Article
Editorial: October 2009
September 28, 2009
Amongst all this, León Gil’s poem ‘VanGoghiana’ was a surprise and rather different from more typical Colombian poetry. In 1990, he published a collection of verse, From Van Gogh’s Orchard, recreating Van Gogh’s life and experiences:
At thirty-seven, the painter
paints like a madman and like a child
not being a child
and paints himself like a philosopher or an old man
not being an old man
Oppression seems to be the theme of this month’s issue: the fourth Colombian poet, Eva Durán, is concerned with preserving hope within difficulty. She kicks and scratches against her lot and adds her voice to that age-old feminine complaint that men exploit women in love.
“A useless woman” Kiyoko Nagase called herself, yet her determination and poetic talent have made her a role model to many Japanese women writing today, including the Empress Michiko who translated one of her poems. Nagase’s life spanned most of the previous century and she was through financial necessity a working mother who wrote at the kitchen table while the rest of her family slept – a poetic image in itself. Kiyoko Nagase was a highly intelligent woman whose poems show her perspicacity. In ‘You in the Shade of a Tree’, published in 1950, she describes talking to another woman’s ‘magnificent’ husband, while the other woman looks on, clearly worried and jealous. At the end of the poem the narrator is frustrated, her “heart wilting” because women cannot overcome their emotions, however intellectual they may be.
In ‘Song of a Woman’ she describes a typical relationship problem:
I want to start learning magic.
I want to stop your criticism with a single glance.
I want to put your heart to sleep with one finger.
I want to go out every night riding a broom.
I want to jump over the mountain ridge
trailing my hair like smoke.
I want to fly into the sparkling moonlight
laughing away your beratings down there.
Accompanying the poems is an interesting essay by Nagase’s translator Takako Lento, helpfully placing the writing in a historical context. There are also audio files of two of the poems, including ‘O You Who Come to Me at Dawn’, which are well worth a listen.
A near contemporary of Nagase’s, Dutch poet Hanny Michaelis’s life was also marked by the difficulties of the twentieth century. She was confronted by loss at an early age when her Jewish parents died at Sobibor, an extermination camp in occupied Poland. She married one of the Netherland’s great writers, Gerard Reve, who later became openly homosexual, and her second partner died. Judith Wilkinson’s skilled translations allow us to experience Michaelis’s subdued elegance and mournful tone:
Over the years
a great deal has to be thrown out.
The notion, for instance,
that happiness is mild and enduring,
something like a southern climate
instead of a bolt of lightning
that leaves scars
cherished a lifetime.
The two poets from the Netherlands and Japan return to similar themes and indeed use similar imagery, but reading them together allows one to admire even more the strength and optimism that Kiyoko Nagase demonstrates in the face of oppression.
Sarah Ream will be back next month.
Links to articles on modern Latin American poetry
www.paginadigital.com.ar
In Spanish
Surrealist influence in Latin-American poetry
In English
To a Western reader, Juan Diego Tamayo’s associative and sensual poems seem reminiscent of automatic writing. He combines symbolic images and prayer in his poetry, following in the tradition of compatriots Humberto Díaz Casanueva, Rosamel del Valle and José Lezama Lima, as Jario Guzmán explains on the poet page. Colombia is famous for its literary tradition and has beaten its own path within the Latin American canon. The European movements of Romanticism and Symbolism were adopted and keenly explored at the beginning of last century and paved the way for the visionary poets of more recent years.
What is visionary poetry though? A quick search of the web led me to Alice A. Bailey, a 1930s British intellectual, who wrote, “The visionary mystic senses the ideal but (using not his mind) makes no compromise between the wonderful ideas which may materialise in a far distant future and the present period of hard necessity.” This seems to me to encapsulate the project of the Colombian poetry featured on PIW. Living in a country beset by violence and corruption, the poets seek refuge in the imaginary, in an alternative realm of thought, related more to dream than reality. Their visionary poems look to a better future or at least to somewhere other than their actual lives, as Jairo Guzmán’s own works in this issue seem to suggest. Amongst all this, León Gil’s poem ‘VanGoghiana’ was a surprise and rather different from more typical Colombian poetry. In 1990, he published a collection of verse, From Van Gogh’s Orchard, recreating Van Gogh’s life and experiences:
At thirty-seven, the painter
paints like a madman and like a child
not being a child
and paints himself like a philosopher or an old man
not being an old man
Oppression seems to be the theme of this month’s issue: the fourth Colombian poet, Eva Durán, is concerned with preserving hope within difficulty. She kicks and scratches against her lot and adds her voice to that age-old feminine complaint that men exploit women in love.
“A useless woman” Kiyoko Nagase called herself, yet her determination and poetic talent have made her a role model to many Japanese women writing today, including the Empress Michiko who translated one of her poems. Nagase’s life spanned most of the previous century and she was through financial necessity a working mother who wrote at the kitchen table while the rest of her family slept – a poetic image in itself. Kiyoko Nagase was a highly intelligent woman whose poems show her perspicacity. In ‘You in the Shade of a Tree’, published in 1950, she describes talking to another woman’s ‘magnificent’ husband, while the other woman looks on, clearly worried and jealous. At the end of the poem the narrator is frustrated, her “heart wilting” because women cannot overcome their emotions, however intellectual they may be.
In ‘Song of a Woman’ she describes a typical relationship problem:
I want to start learning magic.
I want to stop your criticism with a single glance.
I want to put your heart to sleep with one finger.
I want to go out every night riding a broom.
I want to jump over the mountain ridge
trailing my hair like smoke.
I want to fly into the sparkling moonlight
laughing away your beratings down there.
Accompanying the poems is an interesting essay by Nagase’s translator Takako Lento, helpfully placing the writing in a historical context. There are also audio files of two of the poems, including ‘O You Who Come to Me at Dawn’, which are well worth a listen.
A near contemporary of Nagase’s, Dutch poet Hanny Michaelis’s life was also marked by the difficulties of the twentieth century. She was confronted by loss at an early age when her Jewish parents died at Sobibor, an extermination camp in occupied Poland. She married one of the Netherland’s great writers, Gerard Reve, who later became openly homosexual, and her second partner died. Judith Wilkinson’s skilled translations allow us to experience Michaelis’s subdued elegance and mournful tone:
Over the years
a great deal has to be thrown out.
The notion, for instance,
that happiness is mild and enduring,
something like a southern climate
instead of a bolt of lightning
that leaves scars
cherished a lifetime.
The two poets from the Netherlands and Japan return to similar themes and indeed use similar imagery, but reading them together allows one to admire even more the strength and optimism that Kiyoko Nagase demonstrates in the face of oppression.
Sarah Ream will be back next month.
Links to articles on modern Latin American poetry
www.paginadigital.com.ar
In Spanish
Surrealist influence in Latin-American poetry
In English
© Michele Hutchison
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