Book Review
JOSÉ GARCÍA OBRERO
Marco Polo’s Dilemma
After reading this anthology, which accounts for a long,
fruitful poetic calling, we might imagine Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (Havana, 1955)
as a, “clockmaker’s hunch-backed apprentice” with a loupe in one eye, alone in
his room late at night. There, he carefully places each word, each image, each
enjambment, in the artifact of the poem, in order to provoke a certain
strangeness in readers, making them delve into reality. We might also imagine
the house where the watchmaker’s room is as being anywhere, more fixed in the
sky than in a specific space, since the occupant is uprooted, a foreigner. Of
course, the mihrab of this particular mosque is oriented towards Cuba.
Rodríguez Núñez grew up in Cayama, a village in Sancti
Spíritus province, in the center of the Caribbean island. He is a descendant of
Galician immigrants, class-conscious peasants and workers. There were no books
in his house, as he says, “not even the Bible.” Self-taught and nourished by
authors who would later set him on his poetic path, he began writing under the
influence of Federico García Lorca, who taught him that poetry is thinking
through images and rhythmic discourse. From the Peruvian César Vallejo, he took
the idea that poetry is opposed to all ideology and, from the Mexican José
Emilio Pacheco, that the poet must be trained as an intellectual. Among Cubans,
Eliseo Diego offered up the texture of his verses, and Fayad Jamís, a visual
depth.
The early period of Rodríguez Núñez’s poetry, spanning from
1979 to 2000 and six books, is marked by an openness to the universal, like
“Marco Polo’s Dilemma”: “I’ve seen something of the world / and it only deepens
my sorrow / nothing belongs to me.” More than once the poetic subject refers to
himself as “the foreigner.” Ultimately, nothing human is alien to the poetic
subject, and therefore nothing is alien to his poetry. This becomes evident in
superb poems, so varied in their themes, like “The Captain” or “Madrid
Nocturne.” Inspiration comes from a neighborhood soccer game, like in
“Bogotano”, or from a tiny neutron, as in “Praise for the Neutrino.”
Up until 2000, Rodríguez Núñez’s books revolve around what
has been referred to as conversational poetry. Soon, this way of understanding
the poem became a prison, where he felt forced to define a signifier and a
signified. The search to break with this model led him to organic poetry. It
consists of writing without any preconceived idea, letting thought flow halfway
between reason and the unconscious, though never becoming automatic writing.
The author defines this poetics as the search first for poetry and then for the
poem.
The change of course is fully materialized beginning with
the two books that make up Midnight
Minutes. They constitute one long poem, a torrent of images, divided into
fourteen parts, where “just one night explains the world.” Here,, the night is
a propitious, fertile terrain for the poet, as Spanish poetic tradition has
demonstrated ever since San Juan de la Cruz’s “Dark night of the soul.”Yet, the
limits of Romanticism are crossed, and the poetic subject declares, “I work to
earn the night,” revealing the underside of the orderly life that forces us to
earn a living. “Thirteen” stresses this idea:
I’m one of
those who die eight hours a day
and are
reborn in you
I escape
the case
take off
my fluorescent tag
You’re
alienation undressing
your back
is never turned
At your
breast I converge with the others
in the
same murmur
I’m no longer
merchandise
only use
value
Definitions of the night abound and the poem concludes:
“Night’s made by all / of us the day’s put down.” The night becomes
identification with freedom, poetry, the universe. And it comes naturally to
politics: “There won’t be revolution / if we don’t let the night speak.”
The search for organic writing coincides with an awareness
of the place from which the poet writes. Rodríguez Núñez lived in Cuba until
1988, and later resided in Colombia, Nicaragua, and the United States. This
objective distance from the island has meant a subjective approach, as
reflected in those verses by José Ángel Valente that say: “Leaving was the only
way to stay forever.” Our poet not only writes “from Cuba,” he specifically
writes “from Cayama,” a place where he became aware of the world; the origin.
In the United States, aided by contact with both another
reality and a different language, he became aware of his otherness, but only in
so far as it is a rejection of borders: “The development of an identity always
goes through two stages: first, the awareness of difference; second, the
awareness of identification. In my poetry I try to make identification prevail
over differentiation, and to banish the perverse ideology of nationalism.” This
notion is developed in different ways in books as tasks, reverses, thaw, and from a red barn.
With departures, the collection that won the coveted Loewe
Prize, Spain’s most important award for an unpublished book of poetry, and
which opens this anthology organized in reverse, Rodríguez Núñez returns to his
native Havana, to nostalgia, understood in its etymological sense: to remember
with pain. Exile is palpable, but paradoxically “the foreigner” gives way to
“the compatriot of clouds,” a symbol of a space that belongs to no one and
everyone. What comes to the fore is a notion that only the unnameable, the
inapprehensible, is worthwhile, and that, perhaps, ultimately, the poet gives
himself up to that pursuit because with it he frees himself from perfection,
and thus achieves everything else, the pure beat of life.
Rodríguez Núñez’s work has been called “Spanish-American
irrationalism” and “magical realism,” labels that the author qualifies:
“Relinquishing realism does not mean turning your back on reality, but
representing it with greater depth. . . What I have always sought, although at
first I didn’t call it that, is a dialogical poetry. A lyric that rejects
solipsism.” In his poetry, he gets his readers to experience estrangement,
which leads them to see the world as they had not seen it before. To do this,
he makes use of complexity, inconclusiveness, and darkness as reflections of
our time.
In sum, Rodríguez Núñez understands his poetry as an
elevated form of humanism: “I believe in poetry because it is the one thing
that capitalism has not been able to turn into commodity, because it is a
cardinal instrument of resistance against dominant dehumanization.” At the
beginning of this review I evoke the poem “Nights,” where an image appears, a
verse, that runs through this great Cuban poet’s entire oeuvre: “I am / if I
may / a clockmaker’s hunch-backed apprentice / facing the broken mainspring of
this world.” These poems, although torrential, are not automatic; they are
tamed by the intellectual will and this is reflected in their verses: “The poem
isn’t /a vessel adrift / horizon shipwrecked.”
linverse [2016-1979].
By Víctor Rodríguez Núñez.
Edited and translated by Katherine M. Hedeen.
Mumbai: Poetrywala, 2019.
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