On Poetry and Culture Shock

Instead of wasting my time and yours making fun of Creationism, I’m going to talk about one of the wonders of human evolution. This is not culture shock or comedy of manners either, but an anthropological observation that I am shamelessly stealing from my father. Hola, Opá.

The most important human achievement is a hard choice between the wheel, fire, and antibiotics. But no one has ever recognised the great merit of the inventors of soup. After the discovery of fire, soup has kept humankind alive to invent and discover everything else.

Think of this: to make soup you need fire, a fireproof container, water, and food that you wouldn’t roast. Can you imagine that first cook? Let’s think it was more than one. There was something juicy inside bones, so they licked them dry. But one day, after the glorious invention of the pot (which was initially a water container, so that you didn’t need to go to the river every time you wanted a drink of water), they took the bones, they threw them in a pot of water, and they put the whole lot on the fire. Ta-da. Soup. They could make inedible things edible, and they could feed people without teeth, like the elderly, and babies that for any reason couldn’t be breastfed, or in the transition to solid food. They would also discover that grains boiled in soup tasted nicer than raw or roasted grains, and again, they were softer and more appropriate to toothless people. Wow.

I can’t imagine a scenario in which soup was “discovered” by chance. Maybe the soaking of bones in cold water was an accident, but you can’t put a pot to the fire by accident. So _maybe_ someone soaked leftover food in cold water because they hoped if would make it softer. They already knew that old food is dry and that dry means hard, therefore wet means soft. The morning after, the whole contents of the pot were heated together because our Hominids liked their food warm. And they discovered that the result tasted really nice, definitely nicer than the raw materials.

If the container is artificial, soup was invented relatively late, maybe in the early Neolithic. If the container was natural, for example an animal’s stomach (or was it a skin?) as William Golding suggests in his novel The Inheritors, this wonderful creation may have been earlier, some time in the late Paleolithic.

I was more reinforced in my belief that soup is the mark of civilisation when I read in the Jewish Museum in New York that owning a spoon in Auschwitz would put the owner at a great risk: an item in the Holocaust section of the Museum was a spoon, that a brave prisoner had hidden on him while in the concentration camp to remind himself he was human.

Since it is my father's birthday (feliz cumpleaños, Opá) I'm going to post something he likes.

There isn’t a word to call the genre in which people like Frank Sinatra, his contemporaries and his imitators sing. The closest I’ve ever seen is “the Standard”. “Frank Sinatra sang standards”. Well, OK, it’s an insipid label, but still. With a bit of a leap and a stretch of the imagination, the Spanish-speaking world has two equivalents I’m familiar with: the bolero and the Copla.

The Copla first. Coplas are more or less flamenco-ish to untrained ears (female singers traditionally wear flamenco dresses) but they cannot be danced. Most lyrics are love stories, most of them are sad and most of them are gendered: it’s not just that you can make an adjustment to Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered and change the “he” to “she”. No, it’s that “oh, yes, consider yourself well paid for your kisses” applies to a man talking to a woman, and “you have a son and you haven’t even given him a name” applies to a woman talking to a man. When somebody wants to sing the other gender’s songs, they change the You into I and viceversa: when a woman sings “Maria de la O”, she is Maria, and when a man sings it, he’s a sort of sympathetic narrator of her life. It is a terrible mistake and no one should ever mess about with the other sex’s lyrics (me defending gender differentiation, what next!?)

Boleros might be danced if arranged for that purpose (like Cole Porter or Gershwin can be). Just like coplas sound flamenco-ish, boleros can have a subtle Latin music flavour. Both coplas and boleros have gone in and out of fashion. They made a timid comeback about fifteen years ago, and then some singers played a bit with them, experimented, changed their arrangements. Probably the best album of experimental copla ever is Bebo Valdés and Diego el Cigala’s “Lágrimas Negras”: Cuban piano adorning coplas, boleros, and other beauties like the Brazilian Eu sei que vou te amar.

The most underused copla is Torre de Arena (which is a woman’s song). Think of the best lyric for a standard ever, My Way or What a Wonderful Love or Someone to Watch Over Me and imagine no one had ever sung it well! Bad voices or bad production or bad musicians or all three! I hope I don’t go to the Hell of Translators (where you have to translate Finnegans Wake for all eternity) for this, but here you have Torre de Arena’s lyrics. And it is of course dedicated to my father and my granny (although I don’t think she’s much of a blog reader).

Como un lamento del alma mía
son mis suspiros, válgame Dios,
fieles testigos de la agonía
que va quemando mi corazón.
No hay, en la noche de mi desventura,
ni una estrellita que venga a alumbrar
esta senda de eterna amargura
que, triste y oscura,
no sé dónde va.
Esta senda de eterna amargura
que, triste y oscura,
no sé donde va.

Torre de arena
que mi cariño supo labrar.
Torre de arena
donde mi vida quise encerrar.
Noche sin luna,
río sin agua, flor sin olor,
Todo es mentira, todo es quimera,
todo es delirio de mi dolor.

Como una flor que deshoja el viento
se va muriendo mi corazón,
y, poco a poco, mi sufrimiento
se va llevando todo mi amor.

Como una fuente callada y sin vida.
Como el barquito que pierde el timón.
Como flor del rosal desprendida
está dolorida
mi pobre ilusión.
Como flor del rosal desprendida
está dolorida
mi pobre ilusión.

Torre de arena
que mi cariño supo labrar (etc)

Like laments from my soul
my sighs, woe is me!,
are witnesses of the agony
that burns my heart.

There isn’t a single little star
in the night of my misfortune
to lit up the road of eternal bitterness,
so dark and sad
I don’t know where it leads…

Sand tower
that I learnt to build with love.
Sand tower,
Where I buried myself alive.
Moonless night, waterless river, scentless flower,
It’s all a lie,
It’s all false,
It’s all delirium born out of pain.

Like a flower the wind breaks
my heart dies,
and slowly my suffering
takes away my love.

Like a dead silent fountain
like a steerless boat
like a fallen rose
my poor hope is hurt.
like a fallen rose
my poor hope is hurt

They say that Middle Eastern Dance, also known as Oriental Dance and belly dance, is good for self-esteem. In my case, it's true, for a number of reasons that aren't the point here.

I have just changed dancing classes (not instructor: I wouldn't leave the wonderful June!). Instead of dancing with Cornell students that take the class for credit, curiosity, or maybe to stay fit in a way less mind-numbing than jogging (bleh), I'm dancing with people that dance for the sheer joy of it. And you know what? no one is ever modest. Not one of my new classmates says they're bad, clumsy, too fat, too tall, or "too" anything. Sometimes, someone will objectively say that one particular choreography is too hard for them, or that they are nervous. We're not superheroes. But there is none of that fake-modesty that you will often find in an all-women (or nearly all-women, there is one man in one of the groups) environments. Yay. That alone is enough of a reason to enjoy the dance.

I thought I had more poems with questions on them, but there’s just fivenull. It is just a coincidence that they are all love poems (well, love: jealousy, loneliness, contempt, arrogance, and insecurity). It is probably not a coincidence that two of them are tankas: haikus have to go straight to the point and they don’t have time to ask questions!

Cream on my coffee.
Silver on his hands.
Who could give him all those rings?

Nata en mi café
Plata en sus manos.
¿Quién le habrá regalado todos esos anillos?

Sofas at right angles.
You sit on the other one,
We’re drawing an L.
L for “leather”, “love”, or “lust”.
Maybe for “lonely”, instead?

Sofás en ángulo recto.
Te sientas en el otro,
Y formamos una L.
Nos une el cuero, el amor y la lujuria,
O tal vez la soledad.

He has everything.
The women describe his smile,
Remember his name.
But, who loves someone who eats
Alone in a public place?

Lo tiene todo,
Las mujeres describen su sonrisa
Y se acuerdan de su nombre.
Pero, ¿quién quiere a alguien que come
Solo en un lugar público?

“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
Do I dance better if you watch?

¿Cómo distinguir el baile de la bailarina?
¿Bailo mejor cuando me miras?

Killed by your beauty,
Little tag hanging from my lips:
Coffee “or something”?

Tu belleza me ha matado.
Una etiquetita cuelga ahora de mis labios,
Y dice “¿Quedamos para tomar café, o algo?”

The sign says, in Catalan,

"Barcelona City Hall.
Area under CCTV surveillance.
George Orwell Square."

In my interpretation, it goes against the Spanish Constitution for public institutions to set up CCTV cameras on open, public spaces because that violates our right to privacy (article 18.1).

I stole this photograph from Nachete.

I created this theory of art to tease the Elusive Poet; I don’t remember well his reaction, but I think he agreed. By the way, if you haven’t followed this blog from the beginning, the Elusive Poet is a friend of mine who writes, but doesn’t let anyone see his work, hence the nick.

So, the Pyramid Theory. Imagine a three-sided pyramid:
Side 1 is Unoriginality, terseness, boredom, flatness. “Writing degree zero”. Journalism, technical writing, the unliterary.
Side 2 is Sentimentality, the cheesy.
Side 3 is Pretentiousness, the ornate, innovation.
En español es más sencillo: plano, cursi o pretencioso.

Art is like a ball in an impossible equilibrium at the top of the pyramid; we may disagree about where exactly a work stands (for example, I will forever defend that Bécquer's poetry is always too sentimental and often too pretentious), but the point is not to grade individual works. Art is not a multiple choice test. The purpose of the pyramid is the artist’s self-evaluation: look at whatever you create, and you’ll see how anything that you’d like to improve falls into any of those three faults. It is the simplest measure I’ve found to tell myself whether something must be destroyed or not.

Generally, I have to fight more with pretentiousness in poetry and sentimentality in prose. Unoriginality takes care of itself; trying to be deliberately original makes me pretentious.

I prefer modern poetry not to rhyme because I think that the search for interesting rhymes is too much of a strain on content. But sometimes, only sometimes, rhymed poetry is good even when the rhymes are not hard and clever. Seamus Heaney, a writer with an excellent control of rhythm, manages to rhyme “me” and “be” , and still make me want to be him when I grow up. For the time being, I think I will just translate him. Which is appropriate, because his best work is his translation of Beowulf.

My mother thinks the word “scaffolding”, in English, is funny, so this is for her.

Scaffolding.
Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding:

Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints

And yet all this comes down when the job’s done,
showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
old bridges breaking between you and me,

Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall,
Confident that we have built our wall.

Andamios.
En una obra, los albañiles al principio
miman los andamios del futuro edificio.

Clavan y fijan tornillos y barras,
aprietan y montan las tuercas y amarras.

No importa que al final quitemos todo eso,
queremos ver los muros de ladrillo y yeso.

Por eso, mi vida, si a veces sientes
que rompo las cuerdas que hacia mí tiendes

No te asustes. Cae el andamio, solamente.
para que tranquila, cruces el puente.

I am very serious.

I want to marry Pablo Gervás.

I wish I could just link you to his interview in El Pais today, but you have to pay to access that, so you will just have to trust my summary. Pablo Gervás is a researcher at the Computer Science department of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid who liked poetry. So, he has develoved six different programs that compose poetry using the extremely strict metric (scan & rhyme)rules of the Spanish "Siglo de Oro" (the Golden Age of Spanish literature, roughly late Renaissance and early Baroque). Each program has a different style; for example, there is one who sacrifices content to sound with surreal effects ("The Madman"). What a genius!

In the interview he admits he started to write poetry as a seduction strategy. See, Pablo, I'm going to be on your side of the ocean in six weeks, would you like to go out for a coffee or something?

So I wrote another micro-story. The third one. And like the other two, it is a break-up, so I have a story of loss and longing, a story of hate, and a story of bittersweet redemption. Estoy empezado a cogerle gustillo a esto de escribir sobre romper parejas. Here you have it:

Contigo aprendí que pasada una cantidad de velas encendidas, no importa cuántas más haya en una habitación porque la penumbra no va a resultar más luminosa. Mi amor para ti era un cuarto lleno de velas: daba igual cuánto me esforzase, porque siempre necesitarías más luz. ¿Verdad que fue una suerte que me diese cuenta antes de consumirme del todo?

You taught me that after a certain amount of lit candles, it doesn’t matter if you add any more because the light is not going to be any stronger. My love was to you like a room full of candles: no amount of effort on my part would ever be enough. Wasn’t it lucky that I realised before I was burnt out?

Something that I like a lot about Ithaca is how easy it is to find your way. There are areas in which all the houses look the same and you might think you are lost, but the streets are normally a grid, oriented north-south and east-west. There is a point to the northwest of the Commons (Are you in Seville? the local calle Sierpes, that’s The Commons) that defines where streets start. To your left West Buffalo street, to your right East Buffalo. Ahead North Cayuga, behind North Cayuga. The Cornell campus has areas according to location like that. North Campus, West Campus, and so on. It comes natural to give directions using the cardinal points.

Now try doing that in Europe. Ha! Seville is an extreme example because the North is to the left: the convention is that the river lies horizontally, and to do that, North is left. I cannot read a map of my own hometown if the cardinal points are in the right place. The way to say where things are is by neighbourhoods. I have a very bad sense of orientation, but I’m not the only one that thinks that in Seville, as in other old European cities, you don’t know where things are: you just know how to go from area A to area B. Say, I know how to go from Reina Mercedes or from Nervión to the city centre, but I cannot remember a direct Reina Mercedes-Nervión route.

Some cities take the north-south rationality to the extreme: In Washington DC, north-south streets are numbered, east-west streets are lettered (A for the southernmost, and it gos up), and diagonal avenues always have the names of states. In most of Manhattan, all north-south roads are avenues (three have names, twelve are numbered), and east-west streets are numbered. This doesn't just mean that you never get lost and that it is easy to find your way: it also means that the mention of an address gives you a clue to the sort of neighbourhood it is in. A restaurant of shop anywhere between, say, 55th and 100th streets is going to be expensive. Wherever you are, the further east is probably going to be more expensive. And so on.

British cities are a mix of the rational north-south mentality and the chaotic neighbourhood mentality: towns go by neighbourhoods (the big cities started out as small villages clustered together), and public transport is always forever radial (that is, you cannot go from Area A to Area B without crossing through the city centre), but the east-west axis is sometimes important because in general, the further east, the poorer the neighbourhood: a relic from when there were no sewers, since British rivers and winds go eastwards, and if you live in the west, they are cleaner. In any British town, a neighbourhood called "East Side" will probably be the dodgy one.

Almost two years ago, I was living in Glasgow, Scotland, and feeling very much at home there. I kept postponing doing a one-day trip to Edinburgh, until I saw that John Irving was going to the Edinburgh Book Fair just a couple of weeks before my intended return to Spain. I thought he’d be signing books. So I went to Edinburgh to meet John Irving after having half-heartedly avoided the place for months.

John Irving wasn’t going to sign books. He was going to do a reading of extracts of his books, and the tickets were sold out. I had gone to Edinburgh for nothing. I might as well do the tourist thing and take a look at the books to sale.

And in the poetry section there was a book called GLASGOW ZEN. Genius. I leave Glasgow very reluctantly and I find a book that translates classic Japanese haiku into Glaswegian Scots.

Jist this,
Jist this,
And still –

It’s a world of dew,
Only that, a world of dew,
And even so…

Sólo un mundo de rocío,
Sólo somos rocío,
Y sin embargo....

I don’t dare translating it into any Southern Spanish dialect, although it would be easy for someone with a better ear to do so. This is a haiku that a master whose name I can’t remember (Issa?) wrote after the death of his only son. The first is Alan Spence’s version and the other two are my paraphrases of the original. “World of dew” is a common Buddhist metaphor about the brevity of things.

Oh, and I didn’t go to Edinburgh for nothing. A museum had the best temporary exhibition of Monet paintings ever done, gathering paintings from dozen of collections. Good things turn up when you least expect it, specially in Scotland.

Commenting on the sneak-preview reactions to the novel he is just about to release, Neil Gaiman writes this:

as an artist (of any kind) you make things for an audience, normally because you like them. You hope they'll work. (An analogy I used in the Locus interview, talking about short stories, was making clay pots at school. Sometimes you get a pot. Sometimes you get something only a grandmother could love.) And you hope, mostly, that people will like or enjoy or appreciate them. (Or sometimes, just that the story will prickle people or make them think.)

It is probably true. I write better when I have an audience; when I don't have one, or at least when I'm not writing becuase someone else's prompt, after I'm done the question is the same: Is this good enough to show to my best friend? to my poet friends? to my mother? The measure of whether I like my own work or not is normally my intuition of whether something that has never seen the light would be enjoyed by people I know. Having said that, writing for a audience can become pornographic in the sense that I'm giving my audience exactly what pleases them, making things as easy as possible for them. I had a professor that called your average bestseller "masturbation" because they told you what to wanted to hear. Too much pleasure, too little challenge.

In one of the literary online groups I belong to there is currently a heated debate bout the worth of James Joyce's Ulysses. The attackers have mostlyone argument: it is incoomprehensible and art should be understood before it is enjoyed. They invert the terms of my professor's understanding and think that the book is "mastubation" in the sense that the book is so hermetic that the author has all the fun and leaves the readers out of it.

As usual, it is a matter of balance. Too easy and it's too flat. You might please the crowds or bore them to death. Too hard and you create a freak that very few people might love fiercely and everyone else will despise, or be afraid of.

I thought I had posted this a long time ago but it's not on the files. Did it get lost, floating on the blogosphere? Who knows. Here it is anyway. I'm not sure it's not a repeat.

I can’t remember who asked me why I don’t stick to one language and whether I plan on using Spanish in the blog only, once I go back to Spain. Before I started blogging, I thought I had three choices. I could have a Spanish blog, an English one, or one in each language. Spanish might get me readers more quickly, English would get me more potential readers. I have chosen neither option. I want a bilingual blog in which everyone feels slightly out of place. Only a little bit. A blog where Spaniards that know me in the real world (hola, os echo de menos) make an effort to remember their High School English. Something that makes whoever reads me from an English-speaking country be frustrated at my habit of linking to Spanish websites, and the Spanish poetry, and the occasional Spanish word or phrase. A few readers (Sus, un petó) already used to swim in the middle of two or three languages, should feel at home. And that is exactly the way it’s going to be.

And this is what Gloria Anzaldúa thinks of being in the middle. Naturally, you won’t expect me to translate this one.

To live in the borderlands means you
are neither hispana india negra española
ni gabacha, eres mestiza, mulata, half-breed
caught in the crossfire between camps
while carrying all five races on your back
not knowing which side to turn to, run from;

To live in the Borderlands means knowing
that the india in you, betrayed for 500 years,
is no longer speaking to you,
that mexicanas call you rajetas,
that denying the Anglo inside you
is as bad as having denied the Indian or Black;

Cuando vives en la frontera
people walk through you, wind steals your voice,
you're a burra, buey, scapegoat,
forerunner of a new race,
half and half - both woman and man, neither-
a new gender;

To live in the Borderlands means to
put chile in the borscht,
eat whole wheat tortillas,
speak Tex-Mex with a Brooklyn accent;
be stopped by la migra at the border check points;

Living in the Borderlands means you fight hard to
resist the gold elixir beckoning from the bottle,
the pull of the gun barrel,
the rope crushing the hollow of your throat;

In the Borderlands
you are the battleground
where enemies are kin to each other;
you are at home, a stranger,
the border disputes have been settled
the volley of shots have shattered the truce
you are wounded, lost in action
dead, fighting back;

To live in the Borderlands means
the mill with the razor white teeth wants to shred off
your olive-red skin, crush out the kernel, your heart
pound you pinch you roll you out
smelling like white bread but dead;

To survive in the Borderlands
you must live sin fronteras,
be a crossroads.

About two years ago, I wanted to send a haiku cycle to a contest but they only accepted submissions much longer that what I had managed to write in Spanish until that moment, long enough to become a book. It didn’t matter, because that forced me to lose my fear of composing poetry in my first language. I had to start by trimming stuff out of the translations of poems in English (that’s always a good rule: when in doubt, simplify). I ended up with a break-up story of sorts, but not a stoy with a beginning and an end. Something like a catalogue of feelings related to a break-up.

Since I started from my poems in English, these poems have three versions: the original English one, the first Spanish translation, which is very faithful to the original content, and the Spanish version that tries to fit into the syllabic pattern of haikus, so the content is no longer so faithful. I'm going to post each threesome individually, and in the hope that the series is interesting for readers who don’t understand Spanish, I will go beyond the usual “this is not autobiographical” disclaimer and explain a bit about how each poem came to be.

Rose became snow became naked branches.
Swimmers turned into monsters.

Rosa se convirtió en nieve se convirtió en ramas desnudas.
Nadadores que se volvieron monstruos.

Era un nadador,
Se convirtió en piraña.
Fue culpa mía.

It was hard to put all I wanted into one poem. This one is autobiographical, for a change. I lived for a year in a house that had a lovely plot of orange roses when I moved into it in September. The snow that fell in winter looked pretty for a short while (this was Aberdeen, where it snows often but it melts quickly). For many depressing months, the bushes were black and leafless. They looked dead. The succession of a burst of beauty followed by something still good but more discreet, followed by misery, was exactly what was going on in my life at the time.

So. James Joyce's Ulysses happens all in one day. Many people know that. The day is June 16th, 1904, because that was the day that Joyce and Nora Barnacle had their first date (or second, it depends on who tellsyou the story) and decided to get married. That's a love letter y lo demás es tontería.

This is the end of Ulysses. The strema of consciousness of the protagonist's wife, Molly Bloom. It is hard to decide whether the man was an old boyfriend of hers, long before she got married, or her husband.

... and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

One of the first surprises I had on my first few weeks at Cornell were waivers. There is an office that organises all sorts of activities for the foreign students, and when I went to sign up and pay a fee for the trip to Niagara Falls in September, I had to sign a waiver: a piece of paper saying that I join that activity under my own responsibility and that I would not sue Cornell University for anything that happened to me as a result of my participation. In plain English: I would not sue Cornell if I was injured during the trip.

OK, just fine. But I have to sign a different for every single activity. I’ve had to sign them even to go to a classic music concert.

Foreigners who see American TV shows get the impression that Americans would sue anyone, responsible or not, for any reason. Waivers suggest that American corporations are scared of that. I don’t think that waivers would be legal in Spain, especially in the case of individuals dealing with corporations.

Please don´t let the following line scare you. Keep on reading.

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

That was the opening of Finnegans Wake, James Joyce's last work. It is normally called a novel, but I don't think it is one. This experimental book takes the English language and a few dozen others, twists and bends them to create somthing in which every word has layers and more layers of meaning. For example that first word: "riverrun", is evidently composed of "river" and "run". It is no exactly "the river runs", the S is missing. But besides, you have riv(ERR)un. Err means both to wander and to make a mistake. So, you have four words and infinite possibilities of interpretation in a single word.

This week I have attended a performance of section II.1, called "Children's Games", "Night games", or "The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies", which is the title that the actor Adam Harvey chose. All I knew before I went to watch it was that it wouldn't be a reading or a recitation but a performance. So I decided to attend. I have read little bits and pieces of Finnegan's Wake, but not a lot. Having read this entry so far you nearly know as much as I do about it.

So, there I was at the theatre and a man in loose clothes with a stocking on his head storms in and starts to talk in the style characteristic of Finnegans Wake in a way that suggests a playbill. Something close-to-but-not-quite English, meaning maybe "Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to our show, this is the cast". But he was all the cast! I can only compare it to a one-man performance of a "normal" play. So imagine a man doing all the appropriate voice and gesture changes for the complete cast of Hamlet. Now imagine that you are watching that, in a language that you don't understand, but that is close to one you know. If you are Spanish, think Portuguese, maybe. That was just about my level of comprehension of what was going on on the stage: a one-man performance of a play that uses a vaguely familiar plot in a vaguely familiar language.

It is hard to explain how something so difficult to understand was so appealing. I guess it is all in the acting. Adam Harvey, the actor, is very expressive and has a great control of body language and movement. Audiences of his three Finnegans Wake pieces are always in awe of his ability to memorise such long pieces of text; he is already tired of explaining that there is nothing special about his memory and that any actor should be able to do that sort of thing. He has been working on making sense of the book for very long, so it is not in any way an empty exercise in memorising something meaningless.

Any one who has had the patience to sit through a whole performance of Harvey's then praises him to the skies. I think that the problem with performing Finnegans Wake is that no one would dare criticise Harvey's interpretation under risk of seeming petty. For example, we can argue to what extent we think Hamlet's mother is guilty, that's an open topic, but since Finnegans Wake is such a hard work no one who knows and likes it tries to argue about Harvey's take on it. As I said, I'm not qualified to give an opinion on it in that sense.

So, what next? I think that lots of people should watch this strange performance, that I found at times very funny and amusing (Harvey thinks it is very confrontational and terrible and not light and amusing at all). Children have enjoyed small fragments of it and it looks like something that avant-garde theatrical audiences would love. The way Adam moves onstage wouldn't need many words to be expressive, anyway.

Now that I have had time to digest it, and that the performance had a discussion afterwards and I think I know more about reading, and acting, and music, and dance, and Literature, I would love to see "The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies" again. Since I'm going back to Spain soon, I don't see that happening in the near future, but who knows? Maybe when Adam Harvey is rich and famous I can boast that I knew him now. Heh.

This is my own translation, taking a few liberties, of a Spanish blog post that everyone has read either in its original location or as an anonymous e-mail atachment. The Spanish original is here.

***
Since the modification of the laws that apply to marriage, and the Christian views on the issue, are controversial these days, I am going to explain my own opinion:

I am completely in favour of allowing Christians to get married.

I think that trying to prevent it is unjust and a mistake.

Christianity is not a disease. Christians, even though they are disliked or mistrusted by many, are normal people and should have the same rights as everyone else, as if they were, let’s say, homosexuals or computer programmers.

I am aware of the fact that many traits in the behaviour of Christians, such as their attitudes towards sex, many seem strange to the rest of us. I know that sometimes, reasons of health policy could be argued against them: for example, their dangerous, delibarate rejection of contraceptives. I also know that some of their traditions, like the public exhibition of images of tortured people, may make some people feel uncomfortable.

But all this, besides being an image transmitted by the media rather than the reality, is not a reason to prevent their marriage.

Some could argue that Christian marriage is not real marriage, because to them, it is a ritual, and a covenant with their god, instead of a contract for the union of two people. Also, since sex outside marriage is condemned by Christianity, some could say that allowing Christians to marry would encourage marriages in order to avoid shame in their communities or simply because they wish to have sex (forbidden to them outside a marriage), increasing domestic violence and dysfunctional families. But we have to remember that this is not exclusive of Christian families and that, since we cannot know the thoughts of others, we should not judge their intimate motivations.

On the other hand, to say that their unions are not true marriage and that therefore they should be given some other name is just a mean, petty technique to lead the debate towards semantic questions that are beside the point. Even among Christians, marriage is marriage and a family is a family.

And with this I will go on to another very controversial subject that I hope does not seem too radical: I am also in favour of allowing Christians to adopt children.

Some people might be outraged by my affirmation. A few are likely to reply, “Christians adopting!? Those kids could become Christians!?”

I see that type of criticism and my answer is: even though the children of Christians have a much higher likelihood of becoming Christians also (contrary to what happens to the children of homosexuals or computer programmers), I have already made clear that I believe Christians to be human beings like everybody else.

Despite the opinions of some and the hints that we have, there is no conclusive evidence that Christian parents are less well equipped to raise a child, or that the religiously biased atmosphere of a Christian home is a negative influence of a child. Besides, adoption offices judge each case individually so it should be up to these to determine whether a pair of parents is the right one or not.

In short, in spite of what some people think, I believe that Christians should have the right to get married and to adopt children. Just like homosexuals, or computer programmers.

You are my inspiration. /Eres mi musa.

1
Love is a bad poet
and sleepless, writing haiku
about your shoulders.

El amor es un mal poeta
e insomne, que escribe haiku
sobre tus hombros.

2
Love is a bad poet.
Unconvinced? Come closer,
I will show you why.

El amor es un mal poeta.
¿no te lo crees? Acércate más
y te enseño por qué.

3
Love is a bad poet
who turns your hair into words.
Never trust a poet.

El amor es un mal poeta
que convierte tu pelo en palabras.
Nunca te fíes de un poeta.

4
Love is a bad poet.
It never edits a draft,
Unlike resentment.

El amor es un mal poeta
Nunca corrige sus borradores,
al contrario que el resentimiento.

Insomnia is a wonderful poetic theme. There is so much to say about it. I can’t remember any names right now, but I think there’s a handful of Spanish classic poems about sleeplessness.

I actually wrote the first three poems during a sleepless night. The fourth came a couple of days later; I have more than ten haiku cycles and this is the closest I’ve come to have the idea of a cycle before grouping the poems. On the other occasions, I have picked here and there for enough poems on the same theme to get a cycle together, sometimes composing only one or two to fit the others. It is also my only composition with a refrain so far.

This cycle is the more mature, restrained, mysterious older sister of “Heart on a tray”: another refusal to shove my feelings down the reader’s throat (we already have Bécquer to make us sick with his self-indulgence, so no need for the rest of us to make the paper dirty with tears and snot).

There are words that I cannot translate because they either don’t have an equivalent that means the same in the other language, or because there’s something special about their sound. Most of them are in Spanish:

Chulo: How can you say in English that someone is “arrogant” with a very colloquial word? Neither cheeky or arrogant imply “overconfident”. There is simply no way to say in English “es que tú eres más chula que nadie”.

Merienda: If you have dinner at ten, like everyone does in Spain, you need a snack at six. “Afternoon tea”, as a meal, not as a drink, is the closest. But that’s as if you loved nice big breakfasts, and found a language that calls any type of breakfast “coffee”.

Avíos: Ingredients, or the set of tools for a task. Aviárselas: to make do with a substitute, especially one of inferior quality. To cope. Very colloquial and very local.

Desavío: What happens when you have put water to boil, made the pasta sauce, open the pantry door and see the spaghetti jar is empty. Lacking an essential tool for the task. Also, a convenience store!

Pesado: the word that means “heavy” used for a person who either talks too much or insists too much on one thing; a pest, someone that tires you.

Jartible: a pest, a pester, someone you are sick of. Extremely local.

Moña: An effeminate homosexual, but also a coward, acts of cowardice, anything half-hearted or wishy-washy. It does not imply homophobia on the part of the speaker (I use this one even when I speak in English).

Afú: Not a real word. Meaningless expression, to express annoyance or tiredness. I was very surprised when some Catalan friends found it funny and weird, so I guess it must be local too.

Saborío, esaborío. Sabor means flavour, and therefore this word would mean “bland, flavourless”. It applies to a person who is either unfriendly or boring, charmless.

Today it's the birthday of my wonderful cousin-and-friend Irene, who saved my life once or twice. Really. I can't say she's my "best" friend because that somehow diminishes some of my other very good friends.

Anyway, the poetry. These are all the poems I've written that are directly inspired by her. The gossipy note for those who need it: number 1 is one of my earliest, I sat with the idea of writing about Irene, but didn't know exactly how. When we were children, she was blondish, I was dark, and we liked to play with dolls together until we were way too old for them. The "forbidden" bit was that we were supposed to entertain her little brother, but keeping him out was part of the fun. I know, I know, the result looks like lesbian erotica. Which isn't a bad thing necessarily. Number 2 is a simple description of what happened when she came to visit me in Aberdeen, one month of may in which snow fell from a clear sky. Number 3 is another simple description of me locking myself out of the mountain refuge where ten of us wer spending a weekend.

1
Brunette and blonde hide.
No longer children.
Forbidden games are always best.

Una morena y una rubia.
Ya no son niñas.
Los juegos prohibidos siempre son mejores.

2
Snow melts in the air.
Under her coat, she shivers.
Seagulls around us.

La nieve se funde en el aire.
Bajo su abrigo, ella tirita.
Gaviotas a nuestro alrededor.

3
Alone, out at dawn.
The icy wind wraps me up
While my friends sleep.

Salgo sola, al amanecer.
El viento gélido me envuelve
Mientras mis amigos duermen.

I have studied in three Universities: Seville (Spain), Aberdeen (Scotland) and Cornell (USA). In each of these universities there is a completely different concept of what a library is and what it is for, and it took me a while to adpat to the Cornellian model.

In Seville, a library is a study room. People often find it so hard to concentrate and study at home, that they commute for an hour in and an hour back every day to have some peace and quiet. Sadly, there are so many people wanting to do the same that on exam times (late January to late February; June; September) lines form some minutes before the libraries’ opening time. Many students have the horrible habit of keeping seats for friends. Be at the library at 9.05am, and find maybe one third of the seats taken by a person, and all the rest covered in folders, books and jackets, supposedly "reserved" for people who will turn up two hours later.

In Aberdeen, the library (wow, the library, there's only one, all the books together, I don’t have to go to the other end of town to borrow a book on Literary Theory that happens to be in the Philosophy Department!!) was a books’ warehouse with very few places to study and just about 20 computers, who were older and a lot worse than the ones in the computer building. For any Cornellians that may be listening, the Queen Mother’s Library in my mind is about the size of three or four Olin libraries.

In Aberdeen the problem were not study seats, but computers. The computer building was crowded during the day and the computer labs doubled as classrooms. I don’t think I ever saw a laptop in all the time I was there, although there was quite a talk of a laptop loan system to be used in the library. I wonder if that was ever done.

It was so puzzling that people didn’t demand more study space. After all, student flats were often noisy, cold and uncomfortable. I had friends who didn’t even had desks in their rooms; flats came badly furnished and they couldn’t afford to buy what was missing, so they lived in bed. The computers were a more pressing necessity because no one owned one and we needed them for our essays. So, we would go to the Library in the early evening, borrow a pile of books and take them to the almost-empty computer building, that you could open with your student card.

I needed a laptop to come to Cornell not because I wanted to have one here, but because I needed to make a vast amount of information portable. Then I got here and I saw that the study space was limited, but not as badly as in Aberdeen. I was shocked to see that people would sit in a place, and put their jackets and bags in the one next. Not to save it for a friend, no. Just because they can. And everyone keeps coming and going and making as much noise as they please (why, oh why does Uris Library have such echoing acoustics?). So, people study at home, I guess. Nothing new for me there. The computers are the surprising thing: there is a sprinkling of computers everywhere, but they are clearly not enough for even a tenth of the students.

One, two… Does everyone have a laptop? I mean, everyone? When I got mine it felt as if I was spoiling myself, just getting an expensive little toy. Here people are either very rich (graduate students aren’t, of that I’m sure), or they have completely different priorities that we have at home. Or both.

Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground have much better songs than “Sunday Morning”, but I’m in the mood for drug music. This little one here is weird because it sounds like a Beach Boys ballad, all soft and sweet, but the lyrics are about the paranoia and depression that people get as the effects of some drugs wear off.

Sunday morning, praise the dawning
It’s just a restless feeling by my side
Early dawning, Sunday morning
It’s just the wasted years so close behind
Watch out, the world’s behind you
There’s always someone around you who will call,
“It’s nothing at all!”
Sunday morning, and I’m falling
I have a feeling I don’t want to know
Early dawning, Sunday morning
It’s just the streets you crossed not so long ago.
Watch out, the world behind you
There’s always someone around you who will call,
“It’s nothing at all!”

Today I took what I think will be my last trip to the supermarket in Ithaca, because I'm leaving this insane country in three weeks. That is an excuse as good as any other to repost a winter impression of the way to Greenstar

* * *
Before you read me, click here if you can read in Spanish.

My trips to the supermarket include walking for 20 minutes with a backpack on, so I have to be careful with the weight of what I carry and I never have my camera on me. I often regret it because there are so many things I would like to take pictures of. Like all this.

The bus slides down the slope and stops at a traffic sign that says “STOP war”; the second word is a graffiti. The tourist slogan is Ithaca is Gorges, but I’d get it changed to Ithaca is Hippie. The other bus riders are obese young men as if out of a documentary for the risks of fast food, and delicate Asian students that wear stiletto boots in the snow. I get down at the Commons, where the Christmas decorations are still on, and I swear as I pass by the Greek Orthodox Church: it is decorated with a biblical quote that says MY YOKE IS EASY AND MY BURDEN IS LIGHT. Jesus did not have to walk to the supermarket with a backpack.

My Discman screams Spanish rap at me as I walk past skinny black boys walking like pendulums in oversize clothes and old ladies that wrap their little dogs in little blankets to go for a walk in the middle of a snowfall. I laugh loudly at a sign that says JESUS HAS ALREADY COME, with a phone number and a biblical reference. Will Jesus help me with my bags, do you think?

Past the second-hand children’s clothes shop, painted bright yellow and decorated like a fairy tale house, there is the main road to cross and trucks pass by, as if out of a road movie, huge monsters, bigger than anything I’ve seen in Europe, that stop to let me cross. Thank you. I’ve survived the road and I’m at the supermarket.

The way back. A tiny Asian girl with a white father smiles at me as if she knew me, and it takes me seconds to realise that she is just smiling back: the mood in my Discman is contagious. A teenager drags behind the steps of his father, frowning like only teens can. A graffiti on a street light remind us KNOW THYSELF: Ithaca has very learned hippies. There is a Pregnancy Center and a funeral parlour on opposite sidewalks of the same street. I pass by the Public Library just before the bus stop and cross a woman and a little girl; both have the happy-tired look of people who have spent a whole day shopping, which the added excitement of having done it for free. The mother has one very thick romance novel, the girl the complete works of J K Rowlings and a cookie.

And on the bus home, there is a dodgy type drinking something that does not smell like coffee out of a paper cup. I don’t know if he’s talking to me or to his invisible friend, but I’m not going to take off my Discman to ask.

The first one is an original, the second a literal translation and the third a less literal translation that fits the haiku pattern.

Tenderness has died.
Two fierce young bodies,
“Stirring memory and desire” (T. S. Eliot).

La ternura ha muerto.
Dos cuerpos jóvenes y feroces
“Removiendo el recuerdo y el deseo”

La ternura ya ha muerto.
Cuerpos feroces,
Puro deseo.

It was that little line that reconciled me with T. S. Eliot, about four or five years after my first introduction to him. It makes sense that the line came back to haunt me, since memory and desire make three quarters of my creative writing. I composed the original one, the English haiku, while I was driving to class. I had been thinking for weeks about writing a haiku around the quote. There is something in the tediousness of driving along the jammed A49 highway that switches my head off the road and on more creative things. Another reason why it took me long to write it was because my initial approach was nostalgic. I wanted to write a poem about remembering an old love when it’s completely over.

I think the second, shorter Spanish version is superior to the more faithful translation.

I’m not a big fan of Lorca; I just like the occasional poem, or even individual lines by him. I love one that says,

Caballito frío,
¡qué perfume de flor de cuchillo!

Cold little horse,
What a fragrance of knife flowers!

The horse is cold because it is dead and the fragrance of knife flowers is blood. And the poem is about highwaymen that have assaulted a traveller in the night.

Surrealism in a poem is like sex in Hollywood movies. I don’t have anything against it, as long as it really adds something good to the whole instead of just being there because it is expected.

Anyway, a little bit more Lorca. My town associated with suffocating heat. I hope I don’t go to the Hell of Translators for this (where bad translators have to work on Finnegans Wake for all eternity).

Adelina de paseo

La mar no tiene naranjas
Ni Sevilla tiene amor
Morena, ¡qué luz de fuego!
Préstame tu quitasol.

Me pondrá la cara verde
Zumo de lima y limón
Tus palabras, pececillos,
Nadarán alrededor.

La mar no tiene naranjas.
¡Ay!, amor.
¡Ni Sevilla tiene amor!

Adelina takes a walk

There are no oranges at sea,
There is no love in Seville.
My brunette, what fiery light.
Lend me your parasol.

It will make my cheeks green
(juice of limes and lemons)
Your words – little fishes –
will swim all around us.

There are no oranges at sea.
Ay, love.
And no love in Seville!

Again: the first one is an original, the second one is the literal Spanish translation, the third one is a Spanish adaptation that scans, from a haiku cycle that tells the story of a break-up.

Blue sky, blinding snow.
A lovely orchid withered
Left out in the cold.

Cielo azul, nieve cegadora.
Una orquídea preciosa se marchitó
Cuando la dejaron a la intemperie.

Nieve y cielo azul.
Las rosas se han quemado.
No las cuidaste.

I have said before that the English version is the closest I have come to a poem about my teenage years. Being a teenager was no fun; bullied for two or three years and being generally ignored for the rest. One of the highlights was a skiing trip that went better than any other school activity of the previous seven years: that’s were the blue sky and the snow come from. The other two lines are anachronistic, since they refer to the time that came before. The second Spanish version turns it all into a reproach for a neglectful partner that has nothing to do with the initial conception.

I was thinking of the orchid in the photo, one of Mapplethorpe masterpieces; the metaphor of woman-as-orchid is as evident as the teeth of pearl and the hair of gold, but thankfully it is not as overused.

So. The law to make same-sex marriage legal in Spain has been approved today. You can see it in the news everywhere and there is not much point in me blogging about it. Who cares about my opinion? I'm only a culture-shocked poet and I will never tire of saying that this blog is not a door to the private thoughts and ramblings of La Guiri. I should hope it's not that anyway.

This is a piece of culture shock. I wanted to see the reactions to the news in foreign online news services, and I checked CNN, which says, near the end of a long-ish piece:

The Roman Catholic Church, which held much sway over the government just a generation ago when Gen. Francisco Franco was in power, had adamantly opposed gay marriage.

Franco died 30 years ago. That is not a generation ago, that's two generations. Franco agonised slowly over many years, roughly during all the time Nixon was president plus the first year of Ford's presidency. I would say that the emotional weight of Franco's presidency over Spain (1939-1975) is more or less the weight that the Vietnam War (1957-1975) has for Americans. We don't mention the Vietnam War every time we mention the United States' foreign policy. We don't mention Mao every time we talk about China. Will American newsreporters please stop mentioning Franco every time they talk about Spain? He died 30 years ago. Don't resurrect him.