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.
Now available on Amazon USA, UK,
Canada, Germany, Netherlands and India
USA : https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09RSWST7K?ref=myi_title_dp
SPAIN: https://www.amazon.es/dp/B09RSWST7K?ref=myi_title_dp
UK : https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09RSWST7K?ref=myi_title_dp
CANADA: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B09RSWST7K?ref=myi_title_dp
GERMANY: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B09RSWST7K?ref=myi_title_dp
NETHERLANDS: https://www.amazon.nl/dp/B09RSWST7K?ref=myi_title_dp
INDIA : https://www.amazon.in/dp/B09RSWST7K?ref=myi_title_dp
No comments:
Post a Comment