta pelo caminho. Dividamos: Poesia de importação. E a Poesia Pau-Brasil, de exportação.

(A single fight – a fight for passage. We are divided: Poetry of importation. And Wood-Brazil Poetry, of exportation.)

Manifesto Pau-Brazil 2

A nunca exportação de poesia. A poesia anda oculta nos cipós maliciosos da sabedoria. Nas lianas da saudade universitária.

(The non-exportation of poetry. Poetry walks mystically in the malicious vines of knowledge. In the vines of academic desire.

Mas houve um estouro nos aprendimentos. Os homens que sabiam tudo se deformaram como borrachas sopradas. Rebentaram.

(Yet it possesses explosions of understanding. The men who supposedly knew everything strained like balloons. They ruptured.)

[borrachas sopradas: lit. rubbers blown. at first i thought, “blown tires/wheels” – then settled on balloons for the explosion!]

A volta à especialização. Filósofos fazendo filosofia, críticos, critica, donas de casa tratando de cozinha.

(The return to specialization. Philosophers making philosophy, critics, criticism, mistresses deal with the kitchen.)

A Poesia para os poetas. Alegria dos que não sabem e descobrem.

(Poetry for the poets. Joy of what they do not know and discover.)

Tinha havido a inversão de tudo, a invasão de tudo : o teatro de tese e a luta no palco entre morais e imorais. A tese deve ser decidida em guerra de sociólogos, de homens de lei, gordos e dourados como Corpus Juris.

(It possessed the inversion of everything, the invasion of everything : the theatre of thesis and the on-stage fight between the moral and immoral. The thesis shall be resolved by war with sociologists, men of law, fat and golden like Corpus Juris.)

[Corpus Juris: body of law: It was originally used by the Romans for several of their collections of all the laws in a certain field.]

Ágil o teatro, filho do saltimbanco. Agil e ilógico. Ágil o romance, nascido da invenção. Ágil a poesia.

(Agile theatre, son of saltimbanco. Attentive and illogical. Agile romance, born of invention. Agile poetry.)

[Saltimbanco:lit, acrobat. Also, a dance Cirque de Soleil, that is a celebration of life. Conceived as an antidote to the violence and despair so prevalent in the 20th century, this phantasmagoria offers up a new vision of urban life, overflowing with optimism and joy. Saltimbanco is anything but linear; rather, it is a kaleidoscope, a whirlwind, an adventure in which anything can happen. Saltimbanco has its own special language, and its spirit is conveyed through voice, movement and music.

The framework of Saltimbanco, the characters, like all human beings, are born with nothing. These are the Worms, at the very base of society. All similar in appearance yet different one from the other, they must with time adapt themselves to their environment. Thus, as the show goes on, they embody various types of social characters, hoping to one day accede to the rank of Baroque, a cast of visionaries. The Baroques constitute the most important family in the world of Saltimbanco. Armed with a deeply perceptive vision of the world and sleeping under bridges, the Baroques, throughout the fable, reveal the countless contradictions of our civilization where imagination has not yet taken power.]

A poesia Pau-Brasil. Ágil e cândida. Como uma criança.

(Wood-Brazil poetry. Agile and pure. Like a child.)

Manifesto Pau-Brazil 1

In the last week or so, I’ve been working to translate and annotate two manifestos by Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade: “Manifesto Pau- Brasil” (1924) and “Manifesto Antropófago” (1928). I do not read Portuguese, nor do I know anything about Brazil’s history – two painful reasons to undertake this task. Both manifestos present important post-colonial positions and this is simply a modest effort to “digest” them more thoroughly. However, I will not include an interpreation of the text until i complete this first task. So, if you have an interpretation of any of the paragraphys, please comment! I will be presenting what I find little by little on this blog and I hope if anyone has any advice or info or sources or suggestions to please let me know (this is a work in progress).

note: Portuguese text (in bold) will be followed by English translation in parenthesis, and then annotation in brackets and italics. This will continue paragraph by paragraph. (this post only covers the first 4 paragraphs).

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MANIFESTO PAU-BRASIL

(Manifesto Wood-Brazil)

[Brazilwood is a common name for wood which yields a red dye called brazilin, which oxidizes to brazilein. The name is said to come from brasa, Portuguese for “ember”, owing to its red hue.

Portuguese explorers used the name Pau-Brasil for such a wood from a South American tree, which led to the name Brazil for its land of origin. The orange-red wood, which takes a high shine, is also used for making violin bows, and is the premier wood for that purpose.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, brazilwood was highly valued in Europe and quite difficult to get. Coming from Asia, it was traded in powder form and used as a red dye in the manufacture of luxury textiles, such as velvet, in high demand during the Renaissance, When Portuguese navigators discovered present-day Brazil, on April 22, 1500, they immediately saw that brazilwood was extremely abundant along the coast and in its hinterland, along the rivers. In a few years, a hectic and very profitable operation for felling and transporting by shipping all the brazilwood logs they could get was established, as a crown-granted Portuguese monopoly.

Excessive exploitation (it has been estimated that in the last two centuries, more than 50 million trees were destroyed) finally led to a steep decrease in the number of brazilwood trees in the 18th century, causing the collapse of this economic activity. Presently, the species is practically extinct in most parts of the country.]

A poesia existe nos fatos. Os casebres de açafrão e de ocre nos verdes da Favela, sob o azul cabralino, são fatos estéticos.

(Poetry exists in the facts. The saffron and ochre shacks in the greens of the Favela, under the blue cabralino, healthy aesthetic facts.)

[1. Favela: Commonly used in Brazil to describe the shantytowns primarily on the hills of Rio de Janeiro. The term favela comes from a species of plants that often grows on the hillsides of Rio de Janeiro, where freed slaves first established a community of squatters in the 1890s.

A favela is fundamentally different from a slum or tenement, primarily in terms of its origin and location. While slum quarters in other Latin American countries are generally started as poorer residents from the countryside come to larger cities in search of work, favelas are unique in that they were created as a large population becomes displaced. Another important distinction is that in a typical favela there is an anomalous form of social life that diverts from mainstream culture and way-of-life. Such a state of things is recognised as early as 1940.

It is generally agreed that the first favela was created in November 1897 when 20,000 veteran soldiers were brought to Rio de Janeiro and left with no place to live. The former soldiers used to compare the shanty towns to the favela plant because, just as the thorny plant, they managed to carve their meagre existences in spite of unfavourable conditions. Some of the older favelas were originally started as quilombos (independent towns for refugee African slaves) among the hilly terrain of the area surrounding Rio, which later grew as slaves were liberated in 1888 with no place to live. Most of the current favelas began in the 1970s, as a construction boom in the richer neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro initiated a rural exodus of workers from poorer states in Brazil. Heavy flooding in the low-lying slum areas of Rio also forcibly removed a large population into favelas, which are mostly located on Rio’s various hillsides.

Shanty towns are units of irregular self-constructed housing that are occupied illegally. They are usually on lands belonging to third parties, and most often located on the urban periphery. Residences are built without a license and with little or no sanitation. Favelas are often characterized by an almost total absence of numbered streets, sanitation networks, electricity, telephone service, or plumbing. Most favelas are inaccessible by vehicles, the houses being randomly built, circulation provided by stairways, passageways or simply tracks.

These areas of irregular and poor quality housing are often crowded onto hillsides. Landslides in such areas, caused primarily by heavy rainfall but worsened by deforestation, are frequent. In recent decades, favelas have been troubled by drug-related crime and gang warfare.

The most well known favelas are those in and around Rio de Janeiro, where they provide a dramatic illustration of the gap between poverty and wealth, positioned side-by-side with the luxurious apartment buildings and mansions of Rio’s elite. Rocinha, Pavãozinho, Parada de Lucas, Cidade de Deus, Maré and Turano are some of the most famous Rio’s favelas.

The 2002 film City of God placed a spotlight on favelas]

[2. I cannot locate the word “cabralino” – since Cabral is a common name, this brought two things – the first: Pedro Álvares Cabral, explorer who “discovered” Brazil in 1500. the second: Sacadura Cabral (1881-1924), a Portuguese aviation pioneer who, together with Gago Coutinho (1869-1959), was the first to cross the South Atlantic Ocean by air in 1922, from Lisbon, in Portugal, to Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil. This coincides with the date of the manifesto, and could mean “little plane” against the blue sky. Or, something else entirely…]

O Carnaval no Rio é o acontecimento religioso da raça. Pau-Brasil. Wagner submerge ante os cordões de Botafogo. Bárbaro e nosso. A formação étnica rica. Riqueza vegetal. O minério. A cozinha. O vatapá, o ouro e a dança.

(Carnaval in Rio is the religious event of the people. Wood-Brazil. Wagner drowns before the troupes of Botafogo. Barbarian and ours. A rich ethnic formation. Vegetal wealth. The mineral. The kitchen. Vatapa, the gold and the dance.)

[1. The Brazilian Carnival is an annual celebration held forty days before Easter marking the start of Lent. Despite the Catholic inspiration, Brazilian Carnival is celebrated more as a profane feast than a religious event. Its origins are European, by a kind of carnival called Introito (Latin for entrance). The entrudo, as it was known in Brazil, could have been characterized mainly as a joke: to throw water (and later, other things) at other people, to “purify the body”.

In the late 19th Century, the cordões (literally laces in Portuguese) were introduced in Rio de Janeiro, which consisted of groups of people who would walk on the streets playing music and dancing. The cordões were ancestors of the modern samba schools.

The blocos (blocks), another name for the cordões, are some of the current representations of the popular Brazilian Carnival. They are formed by people who dress in costumes according to certain themes, or to celebrate the carnival in specific ways. The schools of samba are truly organizations that work all year in order to prepare themselves for the samba schools parade.]

[2. Botafogo is a neighborhood in Rio]

[3. vatapa: fish stew]

Toda a história bandeirante e a história comercial do Brasil. O lado doutor, o lado citações, o lado autores conhecidos. Comovente. Rui Barbosa: uma cartola na Senegâmbia. Tudo revertendo em riqueza. A riqueza dos bailes e das frases feitas. Negras de Jockey. Odaliscas no Catumbi. Falar difícil.

(All colonial and commercial history of Brazil. The side doctor, the side citations, the side known authors. Impressive. Rui Barbosa: a top hat in Senegambia. Everything reverts to wealth. The wealth of balls and made phrases. Slave traders. Odaliscas in Catumbi. Difficult speech.)

[1. bandeirante: At first, settlers tried to enslave the Indians as labor to work the fields. (The initial exploration of Brazil’s interior was largely due to para-military adventurers, the Bandeirantes, who entered the jungle in search of gold and Indian slaves.) However the Indians were found to be unsuitable as slaves, and so the Portuguese land owners turned to Africa, from which they imported millions of slaves.]

[2. Rui Barbosa, writer and liberal politician who played a part in the proclamation of the Brazilian Republic in 1889 and was elected Judge of the Permanent Court of International Justice in 1921.]

[3. Senegambia: Senegambia, a political unit composed of Senegal and Gambia, was created by dueling French and English colonial forces in the region. Competition in this region begins between the French and the English in this region in the 1500s when both begin to establish trading centers in the region – with French centered in the Senegal River and Cape Verde region and the English on the Gambia (although they was some overlapped in area of influence) (Richmond 176). This region becomes more important for both growing empires because West Africa allowed for a convenient way station for trade between Europe at their American colonies and a warehouse for the African Slave Trade. Most slaves in Brazil were imported from Senegambia.]

[4. “Negras de Jockey” literally means “blacks of Jockey” – which I perhaps mistakenly translate as “slave traders.” Jockey could also refer to the Jockey clubs in Brazil, Negras could either be black jockeys, or a last name of a Jockey…]

[5. Odaliscas: eastern belly dancers that worked in a harem]

[6. Catumbi: a poor neighborhood in downtown Rio]

O lado doutor. Fatalidade do primeiro branco aportado e dominando politicamente as selvas selvagens. O bacharel. Não podemos deixar de ser doutos. Doutores. País de dores anônimas, de doutores anônimos. O Império foi assim. Eruditamos tudo. Esquecemos o gavião de penacho.

(The side doctor. Fatality of the first white men arriving and politically dominating the indigenous people. The graduate. We cannot escape from being learned. Doctors. Country of anonymous pains, of anonymous doctors. The Empire was thus. We rationalized everything. We forgot the gavião de penacho.)

[1. More colonial history in relation to the “Fatalidade” and Empire: It is widely accepted that Brazil was discovered by Europeans on April 22, 1500, by Pedro Álvares Cabral, but there are controversies. The first permanent Portuguese settlement—São Vicente, a coastal town just south of the Tropic of Capricorn—was founded in 1532. The Dutch also established themselves in Brazil, around the city of Recife in the northeast corner of the country, in the 1630s. The Dutch were driven out of Brazil by the Portuguese in 1654.

From the 16th to the 18th centuries, Brazil was a colony of Portugal, exploited mainly for brazilwood at first, and later for sugarcane and, in the 18th century, for gold. During this period most natives were exterminated, pushed out of the way or assimilated, and large numbers of African slaves were brought in. On September 7, 1822, the country declared its independence from Portugal and became a constitutional monarchy, the Empire of Brazil. A military coup in 1889 established a republican government. The country has been nominally a democratic republic ever since, except for three periods of overt dictatorship (1930–1934, 1937–1945, and 1964–1985).]

[2. bacharel also means bachelor/graduate, but in the context, graduate seems to fit.]

[3. “selvas selvagems” literally means: jungle barbarians.]

[4.Eruditamos: seems to come from erudite: learned, scholarly – so as a verb, I thought rationalize / analyze / or academicized…any suggestions?]

[5. gavião de penacho: one of the most majestic birds in Brazil. A powerful hunting bird that is now an endangered species because of deforestation and trafficking of wild birds. Penacho means plume: the gaviao has a plume of feathers which give it a regal quality, and perhaps a reference to both indigenous ritual dress and Carnaval.]

"the memory of another light"

Who hears them? Who
gathers them, thus,
cruel, shapeless,
in their pure shells?

[“Words”]

From the Portuguese poet Eugenio de Andrade, whose selected poetry “Forbidden Words” I’ve been reading the past couple days. His work reminds me of Pessoa’s Alberto Caeiro – both touch perception through sensation. Eugenio’s work is grounded in the sensual real, even when it becomes abstact, it treats the idea as a sensation – language itself become sensation.

See how suddenly the sky closes
over the dunes adn boats,
and each of us turns and fixes
his eyes on the other,
and see how the last light slowly
drips from them onto the sand.

What then shall we say? Could it be words,
this that rises to the lips?
Words? This sound so light
that we can hear the day as it departs?
Words, or might it still be light?

Words, no. Who could know them?
It was just the memory of another light.
Perhaps not even light, just another gaze.

[“What then shall we say?”]

Reminds me of Rilke from the first elegy: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierachies?” This desire and non-desire for the other world creates a subtext for many of Eugenio’s poems – a quality found in Whitman also (Eugenio has a few poems where he mentions Whitman explicitly/implicitly):

In this land
where one dies of an incomplete heart
I will leave just three or four syllables
of quicklime beside the water.

[…]

How strange my task
to search close to the ground
for aleaf between the dust and sleep
moist still from the early sun.

[“Three of Four Syllables”]

His poems develop a quiet sensationism that infuse the images and the ideas. The words themselves have an amazing plasticity despite their absolute dependence on the signified sensation. In the poem “The Fruit”, he writes:

This is how I want the poem to be:
trembling with light, coarse with earth,
murmuring with waters and with wind.

So much depends on both the trembling and the coarseness. The trembling occurs because words are woven with light – “there at the border of my verse” [“Post Scriptum”] where also the coarseness of the earth becomes sensation and the poem emerges from this border – tenuous, blossoming under its own weight:

Between a white leaf and the sharp edge of a gaze
the mouth grows old.

Upon the word
night approaches the flame.

This is how one dies you said
this is how one dies says the wind, its touch upon your waist.

At the porous frontier of silence
the hand gives light to an unfinished land.

Endlessly.

[“Upon the word”]

"creators of the invisible change"

Also just finished reading Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s Selected Poems.

Born in Irkutsk to a family of Ukrainian exiles in 1933, he moved to Moscow as a boy and attended the Gorky Institute of Literature. Yevtushenko was one of politically active authors during the Khrushchev Thaw. In 1961 he produced the poem “Babi Yar,” in which he attacked Soviet indifference to the Nazi massacre of the Jews of Kiev in September 1941. The poem was widely circulated in samizdat but a typical Soviet policy regarding the Holocaust was to present it as atrocities against Soviet citizens, not acknowledging the genocide of the Jews and this politically incorrect poem was published in the state-controlled Soviet press only in 1984. In the same year that he released Babi Yar, he also published “The Heirs of Stalin,” claiming that the legacy of Stalinism still dominated the country. Published originally in Pravda, the poem was only republished a quarter of a century later, under the more liberal leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1963, Yevtushenko, already an international literary sensation, was banned from traveling outside the Soviet Union; the ban was lifted in 1965.
In the post-Soviet era, Yevtushenko has been active promoting the works of former dissident poets, environmental causes, and the memory of victims of the Soviet Gulags. [from Wikipedia]

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His most important poem, titled “Zima Junction” (1956) records his return to his childhood home in Siberia after a long absence in Moscow (Zima is a small town near the trans-Siberian railway). The poem is a powerful narrative of his memories and of his experience of remarking the areas of his memories. The poem is pastoral at times, self questioning at others, and documentarian (major portions of the poem are quotes from different people he meets there – their voices of struggle rising powerfully from the narrative creates an ethic not only of personal memory but of the responsibility of the artist to remember the voices of those who suffered – the poet as witness. The narrator becomes a kind of Odysseus entering the underworld, the dead requiring of him and recovered through story.

“There were so many hardships
anxieties of survival,
however much they bent their labouring backs,
it always turned out not be them
who ate the bread, it was the bread that ate.
Threshing, reaping, cleaning-out,
in the fields, in the house, in the barns.
There’s truth enough where there’s enough bread,
see to the bread and truth sees to itself.”

“I grew up
and at hide-and-seek
uncatchable whatever guard you kept
we peered out from the barn through bullet-holes.
There was war at that time;
Hitler not far from Moscow.”

“I couldn’t sleep.
Texture of dark
showed faces faintly. Woman’s voice. Whisper.
I strained my ears to listen.”

~

Reading “Zima Junction” with Cesaire’s “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land” – which also explores a return to a home affected by imperial power. Yevtushenko is much more of a journalist and documentarian than Cesaire. Cesaire is more certain and aggressive, whereas Yev. is more searching and receptive. Cesaire’s use of surrealism proposes that the colonized can find agency in decolonizing the unconsciousness – whereas Yev. is more interested in the use of memory – that remembrance itself is a political act.

KOSHUETI

I AM inside the church of Koshueti:
on a wall without dogmatic loyalty
unruly saints and questionable angels
tower upwards in front of me.
And I the savage and the unawakened
can understand hiding my awkwardness
below the painted wall of the vast church,
this picture is not part of this building —
but this building is part of this picture.
The land of Lado Gudiashvili drew
the guilty on it, not the sanctified,
neither in ridicule nor in detraction
being himself tarred with the same brush.
He was God and guilty. He was angel and devil.
Writers of poems, painters of pictures,
all we creators of the invisible change,
there are so many walls we have painted
like this one in the church at Koshueti.
We painters of icons
have had amusement from the heads of the great,
we were urbane enough to get commissions
and put a bite into their execution,
and whatever the risk and whatever
the suffering we painted faithfully
the godlike humans and the human gods.

A Precarious Guest

Just finished reading the Selected Poems of Saint-John Perse (1887-1975). He was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, as Alexis Leger. His father, a lawyer, had lived in Guadeloupe since 1815. The family divided their time between the two family plantations, one for coffee, one for sugar. In 1897, with the election of the first native Guadeloupan president, Hégésippe Légitimus, the Legers returned to France. He was part of the Foreign Ministry, the government press corps, secretary of the French Embassy in Peking, and eventually became the general secretary of the Foreign Ministry. His anti-nazi stance before WW2 resulted in the Vichy government removing him from office and revoking his citizenship. He remained in the united states for many years, receiving the Nobel Prize in 1960.

His poems are somewhere between Whitman and Rimbaud; long, organic, heiratic sentences that sometimes create ecstatic/illuminated paragraphs and unfolding clauses:

“. . . New lands, out there, in their very lofty perfume of humus and foliage,
New lands, out there, under the lengthening of this world’s widest shadows,
All the land of trees, out there, on a background of black vines, like a Bible of shadow and freshness in the unrolling of this world’s most beautiful texts.”

[“Winds”]

” Stranger, on all the shores of the world, without audience or witness, life to the ear of the West a shell that has no memory:
Precarious guest on the outskirts of our cities, you shall not cross the threshold of Lloyd’s where your word has no currency and your gold no standard. . . .
‘I shall live in my name,’ was your answer to the questionnaire of the port authority. And at the money-changer’s you have nothing to show but that which is suspect,
Like those great iron coinages laid bare by lightning.”

[“Exile”]

” many things on the earth to hear and to see, living things among us!
celebrations of open air festivals for the name-day of great trees adn public rites in honor of a pond; consecration of black stones perfectly round, discovery of springs in dead places, dedication of cloths held up on poles, at the gates of the passes, and loud acclamations under the walls for the mutilation of adults in the sun, for the publication of the bride-sheets!
[…]
ha! all conditions of men in their ways and manners; eaters of insect, of water fruits; those who bear poultices, those who bear riches; the husbandman, and the young noble horsed; the healer with needles, and the salter […]

[this poem “Anabasis” goes on like this for quite a bit…the Whitman is thick here]

~

In the poem, “To celebrate a childhood”, there are revealing portraits of colonial life (probably obvious at this point is how imperialism infuses many of his poems, Perse even did a translation of Robinson Crusoe – so perhaps associating him with Whitman and Rimbaud doesn’t miss the thematic mark either – as they too are steeped in the ideology of imperialism):

“. . . . My nurse was a mestizo and smelled of the castorbean; always I noticed there were pearls of glistening sweat on her forehead, and around her eyes–and so warm, her mouth had the taste of rose-apples, in the river, before noon.”

“. . . And I never knew all Their voices, and I never knew all the women and all the men who served in our high
wooden house; but I shall still long remember
mute faces, the color of papayas and of boredom, that paused like burnt-out stars behind our chairs.”

The Rules of the House

“The religious image and the poetic image are close in turn to the psychological archetype of Jungian analysis which seeks to arouse the content and form of the individual life from the collective unconscious.”

Had a great discussion about chapter 4 in the H.D. book in last night’s class…but this sentence above has stuck in my mind.

Duncan’s constant use of the trope of “arousal” (the evocation of Eros) seems to highlight his “libidinal apparatus” of interpretation. “Meaning is not given to the world about us but derived from the world about us, that our human language is a ground in which we participate in the cosmic language. Such a sense of the universe as a meaningful creation and of experience as coming to apprehend that meaning determines the change from the feeling that poetic form is give to or imposed upon experience…to the feeling that poetic form is found in experience, that content is discovered in matter.”

Duncan argues that Pound’s ideogram and H.D.’s hieroglyph are evocations of received signs from the “great language that the universe itself is written.” Thus, the image resembles both the religious (iconographic) and the psychological (archetypal) as other examples of this evocation…of the universal language existing within the image itself.

The difficulty i have with this particular argument is not the idea itself of evoked image as received sign, but of the ground itself of the “meaningful creation.” It seems that the same critique that Deleuze and Guattari pose against Freudian interpretation in Anti-Oedipus (a reduction and rewriting of the heterogeneity of experience into a contained family narrative, which becomes proposed as the ultimate meaning (albeit hidden) of experience).

Reading this into both the religious image and the Jungian archetype, it seems that these interpretative methods employ a similar reductionism (granted that the collective unconscious is more of an extended family). This reductionism of the ground, or “containment strategy”, is present also in chapter 3 of the H.D. book, Duncan’s clunkily poetic attempt at the mytho-historical.

Besides the dangers of this kind of reductionism, which doesn’t leave space for “others” to work the ground, there is the problem of his determinism. The ground is always-already fixed. Levertov picks up on this tendency in their letters (which i posted on a few weeks ago). One is not able to re-vision the ground – i.e. the collective unconscious as formulated by Jung is always-already closed. This does not allow us to revise our collective unconscious, in the same way that we are contained, if within a Freudian matrix, in the drama of the family.

This “containment strategy” is present throughout chapter 4. Particularly in the ways in which Duncan banishes particular tendencies from his Garden (perhaps his “Household” is more appropriate). Amy Lowell, Early Williams, Pound the pedegogue and activist, are caught “disobeying orders of the imagination.” The acceptance of the visionary Pound as opposed to Pound the pedagogue highlights what Duncan is willing to contain within his ground. This is similar to his dismissal of “Lilli” in chapter 1. Lilli as poetic nurse/muse is acceptable, but Lilli as “Trotskyite partisan” is “disobeying orders.”

As romantic as the cosmic language sounds, as the idea of a “community of meaning”, it is equally problematic because of its tendency towards reductionism, closure, and exclusivity.

a revision of Pound’s dictum

MAKE IT MARXIST!

"particular grief" 1

In the last post, I only focused on poems that felt to echo Drummond de Andrade’s conversational nihilism. For this post, I wanted to look at two poems that are more social in reach: “SONG OF THE PHANTOM GIRL OF BELO HORIZONTE” and “THE DISAPPEARANCE OF LUISA PORTO”. Although the poems are quite different, they illustrate a different strand of Andrade’s work.

Belo Horizonte (beautiful horizon) is the third largest city in Brazil, and the first modern Brazilian city to undergo complex urban planning (actually designed after Washington, D.C.) – but its urbanization could not keep up with the demands of the population, and suffered all the major difficulties of urban development/underdevelopment.

The poem is haunted by the human consequences of urbanization:

I am the phantom girl
Who waits on Chumbo Street
for the coach of dawn.
I am white and tall and cold,
my flesh is a sigh
in the mountain dawn.
I am the phantom girl.
My name was Maria,
Maria-who-died.

Maria haunts the beautiful horizon (unfortunately I couldn’t locate the importance of “Chumbo Street”) in her innocent whiteness (Belo Horizonte is surrounded by mountains). The fact that she is speaking gives her agency as a phantom that she probably did not have in life:

I am the girl you loved
who died of sickness,
who died in a car crash,
who killed herself on the beach,
whose hair stayed
long in your memory.
I was never of this world;
when kissed, my mouth
spoke of other planets
where lovers burn
in a chaste fire
and without irony
turn into stars.

Whatever potential “Maria” had of achieving an actual referent in history, seems to diminish as she becomes the Maria-of-all-women-who-suffer. She is the innocent Brazil perhaps, the los Beatrice.

Unlike the other, I died
without having time to be yours.
I cannot get used to this,
and when the police are asleep
in and around me,
my wandering ghost
goes down Curral Hill,
spying on the new houses,
circling the lovers’ gardens
(Claudio Manuel da Costa Street),
stopping for shelter in the Hotel Ceara
that offers no shelter. A perfume
I do not know invades me:
it is the odor of your sleep,
soft and warm, curled up
in the arms of Spanish women….
Oh! Let me sleep with you!

Who is the other? Mary? other Muses? the new houses and the hotel offer no shelter, the promise of modernity failing at its most basic function. who is the you? the poet? the reader? do the spanish women represent a betrayal? i am lost like the phantom girl is lost:

My ghost keeps going,
For I meet none of my lovers,
who were seduced by French women,
who drank all the whisky
in Brasil
(and are now in a drunken sleep),
and meet only cars that pass
with drivers who surprised
by my whiteness, flee.
The shy policemen,
poor things! One wanted to grab me.
I opened my arms… Incredulous,
He felt me. There was no flesh
And outside the dress
And under the dress
The same white absence,
A white anguish…
It is obvious: what was body
Was eaten by the cat.

Well, the you is most likely male, most likely allegorical (as she is). angered by the seduction of Spanish and French women (colonial corruption and exploitation). I find the police to be odd presences: shy or asleep. what role did the police have during this time? why did a policeman try to grad her? was the police system corrupt as well? is this to show also that there is no where to find refuge.

The girls that are still alive
(they’ll die, you can be sure)
are afraid that I appear
and pull them down by their legs…
They’re wrong.
I was a girl, I will be a girl
Deserted, per omnia saecula.
I have no interest in girls.
Boys disturb me.
I don’t know how to free myself.
If only my ghost wouldn’t suffer,
if only they would like me.
If only the spirit would consent,
but I know it’s forbidden,
and you are flesh, I am mist.

She shares Drummond’s nihilism. Her motive is revealed here: to join mist and flesh. In the possible degradations of urbanization and transculturation, the spirit of innocence, that deserted child, is forbidden to merge with the body of the poet – a poet who is importing muses from the colonial powers – and thus she becomes

A mist that dissolves
when the sun breaks in the mountains.
Now I feel better,
I’ve said everything I wanted to
I would climb that cloud,
be a frozen sheet
sparkling over mankind.
But the stars will not understand,
nobody will understand,
my reflection in the pool
on Parauna Avenue.