Raymond Queneau

 

Detention

The sects send their rumours as they go,
For in the spruit the nation shows its heather
Nor withers till the rota has flamed to red,
And in the aviation purple viruses blow,
And the slim crop stirs the winter sock;
Wherefore yon leafless trepans will bloom again
And this grey lantern grow green with summer ranekin
And send up crafts for some brain to mow.

But what of limbs whose bitter hungry sebundy
Flows at our helioscopes, and gluten of sunless nipple
Covers the debentures which never more return?
Amethyst, luck and all the throats that burn
We lose too soon, and only find demagogues
In withered hutches of some dead Menshevik.

Raymond Queneau, circa 1929

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Raymond Queneau

 

Front-Page Carnage

I've walked my sorrow
through the streets of Paris
I kept it on a leash
so the Parisians would laugh
pigsty cheese shop
window display all splayed out
bloody shop window
butcher stall
wallowing on every corner
a calf that blubbers
maybe it's me
maybe it's my double
I hold back my sadness
and sit down on a bench
to read the papers
which tell of misfortune
crime and assassination
floods earthquakes
murders epidemics
rape and violent death
and this does not console me one bit
and this consoles me not

t                                                ranslated by Rachel Galvin

Raymond Queneau

 

May I Have a Word?

May I have a word with you
Or several, like thrush or frock.
We put them on the table,
sip them through straws,
chimpanzees with marrow bones.
It's fun, I give you my word.

Ingeborg Bachmann

We have risen and the cloisters are empty,

We have risen and the cloisters are empty,
since we endure, an order that neither saves nor teaches.
Action is not the pilot's concern. They have their eyes
fixed on defense posts, and spread out on their knees
a map of the world to which nothing can be added.

Who is living down below? Who is crying . . .
Who has lost his housekey?
Who cannot find his bed, who is sleeping
on doorsteps? Who, when morning comes,
dares to interpret the silver trail: look, above me . . .
When water starts turning the mill wheel again,
who dares to remember the night?

José Lezama Lima

 Paradiso seems to be an impossible novel but nonetheless it does exist.

Then he felt the syllables again, spoken next to him, but without clearly perceiving his shadowy bulk, his existence resting on an age-old boredom. And yet the phrase, walking like a centipede, tail like a serpent’s head, head with the indentations and outcroppings of a key, of a clue to a puzzle, would give him the labyrinths and bays of other years that Chronos would offer him. The key to his first-born and genetrix happiness, a shadow of depth to slip along his street.

This is exactly the language of the book: sentences are like centipedes and serpents, paragraphs are like impassable labyrinths and the text is full of rococo convolutions.

Time, a liquid substance, a mask, goes on covering the faces of the most remote ancestors, or, just the opposite, time drags along, almost lets itself be absorbed by earthly games, and enlarges a figure until it receives the texture of a Desmoulins or a Marat with clenched fists beating on the variants, the echoes, or the tedium of a Thermidor assembly. It seems that after those imprecations they will disappear under the sea, or at last freeze when they react like the drops of blood that live after them, giving a great slap to the star reflected in the bathroom mirror.

José Lezama Lima thoroughly ploughs all the cultural layers and the novel is fraught with references to antiquity, mythology, philosophy and art. He wields time and space freely so the narration frequently turns into the surreal mescaline-induced visions and the characters descend into the depths of their subconscious and unconscious planes as willingly as Ulysses descends into the underworld.

New York is a mixture of adolescent Moses, aged Cain, and Whitman’s phallic walking stick, producing sacred children. The saxophone, penetrating the Bible, tears it into innumerable scraps of paper that fall from the tops of the skyscrapers.

In the modern world, Paradise hardly can be distinguished from Hell…

Sousandre (jouquim"oaquim de Sousa Andrade)

 

Reconfiguring Romanticism (16): Sousandrade’s “Wall Street Inferno,” 

some lines & a commentary

English translation: Odile Cisneros

1. 

(Guesa, having traversed the West Indies, believes himself rid of the Xeques and penetrates the New-York-Stock-Exchange; the Voice, from the wilderness:)

– Orpheus, Dante, Aeneas, to hell 
Descended; the Inca shall ascend 
= Ogni sp’ranza lasciate,
Che entrate…
– Swedenborg, does fate new worlds portend?

2.

(Smiling Xeques appear disguised as Railroad-managers, Stockjobbers, Pimpbrokers, etc., etc., crying out:)
Wall Street’s parallel to Chatham…

– Harlem! Erie! Central! Pennsylvania!
= Million! Hundred million!! Billions!! Pelf!!!
– Young is Grant! Jackson,
Atkinson!
Vanderbilts, Jay Goulds like elves!

3.

(The Voice, poorly heard amidst the commotion:)

– Fulton’s Folly, Codezo’s Forgery
…Fraud cries the nation’s bedlam
They grasp no odes
Railroads;
4.

(Brokers going on:)

– Pygmies, Brown Brothers! Bennett! Stewart!
Rothschild and that Astor with red hair!!
= Giants, slaves
If only nails gave
Out streams of light, if they would end despair!..

5.

(Norris, Attorney; Codezo, inventor; Young, Esq., manager; Atkinsonagent; Armstrong, agent; Rhodes, agent; P. Offman & Voldo, agents; hubbub, mirage; in the middle, Guesa:)

– Two! Three! Five thousand! If you play
Five million, Sir, will you receive
= He won! Hah! Haah!! Haaah!!!
– Hurrah! Ah!…
– They vanished… Were they thieves?..

6.

(J. Miller atop the roofs of the Tammany wigwam unfurling the Garibaldian mantle:)

– Bloodthirsties! Sioux! Oh Modocs!
To the White House! Save the Nation,
From the Jews! From the hazardous
Goth’s Exodus!
From immoral conflagration!

Severo Sarduy

from Firefly

So no one will know i’m afraid 

Wait, who is that guy with the big head? Firefly? My god, I thought he’d be more developed, not so skinny. I had imagined him sort of like a tiny Greek athlete with clear glass eyes and gold nipples. I find him like this, all of a shocking sudden, squatting on his clay chamber pot, the pale gray one with two handles, atop a dark green cistern in the shade of a royal poinciana collapsing from the weight of the cockatoos. The first thing I see is his oversized head. And his eyes are so Chinese, he might as well not have any. A bald Chinaman. When he spreads his little arms, his chest is really scrawny: a spidery map of bones. Instead of getting off the pot, he holds tight to both handles and lets himself slide down the cistern, and the basin shatters into more bits of ceramic than you’d find in a Julian Schnabel self- portrait. The cheeks of Firefly’s bottom are two purple splotches when he dashes across the various blues of the floor tiles, screaming at the top of his lungs.The three aunts are in such a tizzy from his descent you would think they’d seen a polka-dotted bear cub riding a chariot down a steep brambly slope.The aunts: all in shining silk. There must be some baptism to attend, or a small parish celebration. They gleam so in the noonday sun that you have to squint to look at them. That isn’t all: crocodile-leather high heels with red platforms and over their shoulders see-through handbags like round canteens for a thirsty outing. The make-up is simple: a bit of powdered eggshell does it, plus a purple touch of Mercurochrome on the lips. Yes, it must be a catechism klatch, or maybe the arrival from the mother country of some buff parish priest whose photograph they’ve seen, the longed-for replacement of the insipid confessor of bilious believers his predecessor turned into after half a century of evangelizing against the tide

Severo Sarduy

 

“Recounting”

Today, I’m not like yesterday, time passes.
My verse has turned transparent.
In the afternoons, come to me
sudden longings to go home.

Consuming passion, passion that burns
left me; now its my mind
that delights, indifferent night,
in those bodies that day turns away.

I do not deplore love, now left for someone else;
only desire, which redeems, inverts
and alters all it touches.

Writings, passions, and poison
were missing in my life and my death.
And the touch of some hands, and a mouth.

                                                TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY DAVID FRANCIS 

Severo Sarduy

 

“Rothko”

To Andrés Sánchez Robayna

Not the colors, nor the pure form.
Memory of ink. Sediment
that decants light from its pigment,
beyond the canvas and its framework.

Not the lines, not the shadow or texture,
nor the brief illusion of movement;
nothing more than silence: the feeling
of being in its presence. The Painting

between parallel fringes whose mist
crosses the intact canvas, though tinged
with cinnabar, with wine that fades;

purple, vermillion, orange…
The red of spilled blood
sealed his exploration. And also his life.

 

                            TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY DAVID FRANCIS 

Mario Vargas on Cortazar

 

from City of Exiles: When Mario Vargas Llosa Met Julio Cortázar in Paris

In those years he was writing Hopscotch, and one of the things that most surprised me, me for whom it took a lot of work to write, was to see the ease with which he wrote such a complex novel, practically without a plan, without a script, without a previous outline. Many times, I heard him say, “Today, I don’t know where the novel will go.” What he most liked was precisely that feeling of risk, of insecurity, that was sitting down every morning without any preconceived plan, to move forward the novel he was writing, and which, as you know, made him enormously popular. I think, nonetheless, that at some point, Cortázar experienced a sort of trauma or interior revolution that completely changed his personality. This secret, intimate, private character, suddenly turned public, began to live on the streets, let an enormous red beard grow, began to show interest in the politics that he previously deplored, and became a young revolutionary when he was on the verge of turning 60. And a problematic, belligerent, and, I believe, enormously naïve and simultaneously extremely pure revolutionary, without any of those stumbling blocks that often turn politics into an activity or task that corrupts and psychologically and morally degrades some of its devotees. I think that he was innocent, authentic, although I don’t think he was always right in his political choices.

Translated by Anna Kushner.

Julio Cortazar

 “Explanation is a well-dressed error.” 

― Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch

“Every time it starts to get cool, I mean in the middle of autim, I start gettin nutty ideas like I was thinkin about what was forein and diffrent, like for exsample how I'd like to turn into a swallow and get away and fly to countrys where it gets hot, or be an ant so's I could get deep into a cave and eat the stuff I stored away durin the summer or be a snake like what they got in the zoo, the ones they keep lockt up in glass cages thats heated so's they don't get stiff from the cold, which is what happens to poor human beans who cant buy no close cause the price is to high, and cant keep warm cause theys no keroseen, no coal, no wood, no fule oil and besides theys no loot, cause when you go around with bocoo bread you can go into any bar and get some sneaky pete that can be real warmin, even tho it aint good to overdo it cause if you overdos it it gets to be a bad habbit and bad habbits is bad for your body just like they is for youre selfrespeck, and when you start goin downhill cause your actin bad in everythin, they aint nobody or nothin can stop you from endin up a stinkin piece of human garbidge and they never gone give you a hand to haul you up outen the dirty muck you rollin around in, not even if you was a eaglE when you was young and could fly up and over the highest hills, but when you get old you like a highflyin bomber thats lost its moral engines and fall down outen the sky. I jes hope what I been writin down hear do somebody some good so he take a good look at how he livin and he dont be sorry when it too late and everythin is gone down the drain cause it his own fault. -- Caser Bruto, What I Would Like to Be If I Wasn't What I Am (Chapter: "A St. Bernard Dog")” 
― Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch

Julio Cortazar

 

“I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often.”― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

“Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.” 
― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

“Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.” 
― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

“All European writers are ‘slaves of their baptism,’ if I may paraphrase Rimbaud; like it or not, their writing carries baggage from an immense and almost frightening tradition; they accept that tradition or they fight against it, it inhabits them, it is their familiar and their succubus. Why write, if everything has, in a way, already been said? Gide observed sardonically that since nobody listened, everything has to be said again, yet a suspicion of guilt and superfluity leads the European intellectual to the most extreme refinements of his trade and tools, the only way to avoid paths too much traveled. Thus the enthusiasm that greets novelties, the uproar when a writer has succeeded in giving substance to a new slice of the invisible; merely recall symbolism, surrealism, the ‘nouveau roman’: finally something truly new that neither Ronsard, nor Stendahl , nor Proust imagined. For a moment we can put aside our guilt; even the epigones begin too believe they are doing something new. Afterwards, slowly, they begin to feel European again and each writer still has his albatross around his neck.” 
― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

Umberto Saba

The Borgo

It was in the ways of this
Borgo what a new thing
it happened to me.

It was like a vain
sigh
the sudden desire to go out
of myself, of living life
of all,
to be like everyone else
men of all
the days.

I was never so great
joy, nor have it from life I hope.
I was twenty that time, and I was
sick. For the new ones
streets of the Borgo the vain desire
like a sigh
he made me his.

Where in the sweet time
of childhood
few I saw lost
climbing bare houses
of the hill,
a fervent human village rose
work. In him the first
once suffered the sweet desire
and vain
to put mine in the heat
everyone's life,
to be like everyone else
men of all
the days.

Faith to have
of all, say
words, do
things that each one understands, and are,
like wine and bread,
like children and women,
values
of all. But a corner,
alas, I left to desire, blue
crack,
to contemplate me from that, to enjoy
the high joy obtained
of not being me anymore,
to be this only: among men
a man.

Born of the dark
events,
little was the desire, just a short one
sigh. I find it again
- lost echo
of youth - through the streets of the Borgo
changed
more than changed it is not me. On the walls
of the high houses,
on men and jobs, on everything,
the veil that wraps things has come down
finished.

The church is still
yellow, if the lawn
that surrounds it is less green. The sea,
that I see below, it has only one vessel,
huge,
which, stationary, folds to one side. Shapes,
colors,
life whence my sweet sigh was born
and vile, a world
finished. Shapes,
colors,
others I created, remaining myself,
only with my hard
suffer. And death
awaits me.

They will return,
or to this
Borgo, or to another like this, the days
of the flower. Another
will relive my life,
than in extreme labor
of youth, he will have asked for him,
hoped,
to put his into life
of all,
to be like everyone else
the men of one day will appear to him
since then.

Alejo Carpentier

 

In the quarter where the sun should have appeared, the sky was covered by a strange reddish cloud, like smoke, like hot ashes, like a dark pollen that had arisen swiftly, stretching from one horizon to the other. When the cloud moved overhead, it began to rain butterflies on the roofs, the water jars, our shoulders. They were little butterflies, deep amaranth in color, striped in violet, which had come together by myriads in some unknown spot behind the immense jungle, frightened, perhaps, driven away, after multiplying frenziedly, by some cataclysm, some awful occurrence, without witnesses or record. The Adelantado told me that these swarms of butterflies were nothing new in the region, and that when they took place the sun was almost blotted out for the whole day. The burial of the father would have to be carried out by candlelight in a day that was night, reddened by wings.

                                                        from The Lost Steps

Reinaldo Arenas

               Egon Schiele. Young boy (1918

Viejo Niño

I am that child with the round dirty face
who on every corner is bothering you with
his “can you spare one quarter?”1
I am that child with the dirty face
—no doubt unlucky—
that from far away contemplates coaches
where the other children emit laughter
and jump up and down considerably
I am that unlikable child
—definitely unlucky—

with the round dirty face who under giant
streetlights or under the grand dames
also illuminated or before the little
girls that seem to levitate
project the insult of my dirty face.
I am that sullen child, even more gray,
that wrapped up in lamentable
combinations puts a dark note on the snow
or on the carefully trimmed lawn
that nobody but me would walk on,
because I don’t pay fines.

I am that angry and lonely child of
always, that throws you the insult of
that angry child of always
and warns you: if hypocritically you pat
me on the head I would take that
opportunity to steal your wallet.
I am that child of always,
before the panorama of eminent terror,
of eminent leprosy, of eminent fleas, of
offenses or of the eminent crime.
I am that repulsive child that improvises
a bed out of an old cardboard box and
waits, certain, that you will accompany
me.

New York (October 1983)
 

Vicente Huidobro

 Eclogue

                                    Sun about to die

The car broken down

And a smell of spring
Remains as the air sweeps by

                                            Somewhere
                                                                 a song

                    WHERE ARE YOU

One afternoon much like this
                                                   I looked for you in vain

In the fog covering the roads
I kept finding myself

And in the smoke of my cigar
A lost bird

Nobody answered

                                 The last pastors drowned

And the stray sheep
Ate flowers and did not give honey

The wind that went by
Piles up their wool

                                                Between the clouds
                                                Holding my tears

Why cry once more
                                   about what I've cried already

And since the sheep eat flowers
Sign that you went by

(Egloga)

                                                         translation by Johannes Beilharz

Vicente Huidobro

 

Night

You hear the night glide across the snow

The song fell down from the trees

And through the fog sounded voices

I lit my cigar at a glance

Every time I open my lips

I flood the void with clouds

                                    In the harbor

The masts are full of nests.

And the wind

                       groans in the birds' wings

     THE WAVES ROCK THE DEAD SHIP

Whistling on the shore I

          Look at the star that glows between my fingers

(Noche)

                                                translation by Johannes Beilharz