Pablo Gervás and creative computers

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?

Rhymed poetry by Seamus Heaney

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.

A pyramidal theory of art.

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.

Big Brother is watching you

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.

Questions

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?”

Dance and self-esteem

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.

Coplas, boleros, Frank Sinatra and other modern gods.

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

In the soup

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.

Something is still stuck

Five months ago, when this blog had a different location and an fussy, ugly template, I made this list of things I wanted to write poems about:

1. a haiku about flying over olive tree groves. The familiarity of landscapes from a plane.

2. a haiku about winter that is very sunny, very cold, very green. The coldest makes the light brighter.

3. A poem (is this idea too big for a haiku?) or even a short story: do we want to stay friends after having broken up without hard feelings?

This last idea intimidates me because I haven´t written half-decent prose since June 2004, and I haven´t written decent prose with a plot in a year or a bit more. In my experience, even having a complete plot from beginning to end doesn't mean I can write the story. Patience, patience, it will come back, it has to come back.

It scares me a bit to realise I'm still not writing prose. Since then, I have written four microstories, and bits and pieces that don't get anywhere, just wee little sketches. I've written nothing on the first idea although I'm sure that when my plane lands on Spain in July I should be in the right mood for it. I had forgotten about the second idea, which shows that it wasn't interesting enough.

And I have one haiku for the third one, showing that no, it was not too big.

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

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

Feminism, Women's Studies, Gender Studies

An anonymous Spanish reader left once a comment here saying that making a distinction between literature for/by queers, for/by women, is discriminating, and that we should only pay attention to whether literature is good or bad. Excuse me if I don’t link.

Then, Carboanion asks me if my research, which is done from a “gender studies” perspective, is feminist or not. I don’t want to give much detail, but I study domestic violence in fiction. When Carboanion asks me if my research is feminist, she means whether I’m attacking violence against women as a real-life phenomenon, if I show sympathy in favour of women victims, and the like. My answer is that my research is feminist because I’m feminist, but not in the sense she says because I’m researching fiction, not writing a manifesto. I only analyse. I’m not an activist when I’m at the library.

What is the difference between disregarding feminism like my anonymous commenter, and doing Gender Studies the way I do them? And what is the difference between Women’s Studies and Gender Studies? I’ll take a simple example. Barnaby Rudge is a minor novel by Charles Dickens with a main character called Mrs Varden, who psychologically abuses her husband.

Until about twenty years ago, research on this novel pretended Mrs Varden didn’t exist. This author’s analysis of Barnaby Rudge simply excludes the four main female characters except for a few minor details that he needs to mention in order to better describe three of the male ones.

A feminist in Carboanion’s sense would explain Mrs Varden as either a product of a misogynistic Dickens, “Women are not really as nasty as Mrs Varden”, which is not true. Or she would explain that Mrs Varden is a victim of the circumstances, that she is nasty because she is unhappy (true) and that men have made her unhappy (maybe true).

Someone doing Women’s Studies would go a little bit beyond the feminist and maybe analyse the relationship between Mrs Varden and other women in the book, and with women in the real world. Does Mrs Varden behave like a historian or a psychiatrist say women in her position do? The Women’s Studies expert would not necessarily behave as if Mrs Varden had to be defended or excused, and that would be the biggest difference between this one and the feminist-in-Carboanion’s-sense.

Someone doing Gender Studies would also analyse Mrs Varden’s husband.

So, contrary to what my anonymous commenter said, doing Gender Studies, or Women’s Studies, or Queer Studies, is not discriminating: it just adds to everything else. Literary criticism as it was done thirty years ago is not simply discriminatory, it’s incomplete.

Edwin Morgan: Glasgow Sonnet 1

from Glasgow Sonnets


I have said before that when I grow up, I want to be Alan Spence, right? Okay, my beloved Alan Spence takes quite a lot of inspiration from Edwin Morgan. I know very few of his poems; this is taken from a sequence. I stand in awe. No, actually, I'm green with envy at someone with such a strong control of rhyme. If you're reading this in Spanish, leave a comment if you want me to translate; I haven't done it as usual because I'm sure I'll kill the sonnet form, which is the whole point.

I

A mean wind wanders through the backcourt trash.
Hackles on puddles rise, old mattresses
puff briefly and subside. Play-fortresses
of brick and bric-a-brac spill out some ash.
Four storeys have no windows left to smash,
but the fifth a chipped sill buttresses
mother and daughter the last mistresses
of that black block condemned to stand, not crash.
Around them the cracks deepen, the rats crawl.
The kettle whimpers on a crazy hob.
Roses of mould grow from ceiling to wall.
The man lies late since he has lost his job,
smokes on one elbow, letting his coughs fall
thinly into an air too poor to rob.

Sauces (culture-shocking food series)

A man with a taste for comedy of manners once said that France had one religion and a thousand sauces, while England had a thousand religions and one sauce (by which he meant melted butter). I wish I remembered who that person was, and what he would think of Thai peanut butter dip, sour cream, ketchup, bright yellow sweet mustard, and such American favourites.

Spaniards prefer stews, casseroles, and similar dishes that are cooked in its own sauce. And when you serve something that cannot be cooked in sauce, like fries with spicy tomato sauce, the sauce goes normally on top. When you are sharing a platter with a group of friends, the one that pours the sauce on top of everything else is received with a chorus of “HEEEYYYY, not __that__ much!”.

I knew that Americans prefer to dip things. It makes sense for shared platters. But it doesn’t make sense for “proper” meals. Here I order a salad, or a fish-with-rice-and-veggies, and the sauce comes on a little pot on the side. The food looks unfinished that way! Besides, I have been told that the sauce goes on the side because of the calories, the fat, and such, so that I don’t eat it if I don’t want to. But it’s useless, because a spoonful of sauce stirred on food looks like quite a lot, and a spoonful of sauce on a little tray looks as if it’s next to nothing, so sauce on the side is four or five times the amount it would be if served the Spanish way.

Spring flowers

Snowdrops on the ground,
White lilies on pots:
Will you live forty-two months?

Azahar en la rama,
nardos en un jarrón:
¿vais a vivir cuarenta y dos meses?

This is mi first poem on the classic collige, virgo, rosas topic (a variation on Carpe Diem: “pick up the roses before it’s too late”). It is a good example of how translation needs to take liberties sometimes. The first flower is the first of spring and it grows in the streets. The second flower smells really sweet. Both are white. But the American version gets American flowers and the Seville version gets Seville flowers.

And it's dedicated to MP,with thanks for the friendship, the patience, the rides, the CD's, and of course, the daffodils.

Culture-shocking food 4: Scotland

I’ve spent one year in Aberdeen University and one summer living in Glasgow. There is not a lot in Scottish/British ingredients that would be interesting to tell here. Nevertheless, the way Scottish people eat, their meals, are unbelievable. I promise to talk about nice Scottish food on another day, to compensate for this.

The first thing that surprised me was the Friday-night routine. All over the world, people go out, get drunk, then go dancing. Right? Well, in Scotland, since they have dinner at six, by the time the last club closes at two or three in the morning, they suddenly realise they are hungry. So, every junk-food place is open all night, with the workers getting sleepy and bored from nine pm to 2am, when there is a mad rush of very drunk students getting a refill of greasy food to guarantee they’ll be sick in the morning.

Chip shops (also called chippies) serve everything deep-fried: everything is covered in a thick mixture of flour and water (si estás leyendo esto en español, un rebozado como masa de churros pero más líquida, un engrudo, vaya) and then fried in grease or oil. I promise you don’t want to know the oil’s origin. The oil is never, ever changed and the inside of the fryer is never cleaned, because the starch of frying potatoes absorbs the dirt that greasier food leaves behind. And what do they deep-fry? Fish of course, but also sausages, meat pies, and burgers. Yes, burgers. The outside goes very crunchy and I think the inside stays moist and not completely cooked through. I never tasted them to make sure.

I heard the legend of the deep-fried Mars bar and the deep-fried pizza (called pizza crunch), but I never found a place that served them. I think deep-fried chocolate is an excellent idea, as long as you don’t use fat that has had pork pies in it.

That’s not all. The first time I heard someone ask for a “roll and chips” (a roll is bigger than American dinner rolls and chips are fried potatoes, French fries), I thought they meant they wanted a piece of bread and a portion of potatoes. OK, no problem. I was wrong. They meant what Americans would call a French fries sandwich. I knew people who had that for lunch every day.

And many people know that the British put vinegar on their chips. What they don’t know is that in fast food places like chippies, it is not really vinegar. It is pure acetic acid that comes in a gallon container, diluted in water until it has the colour the customers expect. Like other synthetic foods, the smell is stronger than the flavour. The purity of the raw material makes it corrosive and toxic; the fumes, even of a few drops spilled on the floor, can make you ill.

And there is something so peculiar about smells. Chip shops smell of grease and vinegar; some streets in Aberdeen and Glasgow smell like that at all times. There seemed to be no way of getting the stink out of my hair and clothes. Sometimes I pass by a Cornell cafeteria at mealtimes, and the smell of greasy beef brings me two years back.

News: festivals

The first weekend in June (June 2nd to June 5th) is time for lots of good street shows in my hometown and also here in Ithaca.

La segunda edición de la Feria LaTeatral tiene una pinta estupenda. Con que sea igual de buena que la primera edición, del año pasado, es algo que nadie que viva en los alrededores debería perderse. Ahí tenéis el link para más información.

The Ithaca Festival doesn't have a theme that I know of; it gets together a bunch of performers of very different things. Including June Seaney three bellydancing troupes. It's going to be a great show, and I'm not just saying that because I'm dancing with them.

Elegy to a fritatta

Here it is, my elegy to Spanish tortilla de patatas. An elegy is not just a poem for death,but a melancholy meditation.

Para una niña, la tortilla es la cena,
comida caliente y barata,
tres personas y mucha mayonesa.
La niña crece y la tortilla es camping,
bocadillos enormes,
dos personas, el deseo de un beso.
Se deja de ser niña, y la tortilla es recuerdo,
querer volver a casa,
una mujer sola que habla por teléfono.

For a little girl, frittatas mean dinner.
Cheap homemade food,
three people, lots of mayonnaise.
For a bigger girl frittatas mean picnics,
big, thick sandwiches,
two people, the longing for a kiss.
No longer a girl and frittatas are a memory,
homesickness,
one woman alone talking on the phone.

More culture-shocking food: Spain.

There are Spanish foods that some people, mostly foreigners, find disgusting. What I’m going to catalogue next are not the controversial ones that many Spaniards hate because of prejudice or texture (brain fritters, anyone?), but things that most of us see as perfectly normal.

Fish heads. For some reason, an Irish friend of mine freaked out when I said I had bought head-on mackerel. We don’t usually eat fish’s heads, but at the fishmonger’s you see it with the head still on, since it has the best signs of freshness or staleness. Some heads are often eaten, it depends on the type of fish. I never eat the heads, but I hate having to choose already clean fish in the shop. It is enough of a reason not to buy fish at all.

Shrimp heads. Spanish treat: Shrimp or prawns (the bigger the better), lightly boiled, whole, shell on, heads on, and then cooled and served just like that, as an appetiser, in a big tray. Everyone takes their shrimp from the big tray, each person peels their own, and you can dip them in a bit (just a little bit) of mayonnaise. Headless shrimp is impossible to find in Spain except as cocktail shrimp (the very small, frozen variety). When eating boiled prawns, most people suck the heads. They contain a lot of flavour. I only do so when they are extraordinarily good and fresh, and when I don’t someone is always ready to jump and tell me “You’re wasting them! The head’s the best part!”.

Squid. There are two things you can do with squid: deep-fry them in batter, and then they are absolutely delicious, or cook them in a sauce, and then the sauce is delicious but the squid itself not so much. One of the possible sauces contains some squid ink and it gives a lovely salty flavour. “Black rice” is a cousin of paella, coloured with squid ink.

Octopus: It was a huge surprise for me when I was told that foreign people found this weird. I wish I could eat octopus every day. It’s expensive, and tricky to cook properly (meaning: soft, not gummy).

Serrano ham: ham that is first salted for a few days, then hung to dry in a place that has to be cold, dry, and with plenty of air flowing through. The pigs’ diet is extremely important. The diet gives the flavour, the breed gives the meat-to-fat proportion and the marbled appearance, and the curing method gives the texture and degree of saltiness. It’s served in very thin slivers. Foreigners like it, but they commit a sin: they separate the fat and eat only the meat. That is absolutely ridiculous, because it is much lower in cholesterol than ordinary pork, the fat has most of the flavour, and besides, you never eat a big amount of ham anyway. Someone who eats enough ham for the fat to be bad for them is a brute that doesn’t truly appreciate the delicacy.

November snapshots (I know we're in May)

It has looked as if it's just about to start to rain for three days now, and it's cold. I put this haiku cycle together about two months ago, and I'm still doubting whether to call it "Come in from the Cold" or "November Snapshots".

For those of you that like the creative-process-is-it-autobiographical bit, I composed the first poem more than a year ago when I was locked out of a little mountain refuge very early in the morning, when my friends were indeed still asleep. The third one I wrote very soon afterwards,but in a very urban setting, after a long, long struggle with the Pink Floyd line. The little boy and girl in the second poem are my brother and I, age 8 and 6; that, and the Elegy to a Fritatta, are my only poems to date inspired or about my brother (I'll post the Elegy sometime soon). The last one is the most recent one: I wrote it in late November 2004. In February 2003, I spent a week in Limerick, Ireland, with two of my best friends who were living there. I loved the look and feel of frosty grass and I remembered it with nostalgia until I went back to live in a cold climate, this school year. Like all my weather poems it has a bit of Alan Spence in it.

1.
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.

2
Two fiery dragons:
Boy and girl in raincoats,
Their breath of steam.
Dos feroces dragones:
Un niño y una niña con impermeables,
Su aliento de vapor.

3
Leaf clings to the tree,
Chill autumn.
“Don’t give in without a fight” (Pink Floyd)
Una hoja se aferra a la rama.
Otoño helado.
“No te rindas sin oponer resistencia”.

4
Glittery with frost
The grass puts on a costume:
a late Halloween.
Con purpurina de escarcha
la hierba se disfraza:
Un Halloween tardío.

New York food

The fact that I have done one New York chronicle doesn’t mean I’m finished with the town. This is the food report. I could have survived for four days on fruit and bagels and save a ton of money, but food was a part of the experience and I would have considered it half a holiday if it didn’t include exotic food.

-You can buy great breakfast on the streets in the morning! The little stalls don’t have just bagels (Spaniards: a bagel is a piece of bread shaped like a doughnut. It’s hard and compact, like Andalusian bollos de masadura). They also have tea and several different types of coffee. In Spanish terms this would be as if a churros shop (non-Spaniards: churros are finger-thick sticks of deep-fried batter, that Spaniards have for breakfast on weekends) also had coffee and toast, all to take away. It is wonderfully practical.

-Spaniards know that some foreigners, like the British and the Americans, have eggs for breakfast. What I discovered in New York is that eggs seem to be a strictly breakfast food and that diners and delis that give you a varied menu in the mornings don’t serve any of their egg dishes and toasts after 11 am. I found that weird not because I’m Spanish, but because I have lived in Britain, where the traditional food has so little variety that the nicest meal you can have in most cheap eateries (and probably people’s houses too) is the all-day breakfast.

-There are as many little stalls out in the streets selling fruit and sometimes juices as there are stalls with junk food, and even if much of it is out of season, it’s not expensive. I wonder why.

-I ate in several different Chinese restaurants and I had dumplings in all. One of them had the most delicious, fresh-tasting cabbage dumplings I’ve ever had. When the meal was over I looked behind me and saw four people were wrapping little bits of greens… on top of a newspaper. Newspapers are printed with poisonous ink. Lo que no mata engorda.

-It is humanly possible to eat noodles with chopsticks! Actually, it’s easier than eating bite-sized chunks! I ordered a noodle dish and the waiter told me after the order was sent that it was a soup. Fine. And here comes my soup, with julienne-cut vegetables and noodles like thick spaghetti. I was tempted to ask for a fork, but I gave it a try. It makes you slurp sometimes, of course, but it is possible.

-There are very easy rules to find a cheap(er) place to eat. Avenues are more expensive than streets. Corners are more expensive than the middle of the streets. If you are unlucky enough to be in the Upper East Side at lunchtime, food will be cheaper the further east you go (because you are heading away from Central Park). And when in doubt, eat ethnic (Italian or Asian, but not Japanese).

Leonard Cohen in New York

New York songs are easier to remember than New York poems. It doesn’t matter, because this jewel by Leonard Cohen could be recited instead of sung and it wouldn’t lose one speck of beauty. It’s not a description of New York, but I like to know now where Clinton street is.

Famous Blue Raincoat.

It's four in the morning, the end of December
I'm writing you now just to see if you're better
New York is cold, but I like where I'm living
There's music on Clinton Street all through the evening.

I hear that you're building your little house deep in the desert
You're living for nothing now, I hope you're keeping some kind of record.

Yes, and Jane came by with a lock of your hair
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear
Did you ever go clear?

Ah, the last time we saw you you looked so much older
Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder
You'd been to the station to meet every train
And you came home without Lili Marlene

And you treated my woman to a flake of your life
And when she came back she was nobody's wife.

Well I see you there with the rose in your teeth
One more thin gypsy thief
Well I see Jane's awake --

She sends her regards.
And what can I tell you my brother, my killer
What can I possibly say?
I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you
I'm glad you stood in my way.

If you ever come by here, for Jane or for me
Your enemy is sleeping, and his woman is free.

Yes, and thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes
I thought it was there for good so I never tried.

And Jane came by with a lock of your hair
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear

-- Sincerely, L. Cohen


Son las cuatro de la mañana, finales de Diciembre
te escribo para saber si estás mejor
Hace frío en Nueva York, pero me gusta el sitio donde vivo
Hay música en Clinton Street toda la noche.

Me han dicho que te estás haciendo una casita en el desierto,
¿tienes alguna razón para vivir?
Ojalá lo tengas todo controlado.
Jane vino con un mechón de tu pelo,
Me dijo que se lo diste la noche
que pensabas dejar las cosas claras.
¿Alguna vez las aclaraste?

Qué viejo parecías la última vez que te vimos,
tu famosa gabardina azul estaba rota en un hombro,
Habías estado en la estación viendo pasar los trenes,
y volviste a casa solo, sin Lily Marlene.
E invitaste a mi mujer a un pellizco de tu vida
y cuando volvió, ya no era la mujer de nadie.
Y te veo ahí con una rosa entre los dientes,
otro gitano flaco y ladrón.
Jane está despierta, te manda un saludo.

¿Qué te digo, mi hermano, mi asesino?
¿qué te puedo decir?
Supongo que te echo de menos,
supongo que te perdono.
Me alegro de haberte conocido.
si vuelves alguna vez, por Jane o por mí,
Tu enemigo está dormido y su mujer es libre.

Gracias por la pena que le quitaste de la mirada,
creí que se había quedado así para siempre,
así que nunca intenté borrarla.

Jane vino con un mechón de pelo tuyo.
Me dijo que se lo diste la noche que pensabas dejar las cosas claras.

Sinceramente, L. Cohen.