5 minute read
Booklover
Column Editor: Donna Jacobs (Retired, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC 29425) <donna.jacobs55@gmail.com>
A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems of Vicente Aleixandre edited by Lewis Hyde is a real gem. Fifteen translators present 68 poems and three works of prose to the reader in a bilingual format. Discovering this book took me back 12 years to an early “Booklover” column entitled “First and French” describing my experience with the first Nobel Laureate in Literature, Sully Prudhomme. He received the award in 1901. Sully Prudhomme’s (nom de plume for René François Armand Prudhomme) work was only available in his native language, French — a language with which I have a minimal relationship. At the time, I engaged a friend of mine that was fluent in French to read a few select poems to me and tell me what the poems where about. It didn’t take but one poem for me to realize that the sounds revealed the subject matter — I called it “subject-appropriate sounds.” I reread the column in preparation of writing this one. The closing line defined the experiment that became an experience to which I often relate: “As we end our literary experiment I am anxious to plan another, lost in the sounds of words, listening for the subject, and thinking with my heart and my head.” Since I studied Spanish as a young girl, I could run the experiment again thanks to Lewis Hyde’s editorial skills and Vicente Aleixandre’s literary achievement. Hyde reveals the inspiration for the title in his “Introduction.” Aleixandre’s poems are surreal, sad, deep, dark, and many are metaphorically connected to the sea. Hyde shared that Aleixandre felt “that the poems are best understood when seen in ‘rainbow light’” — describing the work as “una aspiración a la luz, a longing for the light.” The collection is laid out with the Spanish version on one page and the translated English version on the facing page. Beautiful formatting. For all the power of his poems and the acclaim of the Nobel Prize, information and biographic background for Vicente Pío Marcelino Cirilo Aleixandre y Merlo is in short supply. He was born in Seville, Spain; studied at the University of Madrid; chose to follow his passion for literature instead of a career in law or economics; poetry stole his soul after being introduced to the work of Rubén Darío; he belonged to the Generation of ’27; and won the 1977 Nobel Prize in Literature “for a creative poetic writing which illuminates man’s condition in the cosmos and in present-day society, at the same time representing the great renewal of the traditions of Spanish poetry between the wars.” Aleixandre opens a window into his poetic conversion in the “Prologue to the Second Edition of ‘La destrucción o el amor’” included in this collection. “So at eighteen I was a young man saturated with reading, enthusiastic to the point of obsession about literature and its world of fantasy and passion; and ignorant, even wary, of poetry. When it made its sudden appearance, then, it was as something pure and untouched, something that grew and burned in a soul already experienced in the beauties of literature, but still innocent of the flash, sudden and complete, of poetic illumination…. Do they coincide, the moment a young man begins to write and the awakening of his creative life?” His words and stanzas answer for us. English version teasers from “Sea and Sunrise,” and “The Jungle and the Sea” — both versions for “The Poet”/“El poeta.”
“Before sunrise, still in darkness, the uncovered waves keep watch. In the east, the day begins to lift Its sharp and timid advances. Long tongues feel their way over the heavy water, the taut metallic plate, cold and rough to that soft stroking.”
“Over in the distance near the lights or the knives that are still new, there are tigers as big as hate and lions like a heart covered with hair and blood like weary sadness and all of them are fighting with the yellow hyena who disguises himself as the greedy, greedy sunset.”
“Para ti, que conoces cómo la piedra canta, y cuya delicada pupila sabe ya del peso de una montaña sobre un ojo dulce, y cómo el resonante clamor de los bosques se aduerme suave un dia en nuestras venas;
para ti, poeta, que sentiste en tu aliento la embestida brutal de la aves celestes, y en cuyas palabras tan pronto vuelan las poderosas alas de las águilas como se ve brillar el lomo de los calientes peces sin sonido:
oye este libro que a tus manos envío con ademán de selva,…”
“This is for you who have seen how the stone sings, who found out how heavy a mountain weighs on a delicate eye, and how, one day, the windy cry of the forest gently falls asleep in our blood;
in your breath, poet, you have felt the animal attack of the birds of heaven, and powerful eagle wings flash in your words the way the bellies of hot fish gleam without a sound:
listen to this book I put in your hands with my forest gestures, ….”
May there be another “subject-appropriate sounds” experiment in my future.
