Insurance.

I don’t know if this is clever or creepy. Or both. I have been told a bit about a way in which Americans go into housing complexes for old people (whatever the politically correct denomination may be). I’m not sure I’m getting the details right, but this is the idea:

Old people sell their house to (or through) an insurance company, and that money is used to pay that type of housing for them, with assistance if needed. Like all insurance policies, it’s risky on both sides. If the old person takes many years to die, the insurance company invested more than it gets back. If they don’t take many years to die, the old people’s heirs have lost their claim on the house.

 
Elderly Spaniards rarely go into housing. It’s not part of our tradition because we rely more on the extended family, and it is very hard to find housing you can trust. In Europe, the idea is that the Government is responsible, either to provide housing or to watch private providers very closely, and every year you get the occasional horror story in the news about bad food or hygiene. Considering that the real estate market in Spain keeps putting up the prices and that young people are desperate to buy houses, this American scheme isn’t colder or more calculating than ordinary life insurance and it might be one possible solution to two Spanish problems. However, I don't see Spaniards trusting the idea. 

Latest poem

I think this melancholic little thing still counts as haiku, even though it has four lines.

So free.
Not a poem in weeks.
Not a lover in months.
So empty.

Qué libre.
Semanas sin componer.
Meses sin un amante.
Qué vacío.

 For those of you who cares about the biographical, gossipy bit, I have many poem beginnings around the idea of how long ago I last wrote something I found satisfying. Those little poem seeds rarely grow into real poems. Everything in this one was written around the second line.

 

Happy Birthday

The first time I read this Mario Benedetti poem I was 18 or maybe 19, and I was very surprised to see a poem dedicated to someone who was specifically 28 years old. It is not a symbolic age for anything, as far as I know. At that point in my life, 28 sounded like a young age, but still, very far away from me. But of course, all birthdays (hopefully) come, and now I am 28, like the intriguing protagonist of this lovely poem.

COMO SIEMPRE 

Aunque hoy cumplas
trescientos treinta y seis meses
la matusalénica edad no se te nota cuando
en el instante en que vencen los crueles
entrás a averiguar la alegría del mundo
y mucho menos todavía se te nota
cuando volás gaviotamente sobre las fobias
o desarbolás los nudosos rencores

buena edad para cambiar estatutos y horóscopos
para que tu manantial mane amor sin miseria
para que te enfrentes al espejo que exige
y pienses que estás linda
y estés linda

casi no vale la pena desearte júbilos
y lealtades
ya que te van a rodear como ángeles o veleros

es obvio y comprensible
que las manzanas y los jazmines y
los cuidadores de autos y los ciclistas
y las hijas de los villeros
y los cachorros extraviados
y los bichitos de san antonio
y las cajas de fósforo
te consideren una de los suyos

de modo que desearte un feliz cumpleaños
podría ser tan injusto con tus felices
cumpledías

acordate de esta ley de tu vida

si hace algún tiempo fuiste desgraciada
eso también ayuda a que hoy se afirme
tu bienaventuranza

de todos modos para vos no es novedad
que el mundo
y yo
te queremos de veras

pero yo siempre un poquito más que el mundo.

 

AS USUAL

Even though today you are
three hundred and thirty months old
this venerable age is unnoticeable when
the instant cruel ones win
you go and discover the happiness of the world
and it is even less noticeable when
you fly seagully over phobias
or undo knotty grudges.

Good age to change laws and horoscopes
for your fountains to flow love without measure
for you to face the demanding mirror
and think you’re pretty
and be pretty.

It’s hardly worth it to wish you joys
and loyalties
because they are going to surround you like angels or ships

It is obvious and understandable
that apples and jasmine
and car-minders, and cyclers
and the daughter of farmers
and stray puppies
and ladybugs
and the boxes of matches
consider you one of them.

so to wish you a happy birthday
could be so unfair to your happy
everydays

Remember this law of your life

If you ever were miserable
that also helps to affirm 
your bliss

Anyway it’s not new to you that the world
and I
really love you

but I always love you a little bit more than the world.

On libraries, again

Two culture shock entries in a row, one about holidays and another about inefficiency. And then I will expect foreign people not to believe stereotypes about Southern Spain!

As I must have said before, Seville University doesn't have a library, but dozens. There are School Libraries, one for each different school of course, and then there are department libraries. A department is a section in a school: for example, the Medieval History dept in the History School, the Civil Law dept in the Law School, and so on. Not all departments have libraries. All university students can borrow books from all the school libraries, but you need to belong to a certain school to borrow books from department libraries. For example, that means that the books in the English dept library are for Languages students only. I could borrow books from the Psychology School library but not from any Psych department library.

This alone would be enough reason to be mad at the system. There's more. The English Dept Library catalog is online, but that's the only thing that is. I need a special library card that is useless in the rest of the university system. The books appear on the online catalog always as "available", because when they are borrowed, filing is manual. Yes. Little paper library cards on a cardboard box.

So. If you need a book from that library, you will have to go at an inconvenient hour (the library opeens three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, at times when the students are busiest). Wait to use the only computer that students are allowed to use. Find out the code of the book you already know you need: the online catalog doesn't have a keyword search AND students are not allowed to browse shelves. Once you know the code, the librarian will look for the book for you, if it hasn't been already taken. Then he will give you a slip of paper for each book, in which you will have to write the book's internal code, the number next to the barcode (even if the barcode system is a decoration until they get a barcode scanner), AND the book's title and author. Even though they have a file with your name and data and a library number, you have to write you name and phone number and Student ID number too. One slip per book.

Then, if you are an undergrad, you can borrow two books for a week, maximum (back in my last year as an undergrad, I had to work for professors that demanded three times as many sources quoted in an essay). I, as a grad student, can borrow the tremendous amount of five books for two weeks. And two weeks before Christmas holidays start, the librarian does not know if the holidays will automatically extend all late December borrowing until January 10th, or not.

Can someone remind me what was it that I liked about being a student at this University?

Making bridges

No, I don't mean the bridges that join two shores. I mean the excellent Spanish tradition of building bridges that join two holidays.

In Spain, if a holiday takes place on a Tuesday, people will do whatever they can to skip work on Monday. If Thursday is a holiday, people will avoid work on Friday. So: Thursday's a holiday, but Friday is a bridge. A bridge between Thursday and Saturday, of course. And we call that "building (or making) bridges".

It's not as bad as it sounds. Number one bridge builders are students at all levels, then teachers, then civil servants, and then everyone else. If you're not a teacher, your only way of making a bridge is to keep a few days out of your holidays to make yourself a long weekend here and there.

The best brigde of the year takes place this week. December 6th is Constitution Day, the anniversary of our Constitution. December 8th is a Catholic holiday. December 5th, 7th, and 9th may become bridges. And since this one is so long, some people don't call it a bridge: it's an aqueduct!

Tom McGrath

I don’t have the least idea of who this guy McGrath is. I bought a second-hand anthology of Scottish poetry just because it was Scottish, cheap, and it had a few Edwin Morgan poems. It has a card from the Finger Lakes Library System Central Library (that would be a quite big area in the north of New York State), showing that no one had ever borrowed the book; the card was stamped DISCARDED. Isn’t that a pity? There’s no way of saying whether anyone ever read the book, but still, never borrowed!

Tom McGrath, Night Songs. The small letters, including the “i”, are not typos.

I
to make poems
from bricks
cities
from words

either

a conversation
with a gutter
or a song
to sweep
the streets

i continue
to eat a lot
and sleep
too little

II
yes the madwoman screams
racialism
past my window

the drunk man shouts
that the bastard o'reilly
will tonight
be knifed

yes

the city sickens the heart

gutters do talk

contraceptives and rats

I should have read Mumford
or travelled more

III
the gutters of suburbia
say no more than whispers
behind curtains

the poetry of keyholes

IV
being in the city
i am a junkyard

V
i can continue
because
the night does

regardless

Smile

I don't read much poetry lately. Real life is getting in the way. So I take my volume of "25 Young Spanish Poets" (edited in 2003) and I open it at random until I find a very short poem. I don´t especifically look for a haiku but that's what I find. The author is called Carmen Jodra.

¿Por qué sonríes?
Porque hay sol en las hojas.
¿Por qué sonríes?

Why do you smile?
Because there's sun on the leaves.
Why do you smile?

 

A fairy tale.

No poetry today. Here you have a fairy tale. Warning: it is from the Bluebeard, child-eating giants, bloody variety of fairy tales.

Once upon a time there was a king who had three daughters, two bad, one (the youngest) good. One day, the King said to his daughters, “I’m old and tired. I have divided the kingdom in three parts and each one of you will have her portion. I will keep a thousand men as my court and I will spend four months a year with each one of you. But first, tell me: How much do you love me?”

The oldest said, “More than my life”.

The middle one said, “More than words can express”

And the youngest one said, “As much as it is right and proper”.

The king went into a rage at tis lack of exaggeration, and he banished his youngest daughter from his castle, which made her very sad, but she was so good and beautiful that the prince in the land at her father’s borders married her, even without any dowry. The King then divided his kingdom in half, between his two remaining daughters, and said he and his thousand men would spend half the year with each one.

The king had a counsellor who was fired after defending the good daughter; this man had two sons, one good from his wife, one bad from is lover. He decided that now that he had more spare time, he would dedicate it to his older, illegitimate son, and find a way of giving him part of his inheritance. But on seeing his castle and his luxuries, the Bad Son decided to take everything and take it soon. So, he faked a letter from the Good Son and the Counsellor was made to believe that his Good Son planned to kill him. And that was how the Good Son had to run away from his house, and pretend he was Poor Tom, a mad beggar.

As soon as the king went to live with his eldest daughter, she banned the thousand men from her castle. The King was furious, but nothing he said affected her. Finally, he said he would go and live with the middle daughter. But when he arrived, she told him to go back to the eldest until his appointed time, six months later. “My sister was right. You don’t need a thousand knights, not a hundred, not one, if you have my sister’s servants to take care of you. Go back to her and apologise”

“Apologise to my own daughter? I’d sooner die of cold in that storm”

“Suit yourself”, said the middle daughter.

The King went out in the rain and was found by Poor Tom, who gave him shelter in a hut. Meanwhile, the two bad sisters realised that the thousand knights might be a danger to them and decided the needed his father back to keep him controlled. They went to the counsellor’s castle, to see if he knew anything, and were received by the Bad Son. The two women immediately desired him. They told him their plans and he said that the counsellor was too loyal to the King, so they would probably need to torture him. The Bad Son went into another room while the daughters tied the old man to a chair. When he said he didn’t know where the King was, each one of the women pulled out one of his eyes. They kicked him out of his house and they told the Bad Son that he was the man of the castle now, although they would like to have him in their army in case there was a war. The Bad Son was delighted.

Poor Tom found his father the counsellor, now blind, who didn’t recognise his son’s voice and asked him to lead him to a cliff so that he could kill himself. The Good Son led his not towards a cliff, but towards the borders of the country. The Good Daughter had found out how her sisters were treating her father, and since her husband the foreign prince loved her so much, she easily convinced him to invade her country to avenge the old King. The first battle of the war was won by the daughters, who had both become lovers of the Bad Son. He made prisoners of both the King and his daughter. The King realised what a stupid fool he had been, and considered himself lucky to be alive and with the one person that had remained true to him, his youngest daughter. But the Bad Son ordered a spy to kill them both when they were in prison.

When the eldest daughter knew that her sister was her rival, she poisoned her. Poor Tom had stayed away from the battle, taking care of his father, but when he saw his half brother, he revealed his identity and challenged the Bad Son in a duel. The Good Son won, and killed his brother. On seeing that, the eldest sister killed himself by smashing her head against a rock. Grief and exhaustion were too much for the old counsellor, who died while his sons fought. The Spy tried to fake the Daughter’s suicide; the King just saw him escape the room, and did not have time to save her. He tried desperately to bring her back to life, not believing for one moment she was truly dead. Death by sorrow found him too, surprised, denying it, unprepared.

And only Poor Tom was left alive, sad castaway in the ruins of a destroyed nation.

************************************* 

This cheery story is the plot of King Lear (I have changed a few details), maybe my favourite Shakespearian tragedy.

The UK is such a civilised country

After five years or so of travelling like my life depended on it, and reading like the future of humankind depended on it,I am convinced that a society is more advanced and more civilised the better it treats its women. Give me maternity leaves, free kindergarten (that’s day care if you’re reading this in the States), legal contraception, full civil rights, maybe even a woman president, and I will start to trust that your country has left the Dark Ages.

The recent news say that the UK is a less advanced country that I though it was. Courtesy of I Blame the Patriarchy , heartbreaking news. A third of Britons believe a flirty woman is at least partly responsible for being raped.

The article does not mention these other opinions:

• 34% of Britons do not think that a man who behaves in a flirtatious way deserves being battered by a woman who feels offended or threatened.
  
• 26% of Britons do not think that a child is partially or totally responsible for being molested if he or she is wearing especially cute clothes that trigger the fantasies of pederasts.
• 22% of Britons do not think that promiscuous straight men would be partially or totally responsible of being raped by a gay man.
  
• 8% of Britons do not think that men are totally responsible in the case above.
• 30% of Britons do not think that a drunk straight man is partially responsible if he is raped (I’m assuming a male rapist again)
• 37% of Britons do not think that a man is partially responsible of being assaulted if he fails to clearly say "no" to his assaulter.
  

Edited to add: I wonder how the people who do not express these opinions would feel if they were told that there were gangs telling white middle-class British boys that they could find excellent jobs in an exotic country, to which they were taken and forced to be sexual slaves.

 

 

Trainspotting the book: a sample.

Trainspotting the book has a lot less comedy elements than the movie, and it is very hard to read because most of it is not in English, but in Edinburgh Scots. If you have never heard Scots or at least the Edinburgh accent, I don’t think you can understand the book at all. The Spanish translation is absolutely brilliant: it is written in a version of slang that is contemporary enough to sound very true, but it doesn’t try to reproduce the sounds of the vernacular: the spelling is always the standard. That is the best way of avoiding to turn Edinburgh into any specific Spanish town.

I got the book in Spanish one Christmas. When I got to the final page I started all over again. When I finished it a second time, I reread a handful of the best sections. Then I lent it, and my friend did more or less the same. Then I lent it a second time and I lost it (that’s what happens when you lend books). That was about seven years ago. Ever since then, once in a while I went to a bookshop with materials in English and I opened Trainspotting at random, to see if I understood anything. Nae, ah couldnae. But after a few years, I did, and I didn’t even remember where the difficulties had been before: that’s simply because now, after having travelled four times to Scotland (two holidays, one study, one work), the version of English I hear in my head is Scottish English. Not slang, as in the book, but it is definitely Scottish.

So that you can see what I am talking about, here you have the beginning of the novel. The translation’s mine; the published one is really good, but as I’ve said, I don’t have it with me any more.

The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling. Ah wis jist sitting thair, focusing oan the telly, tryin no tae notice the cunt. He wis bringing me doon. Ah tried tae keep ma attention oan the Jean-Claude Van Damme video.

Le chorreaba el sudor a Sick Boy, y estaba temblando. Yo estaba sentado sin hacer nada, viendo la tele, intentando pasar del hijoputa. Me ponía malo. Procuré concentrarme en el vídeo de Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Trainspotting the movie: Is it a comedy?

Trainspotting , the movie, is an excellent example of the theory that “tragedy is a slap on the face; comedy is a slap on someone else’s face”. It is a lot easier to make comedy about whatever is different from you, which means, in the case of Trainspotting, that if you have seen the effects of drugs from too up close, if you cannot see them with detachment, you might like Trainspotting, but you will not see it as a comedy. The first time I saw it, about nine years ago, the most salient thing to me was the black, weird humour. Now I still love it, but the things I really appreciate have nothing to do with the plot; they are formal aspects,  such as the cinematography and the editing. I also enjoy precisely what makes the movie closer to me, what I can relate to (and that goes well beyond comedy): the accents, and the places that I know.

By the way, the film was shot on location in several different Scottish towns, which means that in the now classic “Lust for Life”, Renton-chased-by-the-police scene, he runs away in Edinburgh, crosses the street in front of the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art, and is caught by the police back in Edinburgh. That’s quite a long distance to run.

I hate William Gibson

No, I don’t mean I dislike the way he writes. On the contrary, I like it very much. I hate William Gibson with corrosive envy. Something positive out of it is that corrosive envy is a motivation to write more poems.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

El cielo sobre el puerto era del color de la televisión, encendida en un canal sin sintonizar.

This sentence is the beginning of his novel Neuromancer. The expressivity! The mood-setting! The conciseness! The imagination! I hope I like the rest of the novel half as much.

We're one year old today

This blog started the day after Thanksgiving, 2004. Thanksgiving is the last Thursday in November, so I'd rather measure the year according to that date, not to a calendar date. Easier to remember.

 I wonder if other cultures, apart from the United States, have a day that consists on thanking the forces of the Universe for the good things of the last year. I know there is nothing of the sort in Europe, which is a shame. I enjoyed my one American thanksgiving very much, and any excuse is good for having a huge family meal. But then again, I'm conveniently skipping the fact that Thanksgiving is a holiday that sits on the Native American genocide. Native Americans don't have a lot to be thankful for.

Anyway. Thanks very much for coming here. Now let's go back to the poetry.

Exoticism is just another form of racism

Quick background information for foreign readers: Hundred of Africans try to come illegally to Spain everyday, sometimes en route to Northern Europe, sometimes to stay here. Sometimes on wee boats across the Gibraltar Strait, sometimes trying to cross on foot the Melilla border (Melilla is a Spanish town in Northern Africa, right next to Morocco). The ones that come on boats often die. No matter what route they use, they are very often caught and sent back. Nevertheless, I know that my vegetables have been picked by someone who wasn’t born here, and every traffic light in town has a black man trying to sell me tissues.

What amazes me is that the average Spaniard is passively sympathetic of Subsaharians (that is the fashionable, politically correct, term for black Africans), but hostile as can be of Moroccans, no matter if immigrants or not. Why is it? I have a few theories.

• The average black guy by a traffic light is gorgeous. Seriously. Someone please go and make movie stars of the whole lot of them. Moroccan men, on the other hand, don’t normally fit into Spanish conventions of male beauty.
  
• Everyone knows Moroccans are Muslim, and Spaniards don’t like that (and this was so even pre-Al Qaeda). As a culture, we have plenty of stereotypes about Muslims, but very few about subsaharians. Hardly anyone knows that many subsaharians are Muslim too. Ironically, much of it is related to our myths of Muslim treatment of women; who said life is a bed of roses for women in subsaharian cultures?
  
• Get the two previous together: it is very easy to romanticise a gorgeous, exotic-looking person if you don’t know anything at all about their culture.
• In the Spanish imagination, Morocco is not desperately poor, and Southern Africa is that distant place in the news where wars and famine happen.
  
  In short: It is so easy to feel bad about people who are very, very far away, and so hard to do something constructive for people next to you!

Lost in translation: English to Spanish

Some words don’t translate well at all from English to Spanish: 

• Cute: Argh! “He’s not cute, he’s attractive”. “It’s a cute movie”. “You don’t want to look cute, you want to look pretty”. How do I translate “beautiful in the way that babies and Orlando Bloom are, soft, a girly kind of beauty” without saying “lindo”?
  
• Cheesy and tacky: In Spanish both words are translated as “hortera” and sometimes as “cursi” (rough equivalent of “cutesy”). I can translate the words, but I cannot translate in what way they mean different things.
  
• Afterglow is sunset light, once the sun is completely under the horizon: the glow after sunset. That’s what the dictionary says. But the first time I heard that word, it was used to mean the quiet but intense pleasure after something good has already finished. Something sensual. Find me a convincing translation and you’ll have my eternal gratitude (regusto no me sirve).
  
• Gender, especially Gender Studies. It isn’t considered completely correct to use the word “género” to mean “the social construction of sex”. I feel comfortable doing the shift Gender Studies/Estudios de Género, but the problem is that no one understands me when I say I’m working on Estudios de Género and what I do is definitely not a study of sexuality. So I know what I mean, but hardly anyone else does. Besides, most people who know the term identify it with Women’s Studies or with Feminist Theory, and that’s not the whole story.
  
• Queer or queerness: one of these days Spanish will have one short descriptive word, not an insult, to mean “not heterosexual, including those people who are not even sure of their orientation”.
  
• Soft. Surprised to find such a common word? Spanish has a word for “pliable, not hard” (blando) and another one for “smooth, not rough” (suave). Poetry in English sometimes benefits from the ambiguity of the double meaning and I can’t translate that.
  
• I don’t like to generalise, but it says a lot about the Spanish tendency to exaggerate that we don’t have a word, not even a phrase, to say “understatement”. 

Sunday Haiku (one day late)

This haiku is dedicated to my friend Suzanne Guthrie. The Spanish version is the original, and the English one the translation.

Café fuerte.
Pies en alto.
Suplemento dominical.

Strong coffee.
Putting feet up.
Sunday papers.

Racism and jewelry

Sigh.

This happens every once in a while, although thankfully not as often as it used to. The other day I took my jewelry out and I showed it to a number of people who of course loved it and bought tons of it. Except one woman, who held an earring or two close to her ear and said "I like them, but I can’t wear dangling earrings. They make me look gypsy". Looks in horror at my portable mirror, makes a half-hearted tasteless joke about gypsy stereotypes (flamenco singers, this time), tries another earring that lightens up her sad sallow skin, gives up.

I have never understood these women. You don’t like dangling earrings, you think they don’t look good on you, fair enough. But this stupid, racist, "looking gypsy" nonsense, I don’t get it. What the hell is wrong in "looking gypsy"? And the funniest thing, real gypsy women don’t wear colourful, original, inexpensive dangling earrings. They wear very conservative designs, in gold.

There is a whole bunch of stuff that some Spanish women won’t wear or do for fear of gypsiness. I wonder if other cultures have similar arbitrary, racist fashion rules.

Torture

To the recent rumours news that the US are keeping secret prisons in Europe, where prisoners are held indefinitely and without charges, are are probably being tortured, in violation of international law and human decency, I can start by giving you something written by the Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti.

Un torturador no se redime suicidándose. Pero algo es algo.

Tortures will not obtain redemption if they kill themselves. Something's better than nothing, though.

Latest haiku

En la pantalla,
tu piel de pixels,
inalcanzable.

On the screen,
Your skin, made of pixels,
out of my reach.

I'm feeling more and more comfortable about composing haiku in Spanish, even though up to a couple years ago I thought that it was impossible to twist my native language into haiku shape.  

 

Rivers.

This is what T S Eliot has to say about rivers. The first two lines made me buy the whole book

I do not know much about rivers; but I think that the river
is a strong brown god –sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.

No sé mucho sobre ríos; pero creo que el río
es un dios fuerte, marrón -taciturno, indomable,
paciente hasta cierto punto, descubierto primero como frontera;
útil, traicionero, cuando facilita el comercio;
y después, sólo el problema al que se enfrenta el constructor de un puente.