Archive for November, 2005

Pizarnik’s Árbol de Diana

Tuesday, November 29th, 2005

To my best knowledge, there have been only two full translations of Alejandra Pizarnik's Árbol de Diana; that is, Graziano (1987) and Bassnett (2002). Now I shall add my version of The Tree of Diana to the mix.

I am so much more comfortable with the ancient religions than I am with the modern ones. Pizarnik seems so too. It is the goddess Diana, the face on the other side of the mirror, the shadowy "other" she keeps searching for. The Encyclopedia Mythica has this to say about Diana:

Originally a goddess of fertility … [Diana] was worshipped mainly by women as the giver of fertility and easy births. Under Greek influence she was equated with Artemis and assumed many of her aspects. Her name is possibly derived from 'diviana' ("the shining one"). She is portrayed as a huntress accompanied by a deer. Diana was also the goddess of the Latin commonwealth.

Never mind how difficult this poem is to translate. Never mind the psychological borders one must cross in order to begin to understand what it is Pizarnik attempts to communicate. One must start by listening. Slavoj Zizek compares Pizarnik's poem with Plato's Theory of the Cave, concluding1:

… Recall Nietzsche's complaint in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Prologue, 5): "Must one smash their ears before they learn to listen with their eyes?" Is this complaint about the difficulty of teaching people how to listen not ambiguous? Does it mean that it is difficult to learn to listen with one's eyes, or that it is simply difficult to learn to truly listen? In other words, if we follow Wagner's Tristan (who, while dying, shouts: "I see her /Isolde's/ voice"!) and accept, as one of the definitions of modern art, that one has to listen to it with eyes, does this mean that one can truly hear (hear the silence, the silent Message-Thing covered up by the chatter of words) only with one's eyes? Is, consequently, modern painting (as it is indicated already by Munch's Scream) not a "sound of silence", the visual rendering of the point at which words break down? And, incidentally, this is also how the critique of ideology (whose Platonic origins one should unabashedly admit) functions: it endeavors to smash our ears (hypnotized by the ideology's siren song) so that we can start to hear with our eyes (in the mode of theoria).

This is only the first eighteen stanzas of the poem. I will conclude the rest tomorrow when I have more time. Still, how ahead of her time was Pizarnik? Or perhaps I should say, how easy would she be able to slide into our conversations, our discourse, had we let her in? Compare all this with a quote from Gina Franco, who writes in her blog:

The kids are watching Labyrinth. Am noticing this little turn of phrase (gaze?) for the first time:

"Your eyes can be so cruel
Just as I can be so cruel"

What the eyes I. "I can't live within you."

Yes, I should conclude this as follows: what curious orbs, smash our ears so that the ancient primal force can be let in, so we can start to hear once again.

I should.

Árbol de Diana
Alejandra Pizarnik
The Tree of Diana
translated by ZJC

1.
He dado el salto de mí al alba.
He dejado mi cuerpo junto a la luz
Y he cantado la tristeza de lo que nace.

2.
Éstas son las versiones que nos propone:
un agujero, una pared que tiembla …

3.
sólo la sed
el silencio
ningún encuentro

cuídate de mí amor mío
cuídate de la silenciosa en el desierto
de la viajera con el vaso vacío
y de la sombra de su sombra

4.
AHORA BIEN:
Quién dejará de hundir su mano en busca del
tributo para la pequeña olvidada. El frío pagará.
Pagará el viento. La lluvia pagará. Pagará el
trueno.

5.
por un minuto de vida breve
única de ojos abiertos
por un minuto de ver
en el cerebro flores pequeñas
danzando como palabras en la boca de un mundo

6.
ella se desnuda en el paraíso
de su memoria
ella desconoce el feroz destino
de sus visiones
ella tiene miedo de no saber nombrar
lo que no existe

7.
Salta con la camisa en llamas
De estrella a estrella.
De sombra en sombra.
Muere de muerte lejana
La que ama al viento.

8.
Memoria iluminada, galería donde
vaga la sombra de lo que espero. No es
verdad que vendrá. No es verdad que
no vendrá.

9.
Estos huesos brillando en la noche,
estas palabras como piedras preciosas
en la garganta viva de un pájaro petrificado,
este verde muy amado,
esta lila caliente,
este corazón sólo misterioso.

10.
un viento débil
lleno de rostros doblados
que recorto en forma de objetos que amar

11.
ahora
en esta hora inocente
yo y la que fui nos sentamos
en el umbral de mi mirada

12.
no más las dulces metamorfosis de una niña de seda
sonámbula en la cornisa de niebla
su despertar de mano respirando
de flor que se abre al viento

13.
explicar con palabras de este mundo
que partió de mí un barco llevándome

14.
El poema que no digo,
el que no merezco.
Miedo de ser dos
camino del espejo:
alguien en mí dormido
me come y me bebe

15.
Extraño desacostumbrarme
de la hora en que nací.
Extraño no ejercer más
oficio de recién llegada.

16.
has construido tu casa
has emplumado tus pájaros
has golpeado al viento
con tus propios huesos
has terminado sola
lo que nadie comenzó

17.
Días en que una palabra lejana se apodera de mí. Voy por esos días sonámbula y transparente. La hermosa autómata se canta, se encanta, se cuenta casos y cosas: nido de hilos rígidos donde me danzo y me lloro en mis numerosos funerales. (Ella es su espejo incendiado, su espera en hogueras frías, su elemento místico, su fornicación de nombres creciendo solos en
la noche pálida.)

18.
como un poema enterado
del silencio de las cosas
hablas para no verme

1.
I have jumped from my body to the dawn.
I have left myself fixed to the light
I sang the grief of what is being born.

2.
These are the versions that are proffered to us:
a hole, a wall that shudders …

3.
only this thirst
silence
never stumbled upon

caution, my love
caution toward this silent one, out in the dunes,
this traveler with her empty glass
and all the shade of her shadow.

4.
HOWEVER:
Who will surrender stop sinking her fist in
hunting for a forgotten tribute for the girl.
The cold will pay. The wind will pay. The rain
will pay. The thunder will pay.

5.
for only a minute in this unique, brief life
with open eyes,
only for a minute, to see
in my brain, small flowers
dancing like words in the mouth of the silent.

6.
she strips naked in the paradise
of her memory
she is ignorant of the ferocious destiny
of her visions
she is terrified of not knowing how to name
all that does not exist.

7.
She leaps with her shirt in flames
star to star.
From shade to shadow.
She is the one who dies a distant death
the one in love with the wind.

8.
Illuminated memory, vague gallery where
dwells the shadow of my hope. It is not
truth that will come. It is not truth that
will not come.

9.
These bones flaming at night,
these words like precious stones
in the living throat of a paralyzed bird,
this beloved green, beloved,
this warm lilac, warm,
this single, mysterious heart.

10.
a feeble wind
full of doubled faces
that I trim into the forms of objects to love.

11.
now
in this innocent hour
I and the one that I was, seated
in the threshold of my stare.

12.
no more candies metamorphosis of a silken girl
a sleepwalker in the fog's cornice
she will not wake up to find a breathing hand
or flower that opens to the wind.

13.
to explain with words this world
a boat that pulled away from myself, taking me away.

14.
The poem that I can not utter,
the one that I do not deserve.
Fear of being two
pathways in the mirror:
somebody dormant in me
eating me and drinking me.

15.
Extraordinary, to discourage myself
from the hour in which I was born.
Extraordinary, not to play out
the role of one who just arrived.

16.
you have constructed your house
you have feathered your birds
you have struck at the wind
with your own bones
you have finished alone
what nobody could begin.

17.
Days where a distant word seizes me. I go through those days like a sleepwalker, transparent. The beautiful robot sings to herself, enchanting herself, she talks of cases, things: rigid threads nest where I dance for myself, I cry for myself in numerous funerals. (She is alive in her burning mirror, her cold bonfire of delay, her mystical element, her fornication with names growing alone,
pale at night.)

18.
like a poem aware of
the silence of things
you speak to shut me out.


  1. The translation of this on-line essay is not mine, so I did not bother to "clean" it up, rather I found the translation itself a curious tool in and of itself [back]

November 29, such an unfashionable day

Tuesday, November 29th, 2005

Another 3 to midnight shift of changing adult diapers and spoon-feeding my residents at the dinner table.

Tomorrow being November 30, a much more fashionable day and the deadline for many an award, I find myself getting two more manuscripts ready to be sent off into the void in hope of winning some kick-ass poetry prize and becoming a mid-Michigan rock star of one sort or another. Imagine, getting a job where one could actually teach poetry. Ah, dreaming is free.

… mid-west of the mind … ooo … ooo … ooo

As I print out my forms for the Copper Canyon Press/ Hayden Carruth Award and the BOA Editions, Ltd./ A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize I cannot but recall Orson Welles' cameo as Lew Lord the Movie Producer in The Muppet Movie, telling his secretary: "Miss Tracy, prepare the standard 'Rich and Famous' contract for Kermit the Frog and Company." Is there a Lew Lord of the Poetry World?

So yes, my the Fates, Erato, Bragi, Apollo, Clio, Euterpe, Polyhymnia and Thalia! All of you, please bless these manuscripts today … or at least make sure they get to the right addresses.

Pizarnik’s Piedra fundamental

Monday, November 28th, 2005

My brother Eli, his wife Mary and Baby Ivan have just left for the Detroit Airport. It is raining. I have left Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juilet Overture-Fantasy on endless CD playback. I love that music right now. It is dramatic, brassy, cocky, alive while so much of our 21st Century art tries to mute those emotions, to be demure, to be fragmented, to find so little joy in the song. Where does this writing lead us? Alejandra Pizarnik asks the reader. She answers: To blackness, to the sterile, to the fragmented.

But am I being fair? Fragments and sequences, however, are all around us. It mght be said when this life is all over I was much more a formalist in my tastes than anything else, perhaps. It is too early to know. I do not mind a rough ride, per se, but I do mind those who have nothing to say but say it extraordinarily taking up my time. Fragments, I suspect, have the tendancy to allow such brillance. I have stood corrected before, though. The wonderful Ruth Ellen Kocher writes in her introduction to Natural Bridge:

The concept of parts is a writer’s concept. We are all about piecing. And as much as we piece, and assemble, and put together, and weave, we dissect, we disassemble, we destroy, and obliterate. We cannot write without everything going to pieces and then, again, becoming whole. There is, at some point, a stasis, perhaps the type Frost referred to, maybe more than a ‘stay against confusion,’ an actual stasis within it, when we simply halt our process of building and tearing down, fragmenting and making whole, fraying to bits and reassembling—and at this moment of stasis, we find at least a moment of pause, of culmination, of finishing. Without some process of fragmentation, we cannot write or complete anything.

And here I am transalting Pizarnik, her Fundamental Stone, which is both fragmented and part of her larger Infernal Music (1971), written a year before she comitted suicide, would seem to prove me wrong. Elizabeth Zeiss-Banks, writing in Images of Melancholy and Mourning states:

Another image that arises in … Pizarnik’s compositions is that of a hostile object or person inhabiting the subject, a situation, which, as we will see below, is symptomatic of melancholy … These objects, (the melody, the wind), physically invade the subject’s body. The most dramatic example of this phenomenon appears in Piedra fundamental, where the poetic voice says: y he sabido dónde se aposenta aquello tan otro que es yo, que espera que me calle para tomar posesión de mí y drenar y barrenar los cimientos, los fundamentos….

Which I translated as: and I have known where that other which is me rests, which longs that I will be still so as to take custody of me and drain and drill my groundwork, my foundation, all that is hostile from within me, all that conspires to take custody of my wasteland … So how do I stand on all this? While I personally might hunger for poetry that is dramatic, brassy, cocky; at some level I am surprised the Language School of Poetics has not championed Pizarnik more. Her broken style, her obsession with where language in itself could take her, her humor, her poetic mania, all rival much that is being written today.

Piedra fundamental
Alejandra Pizarnik
Fundamental Stone
translated by ZJC

No puedo hablar con mi voz sino con mis voces.

Sus ojos eran la entrada del templo, para mí, que soy errante, que amo y muero. Y hubiese cantado hasta hacerme una con la noche, hasta deshacerme desnuda en la entrada del tiempo.

Un canto que atravieso como un túnel.

Presencias inquietantes, gestos de figuras que se aparecen vivientes por obra de un lenguaje activo que las alude, signos que insinúan terrores insolubles.

Una vibración de los cimientos, un trepidar de los fundamentos, drenan y barrenan, y he sabido dónde se aposenta aquello tan otro que es yo, que espera que me calle para tomar posesión de mí y drenar y barrenar los cimientos, los fundamentos,
aquello que me es adverso desde mí, conspira, toma posesión de mi terreno baldío,
no,
he de hacer algo,
no,
no he de hacer nada,
algo en mí no se abandona a la cascada de cenizas que me arrasa dentro de mí con ella que es yo, conmigo que soy ella y que soy yo, indeciblemente distinta de ella.

En el silencio mismo (no en el mismo silencio) tragar noche, una noche inmensa inmersa en el sigilo de los pasos perdidos.

No puedo hablar para nada decir. Por eso nos perdemos, yo y el poema, en la tentativa inútil de transcribir relaciones ardientes.

¿A dónde la conduce esta escritura? A lo negro, a lo estéril, a lo fragmentado.

Las muñecas desventradas por mis antiguas manos de muñeca, la desilusión al encontrar pura estopa (pura estepa tu memoria): el padre, que tuvo que ser Tiresias, flota en el río. Pero tú, ¿por qué te dejaste asesinar escuchando cuentos de álamos nevados?

Yo quería que mis dedos de muñeca penetraran en las teclas. Yo no quería rozar, como una araña, el teclado. Yo quería hundirme, clavarme, fijarme, petrificarme. Yo quería entrar en el teclado para entrar adentro de la música para tener una patria. Pero la música se movía, se apresuraba. Sólo cuando un refrán reincidía, alentaba en mí la esperanza de que se estableciera algo parecido a una estación de trenes, quiero decir: un punto de partida firme y seguro; un lugar desde el cual partir, desde el lugar, hacia el lugar, en unión y fusión con el lugar. Pero el refrán era demasiado breve, de modo que yo no podía fundar una estación pues no contaba más que con un tren algo salido de los rieles que se contorsionaba y se distorsionaba. Entonces abandoné la música y sus traiciones porque la música estaba más arriba o más abajo, pero no en el centro, en el lugar de la fusión y del encuentro. (Tú que fuiste mi única patria ¿en dónde buscarte? Tal vez en este poema que voy escribiendo.)

Una noche en el circo recobré un lenguaje perdido en el momento que los jinetes con antorchas en la mano galopaban en ronda feroz sobre corceles negros. Ni en mis sueños de dicha existirá un coro de ángeles que suministre algo semejante a los sonidos calientes para mi corazón de los cascos contra las arenas.

(Y me dijo: Escribe; porque estas palabras son fieles y verdaderas.)

(Es un hombre o una piedra o un árbol el que va a comenzar el canto…)

Y era un estremecimiento suavemente trepidante (lo digo para aleccionar a la que extravió en mí su musicalidad y trepida con más disonancia que un caballo azuzado por una antorcha en las arenas de un país extranjero).

Estaba abrazada al suelo, diciendo un nombre. Creí que me había muerto y que la muerte era decir un nombre sin cesar.

No es esto, tal vez, lo que quiero decir. Este decir y decirse no es grato. No puedo hablar con mi voz sino con mis voces. También este poema es posible que sea una trampa, un escenario más.

Cuando el barco alteró su ritmo y vaciló en el agua violenta, me erguí como la amazona que domina solamente con sus ojos azules al caballo que se encabrita (¿o fue con sus ojos azules?). El agua verde en mi cara, he de beber de ti hasta que la noche se abra. Nadie puede salvarme pues soy invisible aun para mí que me llamo con tu voz. ¿En dónde estoy? Estoy en un jardín.

Hay un jardín.

I can’t speak with my tongue, only with my tongues.

His eyes, admittance to the temple, for me, a pilgrim who loves and dies. I sung until I became one with the night, until I fell apart naked in the admittance to time.

I go through a song like a tunnel.

Irksome presence, acknowledgment of bodies that appear alive due to their tireless language that hints about them, symbols that hint at irresolvable horror.

An upheaval of groundwork, a shock of foundations, draining and drilling, and I have known where that other which is me rests, which longs that I will be still so as to take custody of me and drain and drill my groundwork, my foundation, all that is hostile from within me, all that conspires to take custody of my wasteland,
no,
I have to do something,
no,
I don’t have to anything,
something in me does not want to abandon itself to the waterfall of ashes that levels me, inside myself with her who is I, with me who is she and who is me, indescribably distinct from her.

In the very silence (not the very same silence) that swallows the nighttime, a tremendous nighttime sunk in the stealth of lost steps.

I can not speak only to say nothing. That is why we got lost, the poem and I, in the futile attempt to decipher our burning relationships.

Where does this writing lead us? To blackness, to the sterile, to the fragmented.

The dolls gutted by my ancient doll hands, the failure upon finding pure guts (pure grasslands, your memory): the father, who had to be Tiresias, floating in the stream. But you, why did you let yourself die hearing myths of poplar trees covered with first snow?

My doll fingers, I wanted to penetrate the piano keys. I did not want to graze – like a spider – the keyboard. I wanted to plunge myself in, to nail myself, to attach myself, to mineralize myself. I wanted to enter the keyboard in order to enter the interior of the music in order to have a kingdom. But the music was poignant, was hurrying. Only a chorus repeated was my only dream, erected into something the way a railroad station would be established, I mean: a solid and sure point of departure; a place from which to depart, from the location to the location, in junction and fusion with the location. But the chorus was too short, so I could not find a station since I could only count on one locomotive, slightly off the rails, that was twisting and distorting itself. So I deserted music and its treachery because music was higher or lower but not in the center, not on the place of fusion and rendezvous. (You who were my only kingdom, where should I look for you? Perhaps in this poem I am writing.)

One night in the circus I recovered a lost language in the moment when riders with burning brands in their hands galloped a brutal ring on black stallions. Not even in my blithe dreams will there exist a refrain of angels that supply my heart with something like the warm sound of all those hooves pounding against the sand.

(And he told me: Write; because these words are constant and sincere.)

(It is a man or a stone or a tree that will begin
this song …)

And there was a trembling softly shaking (I say it to teach a lesson to she who was lost in me, her musicality and shaking with more chaos than a horse, urged on by a burning brand on the sands of an alien land).

I was hugging the earth, crying a name. I thought that I had died, and that death meant to say a name ceaselessly.

This is not, conceivably, what I am trying to say. This saying and saying oneself is not agreeable. I can not speak with my tongue but only with my tongues. It is also possible that this poem is an ambush, just another abstraction.

When the steamer varied its rhythm and swayed in the violent sea, I straightened up like a rider who, with her blue eyes alone, brought the rearing horse under her control (or was it just with her blue eyes?). Green water fell on my face, I have to drink you up until the nighttime opens. No one can save me because I am veiled even to myself, I who calls me with your tongue: Where am I? I’m in a garden.

There is a garden.

Alan Dugan’s Plague of Dead Sharks

Sunday, November 27th, 2005

I recently joined the information/ conversation board, SHARK-L, which does indeed cover almost everything having to do with sharks. I put out a request for anyone who might be familar with shark-themed poems. Maris Kazmers, who also lives in Lansing, responded with several suggestions, one of which is Alan Dugan's Plague of Dead Sharks.

Who knows whether the sea heals or corrodes?
The wading, wintered pack-beasts of the feet
slough off, in spring, the dead rind of the shoes'
leather detention, the big toes' yellow horn
shines with a natural polish, and the whole
person seems to profit. The opposite appears
when dead sharks wash up along the beach
for no known reason. What is more built
for winning than the swept-back teeth,
water-finished fins, and pure bad eyes
these old, efficient forms of appetite
are dressed in? Yet it looks as if the sea
digested what it wished of them with viral ease
and threw up what was left to stink and dry.
If this shows how the sea approaches life
in its propensity to feed as animal entire,
then sharks are comforts, feet are terrified,
but they vacation in the mystery and why not?
Who knows whether the sea heals or corrodes?:
what the sun burns up of it, the moon puts back.

I like this poem, even if the poet refers to sharks in the same tired old cliche, focusing in on them being little more than old, efficient forms of appetite. Old, indeed. The poem is from Dugan's Poems Seven, new and complete poetry (2001). Robert Pinksy, writing a review in New York Times Book Review, says the following: "Logic and abstraction in these poems deflate moral poses and orations. In Plague of Dead Sharks, Dugan takes up the old idea of mutability, in an image that is both traditional and characteristic … The blunt, plain built / for winning has Dugan's eccentric, impatient economy, and his love for downright words of one syllable energizes and threw up what was left to stink and dry. In another kind of language, a pungent, Latinate precision, the poem considers the consuming sea's propensity to feed as animal entire. The willingness to generalize and generate logical finalities in this case expresses itself not in a moral summary but in a question and an Orphic statement: Who knows whether the sea heals or corrodes?: what the sun burns up of it, the moon puts back. The outlandish punctuation, question mark followed by colon, indicates the way this resolution hovers between the elemental and the unknowable."

I suppose any shark poem is better than no shark poem. It will be interesting to see what poets will ever do with the subject matter if they can step away from their blinders/ fear/ what have you and write about the shark with a little more creativity.

Pizarnik’s Poema para Emily Dickinson

Sunday, November 27th, 2005
Poema para Emily Dickinson
Alejandra Pizarnik
Poem for Emily Dickinson
translated by ZJC

Del otro lado de la noche
la espera su nombre,
su subrepticio anhelo de vivir,
¡del otro lado de la noche!

Algo llora en el aire,
los sonidos diseñan el alba.

Ella piensa en la eternidad.

Across the night
this delay; its name,
its surreptitious yearning to live,
across the night!

Something cries in the very air,
a sound designed by the dawn.

She thinks about eternity.