Sonnet on the sonnet

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?

Making friends

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.

The marriage of true minds

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.

My first haiku ever

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.

Soneto para amadas meteorológicas

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.

Weather with you

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.

African Cinema

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.

Why I write haikus.

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.

March Eleventh

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.

New Beginnings!

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.