A Non-Poet King of Poetry: Ramón Gómez de la Serna

Ramón Gómez de la Serna in his studio. Photograph by Alfonso Sánchez Portela.

Either Spanish literature consists of nothing but anomalistic masterpieces or I’ve had exceptional good fortune in my selections for Spanish Literature Month.[i] I decided to stick to Spain itself (easier said than done), and have been surprised, humbled, and not a little awestruck by what I’ve found. My choices came largely by chance; I read each knowing next to nothing about its author, content, or place in the Spanish canon. Each not only turned out to have had significant impact on Spanish literature, but also moved into the ranks of my personal favorites from any literature. Following Fernando de Rojas’ Celestina (1499) and Angel Ganivet’s The Conquest of the Kingdom of Maya (1897), my final selection for the month hails from the 20^th century, two books by an author who came to my attention only this week. Thanks to terrific posts by Miguel of St. Orberose concerning lists compiled by Jorge Luis Borges for two book series Borges had started to edit, I took a look at some of the names on the lists I didn’t recognize.

How is it possible that I’ve made it this far through life without ever hearing of Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888-1963)? Any of you who might also be late to this party may well ask: why should I have heard of him? Let’s see what the introduction to one of these books, a collection of eight novellas by Gómez de la Serna entitled (with remarkable restraint) Eight Novellas[ii], has to say about him:

…the literary mentor of Buñuel and Dalí.

…the Spanish writer most sought after and the one who had the strongest impact on the Latin American avant-garde writers from the nineteen twenties on…

…often considered one of the two true artistic geniuses of his time in Spain, the other being Picasso.

Okay, so that’s the opinion of the editors/translators. Do they provide assessments other than their own? They do:

As Ortega [y Gasset] describes how the new [modernist] art looks at reality…he refers to Proust and Joyce but cites only Ramón.

Gabriel Garcia Márquez declared that Ramón was the most influential writer of his formative years.

Cortázar regarded him highly, and used to follow him along the Calle Florida as an idol.

Okay then. But how about some primary sources?

“…for me he is the great Spanish writer” – Octavio Paz

“…a visionary of the universe, mental monarch and king of poetry” – Pablo Neruda.

Coming full circle, the introduction notes: “Borges wrote a book about him.”

One excuse for my not having heard of Gómez de la Serna is that little of his work has been translated into English, aside from scattered anthologized stories; an old issue of the literary journal Zero containing a handful of stories translated by Paul Bowles; and the Eight Novellas I’d found in the library. There’s a selection, published in English as Aphorisms and which I also found in the library, of the literary form Gómez de la Serna invented and called greguerías – short, humorous, imagistic, aphoristic one-liners. Finally, there’s one of de la Serna’s twenty novels translated as Movieland! (it’s supposedly about Hollywood). This, alas, was not in the library, and the price of the sole copy I could find for sale - $1,000 U.S. - put me off a bit.

The biographical details of Ramón’s life - I’ll switch to using his first name, as that’s apparently how he’s known in Spain - are perhaps even more incredible than the praise heaped upon him. It’s worth picking up these books just for the biosketches they contain; the Wikipedia entry for Ramón does not quite convey the outlandishness and electrical presence he apparently commanded. Suffice here to say that he was a catalyst – really the catalyst – for avant-garde Spanish literature and art, living a wildly inventive lifestyle and inhabiting a Madrid apartment more like a cabinet of curiosities than a residence. He bridges Spanish and Latin American literature, as he left Spain at the beginning of the civil war and lived out his life in Argentina. His prolific literary output comprises some 90 books of short stories, plays, novels, essays, literary criticism, biographies and, the contribution for which he may be best known, his beloved greguerías.

The greguerías make a good a place to start, especially since they make their way into his longer pieces with a style so singular that it bears his name: ramónismo. Aphorisms is a curious title for this collection of some 400 greguerías, since translator Miguel Gonzalez-Gerth goes to great lengths to distinguish them from aphorisms (his introduction is as succinct and invaluable an analysis of the aphoristic genre as one is likely to find anywhere). Ramón’s greguerías are exceptionally playful, experimental, lyrical condensations that illustrate how Neruda could call him a “king of poetry” even when poetry was one genre Ramón did not attempt. Poetic they are nonetheless:

Clouds should bear tags disclosing their destination so we don’t worry about them.

In the background of all mirrors there crouches a photographer.

The fragrance of flowers is an echo.

It was such nice weather that all keys took the day off.

Cloves of garlic: witches’ teeth.

Distant sails like napkins in the goblets at the banquet of the sea.

We should take more time to forget; that way we would have a longer life.

Gonzalez-Gerth notes that the form originated during a visit to Florence when, gazing upon the Arno, Ramón “suddenly perceived that each of the two banks of the river wanted to be where the other one was…an extraordinary perception [by which] all pairs and even peers among things became involved in a sort of natural and fatal competition of desire which altered the whole humdrum surface of reality.” Thus the genre was born, and Ramón came to define it mathematically: “metaphor + humor = greguería.”

This condensed metaphorical form gets woven into the absurdist stories constituting the enormously enjoyable Eight Novellas: a man’s liver appearing at his doorstop one day to move in as a constant companion; a misanthrope who spends a part of every day aspiring to become a physical feature of Naples’ Principe di Napoli galleria; a battle against influenza waged largely by amateur medical opinion; a revolution of hat haters; a mathematical approach to understanding social interactions in an apartment building; a lady who vanishes mysteriously from a hotel (the inspiration for the Alexander Woollcott novel that in turn inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes); a man attempting to recuperate from a failed marriage by building a short-wave radio and immersing himself in its aural world; and a mad scientist intent on splitting the atom. These cursory descriptions barely hint at the humorous, often moving and glittering poeticism mingled with glimpses of the profound that one finds in these tales, which call to mind the work of Nikolai Gogol, Daniil Kharms, Dino Buzzati, and Frigyes Karinthy (Gonzalez-Gerth also mentions the poet Christian Morgenstern), but with a lighter yet more wildly energetic touch by which ideas shoot off like showers of sparks from a Roman (Ramón?) candle.

In “The Flumaster” (“Le Gran Griposo”), Ramón presents a plethora of dazzling greguerían descriptions of what it feels like to have the flu and addresses the myriad ways people deny illness by proposing all kinds of rationalizations and quack therapies. The afflicted protagonist even wonders if “he could ever find the word that would banish the flu! Success might come by using one word against another.” This remarkably pure modernist concept suggests something of the quality of ramónismo. Ramón writes as though slowly turning a complex kaleidoscope filled with words that tumble into different metaphorical combinations. But – and here he differs from surrealists out for pure effect – he also seems to point his kaleidoscope/microscope/telescope towards every emerging aspect of the modern world, sometimes with a penetrating view into the future. The introduction notes Ramón’s uncanny anticipation of such things as the Internet, various medical and psychological discoveries, the impact of car culture, and even a frighteningly prescient prediction of the atomic bomb, which, via his far-seeing 1926 story “The Master of the Atom” (“El dueño del átomo”), he claimed to have invented. The sophistication of Ramón’s surrealism shows in his story “Kill the Morse!” (“¡Hay que matar el Morse!”), where he refers not to the difference between the real and the unreal, as would be the expected approach, but to that “between the real and the real that seems unreal because it is so far away.”

Ramón’s imagistic sentences often display a kind of fever of composition and experimentation, frequently resulting in startling originality, energy, lyricism, depth, and varieties of beauty that could make the snowflake community jealous. Far from appearing labored or crafted, his prose has a wildly free, extemporaneous quality, a vital and living language. Like his revolutionary hat-hater, “free from the torture of holding onto his hat” and at liberty to stroll through the world “enjoying the challenge of a cane, twirling, riposting, parrying,” Ramón Gómez de la Serna demands the new, and delivers it with flair, joy, and a freedom of spirit rare in literature. I can’t wait to read more.

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[i] Co-hosted by Richard of Caravana de Recuerdos and Stu of Winstonsdad's Blog.

[ii] Herlinda Charpentier Saitz and Robert L. Saitz, translators.

"The most original of knights errant" - Ángel Ganivet’s The Conquest of the Kingdom of Maya

"Flying Hippo," photocollage by Kleemass, used with his kind permission. 

More of Kleemass' work can be seen at http://www.kleemass.deviantart.com/

I’d find it difficult to dislike any work where in the first pages the protagonist declaims a line like this one:

...there are difficult moments in the life of a man, during which he finds himself constrained to abdicate his sovereignty and calmly obey the first pachyderm that comes along.

The pachyderm in question in Ángel Ganivet’s hugely entertaining and disquieting 1897 novel, The Conquest of the Kingdom of Maya (La conquista del reino de Maya, por el último conquistador español, Pío Cid), is a hippopotamus. More precisely, it’s a sacred hippopotamus allegedly capable of flight, and astride it rides the intrepid Spanish entrepreneur Pío Cid into the hidden heart of Africa to be welcomed as a divinity by the tribe named in the title. If the name Maya and the story (minus its pachyderm and African setting) sound familiar, it’s because Ganivet’s picaresque novel is also a lancing, Swiftian satire of Spain’s colonial enterprises, with allusions to the conquest of Mesoamerica (the ghost of Hernán Cortés even makes an appearance) as well as a broader view of colonialist exploits, given that Ganivet began the novel while assigned to the Spanish consulate in Antwerp as Belgium was conducting its genocidal conquest of the Congo. The Sanskrit meaning of “Maya” as “illusion” holds perhaps greater significance (as a student, the polylingual Ganivet wrote a thesis on Sanskrit), since the illusions of Europeans’ aspirations regarding those they colonized form the novel’s center of gravity.

Given the protagonist’s name and his self-identification as “the most original of knights errant,” The Conquest of the Kingdom of Maya also consciously addresses itself to its great predecessors in Spanish literature, most evidently The Poem of the Cid and Cervantes’ Don Quixote, situating itself firmly in the tradition of the chivalric and picaresque.  But in its mixture of acidic irony; absurd, surrealistic elements; and presciently modern themes, Ganivet’s novel looks towards the future of literature. The “magical realism” of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez begins to look a bit threadworn after plunging into Ganivet’s world of hippopotami-borne chevaliers, oracles who interpret parrot songs, velocipede-peddling pygmies and a spiritual mythos in which worlds are stacked one upon the other like a layer cake, the terrestrial tier awaiting a rapture when a race of half-human/half-monkey slaves will descend to liberate humankind from toil.  

I don’t recall where I first heard of Ganivet – almost certainly in an on-line forum regarding worthy works not yet translated into English. Thus my copy of the book is in French (La Conquête du royaume du Maya), translated by François Gaudry and with a terrific introduction by novelist Álvaro Mutis. Mutis describes Ganivet’s work as occupying “a singularly premonitory place upstream of the vast amount of literature that irrigates, up to the present, the Spanish imagination – and perhaps even more so, the Hispanic-American imagination.” An early member of the “Generation of '98” and close friend of Miguel de Unamuno, Ganivet matriculated from the university in his native Granada before leaving Spain to spend his adult life in the Spanish diplomatic corps, serving in Antwerp, Helsinki and finally Riga, where, at age 33, suffering from depression and syphilitic madness, he drowned himself in the icy waters of the Dniva. An essayist and playwright as well as novelist, he’d authored several idealistic treatises exploring the qualities of Spain’s national character and proposing a vision for the country’s future, noted by Mutis as constituting - along with the correspondence between Ganivet and Unamuno - “the most significant works of Spanish thought of the last two centuries.” This overarching concern for the development of a nation lies at the heart of The Conquest of the Kingdom of Maya, the first of Ganivet’s two novels, both of which feature Pío Cid (the second, The Works of the Indefatigable Creator Pío Cid, appeared a month prior to Ganivet’s death and seems to be unavailable in English or French translation).

Pío Cid, a patriotic Spaniard of “independent and proud character,” has honed his practical and commercial skills in various European capitals before taking a position in Zanzibar, where tedium and the exotic travel accounts of European explorers lure him to take leave to explore the African continent. Accompanying a group of Arab traders as they leave the coast for Africa’s interior, Cid is separated from the group and captured by head-hunters. Narrowly escaping with his life and fleeing into the jungle, he stumbles upon a hippopotamus adorned with a bridle of vines which carries him into the hitherto unknown land of the Maya, rulers of a kingdom “the size of Portugal and shaped like a salted cod.” Using his wits to profit from the Maya’s belief that he is a long sought Igana-Igaru, or divinity, Pío Cid re-invents himself as the embodiment of a previous such “divinity” who went missing 20 years before under suspicious circumstances. This set-up, dispatched in the first chapters, provides the platform from which Cid launches into a lengthy account of his intimate life with the Maya. He describes in detail their history, customs, religion, government and social institutions before embarking on a self-appointed attempt to reform all of that, as Ganivet’s satire now subtly turns its focus from the Maya’s primitivism (it need hardly be said that the Maya are presented as completely over-the-top caricatures of early European explorers’ accounts of “the Dark Continent”) to Pío Cid’s efforts to introduce a “superior” civilization. Of unshakeable confidence, Cid lets no fleeting doubts regarding his assumptions and decisions hold him back. Through his blinders (and blunders), Spain itself, its colonial adventures, and a broad swath of European attitudes and behaviors are revealed in their ignorance, arrogance and cruelty. Never does Pío Cid fully recognize his own role in sending ripples (and tidal waves) through Mayan society, which result in not only a coup d’etat but eventually in his own assumption of power as a kind of prime minister pulling the strings behind an easily malleable, ineffective, alcoholic king.

Through a series of ruses that exploit the Maya’s gullibility and susceptibility to new technologies and the promise of commercial gain, Pío Cid institutes major reforms. These include the creation of a Constitution (temporarily abandoned due to its unwieldy length, not to mention the illiteracy of most of the inhabitants); a top-down reorganization of government (with an expansion of the power of the Maya’s religious clerics and teachers, formation of a vast bureaucracy of useless administrative functionaries whom Cid sees as the glue that provides stability in government, and increasing concentration of the country’s resources and riches in himself). He inaugurates massive infrastructure projects including the building of new cities, the canalization of the territory, and the installation of nighttime lighting, as well as a panoply of other efforts such as replacement of loincloths with multicolored robes, the introduction of soap, establishment of a laundry, development of the arts and sciences, and the transformation of a society of ritual into one of spectacle. These efforts to “civilize” the refractory and backwards Maya, introduced with lofty intentions and convoluted rationalizations, somehow always accrue to Cid’s personal advantage (during his stay, while proclaiming only the best and least prurient of intentions, Cid acquires an exponentially growing number of wives, which for matters strictly of manageability he finally caps at 50). His efforts also spawn complications that require even further reforms. Initial misgivings that introducing an industry of alcohol production might create detrimental side effects are dismissed by Cid’s racist assumption that the Maya will react to drink differently than his own countrymen (predictably disastrous consequences ensue). Cid proudly sums up his accumulated reformist efforts as a “tableau,” suggesting that for him (and underscoring the Sanskrit meaning of the title) they have served primarily an aesthetic role. The end result of Pío Cid’s impact is neatly represented in the book’s final pages by a crudely drawn map of the Kingdom of the Maya pre- and post-Cid, the most noticeable change being that the map has been turned upside down.

To succeed, satire must hew close to the truth; what makes The Conquest of the Kingdom of Maya so devastatingly effective is that it reads, with tremendous seductiveness, like an actual explorer’s account. Ganivet never breaks character in his serious narrative façade, even as his protagonist, like a blindfolded person holding a match while walking down a corridor stocked with fireworks, sparks plenty of shock, awe and hilarity. I found it difficult to isolate – for purposes of quoting in this post – passages that succinctly conveyed Ganivet at his most satirical, for he develops his attacks painstakingly and at such length that their objects manifest themselves belatedly. One can read along for pages before a subtle accumulation of incredible details reaches a tipping point, and the absurdity of what’s just been described suddenly becomes apparent. The solemnity with which he describes an ink used by the Maya seems plausible until one pauses to reflect on the farcical quality of its ingredients: palm oil, the tint from a giant yellow flower, and the blood of a rabbit. He accomplishes a similar sleight of hand with his larger themes, inviting identification with Pío Cid’s more magnanimous and altruistic ideas - Cid is, after all, a complex and often sympathetic figure - then stringing his readers along until, too late, we recognize we’re on extremely shaky terrain just at the moment the bottom falls out.

Ganivet’s treatment of judicial processes ably demonstrates his ability to deliver his barbs with subtlety, patience, and blistering humor. The judicial system of the Maya is introduced in Pío Cid’s first decision as Igana Igaru, in which he’s called to pass judgment in the case of a farmer who’s allowed his mule to wander into a sacred temple. Playing to the crowd, Cid rules in favor of the mule, condemning its poor owner to swift decapitation, with the mule left braying madly “from joy or from distress, I could not tell.” Years later, driven by an idle calculation of the number of persons he’s condemned, he begins to seek ways to mitigate the barbarity of these executions, a section of the novel that fiercely lampoons both the inhuman theatricality of judicial processes as well as the inhumanity of incremental reforms in matters of life and death. After unsuccessfully trying a gradual introduction of symbolic animal sacrifices to stand in for the human ones (resulting in little more than a co-mingling of bovine and human blood he fears will offend the Maya), Cid replaces decapitation with an idea borrowed from his beloved bullfighting, with the condemned forced to do public battle with angry bulls (and later, to enhance the show, a panther). Acknowledging that the end result – dead prisoners – is the same, Cid expresses pride in having turned justice into an energetic, cathartic, participatory activity that offers the added bonus of generating heroes out of those few fortunate enough to vanquish their animal foes. Beneath a lot of Ganivet’s humor, there’s as much madness and horror as can be found in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which appeared a mere two years later.

The Conquest of the Kingdom of Maya wowed me with its inventiveness, panoramic vision, subtle but scorching satire, rich language, and sustained ironic tone that made reading the novel a nearly delirious experience (and a challenging one; the many Mayan terms devised by Ganivet would have made a glossary helpful). There’s a warmth and lack of righteousness in Ganivet’s writing that makes his satire palatable even as it’s piercing, investing the reader in questioning his or her own assumptions and motivations, bringing to the surface the myriad ways people can rationalize their most altruistic intentions to unconsciously serve themselves. Lancing human foibles and frailties with an eye on the profound and the eternal, the broad sweep of Ganivet’s novel lights on targets easily recognizable in today’s world: racism and xenophobia, the treatment of immigrants and minorities, the rush to war as a means of fomenting patriotism, the hidden injuries of class, governmental bureaucracy and corruption, the pernicious effects of capitalism and commercialization, the seductions of technology, the arrogance and self interest of imperial power, the destruction of traditions and rituals, the patriarchal organization of societies (I have not even touched on Ganivet’s confounding treatment of gender in the Maya’s polygamous, polyandrous society). Ganivet’s novel seems far ahead of its time, addressing global issues, melding satire and idealism, introducing elements of the surreal and magical, parodying ethnographic assumptions and imperializing aspirations, and undermining narrative authority in the unforgettable, beguiling, ridiculously sublime and increasingly mad voice of the last Spanish conquistador, Pío Cid. Here’s one major work of Spanish literature long overdue for translation into English. 

Read as part of Spanish Literature Month co-hosted by Richard of Caravana de Recuerdos and Stu of Winstonsdad's Blog.

For biographical details, I am indebted to Judith Ginsberg's outstanding monograph, Angel Ganivet, Tamesis Books Limited, London, 1985. 

Celestina, Out of the Sky

Pablo Picasso, illustration from La Celestine, 1968

I was all but fated to read Fernando de Rojas’ Celestina. I’d never heard of this early work of Spanish literature, which first appeared in 1499, before poking around the Internet one afternoon for information on Sir Peter Russell, the Oxford literary scholar and British intelligence officer who’d served as the model for Peter Wheeler in Javier Marías’ trilogy of novels, Your Face Tomorrow. Russell had apparently written extensively about Celestina, and I noted the title for future reference.  The following morning, while walking through San Francisco, I spied a book abandoned on the sidewalk, wet from the previous night’s rain. I was dumbfounded to discover that it was a Spanish language copy of Celestina. I actually found myself gazing into the sky wondering if perhaps the book had just dropped out of it.

It took me until now - thanks to the nudge afforded by Spanish Literature Month co-hosted by Richard of Caravana de Recuerdos and Stu of Winstonsdad’s blog – to pick up an English translation and read Celestina. I expected an interesting work that would expand my minimal knowledge of early Spanish literature. I did not, however, expect a work so subversive and daring, broadly humanistic, startlingly modern, outlandishly sexual, laugh-out-loud funny, moving, beautifully written, and vibrantly alive. This is the kind of book I live for: something unanticipated and new in my experience, capable of opening up whole new perspectives on literature.

Told almost entirely in dialogue, Celestina recounts the wily, advantage-seeking machinations of the shrewd, sixty-year-old bawd, Celestina, in her efforts to engineer for the noble Calisto a love affair with the object of his lovesick, stalker-ish obsession, the noble-lady Melibea. This quintessential upstairs/downstairs story pits servants against their masters and nearly everyone (other than the two hopelessly oblivious lovers) against nearly everyone else, all scheming with lust and self-interest, their public selves contrasting starkly with their private motivations. Much of the work’s humor, in fact, derives from the characters’ cynical private asides, mumbled under breath before emerging as audible platitudes intended to lubricate their listeners. De Rojas’ original title, the Comedia de Calisto y Melibea, molted in subsequent editions into the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, for the work, now known simply as Celestina or La Celestina, is indeed a comedy with - spoiler alert! - tragic consequences: nearly everyone dies, leaving at the end only Melibea’s grief-stricken father, Pleberio, who, in a scene of regret, solitude and anguish no less powerful and apocalyptic than the conclusion of King Lear, rails against the world as “a web of deceit, a wilderness, a home to ferocious beasts, a game played by cheats and tricksters, a treacherous marsh, a realm of thorns, a craggy peak, stony ground, a meadow full of serpents, a flowering orchard without fruit, a fount of tribulation, a river of tears, a sea of misery, toil without profit, sweet poison, vain hopes, fake cheer and true sorrow.”

Despite this pessimism, there’s no lack of wit in Celestina, which takes a bear’s paw swipe at a broad swath of Spanish society, cutting off power and hypocrisy at the knees with freewheeling, libidinous, scalding humor. Among de Rojas’ most daring criticisms are those putting Christians, Muslims and Jews on equal footing as all being children of Adam and Eve, with an explicit rejection of the notion of “noble blood”; implicating the clergy in corruption, sexual hypocrisy, and injustice (“spending time in church is the quickest way to get a reputation as a hypocrite”); an implicit rejection of the barbarity of Inquisitional persecution, with its “use of lying witnesses and torture;” and scathing attacks on the abuses and insensitivity of the rich - “bloodsuckers, ungrateful, rude leeches who ignore services received and never reward them” and who “break their servants’ backs with hollow pledges.” In de Rojas’ tale of love and woe, there is even a suggestion that God is “an enemy of reason.” However he fits into the raunchy, bawdy world of Celestina, God ranks as rather less influential in the lives of de Rojas' characters than are the chaotic eruptions of their own sexual passions.

The Penguin edition translated by Peter Bush contains an informative and succinct introduction by novelist Juan Goytisolo, who notes de Rojas’ break with prior literary forms and challenges more academic and reductionist responses to Celestina as having served mostly to obscure or vitiate the its liveliness, radicalism and striking modernity. As biographical information on de Rojas is abundant on the Internet, I’ll just cull a few key details from Goytisolo’s introduction. Born in the 1470’s near Toledo, de Rojas came of age at a critical moment in Spain, coinciding with the discovery of the New World, the defeat of the last Arab stronghold in Iberia, and most significantly, given de Rojas’ Jewish roots, the founding of the Inquisition and the edict expelling Jews who had not converted to Christianity. De Rojas’ own family of conversos suffered greatly under the purges; several were imprisoned and executed, including de Rojas’ father-in-law, burned at the stake for suggesting there might be nothing after death. Peter Bush notes that the young de Rojas, admitted to the University of Salamanca, “was entering a world of learning that was keeping at bay the Inquisition,” and it was in this corner of liberality in Inquisitorial Spain that Celestina was conceived in shrouded circumstances when de Rojas was only in his mid-twenties. Goytisolo addresses the remarkable range of literary talents on display in the work – its intense vitality of language, use of markedly different registers and interior psychologies for memorably drawn characters, and the weaving into the narrative of a complexity of overlapping meanings (on a purely lexical level, the double-entendre on display in Celestina is relentless and obscenely funny) – but focuses primarily on the work’s radicalism in terms of both its path-breaking form – neither novel nor theater piece - and its subversion of the Inquisitorial milieu in which it was written.

What gives Celestina much of its fresh, modern quality is precisely the subversive manner by which de Rojas brings off his sharp criticisms of class, privilege, power, and the Christian clergy. His strategies for conveying these dangerous ideas make for a fascinating history of the book’s first years of publication. The anonymous first edition contained a postscript describing the first chapter as a discovered manuscript that Celestina’s author claims he recognized immediately for its “beauty, its subtle artifice, its pliant but strong metal, the way it had been wrought, an elegant style, never before in evidence in our Castilian language,” and for which he then, over two weeks’ holiday, composed a continuation of an additional 15 chapters. Goytisolo points out that while “the paternity of the first chapter” – with minor stylistic and linguistic differences from the rest of the work – “remains a matter for doubt and debate,” the case for de Rojas as sole author is convincing. Celestina’s immense popularity resulted in a series of notations in subsequent editions in which de Rojas first reveals his identity by means of an acrostic, then later provides tortured, non-apologetic apologies for some of the book’s more audacious ideas in what appears to be an effort to minimize his culpability for such irreverence[i]. Readers of Don Quixote will recognize one influence of Celestina in Cervantes’ use of a similar obfuscation of authorship, and the indeterminate quality of Celestina’s origins and its deliberate, ironic subversion of narrative authority prefigure, by 500 years, the unstable texts and meta-fictional elements of contemporary world literature.

Celestina’s great humanism, its dark faith in equality and justice, also underscore its remarkable modernity. Its most appealing characters are those of the lower castes: servants, prostitutes, and those most vulnerable to the hypocritical dictates of power. Celestina herself is an iconic figure (small wonder that early audiences latched onto her, resulting in the change of title to bear her name). Though eyed with suspicion by many she encounters and bearing qualities easily reducible to caricature as crone, Celestina ultimately comes across as complexly human. An imaginatively resourceful woman, she has used her wits and her body to strategize a broad range of means of survival catalogued at length in the first chapter, including needlework; the manufacture of perfumes, cosmetics, creams and “unguents to turn your stomach;” the mending of “five thousand” maidenheads so skillfully that “when the French ambassador paid a call she sold him one of her wenches three times as a virgin;” and, most germane to the plot, serving as a go-between for lovers, with her collection of “stuff for curing love and making love work: gut from a stag’s heart, snakes’ tongues, quails’ heads, asses’ brains, horses’ foetal scrapings, babies’ crown, Moorish beans, lodestone, hangman’s rope, ivy berries, hedgehog prickles, badger’s foot, fern spore, stone from an eagle’s nest and a thousand other items.” To most, all of this is “pure stuff and nonsense,” but the reader can’t help but take Celestina at face value: “I’m an old woman as God made me, and not the worst by a long chalk. I live by my trade as any other woman and honestly at that.” One gets glimpses of the dual role Celestina has played with the young women around her, serving not simply as procuress for her own ends but as a sort of rescuer, protector and mother figure, as conveyed in a remarkable scene in the book’s ninth chapter in which Celestina patiently listens to two of her young charges, Areúsa and Elicia, speak frankly of the difficulties of their economic choices, their vulnerability to men and the whims of abusive masters, all the various injustices of their low position and their gender:

Women who serve noble ladies never enjoy love’s thrall and sweet rewards. They can never consort with their equals or have close friends they can ask about the simple things in life: ‘What did you eat for dinner?’, ‘You pregnant or what?’…

What a pain, how hard, how painful, to have ‘my lady’ on your lips all the time! ...They never call you by your proper names, only: ‘Bitch, do this!’ ‘Bitch, do that!’… Their greatest pleasure is to shout and their bliss is to find fault.

These glimpses of everyday conflicts mingled with obscene humor, quick intelligence and caustic criticisms reveal a depth of humanity and lay bare a rich complexity of social interactions, allowing the commonality of human experience and the struggle against power and injustice to emerge as the real stars of Celestina, Its resounding and often hilarious affirmation of the lives of common people in juxtaposition to the institutional forces that oppress them makes Celestina as relevant today as is its surprisingly bleak modern view of a chaotic and hostile universe. The debt owed to Celestina by subsequent works of Spanish and of world literature is clear in its profound use of irony, irreverence, and psychology, its innovative, radical literary form and its subversive critical stratagems. On a personal level, I could not have been more thrilled to discover this work for the first time. And if, improbably, Celestina indeed fell to my attention from out of the sky, then someone up there has one incredibly diabolical sense of humor.


Addendum July 17, 2012: Here's a link to a terrific interview with translator Peter Bush by Scott Esposito. 

Pablo Picasso, La  Celestina 1904 

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[i] A detailed account of Celestina’s first years, gently demolishing the arguments of those who consider the likelihood of separate authorship of the first chapter and characterizing de Rojas’ subsequent prefaces to the work as revealing a mounting and palpable sense of fear - is put forth in the exquisitely researched opening chapter of Stephen Gilman’s The Art of La Celestina, a book I picked up in the wave of enthusiasm I felt after finishing de Rojas’ work.

The Paper Gatherer

An unexpectedly long and unavoidable absence from posting is now colliding with the start of an expected absence. I plan to return to posting in early July. In the meantime, I’ll sign off with this small item, which caught my attention after I’d read a scene in Victor Segalen’s novel René Leys in which a gentleman in the streets of early 20^th century Peking extracts a piece of paper from a pile of horse dung:

From Genthe’s Photographs of San Francisco’s Old Chinatown, Dover Publications, Mineola, NY, 1984, p. 66:

Plate 52. “The Paper Gatherer.” The Wenhuashe, or “Society of the Splendors of Literature,” hired this man to collect any refuse paper with writing on it. It was considered a crime for any paper with writing on it to be tossed away. This attitude reflected a deep cultural respect for literature and learning. The paper gatherer picked up scraps from the streets and sidewalks, and stopped at deposit boxes located throughout Chinatown. He would bring the paper to special incinerators, and the ashes would be sent on boats to be tossed into the ocean outside the Golden Gate… The practice ended shortly after the earthquake. 

Back in two or three weeks – best wishes to all.

Panaït Istrati's Kyra Kyralina

 “…a born poet madly in love with simple things like adventure, friendship, rebellion, flesh and blood.” – Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary

A few years ago I’d visited the French literature section of the library to track down a novel by Joseph Kessel (so few of whose works, alas, are available in English). I located it, but simultaneously my eyes spotted a brightly decorated spine the next shelf over. Stretching to pull it down, I barely avoided having it bean me on the head. On the cover a folkloric floral design accompanied the curious name “Panaït Istrati.” Intrigued, I turned to the preface, written by…Joseph Kessel. This fascinating piece of writing served as my entrée to one of the more unusual literary figures of the 20^th century.

Kessel’s preface was followed by another by Nobel Prize winner Romain Rolland, recounting the extraordinary circumstances under which Rolland had discovered Istrati. A young vagabond had slit his own throat in a park in Nice and was hospitalized there. Inside the man’s jacket, his rescuers had found a letter addressed to Rolland and had forwarded it to him. “I read it and was seized by the tumult of genius, like a wind burning on the plain. It was the confession of a new Gorki from the Balkans. They managed to save him. I wanted to get to know him. We began corresponding. We became friends.”

The man, of course, was Panaït Istrati, a young Romanian of Slavic and Greek descent who had led a most extraordinary life, one that had taken him around the Mediterranean, across eastern Europe and the Levant, and into and out of all kinds of jobs: “cabaret waiter, pastry chef, locksmith, tinker, mechanic, manual laborer, stevedore, house boy, sandwich man, sign painter, house painter, journalist and photographer.” Along the way, Istrati had picked up stories as varied and entrancing as those of The Arabian Nights. Rolland took Istrati under his wing, recognizing in him a born storyteller (in his preface Rolland notes that Istrati’s storytelling prowess proved so irrepressible he’d interrupted the narrative of his own suicide note to weave in a few choice tales).

Though I’d avoided being knocked out physically by the volume that had nearly cracked me on the head (Volume 1 of four volumes of Istrati’s fiction put out by Gallimard in Paris), I could not escape being metaphorically knocked out by its the first selection, Kyra Kyralina. I was smitten by the novel, enough to hunt down my own copy of the Gallimard edition, a book towards which I have developed a particularly fond personal attachment. Kyra Kyralina marks the beginning of what has come to be known as the Adrien Zograffi cycle. This series of tales set in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire had, by the time of Istrati’s death in 1935, amassed into more than a dozen novels, and had earned Istrati accolades as one of the pioneers of modernism. The Zograffi books had even been compared to Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. But as Kessel points out in his preface, Istrati’s death, the dissolution of his publishing house, and the war all conspired together to send his work into oblivion for a third of a century until the Gallimard edition appeared in 1968.

Thus I was immensely pleased recently to discover an American edition of Kyra Kyralina and for the chance to revisit the novel, this time in English (translated by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno and including the original Rolland preface). This new English translation is especially welcome given that Istrati’s vernacular French (he’d only begun to learn the language seven years before writing Kyra Kyralina) contains some grammatical oddities that create occasional challenges for those of us whose French is inexpert.

But even were Kyra Kyralina scratched into dirt with a stick, one would be hard pressed not to recognize in it storytelling of the highest order. One reads Kyra Kyralina in large gulps. Its narratives “nest” within a framing device such as one finds in story cycles such as The Arabian Nights or the Decameron, beginning guilelessly and timorously with the young Adrien’s first leave-taking from home, then plunging one into tales of high drama and exoticism combined with a gripping realism. Adrien serves as the conduit for these tales, gathering them from the singular characters he encounters. In Kyra Kyralina, the story idles along until it meets one of these figures, Stavro, whom Adrien and a companion have joined on a trip to a nearby country fair where they’ll try to profit by selling watered down citric acid as lemonade. Stavro, confronted by the two boys after displaying some amorous intentions in a hayloft one night, offers as explanation the story of his life, a history riveting in its brutality, joy, independence of spirit, and instinct for survival. Stories in Kyra Kyralina possess this kind of power: a capacity for bewitching and transforming the moment; in this instance the boys’ sense of insult regarding Stavro’s advances is quickly dissipated by the spell his tale creates.

An honest, fundamental curiosity, refusing to censor any aspect of life, gives Istrati’s writing both a mythic quality and puts Istrati ahead of his time, with a particularly enlightened sensibility concerning gender and sexuality. Predictably, while the novel was popular upon its publication in France, it met with suspicion and distrust in the U.S., where, as Sawyer-Lauçanno points out, attitudes were quite a bit less liberal sexually than in the Ottoman culture from which Istrati emerged.

Istrati’s principal characters are, like those of Albert Cossery a few decades later, vibrant common people who refuse to accept anything less than their full human dignity, and who, through the sheer ferocity of their zeal for life, expose the niceties of bourgeois morality as sham. Unforgettable in their courage, persistence and vitality, they find themselves able to survive even in the most wretched of circumstances through a conviction, sometimes beaten by the world into a fragile thinness, that events will turn, that their oppression will not last forever, and that “suffering a thousand setbacks does not give one the right to dismiss all of humanity.” In this way these wanderers at fortune’s mercy become teachers of others in the school of hard knocks, their lessons often rising to heroic heights. When Stavro’s mother suffers a ferocious beating by her brute husband, she flees with Stavro and his older sister Kyra, then, once at a safe distance, leaves them with a powerful speech:

I was made by the Lord for the pleasures of the flesh, just as he made the mole to live underground without light. And just as that creature has everything it needs to live in the earth, I was lacking nothing to enjoy my life of pleasure. I made a vow to kill myself if I were forced by men to knuckle under and live a life other than what my body and soul dictated. Today, I am thinking about that vow. I’m going to leave you. …And Kyra, listen to what I have to say to you. If you Kyra, as I believe, do not feel the need to live a life of virtue, then don’t. Don’t be virtuous if it means you are constrained and shriveled inside. Don’t mock God. Strive to be the best in how He made you. Seek pleasure, even debauchery, but don’t let debauchery harden your heart…and you, Drogomir, if you cannot be a virtuous man, be like your sister and your mother, be a thief even, but a thief who has a heart, for a man without a heart, my children, is a corpse that keeps the living from living their lives.

Adrien plays a peripheral role in these tales, that of listener and transducer. The few places in Kyra Kyralina where he appears, he’s a traveler, “following his own destiny” and “[piling] up plenty of adventures,” the perfect vehicle for recounting the stories he hears, as learning them is “what interested him most in life: the need to look ceaselessly in to the deepest part of the human soul. The multitude of nameless beings he encountered rarely possessed souls worth exploring, but Adrien knew how to find them, and by chance he occasionally came upon them.”

It’s a glowing, vibrant, grand world of adventure, violence, tenderness, good humor, great friendship, and a prevailing love bound by blood. Above all, it is a distinctly human world in which God, important only in an abstract sense, proves fairly useless. When Stavro laments that God may have erred in preserving a few of his subjects after the Flood, he adds forgivingly that it wasn’t entirely God’s fault since, “God (like me at sixteen) didn’t know the world all that well and didn’t know what people were capable of doing.”

For its simultaneously larger-than-life and down-to-earth characters, warmly engaging narrator, and vivid realism combined with the exoticism of tales from another age, Kyra Kyralina is a work I relished re-reading. Istrati, like many supporters of communism, traveled to the newly formed USSR. Ever peripatetic, he traveled far beyond Moscow, confirming with his own eyes the rumors that others had incredulously dismissed. Among the first of several authors (later to include George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Victor Serge and Istrati’s close friend Nikos Kazantzakis) to warn of the horrors unfolding under Stalin, Istrati paid dearly for these truths. Accused of betraying the revolution, he was denounced ferociously by many who had been his ardent supporters. Rejected by both left and right, broken and disheartened, sick with tuberculosis, Istrati returned to Romania, where he died in the sanitarium in Bucharest.

In Translation: Carlos Drummond de Andrade

A recent obituary for Antonio Tabucchi noted that, in addition to being a writer of fiction, a political activist, and an academic with a strong focus on modern literature in Portuguese, especially Fernando Pessoa, Tabucchi also specialized in the poetry of Brazil’s most renowned 20^th century poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade. I’m half ashamed that I’d never heard of him.

I say “half ashamed” as the fault lies not simply in the inadequate scope of my curiosity, but also in the scarcity of English translations of Drummond’s work. Drummond is a grand figure in Brazilian literature. His poems are widely recognized, anthologized and recited; one even appears on a bill of the nation’s currency. Yet a mere handful of short collections have appeared in English, all now out of print. This makes for a rather astonishing state of affairs for a poet of Drummond’s stature: imagine not being able to read Pablo Neruda in English, or reading only Spanish and being unable to find Walt Whitman in translation.

Prompted by the Tabucchi obituary, I dug into one of these books - In the Middle of the Road, translated by John Nist – with an exponentially growing excitement and an almost proprietary sense of discovering a writer who appealed to me so directly as to merit inclusion in the selective personal pantheon of writers for whom I feel the greatest enthusiasm. Here was the kind of poet who – in his resonant, concrete clarity, deep humor, and profound appreciation of life’s knife-edge proximity to death – threw into sharp relief the inadequacies of so much other poetry. I followed Nist’s book with The Minus Sign (translator Virginia de Araujo) and Traveling in the Family (various translators). These three volumes together offer a terrific introduction to Drummond, as well as – given their overlapping selections – the opportunity to examine, side-by-side, different approaches to translating him. But the difficulty of finding these books and the limited number of poems they contain – altogether about 100 accounting for overlap, compared to over 200 in a single French pocket edition I found - underscore the dire need for an expanded collection of this tremendous poet’s work to be published for English readers. I’m talking to you, publishers!

The three volumes exhibit remarkably complementary strengths and weaknesses. Only In the Middle of the Road provides the original Portuguese, with translations on facing pages. Drummond’s clear simplicity of expression makes turning to the originals - if for no other reason than to get a sense of the sound and rhythm of his work - rewarding to anyone with even a wisp of a background in a Romance language. De Araujo notes that Nist’s translations are often overly literal, and while in certain instances I preferred them to others, they displayed occasionally wince-inducing missteps (most notably in the translation of a proper name, “Raimundo,” used to rhyme with “mundo” [world], for which Nist’s baffling, expedient solution is "Twirled"). The organizing principle behind Nist’s selections is also unclear and frustrating in its lack of dates for the poems. Traveling in the Family remedies this problem with a chronologically-arranged selection of about 45 poems, translated by Thomas Colchie, Mark Strand, Gregory Rabassa and Elizabeth Bishop - the last widely credited with bringing Drummond to the attention of admiring Anglophone poets (with whom Anglophone familiarity with Drummond has largely, alas, appeared to settle).  Finally, Virginia de Araujo’s solo translation effort, The Minus Sign, offers some 55 poems organized thematically: The Individual, Land and Family, and Being-In-The-World. De Araujo also offers a majestic introductory bio-sketch of Drummond’s remarkable life (plus, as an added bonus, a defense of her translation method that could stand alone as an unusually conscientious argument for the serious responsibilities of the translator). This beautifully written introduction outlines Drummond’s aristocratic origins in the hilly mining and agricultural country of Minas Gerais and the way in which the close friendships of his youth – with many who would later become influential Brazilian politicians – trumped to a large extent any ill feeling regarding his rejection of privilege in favor of a strongly left-leaning, humanistic political activism. Thus, despite an embrace of communism, Drummond remained a respected civil servant in Rio de Janeiro, holding for most of his life a position in charge of preservation of the country’s historical monuments.

One poem included in all three books - “In the Middle of the Road” - is arguably Drummond’s most famous – and uncharacteristic. Here is de Araujo’s translation:

In the Middle of the Road

In the middle of the road there was a stone

there was a stone in the middle of the road

there was a stone

in the middle of the road there was a stone.

I will never forget the occasion

never as long as my tired eyes stay open,

I will never forget that in the middle of the road

there was a stone

there was a stone in the middle of the road

in the middle of the road there was a stone.

This short, curious poem encapsulates many of Drummond's signature elements: humor and liveliness; complexity in simplicity; universality; the abrupt sense of the immediacy of events; the grounding (literal in this case) of his subject in the concrete and tangible; the notion of the inevitability of obstacles in life; the harmonious melding of form with function (in this case, experimentation with form as a means of approaching and evading obstacles).

For skeptical readers, I’ll quickly note that the poem is perhaps the most obscure in these collections. By contrast, most of Drummond’s work, though no less intriguing,  is eminently accessible: intimately personable, warmly conversational and clear. He writes about subjects immediately familiar (at a slant), exploring unexpected niches of life one nonetheless recognizes as having been in front of one’s face all along:  the essential weirdness of family photographs; the losses that occur with maturity; the mixture of joy and regret in discovering love in middle age; the curiously potent nostalgia in seeing a grand hotel being demolished; the everyman qualities of Charlie Chaplin; even a poem about the complicated psychological concern for one’s appearance that dental work can produce. His range is formidable, from brief poems that indulge in almost childlike, whimsical word-play, to lush, erotic love poems, to poems with a deep resonance on sober subjects, for example a mother fretting over a disappeared daughter (“Forget politics for a moment/set aside materialistic concerns/and devote some time to searching,/making inquiries, nosing around./You won’t regret it. There’s no/satisfaction greater than the smile/of a joyous mother”), or a man heading to his death in a plane crash - a stunning poem told as though time has been twisted to simultaneously show both the man's awareness and unawareness of what’s to come (“I eat a fish in a sauce/of gold and cream./It is my last fish on my last/fork.”). 

Mortality and its companions, time and aging, appear throughout Drummond’s work. Particularly striking for a modern poet, Drummond appears to assume the inevitability of human extinction, though with a fierce defense of the importance of reveling in life despite our species’ poor odds. What appears to be an implicit pessimism may actually be (to use a phrase from Sartre) “the sternness of our optimism,” as these are hardly what one would think of as apocalyptic, grim or morose poems. They exalt and extol life, rage against the dying of the light, sometimes on a global scale, embracing the “the sun of the short day in which we fight.” There’s a tender ferocity in Drummond, a deep appreciation of the limited time we have on earth fused with a pointed sense of justice and a deliberately humanistic, generalisable quality. When he writes of love, it is both particular and partaking of a wider, agape-like love of humanity. Also, in defiantly setting himself against death, Drummond can be funny and moving in equal measure.

One example of this is the poem “The Table,” an extended fantasy on a family holiday feast at which Drummond’s deceased father – and the family’s other ghosts – are present along with the living. It’s a clever idea brimming with humor (“you’d feel replete, pleased/to have such sons…Man!/What crooks! But [you’d say]/they did turn out better/than they looked”), but also flickering with deeply felt grief and love. At one point in the poem, Drummond invites his father to look at a girl we assume to be Drummond’s daughter:

take a close look at this

little girl: chin, eyes, hands,

and into her private conscience,

and into her young grace,

and say, after that look,

if she isn’t – in my tide of error –

an island of surprise.

She is my explication,

my best, my most quiet stanza,

my all, who fills the vacuum.

“My most quiet stanza” echoes a philosophical underpinning of Drummond’s poetry – that poetry is both essential and inadequate to life, a kind of meager scratching to get at truth. Poetry itself is a frequent, reflexive subject of Drummond’s poems, which plead both in form and content for conscientiousness in writing and humility in recognizing poetry as a tool for the grand task of living.  Seldom does one find a poet who breathes so much life into words, makes of them such living entities, offers such buoyant support for why poetry and literature matter to us.

Come close and consider the words.

With a plain face hiding thousands of other faces

and with no interest in your response,

whether weak or strong,

each word asks:

Did you bring the key?

Take note:

Words hide in the night

in caves of music and image.

Still humid and pregnant with sleep

they turn in a winding river and by neglect are transformed.

Amid poets who believe so strongly in the power of the written word, it’s immensely refreshing to find one who so humbly recognizes that poetry can only get us closer to life, that (in the poem from which de Araujo’s book takes its title) “the best poetry is/a minus sign.” In the pantheon of great modern poets, however, what Drummond deserves is addition, particularly for those readers of English like me who until now have been unfamiliar with his marvelous work. Discovering him in the middle of my own road has been an occasion I will never forget. 

Antonio Tabucchi on The Book of Disquiet

If one can say that a life can be transformed by reading a writer’s work, the contemporary Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi (who died this March) provides a notable example. As a student in Paris, Tabucchi read Fernando Pessoa’s poem, “The Tobacco Shop,” which set him on a lifelong trajectory influenced to an unusual degree by the Portuguese writer. Tabucchi  wrote and taught of Pessoa, translated nearly all of the writer’s works into Italian, and, in his own novels and short stories, fed ravenously on Pessoa’s influence.

Before I leave off discussion of Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, I thought I’d attempt to summarize Tabucchi’s brief treatment of this work in La nostalgie du possible: sur Pessoa (The Nostalgia of the Possible: On Pessoa), one of Tabucchi’s two books of essays on the writer. There may be more insightful works on Pessoa, but I’ve singled out this one due to my appreciation of Tabucchi and because the book is both unavailable in English and difficult to track down in French.  La nostalgie du possible consists of four lectures Tabucchi presented in Paris in 1994 along with a handy guide to Pessoa’s principal heteronyms, those alter egos he created as authors of his poetry and prose. The first lecture addresses philosophical concepts in the entirety of Pessoa’s work. Another compares Pessoa to Leopardi. In a third (for me the highlight of the collection, though not the subject of this post) Tabucchi literally unpacks – like Harpo Marx emptying his pockets – the diverse and surprising belongings of the Pessoan heteronym Alvaro de Campos, commencing with a list of all the physical objects mentioned in de Campos’ poems, and incorporating a wonderful bit about the automobile in modernist literature that begins with Proust’s “Ruskinian adventures” in visiting France’s cathedrals using a car’s headlights to illuminate their facades and ends with discussion of a wayward tire floating in the middle of the de Campos poem, “Maritime Ode.”

The short lecture Tabucchi devotes to The Book of Disquiet is entitled, “L’infinie dysphorique du Bernardo Soares” (“The Dysphoric Infinity of Bernado Soares”). Tabucchi views Soares as a being whose primary mode of interacting with the world is a “disquiet” feeling of nostalgia, not for the past, or even the present, but for those things that might have been. Soares’ life is unusually marked by insignificance and troubled by the day-to-day. Out of the vast and dense universe of the quotidian described in these 450 pages of meditations by Soares, Tabucchi pulls out a particularly interesting episode: the fright Soares experiences when a group photo is taken at a holiday party at his office (fragment 56 in the Richard Zenith translation), a photo that causes Soares to suffer “the truth on seeing myself there” and that prompts him to wonder who he is, exactly, among this “lifeless tide of faces.” In effect, it’s a scene that clearly identifies Soares as depressive and dysphoric. And while as Tabucchi points out, the origins of this depression beg for a psychoanalytic interpretation he’s unqualified to provide, one must also point out that Soares is a fictional character, his book a “phenomenological” one (with a kinship to Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge). Soares’ depression is not just the “black mood” of the ancients, but a dysphoric rupture with reality, a frustration with not being able to find in the exterior world a correlation for the grandeur of his emotions and sensations, those great and small alike. His interior world is simply too expansive to fit the crude limitations of his commonplace reality. A commonplace person, he turns of necessity to “his little daily universe, his pocket universe,” (I love this phrase – “pocket universe”), the ordinariness of the world, constructing of it a new kind of infinity, a new kind of metaphysics through which the mysteries of the universe are revealed via the quotidian and banal. One result of this attempt to invest the outside, commonplace world with the tumultuous interior world of Soares’ emotions is the richness with which, in his daily journal, Soares is able to imbue the most insignificant of things and magnify the world through them (through descriptions Tabucchi compares to the “word-paintings” of Ruskin).  As Tabucchi concludes, Soares’ writing – his pinning down the impressions of a day and etching his reflections on his tenuous existence – is the dysphoric stroke of a pendulum that finds a correlating euphoric expression in Pessoa’s other poet heteronyms, together representing an almost compulsory attempt to fill the void by trying to write “all possible books…incessantly multiplying oneself as though the world were made of writing.”  

“…as though the world were made of writing.”

I look forward to tracking down Tabucchi’s other book of essays on Pessoa.

Song of My Selves: Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet

To open Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet is get a glimpse of still, twilit infinity. This surprisingly rich, dense, lyrical work defies classification, interpretation and conclusions. At once novel, journal, poem (or “poeticized prose,” as translator Richard Zenith calls it), meditation, confession, psychological case study (from the patient’s point of view), philosophical essay, and description of the abyss, The Book of Disquiet may well be one of the world’s most accurately titled works of art.

It also may well be one of the world’s most amorphous documents, a book only in the loosest sense. Its history reads like the contrived conceit of some contemporary metafictional novel: found at Pessoa’s death in 1935 as a collection of bound and loose pages in a trunk, The Book of Disquiet, from its indeterminate plan as to how its parts were to fit together, and as to what should and shouldn’t be included, retains an indefinite, shifting shape.

The indistinct outlines of its form provide us this: close to five hundred entries in a kind of log in which the impressions of Bernando Soares, an accounting clerk in an import/export office in the Rua Douradores in Lisbon (the city that gave birth to the sublime) are recorded with a repetitive layering, the day by day accounts of a solitary, depressive yet poetic functionary who goes each day to his office, performs his duty, dines at the same restaurant each evening, and walks home through Lisbon’s streets to his spare, humble apartment where he puts down his observations and reflections. If a more communicative Bartleby or a less bitter and incapacitated Willy Loman had kept a journal, it might read a little like this; a devotional exercise in capturing tedium, routine, and the mechanical, paralyzed life of an office worker.

Amateur Reader at Wuthering Expectations hosted something of a solo read-along of The Book of Disquiet a couple of weeks ago, pulling the weight himself. In joining this late, I can add little to the insights provided by his posts and in the accompanying comments, but among the latter one reader called The Book of Disquiet “frightening,” while another called it “comfort reading.”  I can’t know what’s behind those readers’ disparate poles of reaction, but since I’ve experienced both of them myself, I’ll argue in favor of discarding an understandable reluctance to begin this admittedly frightening prospect - a 450 page book in which melancholy, insomnia, and passive crises of identity repeat across the entirety of its surface – and even finding solace in it.

I’d flirted with picking up a copy of The Book of Disquiet for many years, repeatedly passing it over out of anxiety that it would prove a dreary, melancholic cult novel attractive primarily to dreary, melancholic, cultish intellectuals. The first pages of The Book of Disquiet, however, made me sit up straight. Its immediate, prescient articulation of modern anxieties and sentiments felt intimately, eerily, abruptly familiar, yet for all that seemed fresh and illuminating. Pessoa’s language surprised me even more; in describing a world of the banal and ordinary, of office work and simple rooms, of passivity and resignation, Bernardo Soares’ gaze is also charged with an intense, ravishing lyricism and a Whitmanian, biblical cadence. Some passages in the The Book of Disquiet are simply breathtaking, lending a subversive irony and an intensity of observed life to the narrator’s meditations on futility.

Soares is a quintessential modern man, yoked to a workday that repeats itself with no promise of respite “until the coach from the abyss pulls up” (Zenith, fragment 1). In some ways he’s the flip side of a Kafka character; both are at the mercy of bureaucratic, impersonal forces larger than themselves, but Soares, rather than being reduced to the iconic singularity of a dry and dusty beetle, a badger in a burrow or a hunger artist in a cage, finds, if not escape exactly, then perhaps a kind of allowance for continuing to live, gained through the unexpected fruits of his concentrated attempts to melt into his surroundings, to extinguish himself to the point of refusing an identity, to seek refuge in nothingness. Like Whitman (whose influence pervades The Book of Disquiet) Soares, in his naked confrontation with the world and panoramic, encompassing, personified identification with all that his attention touches, contains multitudes. Unlike Whitman, whatever celebration of himself he makes is sober and interior, whatever singing of it but a wistful fado. Pessoa has taken the ebullient, expansive infinity of Whitman and seated it in 9-to-5 office job. In place of a desire to merge atomically with the world in a joyous fusion, there’s an almost pathological compulsion in Soares to obliterate himself in the world. In large measure he succeeds, sensing himself only as a concentrated awareness, a disembodied eye that observes, an existence reduced to a presence that dreams, with an effacing, disconsolate kind of freedom snatched from trying to avoid being seen. Dreams trump reality in The Book of Disquiet, providing a kind of parallel shadow life for Soares to inhabit, one multiplied by dreams’ capacity - like that of fiction, one might add - to allow one to lead, in the world of the mind, a multiplicity of lives other than one’s own (tellingly, Soares dreams of a romanticized Samarkand of the past, an exotic and impossible destination that might as well be the back of the moon).  Even dreams, though, as Soares recognizes, have “detestable” limitations, since the mind recognizes that they are but dreams. Yet neither is action possible, in that action “offends… sensibility” and threatens to disrupt – as though sicklied over with the pale cast of thought - the still gaze that provides Soares the poetic response that sustains him. And so Soares remains something of a fixed quantity, a gaze that thinks, slotted somewhere between dreaming and action, between emotion and intellect, flickering but not really moving, a figure in a zoetrope.

What could be comforting in this? Routine can provide comfort. Inaction can provide a kind of tranquility. But a serious person would hardly think of these as more than illusory. What may be comforting, however, in a philosophical sense, is Soares’ acceptance of the price of routine and inaction, one articulated here as disquiet, or in the original Portuguese, desassossego (a word deconstructed by Antonio Tabucchi in a brief essay on the book[i], as being, like its sister word saudade, nearly untranslatable in its complexity of associations). Soares provides the kind of comfort one obtains from having one’s sense of reality affirmed, from accepting intranquility as a condition of modern life. In other words, Soares provides the solace of understanding that he does not understand.

One might also find comfort in the aphoristic quality of Soares’ journal. Much of The Book of Disquiet consists of meditations, aphorisms that, even in their disquieting assertions, provide a lulling affirmation of one’s existence. Despite Soares’ determined conviction that action is futile, that the refuge of dreams is temporary, that thought is of questionable use, there remains a palpable heroism not only in the poeticism of his response to the world, but in the very fact that he has one. Perhaps most striking about The Book of Disquiet is the manner in which Pessoa merges these meditations on routine existence with a rapturous poeticism that lifts Soares far above his ordinary, day to day life; it’s no coincidence that so many of Soares’ descriptions involve the sky above Lisbon. Pessoa/Soares provides us, as Tabucchi points out in his essay, a metaphysics of the banal. It’s the closest thing we may have to a religious text for the faithless and dispossessed.

The one activity in which Soares engages that may be construed as action (apart those minimal functional tasks required to dress and eat and hold a job) is writing. In this dense, amorphous collection of what at times appears to be little other than entries one might shuffle like a deck of cards (one kind of infinity), perhaps the beginning of The Book of Disquiet is really the end. Here one finds a short framing device through which Fernando Pessoa first introduces us to Bernando Soares, a man (like himself) who dines each night (like himself) at the same restaurant and who (like himself) retires each night to a simple room to write:  a semblable, an intimate if not exactly a friend. At the end of this preface, Pessoa notes Soares’ contentment in finding someone with whom to leave his book, a gift Pessoa accepts with an appreciation “from a psychological point of view” and because he recognizes the writer’s need to have a reader. For those of us now privileged to be readers of The Book of Disquiet, we may recognize our own semblable in Pessoa’s book, which speaks so intimately to the many attributes of our own modern psychology, and which, by being a work of fiction and not simply a psychological case study, immortalizes, in an almost infinitely intriguing work of art (I have scarcely begun to sound its depths), the heroic/anti-heroic fragility of our dreaming, shifting, insubstantial search for meaning, solidity and identity in a mechanized and spiritually tenuous world.

One final note on reading The Book of Disquiet to help mitigate the fright of anyone approaching it for the first time, particularly those who, like me, expected a novel. While the book has novelistic aspects, its dense accumulation of observations and reflections can weigh heavily in one’s reading, and it has little if anything in the way of plot (unless one might approach Pessoa’s coyly expressed “psychological point of view” with a psychologist’s interest in tracing Soares’ pathology). In a comment, Amateur Reader notes translator Alfred MacAdams’ suggestion to approach the book by reading it through once in the already somewhat arbitrary order in which it has been assembled, then turning to its entries randomly for the rest of one’s life. This seems infinitely sound advice.

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[i] Antonio Tabucchi, “L’infinie dysphorique de Bernardo Soares,” in La Nostalgie du Possible: Sur Pessoa, Éditions de Seuil, Paris, 1998