An interview with Eduardo Espina

May 11, 2011 You were born in Uruguay and have lived in Latin and North America. To what extent has living in different cultures and languages influenced your writing? Do you consider yourself to be a Uruguayan poet?

It would be difficult to give a precise answer to this question, but I suppose that any human-life activity, including the moving from one geographical place to another, affects, in some way, the order we give to words when writing a poem. I have now lived in the United States for 30 years, and I sometimes ask myself whether I would have written the same poetry if I had stayed in Uruguay. The answer I might give immediately is “no”, but, then again, I am unaware of what type of poetry I might have written or might be writing now if I had never left Uruguay. In a way, the fact that I live in a country where the spoken language differs from the language I use in my own writing has penetrated the syntax of my own poetry, the formal nucleus from which its characteristic rhythm and harmony derive. And this does not necessarily correspond with the definition of  ‘Uruguayan poetry’. The musician Gustav Mahler considered himself to be a stateless individual in three ways: as a bohemian in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans and as a Jew in the rest of the world. I also consider myself stateless in three senses: as a foreigner in Uruguay, as a Uruguayan among Americans and as a poet in a world with no room for poets.

When I write poetry, most often I feel that I don't belong to any country; in other words, I belong to the country of the mind, and this country is full of languages, voices and syntax, whose origin is one and many at the same time.

How do you feel about your poems being translated into other languages?

My poetry is difficult – perhaps even impossible – to translate, since in translating it, there is the risk that some of its fundamental elements, such as its intricate syntax, the superposition of a simultaneity of ideas and a music made of atonal rhythms might be lost. Consequently, I would consider anyone who dares to translate my work to be not only a translator but also a poet.

Which contemporary poets do you most identify with? Which other writers have influenced your poetry?

In the past – which does not pass – I felt an affinity in spirit as well as a formal affinity with Cavalcanti, Góngora, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Paul Éluard and Eugenio Montale. These are the first poets that come to my mind, and there must be a reason for that. Nowadays, the list of poets that draw my attention is not very long because I only identify with those that place their mind at the disposal of language and follow the orders of a brave metaphysical impulse, rather than with those that subscribe to an ideology with a vague social commitment. However, the former type of poets are becoming harder and harder to find.

Your poetry has been described as ‘neo-Baroque’. Do you agree? Do you feel that your poetry is part of a genre or movement?

When I published Valores personales, my first book, which was written in Spanish, only a few poets were employing risky syntax and a diversification in tone and prosody in our writing at the time. I had been insisting on that riskt aesthetic and on an overflow of meaning for a long time before I published Valores personales. In 1983, when I was living in Wichita, Kansas – a city that appears in the poems of Pound, Ginsberg and Cardenal, among others – I received a letter from Néstor Perlongher in Sao Paulo. He was a poet that I didn’t know and hadn’t read at the time. It was a friendly and lucid letter that referred to Valores personales in one of its passages. “Where have you been?” he wrote. “You are neo-Baroque”. I was surprised because I had never heard that term before, and I was especially surprised by the fact that someone considers me as such when I thought my writing was ‘Barrococo’, as I told him later during one of our conversations in Paris, May 1990. I felt I had arrived at the Baroque backwards, first passing through Rococo, that artistic periphery in which the mundane, freed from any mystifying artifice, imposes a perfectionist meticulousness, a mythology of all words that is established once they overcome the condition of being mere decorative mediators.

Enrique Mallén, in Con/figuración sintáctica: Poesía del des/lenguaje, noted clear parallels between your work and Ray Jackendoff’s theories on conceptual semantics. Are you familiar with Jackendoff’s work?

Mallén is one of the best readers of modern poetry that I know of. He’s an intellectual reader, one of the very few of his kind. In the context of Hispanic poetry he is, I believe, the only one. But I must be totally sincere with you: when I read his excellent book, Con/figuración sintáctica: Poesía del des/lenguaje, and saw Ray Jackendoff mentioned, I went to the library to find information about him because I did not know who he was. I am still not certain of who he is either, because I still haven't read any of his books or essays. I recently bought two of his books, the titles of which were the ones that caught my eye – Languages of the Mind: Essays on Mental Representation (1992) and Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution (2002), but I still haven’t had time to read them. I might find a new way of looking at my poetry after reading them, but that might also change the way I write.

It seems in your work that you try to keep the reader suspended within language. Your poems open a door on a rich universe of sensations, but the reader is kept at the threshold of this universe. Would you agree with this view of your work? What do you consider (or desire) a reader’s relationship to your poetry to be?

Not all readers are the same. Some open the door and decide not to come in. Others, however, open the door, come in and are never able to leave. Strangely, my poetry –which is considered ‘difficult to understand’ by some readers (many of which haven’t even dared to open the door) – has a greater number of readers than I might have expected at first. An IT expert told me the other day that an average of 400 people read my poems via a Google search every month. When I started writing, I would have never imagined having more than 300 readers, the same quantity that Paul Valéry is said to have  had in the greatest moment of his career, and he felt very happy about that number.

It is also difficult to speak of the type of relationship I expect to have at first hand with my readers, since there is not a singular pattern to define a reader, and not all readers find the same things in my poetry. Nevertheless, I feel an inexplicable happiness every time a reader is enthusiastic about a poem and is drawn to read more poems and different poems, to continue digging through the moods of my language. In other words, I celebrate the type of reader that respects his or her own intelligence and doesn’t resort to the easy excuse of saying “I don’t understand”, the type of reader who doesn't give up immediately. Perhaps the ideal reader could be identical to the reader who came up to me one day after reading La caza nupcial and asked: “How did you do it?”

The theme of this year’s festival is ‘Order and Chaos’. What elements of order and chaos do you see in your own work?

Everything, absolutely everything, in relation to my poetry – especially in the act of writing it – starts with a horrifying chaos and finally ends by imposing a sacred order dependent of all the words. Writing a poem is an act of obliged metamorphosis. Poetic language is in charge of transforming one thing into another. Its existence is justified mainly in the transition from chaos into order, in which thought and rewriting occur in a frenzied manner. Everything begins from a recognisable – yet indefinable – chaos and ends in an order that is directly related to the repercussions, the influence and the consequences it generates. I write just for this reason, that’s all: to be able to pass from a restlessness that is close to chaos, to the grateful spiritual stillness of order. I go from not being to being to the fullest. If I attain this, when I attain it, it is through the brave words, which, with some help from us, know how to mediate.