Hans Faverey | Against the Forgetting: Selected Poems / 2004

standstill

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hans Faverey, Against the Forgetting: Selected Poems, translated by Francis R. Jones (New York: New Directions, 2004)

 

Born in 1933 in Paramaribo, Surinam, poet Hans Faverey moved to Amsterdam as a child and lived there until his death in 1990. Faverey was one of those rare individuals who combined the scientific mind—he worked as a clinical psychologist—with music—he played and composed for the harpsichord—and poetry—he published eight volumes of poems and won several of major Dutch literary awards.

     Now, through the good graces of New Directions and translator Francis R. Jones we have a new US edition of his selected poems, Against the Forgetting. Faverey wrote short abstractly modulated lyrics, most often in sequences or cycles. Unfortunately, in this collection we get very few complete sequences, with 28 of the 33 sequences represented being incomplete. It is difficult therefore to get the sense of Faverey’s poetic “pace” in English. It appears the separate sections of each sequence are only tangentially related with regard to images and subject matter, and are generally connected only through formal devices; but it would have helped to have a just a few more complete cycles in translation to see how they function.

      One of my favorite works of the volume presents a complete cycle: “Chrysanthemums, Rowers,” which begins with a seemingly static image: chrysanthemums in a vase on a table, an image Faverey immediately deflates as, with Gertrude Stein-like logic, he reverses himself: “these / are not the chrysanthemums / which are by the window / on the table / in the vase.” Clearly, the words with which he has begun are meant to be understood differently from a still-life in someone’s house or apartment. As he makes clear in the second part of the cycle, these words are like a photograph, an image of something real, a mirror of reality which, like a mirror, reverses its image (just as he has reversed his original image in the second stanza of the poem), making it difficult for the perceiver to recognize that it represents himself and the world in which he stands. As objects, moreover, photograph and mirror cannot recognize anyone. It is only in the human mind, one’s own living hand or “a hand that wants to belong to me” that actually “is” something that, as it covers the eyes, can be understand as a part of the self coming towards one from space. Objects, like the still-life he has first presented, might be misunderstood as revealing meaning, but it is only as these objects are internalized in thought that their “meaning” can be revealed. The poet perceives “The utter emptiness / in everything, which actually is.” Mind over matter, so to speak, is Faverey’s true subject in this poem; as the rowers row further inland, in their mythology, they row until the water is gone, rowing into the overgrown landscape, a land without rowers,an “over- / rown land.” The final pun closes the argument, as we recognize the poem as a thing of art, an artifice as opposed to mimesis or a representation.

     Even though the translator does not feature many such complete texts, the reader does quickly perceive that this issue is at the heart of most of Faverey’s writing, and the processes of composing and decomposing, building and unbuilding a world of language, are at the heart of his vision. I will present three examples as a kind of random evidence of this pattern in Faverey’s poems:

 

It is snowing

 

but is no longer snowing.

When it started to snow

I went to the window;

 

I went missing.

 

Sometime then,

 

just before the snow started

falling again, into great,

ever slower flakes,

it must also have

 

stopped snowing.

 

 

[from “Sur place”]

 

*

 

Now it is here;

 

now it is not-here.

How it thrusts through itself

takes place between not yet

 

and nevermore. Once under

 

way, it moves neither where

it is, nor where it is not.

Given free rein

it keeps slipping from who

stands fast: now from one

 

now from another….

 

[from “My Little Finger”]

 

 

*

 

Where the apricot tree

stood still then

I stand still now.

 

Between the gladioli

I know the spot

where she stood then:

she threw me the apricot—

then. Now,

 

as memory does with itself

what it will, we begin

biting once more, almost

in unison, between

 

the maize plants; she her

apricot, I my apricot;

 

while the little foxes still prowl

through the vineyard, and the sea,

whispering: she is not with me;

no, you will not find it here;

she is not in me.

 

[from “Lightfall”]

 

In the earliest poems of this collection, this process of evolving and devolving images and language results in a kind of “standstill,” a word repeated in several of Faverey’s poems. The poet alternates between these two actions as he moves from the “real” world (or perhaps we should say the “unreal” world) of space to the world of the mind, the truly “real” world of experience. As each “reality” takes back its own meaning, the reader is left with a sense of emptiness—like a lover who was there but is no longer, like a perceiver who, in lifting a stone, finds in his hand an object that is “no longer a stone,” but a thing of language.

     In later work Faverey recasts this image of a “standstill” into a image of a spider at work on its web, a Penelope-like figure who weaves and unweaves each day, destroying its creation and itself in the very process of creating it:

 

The dolphin swimming in front of the ship

keeps swimming in front of the ship

until there is definitely no longer

a dolphin swimming in front of a ship.

 

 Faverey’s work, accordingly, will not be for those who see a poem as a lifesaver of meaning in a world a chaos. Rather, his poems reveal the process of life itself as an ever-shifting, changing force that destroys the perception at the very moment of perceiving the world’s “merciless beauty.”

 

Los Angeles, September 21, 2005

Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, no. 1

(January–February 2006) and Jacket, no. 31 (2006)

Machado de Assis | Resurrrection / 2013

saved by refusing to live

by Douglas Messerli

 

Machado de Assis Resurrrection, translated into English by Karen Sherwood Sotelino (Pittsburgh: Pennsylvania, 2013)

 

Brazilian novelist Joaquim María Machado de Assis is the author of several 19th and early 20th century fictions—notably among them Quincas Borba (Philosopher or Dog?) (1892) (which I reviewed in My Year 2007) and Dom Casmurro (1899)—that chronicled Brazilian society of the period, taking the reader into a world of Portuguese-speaking eccentrics, parties, small-talk, societal gossip, and, most importantly, love and delusion.

     His first novel, Resurrection of 1872, translated by Karen Sherwood Sotelino for the first time into English, has nearly all the elements that make Machado de Assis’ work so popular, the major difference being that here the scale is much less epic that in his later works, and its lack of complexity slightly disappoints. Nonetheless, is does give us a kind structural glimpse into the underlying themes in those later masterworks.

       The plot of Resurrection—and in this author’s books, plot is crucial—focuses on a retired doctor, Félix, and the two women he loves, Raquel, and the beautiful and well-to-do young widow, Lívia. Minor but also important characters include Lívia’s brother Viana and a mutual friend Meneses. Numerous other figures fill the rooms for the book’s several parties, but only one other figure stands out, the villain of Machado de Assis’ tale, Luís Batista, a man who has been spurned by the widow.

       Although the story of these figures’ comings and goings are the heart of this Brazilian fiction, the action is often paired down in this work so that the author can center his attentions on the psychological conditions of his three major figures. Both women are loved and in love with the so-called “hero,” both of whom he, in time, rejects, because he himself—as we gradually come to discover—has no heart, justifying his rejections and his unperceived misogamy to be the fault of the two irreproachable women. And, in that respect, although the book does not out rightly say so or even hint at it, Félix can be seen as a kind early fin de siècle-like dandy, a man somewhat like characters out of works by Wilde or Huysmans, while not quite recognizing himself as homosexual.

        But in this case, it hardly matters. For the doctor’s core problem, as the author makes clear, is his inability to live life. If we, as readers, might be able to forgive his rejection of the fragile Raquel in order to marry Lívia, we cannot forgive Félix for believing an anonymous letter castigating the widow for driving her husband and others to despair because of her unfaithfulness. The letter, in fact, has been sent by Luís Batista, in revenge for Lívia’s dismissal of him. And it is Félix’s reaction to that Iago-like act that tells us of the doctor’s inability to love. Even though he later discovers the letter to have been Batista’s lie, Félix continues in the illusion:

 

                      When all had calmed down in his heart, Félix naively confessed

                      to himself that the breach in his love, as painful as it had been, was

                      yet the most reasonable solution. The doctor’s love experienced

                      posthumous doubts. The veracity of the letter that had prevented

                      the marriage, with the passing of years, not only seemed possible

                      to him, but even probable. One day Meneses told Félix he had

                      ultimate proof that Luís Batista had written the letter. Not only

                      did Félix refuse his testimony, he did not even ask what proof he

                      had.

 

Machado de Assis sums up his hero: “Nature placed him among the class of men who are cowardly and visionary, whom the poets describe as ‘losing the good for fear of seeking it.’”

       So does this brilliant author transform his “hero” into a kind “anti-hero,” a figure who begins the work as a possible romantic but, in the end, becomes a modern everyman unable to act because of inner opposing forces. The title of his work becomes ironic as what that hero perceives as having “saved” him has, in fact, prevented him from having lived a full life.

       While Machado de Assis wrote into the 20^th century, however, he never adapted the modernist transparent narrative strategies as did Henry James, and later, Marcel Proust, Virigina Woolf, and William Faulkner adopted. If his story-telling often takes us into a psychological world akin to modernist writing, Machado de Assis remained an interruptive narrator, which is one of the reasons I so like his work. When Menses first convinces Félix that Batista is behind the letter, for example, the author intrudes:

 

                      Reader, let us understand each other. I am the one telling this story,

                      and I can assure you the letter was indeed from Luís Batista, However,

                      the doctor’s conviction…was less solid and well thought out than

                      befitted the state of affairs.

 

In short, Machado de Assis humorously criticizes his characters for believing what they do—even when they are right!

       At other times, the writer uses his authorial powers to speed up or slow down his narrative as in a film:

 

                      It was mid-December. The wedding date was imminent. Everything

                      required a swift solution.

 

Like several writers of the late 19th century and early decades of the 20th—Zola, Stein, Lewis, Barnes, etc—Machado de Assis retained his authorial voice in order to entertain the reader and to point to his themes in a way that would be “picked up” again by post-modern fiction writers. Accordingly, while some readers may see these intrusions as “old-fashioned,” they are in fact original and fresh, at least to my way of thinking, helping to enrich his art. If Resurrection is far from being a major work, it reveals much about this great writer’s literary methods.

 

Los Angeles, March 8, 2014

Reprinted from Rain Taxi (August 2014) [on-line].

 

Anne Portugal | Nude / 2001

at point zero

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anne Portugal Nude, translated from the French by Norma Cole (Berkeley, California: Kelsey Street Press, 2001)

 

With over four books of poetry published in France—all on the list of the distinguished publisher P.O.L—Anne Portugal is fast becoming recognized as one of the major French poets. Her book Le plus simple appareil has been translated in a beautiful edition as Nude. Before I go any further with this review, however, I must admit that it was originally to have been published by my own Sun & Moon, but given the financial duress of the last few years, it was taken on by Kelsey St. Press. So I am prejudiced to like it. However, in rereading the work—years after my original encounter—I do feel I have some observations to make.

     The work, divided into seven parts—“the bath,” “the exhibition,” “the garden,” “the elders,” “the visitors,” “Susanna’s letters,” and “the painting”—is really one long work thematically based on the Biblical tale of Susanna and the Elders. That story, canonical in Catholicism and apocryphal in Protestantism, added sometime in 100 B.C. to the Hebrew-Armaic version of Daniel, tells the story of Susanna, a beautiful woman married to Joakim, whose house is the site of the local court. Two of the elders of that court desire Susanna and plot her rape. As she takes a bath in the garden, they hide themselves, observing, and then offer her the choice of sexually submitting to them or being accused of adultery. When Susanna refuses to give in to their demands, they denounce her, trying her in the court and sentencing her to death. Enter Daniel, who interrogates the two elders, proving their guilt and Susanna’s innocence. Praised by her parents, Daniel becomes a hero among the people.

     Portugal’s work, however—although containing the bath, garden, nudity, elders, and sexual encounters—is hardly a literal retelling of the Bible tale. Rather, for this author the work is an interweaving of what it means to be a woman in contemporary France and a study in formal structures, a kind of verbal painting, which she lays out early in the book with a series of panoramas. Indeed, the work is addressed to an unknown who “knows painting” (“You really know painting”), presumably the individual to whom the book is dedicated, Marc Silvain. But the author could be addressing anyone else, even possibly the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, to whose poems Portugal makes reference throughout Nude, and, who, as the author of The Cubist Painters, certainly did also know painting. Already in the second section, “the exhibition,” Portugal alludes to Apollinaire’s poem “Annie,” which describes a Mennonite living on the shores of Texas between Mobile and Galveston, passing a garden filled with roses by a villa “Which is one huge rose.” And in “the garden” she connects that poem with images from Apollinaire’s “White Snow” and “Palais.” The last section reverberates with Portugal’s references to Apollinaire’s “Rosemonde” (“the rose of the world”), and again to “Palais,” as Susannah turns back to Rosemonde’s palace.

     To focus on these echoing patterns, however, would be to mislead the reader. Portugal’s work, far from being a sort of academic compilation of literary references, is lyrically dense and complex in its structure. And for that reason, if for no other, I long for a bilingual edition, where I could compare the complexity of the original—its multiple puns and enjambments—with Cole’s translation. For, if the poem begins with the simple image of Susannah at the bath, a plump and blonde Swede, as the author sees her, “limned” by “the two elders’ heads,” it soon swirls into a series of multiple images, of numerous Susannahs, a woman naked in a field in Normandy while at the same time a passionate girl in a sateen nighty. The poem becomes a “vessel borne upon multiple waves,” just as Susannah comes to represent opposing visions of women, both Venus and “a plump woman who’s put on weight she’s put on weight.” Portugal’s work, in fact, is like a cubist painting, a series of images overlaying each other which together portray not an instant in time, a symbolic flash of womanhood, but all women through time, being both preyed upon by the opposite sex and sensually aroused by its attentions, a woman moving forward in history while turning back to the romance of Rosemonde’s palace—which leaves man eternally starting out again “at point zero.”

 

Los Angeles, February 3, 2004

Reprinted from The New Review of Literature, I, no. 2 (April 2004), in slightly different form

Ece Ayhan | A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies / 1997, 2015

flying

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ece Ayhan A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1997 / Reprinted by Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2015)

In 1994 or 1995 poet and translator Murat Nemet-Nejat sent me a manuscript of his translation of the Turkish poet, Ece Ayhan. If Nemet-Nejat is to be believed, he had attempted to get this manuscript published for more than 10 years. I immediately was drawn to it, and in 1995 I gave him a contract which, through a series of underground figures, was passed on in Turkey to Ayhan, apparently in hiding from his government for failure to pay taxes or some other infraction, who signed and dated it 14.12.1995.

      The manuscript Murat had given me seemed to me to have many similarities to the American poet John Wieners, who, like Ayhan, was a gay writer who had begun his early life at the edges of academic and socially responsible behavior—Wieners began his education at Boston College, later enrolling in Black Mountain College to study with Charles Olson and Robert Duncan before working as an actor and stage manager at the Poet’s Theatre in Cambridge; Ayhan graduated from the school of Political Sciences in Ankara before serving as a civil servant—while later gradually moving out into the underground and sexual fringes of society.

     According to Nemet-Nejat, by the time of Ayhan’s third major collection of poetry, Orthodoxies (1968), he had moved to the streets of Istanbul’s Galata section: “historically both its red light district—of transvestites, girl and boy prostitutes, tattooed roughs, heroin merchants, that is, the unnamed or ‘euphemized’ outcasts of Turkish culture—and the district where minorities—Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Russians, etc—lived.”

       The two works that made up the Sun & Moon book, ultimately published in 1997, A Blind Cat Black (which I inexplicably published as The Blind Cat Black) and Orthodoxies, reveal Ayhan’s spiral out of the social center.

      Nemet-Nejat describes the first work as a story of exile “masquerading as an adventure sea romance.” “One has a fairy tale with pirates, treasures, á la Peter Pan, whose child hero does not fly home at the end, but joins the secret and street society of homosexuals: a fairy tale, a misadventure of trauma, shame, torture and rape in deep sea.” Nearly all these elements, for example, are represented in the title poem:

 

                    An absent-minded tightrope walker comes. From the sea

                    of late hours. Blows out a lamp. Lies down next to my weeping

                    side, for the sake of the prophet. A blind woman downstairs.

                    Family. She raves in a language I don’t know. On her chest a

                    heavy butterfly, broken drawers in it. My Aunt Sadness drinks

                    alcohol in the attic, embroiders. Expelled from many schools.

                    A blind cat passes in the black street. In its sack a child just

                    dead. His wings don’t fit, too big. The Old Hawker cries. A

                    pirate ship. Has entered the port.

 

Already in this section “the wings don’t fit,” and by the end of the poem the author-hero’s inability to fly away ends in no longer caring, the narrator of the poem hiding “himself in dust with apoplectic kicks.” In a sense, Ayhan seems to be suggesting that it is impossible to be gay, to be a fairy, without the magic possibility of flight:

 

                    You don’t understand. Being without wings. And it gets

                    dark, weeping in the sea of a sea. A child waiting. The sail

                    boat.

 

     By the time of Orthodoxies, the translator argues, Ayhan no longer was interested in presenting a center against which his figures were judged, but turned to a focusing upon on the word, particularly puns and slang, that made clear that language itself could be the destroyed of things outside its boundaries, that “part of history, is a trap/tomb, a cribdeath, where the peripheral is buried,” something that needed itself to be rejuvenated before the misfit might escape.

      In the strange night world of Orthodoxies, even the perpetual sufferer Jonah has escaped the whale only to himself become a dolphin. While he may symbolize, however, a joyful aspect of the community (joy and community both connected with the image of the dolphin), this Jonah is, as Ayhan jests, “A sight. Cruising. Bedecked with holsters, stirrup, harness.” This horsey leather queen combs “his hair in cum water. Then is treated to flowers. A garland of braids. From time to time blinking, with vast hanging earrings.” In this work devoted to questioning notions of “orthodoxy,” (the translator points out that in Turkish the word means not only the holy, pious or virtuous, but also in Turkish slang suggests “whore, homosexual, pederast, betrayer, etc.”) Ayhan asks:

 

                      What is an Orthodox lad doing at Maidos? Banged about by

                      agitation which is after the knowledge of knives.

 

Along with Gallipoli, Maidos a nearby city to the South, was heavily damaged in the World War I battle of Gallipoli, the Allied assault on the Ottoman Empire—the last great battle of that Empire before being transformed into the Turkish Republic under Atatürk, himself a commander at Gallipoli—which resulted in the deaths of more than 300,000 people. The horse imagery associated with this new Jonah is appropriate given that one of the major attacks on the Turks occurred at the Battle of the Nek when The Third Australian Light Horse Brigade futilely attacked, a battle depicted in Peter Wier’s film Gallipoli. 

     In short, the poet seems to take pleasure in the paradox that, out of the Ottoman battle to save the Dardenelles from invasion, another being, capable of creating a new world, had been spewn own, like Jonah out of the whale: a preposterous “dolphin,” a sea mammal associated for centuries by sailors with Christ. Accordingly, in Orthodoxies, Ayhan’s figures at least regain, through language, their wings, even if they are only artificial, sad and silver:

 

                       She cannot cover the sadness of her silver wings, the Greek

                       Hag….

 

Drunk, her world reversed (“Boots in hand and parasol on her feet”), Ayhan’s outcast has, at least, the potential to fly away, to be forgiven or, if nothing else, to pray to be forgiven: “But she does know how to cross herself efficiently with index and third fingers.”

       It was with great sadness that I learned of Ece Ayhan Çağlar’s death on July 13th, and I soon after determined to reprint these moving books in my Green Integer series.

 

Los Angeles, August 15, 2002

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (November 2008).

  

Ernest Livon Grosman, ed. | The XUL Reader: An Anthology of Argentine Poetry 1980-1996 / 1997

xul

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ernest Livon Grosman, ed. The XUL Reader: An Anthology of Argentine Poetry 1980-1996, translated from the Spanish by Jorge Guitart, Kathryn A. Kopple, G. J. Racz, Garciela Sidolai, and Molly Weigel (New York: Roof Books, 1997)

 The Argentine magazine XUL began publishing, with Jorge Santiago Perednik as editor, in the beginning of the 1980s, at the height of the mad military dictatorship that killed thousands of individuals. As editor of the The XUL Reader (a collection of writings from the journal) Ernesto Livron Grossman writes, the poetry of its contributors was, in part, a reaction to the regime; but unlike the guerilla movements of the political left—with whom many contributors shared sympathies—the resistance took language itself as its method and subject. Like the American “Language” poets, the XUL writers sought in the purposeful complexity and density of words a way to resist the failed language of seemingly “transparent” statements of both sides, both the victims and the victimizers, who as the editor points out, were interdependent for their existence. Like their American counterparts, these Argentine poets sought models in the avant-garde of the past, most particularly in the vernacular-based poetry of the gaucho (or cowboy) poems, and in avant-gardists such as Oliverio Girondo, Xul Solar (one of the sources of the magazine’s name), Osvaldo Lamborghini, and more recent authors such as Jorge Luis Borges and the Brazilian concretist Augusto de Campos.

       Writing in their fourth issue, a collective of XUL poets argued that their goal was to “translate.” “To translate is to work in one language from another. Translating is the linguistic exercise that most privileges the breach between two texts because it is actually a previous reading that produces a new text in which writing claims to make a former text legible even as it disrupts and obfuscates one text by subtracting from it a legibility that it confers on another…. Translation only acquires significance, as far as XUL is concerned, when it affirms itself as a writing process that voluntarily exhibits its relation to other texts.” A little further in this statement the XUL writers proclaim what might have as easily appeared in the pages of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine (edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein): “XUL’s commitment to reality is actually a commitment to language: to again make legible that which has been used for coercion and deception. Language belongs to everyone.”

     This revelatory anthology begins with a few examples of the historical influences upon the XUL writers, themselves (particularly Girondo and Xul Solar) worthy of further exploration, and then presents work selected from the ten issues of the journal. Each reader will find his or her own favorites, but given the context of the few pages devoted to each poet, I was most impressed by the work of Laura Klein, Néstor Perlongher, Susana Cerdá, Ernesto Livon Grosman, and the XUL editor Jorge Santiago Perednik. I was less taken with the concretist-influenced work as in the poetry of Arturo Carrera, Gustavo Röessler, and Jorge Lépore—but that may be just my own aesthetic at work or a product of the anthologizing. The important thing is that this is a truly brilliant collection of writing that cannot be ignored by anyone interested in contemporary, innovative poetry.   Although the poems are presented bilingually, I do wish the Spanish had appeared enface instead of in small type at the bottom of each page; and I am desperate for biographical material and source information for the poets included. But these are small quibbles with a book of such significance.

 

Los Angeles, 1997

Reprinted from Mr. Knife, Miss Fork: An Anthology of International Poetry, No. 1 (1998); reprinted in My Year 2003: Voice without a Vice (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2003).