On Poetry and Culture Shock

Ahh… I like this new location, with as much or as little colour as I want, a simpler template, bigger fonts and at last the possibility of dividing posts into themes. Now you can ignore the poems, or the culture shock, or me being dogmatic about the creative process.

Anyway, let’s start this one with a few beginnings. One novel, one play, one poem, with extraordinary beginnings. Since faithful translations are easily available I have taken a few liberties wherever that didn’t mean killing the meaning.

Lolita by Nabokov starts like this (thanks for the prompt, Mar):

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

Ay, Lolita, luz de mi vida, fuego de mis entrañas. Mi pecado, mi alma. Lo-li-ta: la punta de la lengua da un triple salto mortal desde el paladar, un, dos, tres, hasta los dientes. Lo. Li. Ta.

Hamlet by Shakespeare starts like this:

BERNARDO: Who's there?
FRANCISCO: Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.
BERNARDO: Long live the king!
FRANCISCO:Bernardo?
BERNARDO: He.
FRANCISCO: You come most carefully upon your hour.
BERNARDO: 'Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco.
FRANCISCO: For this relief much thanks: 'tis bitter cold,
And I am sick at heart.

BERNARDO: ¿Quién anda ahí? No, contesta tú y descúbrete.
FRANCISCO: No, contesta tú y descúbrete.
BERNARDO: ¡Larga vida al rey!
FRANCISCO: ¿Bernardo?
BERNARDO: Sí.
FRANCISCO: Llegas justo a tu hora.
BERNARDO: Ya han dado las doce; vete a la cama, Francisco.
FRANCISCO: Muchas gracias; pues me muero de frío,
Y ya no puedo más.

La Voz a ti Debida by Pedro Salinas (The Voice I owe to you) starts like this:

Tú vives siempre en tus actos.
Con la punta de tus dedos
pulsas el mundo, le arrancas
auroras, triunfos, colores,
alegrías: es tu música.
La vida es lo que tú tocas.

You always live in your acts.
With the tips of your fingers
you stroke the world, you snatch from it
dawns, triumphs, colours,
joys: it's your music.
Life is what you touch.

I could talk about my experience of March 11th, 2004. I could write a little meditation about the value of poetry, art, in times of mourning or desperation. I could talk about the political implications but I’m not going to. I’m going to talk about blood.

Early March last year I had teeth pulled out, which meant I was not allowed to donate blood until June. I had a good cry over that, feeling impotent I could not do my bit to help. Then in June I was sick, I can’t remember what of, and then I had minor surgery. In the United States, Europeans cannot donate blood. I haven’t donated in a year and a half and I really want to. So it’s my mission to make others donate.

Blood is always necessary. Even the victims of the terrorist attack last year need it now because some of them still need surgery. Blood cannot be synthesised yet there is nothing to substitute it. You never know when you will need someone else’s blood (I had two relatives in hospital days after the second-to-last time I gave blood, which was sad and scary).

Almost everyone can donate. It hurts very little or nothing at all: if it hurts it is not done properly, like so many things in life. You probably live close to a donation centre (just google your town’s name and either Red Cross or blood donation). All it takes is a few minutes, drinking lots of liquid before and after, and if it is your first time, making sure you will not have to drive back home, just in case you’re a bit sleepy. That’s it.

Cornell Cinema (what would I do without these guys?) is having a cycle of African cinema. Yesterday I saw two shorts, Histoire des Tresses (Braids) from Rwanda, and Kounandi (that’s a woman’s name) from Burkina Faso. I expected them to be slow, small stories; in my experience, Third World cinema (or should I say cinema out of the Western tradition, which is not the same thing) is a lot slower than what we are used to watch. What surprised me was they way they took the supernatural for granted.

Histoire des Tresses is a movie for fans of Lost in Translation. Minimal dialogue and a story about a woman who does beautiful braid work and never, ever, leaves her house, and a girl with hardly a bit of fuzz on her head, looking for someone to braid it with fake hair. Eventually, they find each other, the old one does the other’s braids, and then the young one’s skin becomes dry and hard like clay or bark, her hair stands on end like snakes, and she looks like Medusa, like some sort of goddess. The last shot shows the young woman in human aspect again, and the old one looking happy, walking down the street.

Kounandi’s acting is sometimes overdone, sometimes static, sometimes theatrical, sometimes awful. The first half of the film is ridiculously fast-paced. The relationships between the characters are very obvious (the woman, her male friend, his raving jealous wife). At the end, the two women meet at night, lightning strikes down a tree, and the wife falls flat on the ground. But the morning after, the other woman is found peacefully dead in her bed, and the wife has suddenly turned sweet-tempered. You are left to assume that the friend killed the wife and occupied her body using magic.

It’s a pity I haven’t had time to watch more of the African festival. That attitude towards the mythical is intriguing.

The night lies ahead.
Cup of tea full to the brim.
The poem doesn’t come.

Toda la noche por delante.
Una taza de té llena hasta el borde.
El poema no llega.

Let' say this again: Every artist that has stopped to theorise about Art in the abstract, about What Art Ought to Be, reaches a simple and easy conclusion. Art ought to be what I do. I am, of course, no exception. What I like and dislike is dictated by what I do or can’t do.

So: If I say that haikus offer the perfect balance of form and freedom, it means that what I can and cannot write gives me that opinion. First of all, I love haikus because they don’t rhyme. Rhyme is an unnecessary constraint that forces the poet to look for a word that fits form instead of meaning. Rhyme for its own sake, especially when it is difficult as in Spanish rap, is an interesting device. In poetry, is often superfluous, and what’s worse, distracting. And the most important thing: para rimar tiempos verbales, mejor no escribas. That is, you’d better not write at all if you intend to rhyme grammatical suffixes or particles.

Good. We have one principle: use excellent, original rhyme for its own sake, or don’t rhyme at all. Now, the distinction between poetry and poetic prose is in rhythm. Of all the non-rhyming traditional poetic forms, haikus are interesting because they must be concise: you cannot waste a syllable. Forms that don’t have a line count run the risk of heading straight into explanation. “This is what happened” slipping into “and this is the way it made me feel”. A haiku is the photograph of a feeling, not its description.

The last question is why not free verse. Free verse is the hardest of all because there are no rules and that makes mistakes so much easier. The balance is no longer between form and meaning but between freedom and self-indulgence. The old saying “master the rules before breaking them” applies. A good poem is one that is fresh and original even if it sticks to the rules. But, what makes a good free verse poem? Nobody knows. Yet.

Etiquetas: Array

Four seasons in one day, said the song. Americans that like Ithaca and don’t like warm countries always make the same remark: “Ithaca has seasons”. I knew a Californian who loves this place and she said “I have always wanted to live in a place that had seasons”. Yeah, right. In the immortal words of Sandra Bem, Ithaca has two seasons: winter and July. That Californian would say that Seville has two seasons, summer and January.

In southern Spain, the spring is warm and lovely, like summers here. Summer has a different heat; it's so hot that going out would make you ill. In the autumn it rains. In winter, it doesn’t, and it is normally as cold as Ithaca in November (minus the snow). From my perspective, Ithaca’s autumn lasted a month, and then came a winter that threatens to last for exactly half a year. Autumn is like winter without snow. Summer will be, I imagine, spring with less rain.

Whether we don’t have seasons here, Southern Spain doesn’t have seasons, or we all do, is just a matter of perspective. This is just a long way to say that I’m tired of snow and I need sunshine. Badly.

Hay una sola palabra: “primavera”,
Pero no hay una sola primavera.
Yo conozco dos.
Necesitamos dos palabras para las dos primaveras.
Una primavera fría,
Esquiva,
Primavera que muestra pero no da.
Beatrice, Dark Lady, Laura, Stella, Elisa,
De blanco cuello blanco que no puedes besar.
Primavera de escalofrío y lluvia,
Una flor al día.
Cada tierno brote una semana de anhelo,
Cielos azules que prometen brisa suave
Pero engañan.
Cuatro meses de súplica y diez días de calor,
Conozco primaveras (¿o eran mujeres?) así.
Y otra primavera ardiente,
Colores que estallan,
Toda entregada entera,
Flores y fruta y luz,
De golpe.
Y de repente te trae el verano,
Ahogo, sofoco, bochorno, treinta y siete grados,
Exigencias.
Te dio placer y te hará sudar.
Conozco primaveras (¿o eran mujeres?) así.

There is one word: “spring”,
But there isn’t just one spring,
I know two of them.
We need two words for two different springs.
A cold spring,
Aloof,
Spring that shows but does not give.
Beatrice, Dark Lady, Laura, Stella, Eliza, Daphne,
With a white neck white she won’t let you kiss.
Spring of chills and rain,
A flower a day.
Every tender new leaf after a week of desire,
Blue skies that promise a soft breeze:
They lie.
Four months begging on your knees and ten days of warmth,
I have known springs (or were they women?) like this.
And a hot fiery spring,
Colours that burst,
All for you, completely,
Flowers and fruit and light,
At once.
And suddenly she brings summer,
Stifling scorching sweltering thirty seven degrees*,
Demands.
She gave you pleasure, she’ll make you sweat.
I have known springs (or were they women?) like this.


This poem is a lot longer than I had planned at first! Sometimes I think I’m writing free verse because I’m losing the discipline to stick to haiku constraints. Maybe in a few days or weeks I’ll be able to take all these ideas into fifteen syllables (and I will probably prefer that version to this one).

I wrote this one after a whole day of walking on slush, looking at the tiny grey shoots that will become leaves on the trees on campus. If this weather was a woman it would be The Teaser From Hell, some sort of Renaissance protagonist of a sonnet.

* 37º C = 100º F.

Cinnamon shoulders,
your waist is a reed.
You can't be snapped by the wind.

Hombros de canela,
tu cintura es un junco.
No puede romperte el viento.

Me: I couldn't write poetry even if I tried.
Him: Oh yes you can.
I wrote a haiku about him, to prove him wrong. And then another. And another. He might deny his responsibility, but he was the one that made a poet of me, my own personal Erato-and-Polymnia in male form.

English is easier for haikus because the words are shorter. I translated the first few just because my readers were Spanish. To me, the “real” version was the original one, the Spanish one just a crutch for readers. About six months and twenty poems later, I wrote my first translation that was not a gloss to the English haiku; by that time, I was already considering the English and the Spanish versions of each poem as a pair that should not be broken.

I have lived in three countries with drastically different customs about the beginning of adult life. In Spain, no one moves away from their parents without having a steady job, yep, a full-time job, or even not until you can afford buying a house. Considering the unemployment rates, the cost of housing, and the fact that you need two salaries (one for the mortgage, one to live on), the average age of becoming completely independent is somewhere around the early thirties. Earlier than 25 is very unusual; some people even think it is perfectly normal to stay with your parents indefinitely if you’re single.

I knew that other countries do it differently and you leave your parents when you’re eighteen. What baffles me is that in the US, people not only leave their parents sooner than we do. I understand that, it doesn’t shock me, after all Universities have this annoying habit of being in the middle of nowhere, so independence (even if not always complete economical self-reliance) comes early. And I have seen it happen in Scotland. The culture-shocking bit is that (gasp) students get married.

If I knew one or two married couples, I would be a bit surprised. But no, it seems relatively normal. Married students are a minority, and I don’t know any married undergrads, it’s something more characteristic of grad students. Some of them met in the real world, got married, and then one of them came to grad school and the other followed; some others met and got married while both were in grad school.

From my perspective, personally and culturally, it is scary as hell to take that step before securing a future economically. Or maybe it’s that I’m more used to see long engagements. But it is probably a better option than the ten-year (and more) long engagements that some Spaniards go through while they wait for the perfect home and the perfect jobs.

Like frozen flowers (paralysed beauty),
the friendship of ex-lovers.

Como flores congeladas (belleza paralizada)
la amistad de antiguos amantes.

I don’t know if I like this one, because it is too “me”. Succinct, ambiguous, sentimental but impersonal. It refuses to say if the friendship of ex-lovers is a good or a bad thing, and it is so detached there is not even an “I”. Still, better a poem like an icicle than line after line of exhibitionism, ewwwww.

It doesn’t matter how much I insult confessional poetry and all the evils brought by Romanticism: some Romantics got it right most of the time (there’s only some people like Bécquer, that give Romanticism a bad name). And probably my favourite Romantic is John Keats, who has an absolutely gorgeous poem on the relationship of content and form. Of course, it could only be on the most classical, demanding, artificial of Western poetry forms. It could only be a sonnet.

If by dull rhymes our English must be chain'd,
And, like Andromeda, the Sonnet sweet
Fetter'd, in spite of pained loveliness,
Let us find, if we must be constrain'd,
Sandals more interwoven and complete
To fit the naked foot of Poesy:
Let us inspect the Lyre, and weigh the stress
Of every chord, and see what may be gain'd
By ear industrious, and attention meet;
Misers of sound and syllable, no less
Than Midas of his coinage, let us be
Jealous of dead leaves in the bay wreath crown;
So, if we may not let the Muse be free,
She will be bound with garlands of her own.

Misers of sound and syllable. I really like that line, just as much as the metaphor of poetry as language bound by hains like poor Andromeda. There are less and less poets in search of a rhyme, so very few that count their syllables. What would have Keats thought of free verse, of the lovely nakedness of verses unbound by stanzas? Would he have compared it to Perseus?

OK, this is not culture shock as in "Americans are weird" but as in "Some people don't have any feelings at all". I don't think it has anything to do with nationality.

Preventive removal of both breasts reduces chance of breast cancer in women at elevated risk. Women with a moderately elevated risk of breast cancer who underwent surgery to have both breasts removed reduced their risk of getting the disease by about 95 percent, a recent study concludes.

Fine. Just damn fine. And also, people whose legs are cut off do not run any risks of tripping over. I cannot understand who would even think that anyone would go through major, very invasive surgery, that leaves permanent scars for life in a sensitive and emotionally charged part of the body, for prevention.

Are they going to recommend preventive hysterectomy to teenagers? After all, they are at risk of unwanted pregnancy. And, are they going to recommend preventive castration to men who are at high risk of testicle or prosthatic cancer? Yeah. Right. No, I didn't think so either. But one of the side effects of being born with breasts and ovaries, worse than the risk of cancer, is that medicine just does not take you, your needs or your feelings seriously.

Cartoons drawn in the back of business cards.

There are three ways of being creative. I don’t mean ways of creating, since those are nearly infinite. I mean there are three ways of being a creative person. I know three people that exemplify each way.

The Elusive Poet writes poetry. It is personal, hard to understand, and surrealist. It is very important to him but no one is allowed to read it; sometimes he'll recite a bit to a very close friend. What is important to him is creation. Plenty of people create so that they can “let out” something trapped inside; of course the results can be too personal to show.

My second example is a rapper. Spanish rap has a tiny but fanatical audience, apart from the yearly sudden success created by the whims of the record companies. Toteking has published 2 CDs, one with his brother and the other one solo. Some of his lyrics are personal, some aren’t, and in many, content is next to irrelevant (as opposed to form, which is everything). I haven’t seen him in ages, but as far as I know, he's given at least one concert if not more every week of the last three years. He despises the attitude of creative people who don't try to make money out of their art, which is why he said I should write a novel instead of short stories and poetry. To him everyone who does not try to make a profit from their creativity is either very stupid, or hypocritical, o snobbish. I wonder in which category he puts me.

I don't think either of them is wrong. Guy One enjoys what he does and no one these days is going to become suddenly rich by publishing poetry. Tote has lots of fun, and a bit of money is never a bad thing. Now the third example. That’s me. I don’t know or care if I can make money with what I do. I don’t know very well why I do it. What I do know is that I need it to be seen. I work a lot better and faster with audience and feedback, even if it is negative. Sometimes as I write I think, "is this good enough to show to this or that person?" Other times, someone’s comments on my work inspires even more work.

That's one of the reasons to blog: It seems a wonderful way to let others read me. And you can just click there and say anything, from “your haikus are trash” or recommendations or critiques or anything. Like a public poetry reading without the snobbery (I hope) and the free food (but if you live in Ithaca, that can be fixed: do you want to go out for lunch sometime? Heh).

So, the massage course is over. I came to Cornell to do research and I’ve ended up learning how to give massage (shiatsu, Thai, and your standard kneading-rubbing massage). The instructors were great and the other students were amazing too: I have received professional massage four times in my life, and in two of them I felt worse the morning after. Here at Cornell I’ve been massaged six times by six beginners like me and my back is still in one piece.

The culture-shocking bit about the class was that the instructors seemed easygoing and at the same time very concerned about the possibility of students feeling uncomfortable about being touched by other people. There were many things, too visual or too technical to tell here, that we were supposed to do or not to do (mostly about how to touch or avoid the thighs). One of them said more than once that an advantage of shiatsu over Western massage is that you’re not be uncomfortable about taking off your clothes (Eastern massage is received while fully dressed). Is it really so awkward to be touched? Are people really so prudish?

Maybe. Or maybe it is a question of perspective. We were taught how to massage the face; it was my turn to work on another person. As the teacher dictated the instructions, I massaged my partner’s head. Weird if you want, I’m comfortable about everything else including the partial nudity, but touching a stranger’s face is way too intimate.

I say that I don’t like exhibitionism in poetry. Mar says that all literature is somehow exhibitionist, since I want my works to be read. The easiest way of explaining where is our disagreement is that my exhibitionism is “Look! Look what I wrote!” while the exhibitionism that I dislike goes “Look! These are my feelings! I wrote a poem about them, too!” Writing poetry about your own feelings is great. Showing it to others is often embarrassing.

But Mar’s comment prompts me to talk of something I had meant to for a while. A famous definition of poetry in Wordsworth’s:

Poetry is the overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity.

La poesía son sentimientos intensos y descontrolados, rememorados en calma.

Our friend Wordsworth, a bit of a sentimental Romantic (not as bad as Bécquer, though), identified poetry with lyrical poetry. Evidently, the Iliad is poetry, but it doesn’t count. Verse satire doesn’t count either. And so on. So we are left with lyrical poetry, including religious poetry too. The powerful feelings: it assumes you have powerful feelings. Can detached people write good poetry? Can you write, for example, good love poetry if you are not in love, or even in you have never been? My answer would be yes. It seems that for Wordsworth, lyrical poetry has to be autobiographical: if it was so, he was wrong. Who the hell cares if Garcilaso’s Elisa (reading in English? Elisa is the Spanish equivalent of Stella, from Astrophel and Stella) was based on a flesh-and-bone woman? Who cares if I wrote a poem in the first person about a friend’s feelings?

I’m being too hard on poor Wordsworth. Lyrical poetry needs feeling after all. Then there is the second part: recollected in tranquillity. Hey, that’s like haikus! You have a powerful experience, whatever it is. “Recollected in tranquillity” means that your feeling becomes poetry by treating it with care and a bit of discipline. It is not enough to just throw it on the page. I call “exhibitionist” the poetry that I dislike because it is both confessional, intimate (in Spanish I would say “intimista”) and at the same time too simple, too unoriginal, bad in some way that makes me think that the main purpose of the poet was to get their feelings written down rather than creating something special and separate from himself or herself.

First warmth of spring.
I feel as if
I have been asleep.

Primer rayo tibio de la primavera.
Una sensación como
haber estado dormido.

No, not spring yet, not officially. But in this grey snowy winter, if it is sunny it is a nice day, even when the temperature is close to 0º C. And that’s a happy poem, and I’m happy. So there you go.

Marian Keyes, a writer of excellent comedy of manners, says that there are three types of women: handbag-and-shoes women, pretty underwear women and cosmetics-and-bath-stuff women. I belong firmly in the last category, and I hate to go shoe-shopping. I need summer shoes right now (why I do is another story), so I went to the Mall thinking that I would get the first pair of black strappy sandals I saw and get the ordeal out of the way quickly.

There are three or four places to buy shoes, not counting sports shoes, at the Mall. And I had two surprises: one, sizes. In Spain, women’s clothes come in erratic sizes: you’re never sure of what is yours, because there is no standardisation among manufacturers. I have two jackets from the same “good”, relatively fancy and expensive brand, the fit is good, and one is a 42 and the other a 44. But shoes are not like that: my size is always and ever the same. I thought I would scream in despair when I realised that American shoes are like Spanish clothes! I am anything between a 6 and a 9, depending on the model! I thought I had died and gone to a hell designed especially for women who hate to buy shoes.

The second surprise was that every single shoe was made of plastic, never leather. All of them. And they weren’t even pretty shoes, the type of shoe that makes you think the design is so good you’ll buy them any way. I can’t wear plastic shoes. So, then I went to the Commons, to drown my sorrows in books. I had gone out shopping and rather that come home empty-handed, I might as well buy a novel and not consider the morning wasted (can you see my impeccable logic?)

There was a shop with cute clothes at the window and I took a look. And there I saw Camper shoes. Camper shoes!? In Ithaca!? Now, this is sophisticated. I have seen Camper shoes in two places: Spain, and British fashion mags. As I told the shop-assistant, I felt like an American would feel if they found peanut butter cookies in a café in Italy.

Its easy to just say that in Spain, there is a tradition of good quality shoes. You only realise the full extent of that when you try to buy shoes abroad. It also means that in Spain, Camper has hundreds of competitors for quality and dozens of competitors for design, and they are a little bit overpriced. But here in Ithaca, it fills me with a weird sort of patriotic pride to see that my choices for shoes are limited to junk and Camper.

Some literary critics, like Harold Bloom, say that the creative impulse is the wish of outshining your influences. It’s very Oedipal: the artist is the child, the influence is the father, and Art is the mother. Yes: you want to kill your father and possess your mother. It would be more appealing if it wasn’t such a male-oriented scheme.

Regarding poetry, that Oedipal triangle is exactly the way I feel. I often write because somebody got there first and said it better than I could. I used to despise T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland because in each line I read “I want to be Dante, and I can’t”. My own personal list of Dantes is a long one, but we could start with e. e.cummings. I have posted this poem before, but it won't hurt you to read it again, and besides now it comes with a Spanish translation.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, misteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

algún lugar por el que nunca he viajado, felizmente más allá
de toda experiencia, tus ojos tienen su silencio:
en el más débil gesto tuyo hay cosas que me engloban,
o que no puedo tocar porque están demasiado cerca

tu menor mirada fácilmente me descerrará
aun si me he cerrado a mí mismo como a dedos,
tú me abres siempre pétalo a pétalo como la Primavera abre
(tocando hábilmente, misteriosamente) su primera rosa

o si es tu deseo cerrarme, yo y
mi vida nos cerraremos espléndidamente, de repente,
como cuando el corazón de esta flor imagina
la nieve cuidadosamente en todas partes cayendo;

nada que podamos percibir en este mundo iguala
el poder de tu intensa fragilidad: cuya textura
me incita con el color de sus países,
representando la muerte y el parasiempre con cada aliento

(no sé qué es lo que tienes que cierra
y abre; sólo algo en mí entiende
que la voz de tus ojos es más profunda que todas las rosas)
nadie, ni siquiera la lluvia, tiene unas manitas tan pequeñas.

Excuse me if I give you something appropriate for St Patrick’s Day two days too late, but my St. Patrick’s celebration started on Wednesday and finished yesterday(heh heh), so to me this still counts. I could give you Yeats but I don’t like it that much. I could give you James Joyce, but after these days’ fun, I’m in the mood for parties and song. So, I offer you some Irish music. It's Father's Day in Spain and my father likes to compile different versions of the same song, so this is perfect for today.This is a traditional Irish song that I know in five versions: Kate Rusby, The Corrs, Marianne Faithful, Sinéad O’Connor and Martyn Bennett sampling someone from a couple generations back. I’d like to have more variations on the same theme, but singers have the habit of recording just a fragment of the song and changing the name every time. Mine are called I Wish, I Know my Love, Love is Teasin’, The Butcher Boy and Blackbird! Versions can be dramatically different. Marianne Faithful and Martyn Bennett’s singer sound sad and bitter; Kate Rusby is sad, but her changes in the lyrics and the way she sings underline, ehem, how she stopped being a maid. The Corrs sound as if they were having so much fun they don’t believe for one second the boy doesn’t love them; Sinead sings about a suicide. Of course, mine is my own personal version, a recycling of the bits I like in the others with one or two extra changes. To me, this is a drunken, party song: a translation into Spanish would have to be in slang or dialect, and I don’t dare.

I wish I was, I wish in vain,
I wish I was a maid again
But a maid again I can never be
Until oak was to grow up an ivy tree.

For love is teasin’, and love is pleasin’,
And love is a treasure when first it’s new
But as love grows older, then love grows colder,
And it fades away like the morning dew.

There is an alehouse on yonder town
where my love goes and there sits down,
he takes a strange girl on his knee
well don’t you think that vexes me?

There is a blackbird on yonder tree,
Some say it’s blind and it cannot see,
I wish it was the same with me,
And then of love I would be free.

I have a week of holidays and I'll be in Washington until Wednesday, so don't expect any updates in a few days. These days are important in my hometown, so rather than talking about the hows and whys here you have (again) a poem about it.

El Río de Norte a Sur (para ciudades que tengan el norte a la izquierda).


1.
“Presos del suelo”,
Me envidian si patino.
¡Mira cómo vuelo!
(Grafitti anónimo en el puente de Chapina)

“Prisoners of the ground”
They envy me when I skate
Watch me fly!

2.
Sobre el río, paz verde,
Cruzan tres flechas.
Piraguas blancas.

On the river, green stillness,
Three arrows crossing.
White kayaks.

3.
Los siete puentes
abrazando la ciudad,
a todos nosotros.

Our seven bridges
Hugging the city,
hugging us all.

4.
Jardines del Cristina.
Mi abuelo no está.
Pero yo sí.

Cristina Gardens.
My grandfather’s gone.
But here I am.

5.
Niebla y gorrillas.
Siete de la mañana,
Lunes de frío.

Beggars on heroin.
Fog, seven a. m.
As cold as Mondays can be.

Hello again! I'm back! And I have a lot to comment on in the culture-shock department. Since I have been defending lately that a blog is not a journal, and that this is definitely not a journal, instead of writing a chronicle of my trip to Washington D. C. I will write the usual very short pieces on individual, surprising things I have seen. This is just for starters...

If you have been in Ithaca for too long, when you travel...

- you are surprised and annoyed when restaurants have hardly any vegetarian options and no vegan ones.
- You keep looking in vain for recycling bins.
- Parents with small children don't smile back at you and touch their kids nervously.
- You suddenly find yourself the lightest-skinned person around. Then you realise that blacks and occasional Latinos make up 90% of security staff, police, receptionists, and similar jobs that involve zero power and little decision-making, but which are very visible from the outside (I did not see one black person in a suit). The Black Receptionist Syndrome does not happen at Cornell, since the admin staff is white, although to tell the truth there aren't many black students.

A flame, a firework,
Red fans, a surprise.
Banana tree in a garden.

Una llama, fuegos artificiales,
Abanicos rojos, una sorpresa.
Una platanera en un jardín.

I love trees. A childhood in an industrial town without trees makes you appreciate them better later. When I came back to Spain from my first trip to Scotland, I summarised my misery as “No cherry trees here and no palm trees there”. Later, I have learnt to enjoy living in two or three countries at once, but I still associate certain trees (bananas, citrus, palm trees) with home.

So imagine my happiness when I saw that a beautiful garden in Cornell had a banana tree.

I went to the Library of Congress on a guided tour, so I didn’t have time to see much, really. Something must be said about Americans: our guide said that the Library is such an ornate, beautiful building because when it was built, this was a very young country and the Congressmen wanted an splendid building that Americans could be proud of. The Pharaohs built tombs, European kings built castles, and early Americans built a library.

So. There is a ceiling decorated with names that represent what the builders of this paradise considered the peak of Literature. Nowadays, to that we add Western Literature, because we are aware of the existence of The Monkey’s Journey to the West, or Issa Kobayashi’s haikus, and other masterpieces not from Europe or North America. When the Library was built, they didn’t know or care much about those things.

It was fascinating to see the designer’s version of the Canon (the Canon is the list of works or authors that an expert considers classic). A few names are lined up together without a heading, so the watcher has to guess that each wall is dedicated to a genre. This is what they have:

Novel: Miguel de Cervantes, Victor Hugo, Walter Scott, James Fennimore Cooper.
Poetry: Henry Longfellow, Alfred Tennyson.
Epic: Dante, Homer, John Milton.
Drama: Goethe, Shakespeare, Molière
Philosophy: Bacon, Aristotle.
History: Moses, Herodotus. Edward Gibbon and George Bancroft are put next to Longfellow and Tennyson.

In the choice of genres, I’m surprised there is no lyrical poetry. Where are Catullus and Petrarch? (Someone mention Bécquer and I’ll puke). Now about the choice of authors. First, the inventor of novels and someone American are a given. Cervantes is definitely in, but then, what about the American? Who cares about Cooper these days? That’s not a rhetorical question. Herman Melville is a lot more relevant nowadays, and Hawthorne… well, I have a soft spot for Nathaniel Hawthorne. So, if the designer was trying to see the future, he failed a bit there. Or maybe he had a preference for historical novels.

I cannot say anything about Victor Hugo. The idea is to take novelists from different countries, good idea, but then, what is Walter Scott doing up there? Representing Britain? Where is Jane Austen? Where is George Elliot? Americans in the 19th century had mixed feelings about Charles Dickens because he satirised them very harshly, so I understand his absence. Maybe is just my feminism (or my love of novels of manners), but Scott up there instead of Elliot or Austen, oh please.

The poetry one is funny because although Longfellow and Tennyson were wildly popular a bit more than a century ago, no one reads them anymore outside universities. And again, Petrach and Catullus??

Of course, the only thing I have to say about Epic is that if there were four columns instead of three, Ovid should’ve been in there. And Drama… what the heck were they thinking of when they left Sophocles out? Come on, Oedipus Rex, guys!

The Philosophy wall is too presumptuous. How can anybody pretend to choose just two philosophers to represent the best of human knowledge? Why not Kant and Plato? And History… Moses is just stuck up there in the ridiculous assumption that he’s the author of the Pentateuch (should I say, the Torah), and only the fact that he’s next to Herodotus suggests that he is considered an historian. Smash down that mosaic and put Caesar or Herodotus instead. And who are Bancroft and Gibbon? I don’t think I had ever heard of them before! The whims of fame and time are very cruel to some people.

So that’s it. Rather than just giving my opinion, I wanted to show how arbitrary the Canon can be, and how anyone that takes up the task of devising one is often doomed to (partial) failure. Blogs are very ethereal things, just bytes on a plane outside space, but if my entries were preserved somehow for someone to read in a century or two, I wonder if they will think me naïve and presumptuous.

No, actually, no “if”. I wonder in what aspects they will consider me naïve and presumptuous.

Our tangled hands are dry
but they hold a slippery love,
Too fragile to last.

Manos entrelazadas,
Secas aunque sostengan un amor resbaladizo
demasiado frágil para durar.

Hmmm... this one doesn’t say everything I want it to say. It should be more ambiguous, or more sensuous, or both.

Etiquetas: Eugenia, Andino, Lucas

In Washington D.C. a guided tour took us to see the Lincoln Memorial, and the Korean War and Vietnam War memorials that are very close to it. In the short stretch between the two war memorials there are a few stalls selling not exactly souvenirs, but badges and replicas and posters ad such, either military, "patriotic", or xenophobic. I was shocked, not culture-shocked but raged-shocked, when I saw that poster there. The photos are not very clear; they are the Twin Towers.

I would have thought that the genocide of Native Americans was the darkest page of American History. No, maybe slavery was. No, maybe the Civil War was (the guide told us that more people died in that war that in all the others put together). Even maybe, the Vietnam War was (sixteen years of war, were they crazy or what?), considering what a wreck they did of the place.

Oh, no. The darkest page in American History is not Americans being senselessly cruel to other people or to each other. It is other people being cruel to them. I see.

After knowing that the atmosphere in Mars is less that 1% as dense as the Earth’s, so even the fastest winds can hardly be felt at all.
Wild, fast and pointless.
Looking for a cheap love cure.
Like the winds in Mars.

Cuando supe que la atmósfera de Marte tiene menos del 1% de densidad que la de la Tierra, por lo que los vientos huracanados ni se sienten.
Rápido, salvaje, sin sentido.
Buscando un vulgar remedio amoroso.
Como los vientos de Marte.

Some time ago I said that "last summer I attended a sort of conference for poets, which publishers and other interested people attended too". Actually, I lied. I didn't attend the conference, I was only there because I won a prize in a poetry by text message competition and I'll give you that poem on another occasion (you find a fraction of it if you google my full name, Eugenia Andino Lucas, but I hate that website's layout). Anyway, there was a dinner and I had the chance to talk with a few professionals, amateurs like me, and publishers, and someone quite ruthless said a way of telling apart the bad amateurs from the promising ones:

Lots of young people write poetry. They are easy to sort out because the mediocre ones stop writing when they get into a steady relationship.

That fits nicely into the usual male-oriented explanations of the creative impulse as something nearly sexual. There is the Sheherezade model: being creative makes you sexy. There is the Sublimation model: you put into creating the energies that you'd put into sex if there was an available partner. There is the Oedipal model, the idea that you write because you want to beat your influences (your influences are your ather and Art is your mother: apply Oedipus to the triangle)

I haven’t had the opportunity to see if that critic's theory applies to me, but I doubt it. Not because I believe I am above mediocrity, but because I think I write faster and better when I have an audience. I think it's very funny (in the "strange" and in the "amusing" senses) how some of my most creative spells, the ten-poems-a-week fits, have taken place in that bubbling ground at the very earliest stages of relationships. I am curious about whether, if I ever have a steady relationship again, that person (or me getting lazy and comfortable) will kill my Muse. I hope not.

By the way, is anybody interested in a post about the Muses? Any fans of obscure mythology reading this?

This is an image I found through Google of another poster on sale at those little stalls near the Vietnam and Korean war memorials in Washigton D. C. I think it's creepy.

The equivalent that comes to mind is someone selling stuff with svastikas or with the Spanish fascist flag (it used to be a little different than it is now, when we were not a democracy) right next to the Bosque de los Ausentes. Creepy and sad.

The trip to Washington is giving me plenty of opportunities to rant on this insane country, so let's compensate that with some beautiful American poetry. What I like the best from e. e. cummings is the originality of his love poems. Many of the others are good too, and the extremely short ones are very original, but to me nothing beats the love declarations, such as this one. Even so, its defence of the value of love above, beyond, after, and in spite of death is better understood in the context of his sadder poems on mortality.

Thy fingers make early flowers of
all things.
thy hair mostly the hours love:
a smoothness which
sings,saying
(though love be a day)
do not fear,we will go amaying.

thy whitest feet crisply are straying.
Always
thy moist eyes are at kisses playing,
whose strangeness much
says;singing
(though love be a day)
for which girl art thou flowers bringing?

To be thy lips is a sweet thing
and small.
Death,Thee i call rich beyond wishing
if this thou catch,
else missing.
(though love be a day
and life be nothing,it shall not stop kissing).

Los dedos de vos hacen flores tempranas de
todas las cosas.
El cabello de vos lo aman especialmente las horas:
una suavidad que
canta,diciendo
(aun si el amor es un día)
no tengas miedo,iremos a la feria.

los blanquísimos pies de vos vagabundean frescamente.
Siempre
vuestros húmedos ojos juegan a los besos,
cuya rareza mucho
dice,cantando
(aun si el amor es un día)
¿para qué chica traéis flores?

Ser los labios de vos es algo dulce
y pequeño.
Muerte,a Vos os llamo rica más allá de todo lo deseable
si atrapas esto,
lo demás perdiendo.
(aun si el amor es un día
y la vida nada,no dejará de besar).

The Vietnam Memorial is very abstract so a few people were not too happy with it, and years after its construction they erected a statue of three soldiers, one black, two white, all men. Then, many years later, as the usual afterthought, they made a separate statue for the women. Instead of considering that they were sufficiently well represented by the abstract, original memorial, they thought it best to underline the differences between men and women (bleh) giving females a separate statue.

From an artistic point of view, I think it is a military version of the Renaissance "Pietà" theme. I've seen much better ones.

Mis palabras te tocan,
hablo,
hablamos,
y mis palabras se enredan entre tus dedos.
No sé qué tienes que me hace hablar.
No sé qué haces que me tiene presa.
Es algo rojo y suave,
frágil,
es algo que cambia cuando lo describo.
(si hablarte es tocarte,
si mis dedos te tocan, te cuentan un cuento)

My words touch you,
I talk,
we’re talking,
and my words get tangled between your fingers.
I don’t know what you have that makes me talk.
I don’t know what you make that has me enthralled.
It’s something red and soft,
fragile,
it’s something that changes as I describe it.
(if talking to you is touching you,
when my fingers touch you they tell you a story).

Yesterday a poem by cummmings, today one of mine that he inspired. I think this poem is the densest collection of allusions I’ve ever done. Most of them are too subtle to point out, but there they are. That is partly why I like it.

This Seen in Washington: a shop that only sells clothes in black and white. Their website says they do sizes 0 to 14,so it's not just for stik insect-shaped women. Yay. Even if it _is_ expensive, this brand should have shops in Spain! Pleeeeease!!!!!!!!

On the other hand, it shouldn't. Because then all I'd wear would be their clothes with brightly coloured scarfs and shoes.

Curse your uniqueness.
After you left me,
Each passing face looked like yours.

Maldita seas, por ser distinta.
Desde que te fuiste,
Cada cara que pasa se te parece.

Heh. This one was a tanka, which means it was twice as long. It was an embarrassing mess that no shuffling about of synonyms would mend (desperation in poems, à la Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, is a very poisonous thing). It took me quite a lot of drafting and ruthless criticism from someone else (thanks, Jhoe) to realise that the problem was that the speaker should hate the beloved. No ambiguity there.