Lorca & Jimenez

by Robert Bly

  The basil is not asleep,

  the ant is busy.

  Are you going around naked

  in the house?

  “VINO, PRIMERO, PURA”

  Vino, primero, pura,

  vestida de inocencia.

  Y la amé como un niño.

  Luego se fue vistiendo

  de no sé qué ropajes.

  Y la fui odiando, sin saberlo.

  Llegó a ser una reina,

  fastuosa de tesoros . . .

  ¡ Qué iracundia de yel y sin sentido!

  . . . Mas se fue desnudando.

  Y yo le sonreía.

  Se quedó con la túnica

  de su inocencia antigua.

  Creí de nuevo en ella.

  Y se quitó la túnica,

  y apareció desnuda toda . . .

  ¡ Oh pasión de mi vida, poesía

  desnuda, mía para siempre!

  “AT FIRST SHE CAME TO ME PURE”

  At first she came to me pure,

  dressed only in her innocence;

  and I loved her as we love a child.

  Then she began putting on

  clothes she picked up somewhere;

  and I hated her, without knowing it.

  She gradually became a queen,

  the jewelry was blinding . . .

  What bitterness and rage!

  . . . She started going back toward nakedness.

  And I smiled.

  Soon she was back to the single shift

  of her old innocence.

  I believed in her a second time.

  Then she took off the cloth

  and was entirely naked . . .

  Naked poetry, always mine,

  that I have loved my whole life!

  AURORAS DE MOGUER

  ¡ Los álamos de plata,

  saliendo de la bruma!

  ¡ El viento solitario

  por la marisma oscura,

  moviendo —terremoto

  irreal— la difusa

  Huelva lejana y rosa!

  ¡ Sobre el mar, por La Rábida,

  en la gris perla húmeda

  del cielo, aún con la noche

  fría tras su alba cruda

  —¡ horizonte de pinos!—,

  fría tras su alba blanca,

  la deslumbrada luna!

  DAWNS OF MOGUER

  The silver poplars

  rising out of the fog!

  The lonesome wind there

  moving over the dark

  marsh—an earthquake

  that is not real—and Huelva

  stretched out, far away, rose-colored!

  Above the sea, toward La Rábida,

  in the moist pearl-gray

  of the sky, with the night

  still cold behind its crude dawn—

  a horizon of pines—

  the baffled moon!

  AURORA DE TRASMUROS

  A todo se le ve la cara, blanca

  —cal, pesadilla, adobe, anemia, frío—

  contra el oriente. ¡ Oh cerca de la vida;

  oh, duro de la vida! ¡ Semejanza

  animal en el cuerpo—raíz, escoria—

  (con el alma mal puesta todavía),

  y mineral y vejetal!

  ¡ Sol yerto contra el hombre,

  contra el cerdo, las coles y la tapia!

  —Falsa alegría, porque estás tan solo

  en la hora—se dice—, no en el alma!—

  Todo el cielo tomado

  por los montones humeantes, húmedos,

  de los estercoleros horizontes.

  Restos agrios, aquí y allá,

  de la noche. Tajadas,

  medio comidas, de la luna verde,

  cristalitos de estrellas falsas,

  papel mal arrancado, con su yeso aún fresco

  de cielo azul. Los pájaros,

  aún mal despiertos, en la luna cruda,

  farol casi apagado.

  ¡ Recua de seres y de cosas!

  —¡ Tristeza verdadera, porque estás tan solo

  en el alma—se dice—, no en la hora!—

  DAWN OUTSIDE THE CITY WALLS

  You can see the face of everything, and it is white—

  plaster, nightmare, adobe, anemia, cold—

  turned to the east. Oh closeness to life!

  Hardness of life! Like something

  in the body that is animal—root, slag-ends—

  with the soul still not set well there—

  and mineral and vegetable!

  Sun standing stiffly against man,

  against the sow, the cabbages, the mud wall!

  —False joy, because you are merely

  in time, as they say, and not in the soul!

  The entire sky taken up

  by moist and steaming heaps,

  a horizon of dung piles.

  Sour remains, here and there,

  of the night. Slices

  of the green moon, half-eaten,

  crystal bits from false stars,

  plaster, the paper ripped off, still faintly

  sky-blue. The birds

  not really awake yet, in the raw moon,

  streetlight nearly out.

  Mob of beings and things!

  —A true sadness, because you are really deep

  in the soul, as they say, not in time at all!

  EL NOMBRE CONSEGUIDO DE LOS NOMBRES

  Si yo, por ti, he creado un mundo para ti,

  dios, tú tenías seguro que venir a él,

  y tú has venido a él, a mí seguro,

  porque mi mundo todo era mi esperanza.

  Yo he acumulado mi esperanza

  en lengua, en nombre hablado, en nombre escrito;

  a todo yo le había puesto nombre

  y tú has tomado el puesto

  de toda esta nombradía.

  Ahora puedo yo detener ya mi movimiento,

  como la llama se detiene en ascua roja

  con resplandor de aire inflamado azul,

  en el ascua de mi perpetuo estar y ser;

  ahora yo soy ya mi mar paralizado,

  el mar que yo decía, mas no duro,

  paralizado en olas de conciencia en luz

  y vivas hacia arriba todas, hacia arriba.

  Todos los nombres que yo puse

  al universo que por ti me recreaba yo,

  se me están convirtiendo en uno y en un

  dios.

  El dios que es siempre al fin,

  el dios creado y recreado y recreado

  por gracia y sin esfuerzo.

  El Dios. El nombre conseguido de los nombres.

  THE NAME DRAWN FROM THE NAMES

  If I have created a world for you, in your place,

  god, you had to come to it confident,

  and you have come to it, to my refuge,

  because my whole world was nothing but my hope.

  I have been saving up my hope

  in language, in a spoken name, a written name;

  I had given a name to everything,

  and you have taken the place

  of all these names.

  Now I can hold back my movement

  inside the coal of my continual living and being,

  as the flame reins itself back inside the red coal,

  surrounded by air that is all blue fire;

  now I am my own sea that has been suddenly

  stopped somewhere,

  the sea I used to speak of, but not heavy,

  stiffened into waves of an awareness filled with light,

  and all of them moving upward, upward.

  All the names that I gave

  to the universe that I created again for you

  are now all turning into one name, into one

  god.

  The god who, in the end, is always

  the god created and recreated and recreated

  through grace and never through force.

  The God. The name drawn from the names.

&nbs
p; CONCIENCIA PLENA

  Tú me llevas, conciencia plena, deseante dios, por todo el mundo.

  En este mar tercero,

  casi oigo tu voz; tu voz del viento

  ocupante total del movimiento;

  de los colores, de las luces

  eternos y marinos.

  Tu voz de fuego blanco

  en la totalidad del agua, el barco, el cielo,

  lineando las rutas con delicia,

  grabándome con fúljido mi órbita segura

  de cuerpo negro

  con el diamante lúcido en su dentro.

  FULL CONSCIOUSNESS

  You are carrying me, full consciousness, god that has desires,

  all through the world.

  Here, in this third sea,

  I almost hear your voice: your voice, the wind,

  filling entirely all movements;

  eternal colors and eternal lights,

  sea colors and sea lights.

  Your voice of white fire

  in the universe of water, the ship, the sky,

  marking out the roads with delight,

  engraving for me with a blazing light my firm orbit:

  a black body

  with the glowing diamond in its center.

  FIRST GLIMPSE OF JUAN RAMON JIMENEZ

  During those exciting years in Madrid, Juan Ramón Jiménez was, to us, even more than Antonio Machado, the man who had raised poetry to the status of a religion, living exclusively because of poetry and for it, dazzling us with his example. In 1924, in La Verdad, a literary sheet from Murcia, I published several poems from my Marinero en tierra which had not yet appeared in book form. Someone told me that Juan Ramón had liked them very much. I paid him a visit.

  He lived on the top floor of a house in a quiet neighborhood, a sort of penthouse. He received me there, among honeysuckles and morning glories which he himself, with his Andalusian homesickness for gardens, was guiding along the walls, and turning into fountains of leaves. That afternoon the writer Antonio Espina was with him.

  Juan Ramón was editor at that time of the literary review Indice and of a publishing house as well with the same name. Two books had just come out: Signario, by Antonio Espina, and Pedro Salinas’ Presagios. In his apartment, holding a copy of Signario, he complained about its typographical imperfections. He had found errata, smudged letters, sloping lines, and over all of this he would lose sleep.

  “In Alfonso Reyes’ edition of Góngora’s Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea he let some errata slip by him too: instead of ‘corona’ there is ‘corna’; for ‘entre’, ‘enter’, and so on. Spain had lost its tradition of great printing. Take a look at this English book. [He showed us a modern edition of Keats.] Look at the fine workmanship, and the grace, the delicacy of the type! I’d like to obtain the same results in the Indice books, but that’s obviously asking too much.”

  In those days Juan Ramón’s beard was still black and rough;

  he had the perfect profile of the Andalusian Arab, and a soft, gloomy voice that sometimes rose into a scratchy falsetto. We talked about writing, and names from his generation came up: Pérez de Ayala, the Machados, Ortega y Gasset . . . During that visit I glimpsed for the first time—later I saw it often, throughout our friendship—the extraordinary Andalusian wit and venom that came out in making fun of people or doing imitations of them. The people I heard him laugh at most—and slander, in his poetic way—were Azorin and Eugenio D’Ors.

  “Have you seen the title of Azorín’s last book? El chirrión de los políticos. [The Ox Cart of the Politicians.] ‘The Ox Cart!’ I received a personally signed copy dedicated to me. Naturally, I went myself, in person, to his house to give it back to him. Azorín lives,” he continued, “in one of those houses that reek of the Madrid dish—boiled-meat-and-vegetables mixed with cat piss. He sleeps far far inside a bed whose mosquito netting is decorated with pink ribbons, and he keeps on his night-table an object he considers to be in the most exquisite taste, a plaster of paris Negro painted black, the kind they use to advertise ‘La Estrella’ coffee, a gift from his constituents when he was congressman for Monovar. No matter how simple the furnishings are, you can always tell a writer by his home.”

  He broke off his friendship with Pérez de Ayala one day during a visit because Pérez de Ayala had showed him a room with various sausages hanging from the ceiling; for that he never forgave his friend. He noticed in José Ortega y Gasset’s home—remember the visitor is Juan Ramón Jiménez, not I—a small Venus de Milo, cast in plaster, on top of a piano, the sort of piece that sells for a few pennies in the square of Cibeles in Madrid. I believe there was also a brass paperweight that undertook to be Don Quixote, and included a desperate Sancho Panza, shouting at the top of his lungs. These details of decoration gave occasion for biting jibes that Juan Ramón aimed at Ortega, using the details as glimpses into Ortega’s style and work.

  His own home was very different. He and his wife, Zenobia Camprubí, had succeeded in keeping it with a taste and an elegance that were truly simple, natural. When Juan Ramón was working, and during this time he would work twenty-four hours of the day, it was impossible to see him; he turned away his visitors, sometimes refusing to let them in himself. The names of visitors would be conveyed to him by telephone from the porter’s lodge. Occasionally the visitor himself would speak:

  “This is so and so.”

  Juan Ramón would answer in a perfectly natural way, from upstairs: “Juan Ramón Jiménez has left me a message that he is out.”

  In that sought-after solitude, he produced, polished, retouched, reshuffled his work (or his Work, as he tended to call it) back and forth. In that darkroom of poetry, the poet from the country, the poet of purple and yellow sundowns, of walks with his silver burro through the narrow streets of Moguer, worked on with the fervor of a mystic, of a solitary, listening to the circulation of his own blood, drawing out the poetry that rose from it. The poet of Arias, Pastorales, Jardines lejanos became at this time, drawing close to the flame of his work, the poet of Piedra y cielo, Poesía, Belleza, Unidad.

  Imaginary wind from the sea!

  Street the sailors like—

  blue blouse, and against his chest

  the chain that works miracles!

  This stanza was from one of the most transparent and lively of Juan Ramón’s poems; I had taken two lines from the stanza as an epigraph for a poem I had published in La Verdad, one of those he praised so much:

  blue blouse, and against his chest

  the chain that works miracles!

  The welcome Juan Ramón gave me, which was like the welcome he gave all the poets beginning to appear at that time, though he perhaps showed me preference over the others, was encouraging and warm, and inspired in me a faith and a self-confidence I hadn’t possessed until then. He asked me to let him see more of my things and so the next day I brought him a group of short poems from which he himself made a selection and published in SI, a review of poetry and prose he edited under the pen name of “The Universal Andalusian.”

  Those first poems of mine were from Marinero en tierra (Sailor on land) a book that shortly after was given the National Award for Literature, together with Gerardo Diego’s Versos humanos. Offering me further proof of his esteem, Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote me the fine letter I have since published as a preface to my poems.

  In Buenos Aires now, from my small balcony overlooking the River Plate, here among my red cardinals and my run-down pots of blackened geraniums, my memory goes northwards up the river, and takes me past the image I have of Juan Ramón in Madrid, lively-eyed in his roof-house of honeysuckles and morning glories, to the picture of the present Juan Ramón, a survivor in America of the immense Spanish catastrophe—living brother of Antonio Machado, who was a genuine piece of the earth sacrificed—like Machado he is a master, a wandering magnificent voice of our country.

  RAFAEL ALBERTI

  Buenos Aires, 1945

  translated by

  Hardie St.
Martin

  Selected Poems of

  FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA

  GARCIA LORCA AND CRETE

  I

  Garcia Lorca’s poems often begin with a simple and clear line, a line like “When the moon sails out,” then unexpectedly a joyful idea appears, the feelings open in surprise, the walls we have put up to keep things in their places collapse, the instincts pour in—it’s as if an animal had written many of his stanzas—mandible feelings come, the jokes of children, the most fantastic delicacy, the longings of the monk for the pure moon, above all desire, desire, desire. What we could call desire-energy passes through Lorca’s poems as if the lines were clear arteries created for it. Ortega y Gasset said once: “Europe is suffering from a withering of the ability to desire.” Americans are weak in the same way. Everywhere we meet people, old and young, who when you ask them if they want this or that smile amiably but can’t remember. The word I love best in Lorca is “quiero,” which appears again and again: “I love, I want”:

  Green, how I love you, green!

  Green wind. Green branches.

  The ship on the sea

  and the horse on the mountain.

  I want the water to go on without its bed,

  and the wind to go on without its mountain passes.

  I have shut my balcony door

  because I don’t want to hear the sobbing.

  I want to sleep for half a second,

  a second, a minute, a century,

  but I want everyone to know that I’m still alive. . . .

  When I am on the roof

  what a pure seraphim of fire I want to be and I am!

  We all know great poets who write about imagination, or the difficulty of dying, or political systems, or anxiety, but Lorca writes about what he loves, what he takes delight in, what he wants, what he desires, what barren women desire, what water desires, what gypsies desire, what a bull desires just before he dies, what brothers and sisters desire. . . .