Green Couch by Edward Hirsch

"Green Couch"

Sofa Verde
By Edward Hirsch

That was the year I lived without fiction
and slept surrounded by books on the unconscious.
I woke every morning to a sturdy brown oak.

Ese fue el año que vivi sin ficción
y me dormí en medio de libros sobre el subconsciente.
Me desperté cada mañana ante un roble fuerte y marrón.

That was the year I left behind my marriage
of twenty-eight years, my faded philosophy books, and
the green couch I had inherited from my grandmother.

Ese fue el año que deje atrás mi matrimonio
de 28 años, mis libros gastados de filosofía, y
el sofá verde que había heredado de mi abuela.

After she died, I drove it across the country
and carried it up three flights of crooked stairs
to a tiny apartment in west Philadelphia,

Después de su muerte, lo conduje a través del país
y lo subí tres pisos de escalera enredada
a un departamento pequeño en West Philadephia,

and stored it in my in-laws' basement in Bethesda,
and left it to molder in our garage in Detroit
(my friend Dennis rescued it for his living room),

y lo deposité en el sótano de la casa de mis suegros
en Bethesda y lo deje pudrir en nuestro garaje en Detroit
(mi amigo Dennis lo rescató para su living)

and moved it to a second-floor study in Houston
and a fifth-floor apartment on the Upper West Side
where it will now be carted away to the dump.

y lo mudé a un estudio en el segundo piso en Houston
y un departamento del quinto piso en el Upper West Side
donde ahora será llevado a la basura.

All my difficult reading took place on that couch,
which was turning back into the color of nature
while I grappled with ethics and the law,

Todo mi lectura dificil sucedió en ese sofá,
que volvía al color de la naturaleza
mientras yo luchaba con ética y el derecho,

the reasons for Reason, Being and Nothingness,
existential dread and the death of God
(I'm still angry at Him for no longer existing).

las razones para la Razón, Ser y la Nada,
el temor existencial y la muerte de Dios
(todavía me enojo con el por no existir).

That was the year that I finally mourned
for my two dead fathers, my sole marriage,
and the electric green couch of my past.

Ese fue el año que lamenté finalmente
por mis dos padres muertos, mi matrimonio único,
y el sofá verde eléctrico de mi pasado.

Darlings, I remember everything.
But now I try to speak the language
ofthe unconscious and study earth for secrets.

Queridos, me acuerdo de todo.
Pero ahora intentaré hablar el idioma
del subconsciente y estudiar la tierra por sus secretos.

I go back and forth to work.
I walk in the botanical gardens on weekends
and take a narrow green path to the clearing.

Voy y vuelvo del trabajo.
Camino en los jardines botánicos los fines de semana
en un sendero verde hacia el claro.

--traduccion Indran Amirthanayagam

PILL FOR AN ISLAND

The war in Sri Lanka has lasted more than 25 years. I wrote this poem in 2006, after visiting New York, another beloved residence on earth.



PILL FOR AN ISLAND


I did not visit the Black Pussycat,
or the Fat Flounder, even Macy’s
on 34th Street. I left the Back Fence
for another return. I must devote
myself to compressing the city
into a compact, multi-purpose
pill to pop on those occasions
far away on Ceylon’s East Coast

where the blue-green jeweled
sea—turned nut brown, in the wake
of the tsunami--witnesses again
patrol boats and small arms fire,
lobbed grenades and thatch explosions,
rapes of social workers and hundreds
upon hundreds upon thousands
in flight from their villages.

War has returned to the hamlets,
coves and palm-fronded taverns,
and in New York those towers
of Ilium vanished, my two islands
united in the global accounting
of war and war’s alarms,
everybody bruised, jaded and afraid
waiting for the Messiah or the flames.



Indran Amirthanayagam c)2009

Victory and Defeat

Let us throw these words,
victory and defeat,
into the dustbin.
Mastering illusion
is the only way out
of the maize. Learn
the art of mapmaking.

Find your own way out of hell.
Use gods and preachers.
Use poetry. But do not listen
to rants of those who say
victory is close at hand, around
the corner, one bomb away.


--IA 3/6/2009

Hablando con Ernesto Cardenal

Hoy el 16 de febrero fui a ver el Maestro Cardenal en el Centro Nicaraguense de Escritores. Platicamos de la guerra civil en sri lanka y en particular los muertos y las heridas que han sufrido los civiles atrapados entre el ejercito srilankes y los tigres tamiles. Tambien platicamos de la condena judicial que ha sufrido el Maestro. Lo encontre bien de salud y fuerte como un chacal y de buena voz. Manana en Granada los poetas del mundo y los poetas nicaraguenses se reuniran para escucharlo.

SRI LANKA: WAR AND SUFFERING

As I write more than 250,000 civilians are trapped in jungle near Mullaitivu,. They have little food, water and medicine. They are being injured and killed. They need help. Please speak to your representatives, write letters to your editors, insist that their plight be reviewed by the UN Security Council. Harming innocents is not a matter of internal security or civil war to be left to the warring parties in the Sri Lankan conflict. We must not be quiet. Let us make a lot of noise. Let us make the bombers accountable to us. Let us try to save a few lives. Indran

To The Courts, In Remorse

Drop all charges
against
Tissanaiyagam.
his glaucoma
needs treatment
and his wife
will be grateful,

…and the Dean
of the Diplomatic
Corps will feel
less inclined
to speak
at public
acts of grievance.

I agree
we must not
interfere
with funerals.
leaves a bitter
taste on
the BBC’s tongue.

Inevitably
advisors
will counsel
banning that
Commonwealth
voice.
Yet, then

we must cope
with reporters
in disguise,
especially
these pesky
bloggers
who feel

empowered
to write
what they see
and hear
taste and
touch
as if witness

can make
bread out
of flour
or yams
sprout
in a
mineswept

Vanni.
And let me
not forget
the political
analysts
who worry
in public

that a failed
state will
be our cup
of tea.
I trust
you will
still drink

our fabled
single
leaf
beverage
and visit
our white
sand,

black
sand,
red
sand,
blue
sand
beaches.

-- Indran Amirthanayagam c) 2009

ON SERVICE, MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY JANUARY 19TH, 2009

“We’ve got to make this world a better place”, the song says. Today we are following the instructions. “I know we can make it. I know darn well”. Here we are making order, making peace. Here we are preparing the house for the invited guests. Tomorrow a new family will occupy the White House. Tomorrow a poet will read to the nation and the world on the Capitol steps. Tomorrow we will return to our lives changed, empowered, moving ahead with confidence.

“We are on earth a little space/to learn to bear the beams of love,” Blake wrote. “Raise high the roofbeams, Carpenter” Salinger told us. Let us raise our arms, friends. Our hearts. We have a garden. It needs water, fruit rinds, tubers, onion peels. And there is a copse nearby. Let that copse alone. Let us live in harmony with other fish ambling about on land. Let us glide, swim, waddle, and walk to walk; throw the car keys into the back drawer.

We shall move ahead with confidence. But let us not forget the errors made in our name. Let us set up a vigil at Constitution Avenue, at the Lincoln Memorial. Let us take back our streets.

First Street: a pact, friends.

Here are the details. Love our neighbor, whether human, fish, bird, worm, scorpion.

Love winds, sky, oceans. Let us learn how to recycle, how to cut down, trim. Let us bonsai our lives, rock garden them and put a pool in the middle. Let us adopt the Mexican custom of a fountain in every home.

Second Street:

Let us cross the borders, tackle difficult, painful wars that murder our spirit. Let us not be silent before them even if our only recourses are the letter to the editor and the vote. Let us not underestimate the power of that vote.

Third Street:

Care for our families. Inscribe the kids into Model UN. Read a poem a day. Say prayers. Sing. Dance for no particular reason and don’t always go to bed at 10. Set up patterns. Then muddy them up. Teach the children to live in the grey areas, to breathe powerfully and straight into the fog and darkness so their breaths will clear the way.

Fourth Street:

Love your neighbor. Cross over the Falls Road. Into Soweto. Downtown East Side. Remove the gates, friends, to the gated communities. Install electronic sensors instead. Yet, how can one tell the movement of one who does not belong, who comes to rob and pillage? Not easy ….Security in the midst of prosperity and poverty. Haves and Have nots. But let’s work to fashioning a world that runs on the word, the bond of man, the trust of Abel in his brother even if Abel will, and must, be killed.

Fifth Street….and I will stop here. There are five acts in the tragedy, in the comedy as well

I have cited Blake already on the beams of love. How about Ginsberg?

Hey Father Death,
I'm flying home
Hey poor man,
you're all alone
Hey old daddy,
I know where I'm going


Where are we going? What is the fifth street or the fiftieth? I am scared but am not yet straight. I am scared but I am taking omega 3, bitter melon and milk thistle. I am scared but I am in love. I am scared but I have my health and a healthy imagination. I am scared but I have a job. And I am grateful. Today I give thanks to Martin Luther King. To my friends. To this evening before the new morning in the United States, everywhere.


--Indran Amirthanayagam c)2009

One Of Us (Lasantha Wickrematunge)

One of Us


During civilized periods
in the history of kingdoms
courtiers, or the king’s
person himself,
in audience
with the gadfly,
would offer the fellow
death or exile.

These days
assassins
butcher their fly
in daylight
near security
checkpoints
in front of
bewildered subjects.

My Lord,
Dutugemunu,
slayer of wild beasts
in northern
jungles, why must
we kill brother
Lasantha, shed
our own blood?


-- Indran Amirthanayagam, January 11, 2009

On LOVE MARRIAGE by V.V. Ganeshananthan

I write rarely about novels in this space dedicated to poetry. But once in a while I am moved to break the unnecessary chains and comment about strong new writing produced in prose in the Sri Lankan or Ceylonese diaspora. VV Ganeshananthan’s first novel Love Marriage is a brave and comprehensive work that mixes personal and political, national and international, diaspora and village, into a compelling story of Sri Lankan Tamils and their dilemmas, strangers in strange lands, expelled from home, trying in some cases to get back to their birthplaces.

Exile is the modern condition. We all seem to come from abroad. Meanwhile, Rimbaud noted that life is elsewhere. I read Ganeshananthan’s novel in a checkered manner, impressed by the powerful stories, interrupted by news from the island. I read Roma Tearne’s Mosquito in the same way. Sri Lankan stories get under my skin, bother my heart and sometimes work like a poison leading to literary paralysis.

What can one say about the unrelenting horror that the island has lived for more than 25 years, 50 if one goes back to the Sinhala Only Act of 1956 that began the disintegration of the calm, sea-bathing polity inherited in 1948. Now, I exaggerate. There have always been disputes and of course inequities. But short sighted policies to gain votes have come back to haunt the island like those horsemen of the apocalypse described powerfully by Tarzi Vittachi in Emergency 58. At least at that time, journalists were spared bullets or knives.

Now, all is changed. The recent murder of Lasantha Wickrematunge, editor of the Sunday Leader, confirms the disintegration of the polity into a chaos where life is nasty, brutish and short, where the rule of law should be renamed the rule of thugs.

In this context—and when is the right moment—to talk about imaginative literature, work that will have a shelf life beyond the particular murders and abuses in the daily political sphere? Of course, Ganeshananthan is also a journalist, a truth teller, which adds another layer of interest for readers of her novel.

So what are the truths revealed in this fiction? I invite readers to examine the novel, to engage its partial truths--Ganeshananthan creates a great variety of powerful and opinionated characters—and to reflect on the correspondences between their lives and the lives of her characters. I am not reviewing the novel here, assessing its merits as fiction or history. My view, in any case, would be shaped by my own prejudices. Yet in the end—to avoid the paralysis of not opining at all, which would be a silly conclusion to the problem of literary or, for that matter, journalistic impartiality—I say here unequivocally that my antennae are dancing thrilled with this novel

I leave you as a teaser with some passages from the novel:

“What he means is this: it would be false to say that there is a beginning to the story, or a middle, or an end. Those words have a tidiness that does not belong here. Our lives are not clean. They begin without fanfare and end without warning. This story does not have a defined shape or a pleasant arc. To record it differently would not be true.”

“To read the story in the press is to read a story that has never gone far enough.”

“Like almos every member of his family, my great-uncle eventually left Sri Lanka. There was nothing else to do.”

“Tamil has two hundred and forty-seven letters. When I was five years old, I could recite about half of them. I could speak Tamil and understand it. But as I got older, I forgot the words. I do not remember how this happened. Sometimes when I dream, I dream in Tamil. But when I wake up I never remember the words. It is like remembering a fever, or a blessing.”

INAUGURATION

INAUGURATION

I have no words
to compete
with rain
or sunlight,

or the brush
of your hair
on my brow.
I am humbled

before beauty
and this chance
to lead a nation
out of delusion

with self and others;
but I remain unelected,
acknowledged only
by a few readers

of psychosis,
the notion that word
becomes flesh,
we accept by rote,

at Mass,
a divine mystery,
but ignore the man
on a soapbox

who reads his ya yahs
out at the Bowery
Poetry Café
on Sunday morning

at 9 am during
a marathon reading
to welcome the year,
to say, World,

you’ve still got poets
to kick around. Bring
on the go-go girls,
mountebanks, acrobats.

The show is everything.
Let’s say hurrah for all
that jazz. The inauguration
will be like no other.

Time moves the chariot
up Pennsylvania Avenue.
Get your dreams on board,
children well strapped, save

room for seedlings in pots,
germs, a fish tank; ‘though
this is no ark, here hope
will take root or expire.

Indran Amirthanayagam c) 2009

FOURTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE TSUNAMI

Do you remember the tsunami? Where were you that day?
Did you run from the wave? Did you run from your television?

Every morning brings a new reason to move ahead, to stuff memories further into the back of the drawer.

So why did I compose The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems?

I wrote the book because I had run out of options. The wave brought my island home to me on the television screen. I had to meet my Maker, the one who assigned me some talent in making metaphors.

It was time to exercise the fingers of my heart, to write poems.

ON JOSÉ GARCIA VILLA

ON JOSÉ GARCIA VILLA


Discovering Jose Garcia Villa’s poetry, thanks to a new collection, introduced by Luis Francia , has been one of my most exceeding joys in recent weeks. Garcia Villa is a poet who exceeds, playing with grammatical preconceptions, forcing us to see, hear and dance the word by itself, and then beside, the next performer in the sentence.

45

A, bee,flying,to, the,end,of,the,world,
To,find,one,flower,wherein,to,lie,curled,

Is,a,fiction,is,a,lie,
That,will,keep,God,in,the,sky.


This is one of more than 50 aphorisms in the suite Aphorisms I,. I am taken to Mondrian and Broadway, Boogie Woogie, to the intense blue color cut-outs of the late Matisse. I think of New York, city of the future, spiraling skyscrapers of glass, to dreamscapes of social light-splashed optimism, not the dark metropolis of Fritz Lang at all.


47

Throwing, diamonds, to,peacocks,
Is,a,philosopher’s,prodigality.


6

A,genius,is,he
That,can,make,
Portable,pyramids


Some background : I have perused Doveglion : Collected Poems for several weeks. I steal five minutes a day to read a poem. I read it furtively. Who is this Philipino modernist, Francisco O’Hara travelling rhetorical streets armed with commas, periods and a gift for word music ? Why does he spin connundrums in the Village ?

I knew Luis had studied with him. But I was too young then to understand the gift that Garcia Villa had bequeathed my friend. I know how to name that gift now. I see it in Luis’ poetry as well.

How shall I call it ? Build maizes with words to ensure that ideas and metaphors get a good workout on the way to the center of the garden where damsels wait,
where aproned chefs serve a plentiful feast of sticky rice and roasted pig.
Delight, complicate and celebrate the gurgling at the heart of the brook, that cascades down the page.

One can’t tell a poem, like a story, from beginning to end. Yet, one can, silly maker of precepts. One can turn the story around as well. We have seen the horror, my friends. We live in the post-post-post epoch. Yet, we fall in love as if love has not taken a bow before and we play with words as if they are the first meteorites crashing into our earth.

I feel first love and heaven-gazing wonder reading Jose Garcia Villa. Although I do not know how often he ate plaintain leaves and sticky rice in the Village in the mid 20th century, I am confident his poems will be read with coffee or tea after any course in any country where English poetry is the currency.

READING AND WRITING

I have not updated this blog at a fevered rate in recent weeks--distracted by other pursuits. However, I will return from time to time with new material. I am reading at least three or four books that will be commented on here in the upcoming weeks and months.

For those of you who have linked your blogs to mine, thanks. I have encountered a problem with Blogger in adding yours. If any of you can guide me about what I can do please let me know

I will be back in touch soon.


Indran

A DEBT (R.S. Thomas)

A DEBT (R.S. THOMAS) November 17


R.S.Thomas (1913-2000) wrote lyrics that seared the imagination as if his readers were cattle and required a harsh accounting, an indelible mark. As I read him today, on my birthday, I think too of that other Thomas of my first loves in poetry, the one who wrote about his thirtieth year to heaven. My meter has been more finely shaped, however, by R.S. than by his better known and fellow Welshman Dylan (1914-1953). I miss them both tonight, of course. And like all children I want my loves together, to swaddle me and put me to bed.

Here are a couple of RS Thomas poems


JANUARY

The fox drags its wounded belly
Over the snow, the crimson seeds
Of blood burst with a mild explosion,
Soft as excrement, bold as roses.

Over the snow that feels no pity,
Whose white hands can give no healing,
The fox drags its wounded belly.


THE GAP IN THE HEDGE

That man, Prytherch, with the torn cap,
I saw him often, framed in the gap
Between two hazels with his sharp eyes,
Bright as thorns, watching the sunrise
Filling the valley with its pale yellow
Light, where the sheep and the lambs went haloed
With grey mist lifting from the dew.
Or was it a likeness that the twigs drew
With bold penciling upon that bare
Piece of sky? For he’s still there
At early morning, when the light is right
And I look up suddenly at a bird’s flight.

Sobre Ernesto Cardenal

SOBRE CARDENAL

de Indran Amirthanayagam, derechos reservados Mayo 2007

Hace tiempo una mañana de domingo neyorquino, un amigo inglés queridísimo se esperaba un taxi en Broadway. Era el 23 de mayo, en las faldas del verano, todavía con la promesa de primavera en el aire. Mi amigo iba al aeropuerto para volar a Managua. Hace unos días atrás habíamos formado parte de la promoción de la Escuela de Periodismo de Columbia University. En ese entonces el movimiento para sacar inversiones de Sudáfrica fue el tema principal de la política estudiantil. Un edificio en la universidad había sido bloqueado por varios meses y renombrado “Harmony Hall” (El edificio de armonía). Cuando caminé para aceptar mi diploma de maestría me levanté el puño en una salutación de apoyo para el movimiento contra las grandes empresas involucradas en la economía de apartheid.

Ese mañana me levanté la mano para despedirme de mi amigo. No sabía que planes tenía en Nicaragua, en ese entonces en pleno conflicto entre los Sandinistas y los Contras. Temía que podría sufrir una herida o podría desaparecer. Fue una despedida difícil, entre hombres con todo su carga inglesa de mantener el decoro, de enterrar las emociones. Unos días después, empecé a escribir un poema pensando en mi amigo ya en Nicaragua. El poema se titula “Homenaje a Managua.” Y ahí, le hice varias preguntas, entre ellas, hay todavía un España y una guerra civil? Y te has conocido a Cardenal?

En esos años la revolución sandinista inspiraba a muchos extranjeros de visitar al país, de trabajar en el campo, formar ONGs dedicadas a la enseñanza, la salud. Mi pregunta era irónica, socrática y lleno del ennui que todos los jóvenes que aspiran a ser intelectuales sufren durante sus estudios universitarios. O tal vez, es un ennui particular al sigo 20 y a este siglo 21, que siempre las promesas, las esperanzas son los blancos de la crudeza de la realidad, su venalidad, su mano corrompida.

En ese mayo, habían pasado también solo dos años desde las manifestaciones del verano de 83 en Sri Lanka, los ataques dirigidos a las casas, negocios, templos y las personas de los tamiles esrilankeses. A raíz de ese verano que dejó la isla ensangrentada se desató una plena guerra civil que desafortunadamente sigue hasta hoy deprimiendo los esrilankeses y los que aman el país. Y Sri Lanka aparece en ese poema donde hago referencias a ciertas guerras justas—si hay—las de Sri Lanka y de Palestina.

Claro, para mi en ese entonces, Cardenal representaba una figura mítica, un poeta sacerdote, discípulo de Thomas Merton, vuelto sacerdote ya adulto como Merton. No podría haber imaginado que algún día me conociera ese leyenda, y en español, mi nuevo idioma de la creación poética. Bueno, ya esta, puedo ahora beber la presencia de Cardenal, tomarla, comerla como una hostia metafórica. Es un poeta que nunca me deja de sorprender por su compromiso con la verdad: la verdad de Marilyn Monroe, de Claudia, su enamorada de los epigramas, mi verdad aunque no me había conocido en persona hasta este encuentro.

Digo por este último que Cardenal inspira poetas y otros luchadores para el derecho de hablar en la fundación de la comunión en la tierra, la entrega intima del amor y del conocimiento del Todopoderoso, el Dios, al feligres/lector por medio del sacerdote, el poeta. Escuchemos a

Detrás del Monasterio

Detrás del monasterio, junto al camino,
existe un cementerio de cosas gastadas,
en donde yacen el hierro sarroso, pedazos
de loza, tubos quebrados, alambres retorcidos,
cajetillas de cigarrillo vacias, aserrín
y zinc, plástico envejecido, llantas rotas,
esperando como nosotros la resurrección.

A la primera lectura este poema parece limpio, entrega su carga de golpe, que no sea necesario la relectura. Y para algunos lectores impacientes o llenos de demandas podrían tomar provecho y seguir en su camino apurado. Sin embargo un lector con más tiempo disponible lo degustaría con revelaciones mas profundas. En fin los grandes poetas hablan de temas esenciales: el amor en todos sus sentidos, la guerra, el descanso en la ribera del río antes de cruzarlo. A donde? A Lethe, o al Cielo, o sea, el río es el Río Bravo y al otro lado está el desierto de Texas. O sea, cruces las aguas y te vas a encontrar tu tema.

En el caso de Cardenal, no puedo separar el hombre que se viste de sacerdote, el antiguo ministro de cultura, el fundador de Soltiname, y el poeta. Una figura parecida en la India seria Rabindranath Tagore de cuya obra vasta se nota su fundación de una escuela y una manera de enseñar, refugios en la tierra como Soltiname. Cardenal es fundamental al paisaje nicaragüense como Tagore a la subconciencia hindú. Los dos interpretan las raíces y las historias de sus pueblos y luchan para los menos afortunados.

Entonces ¿cuáles son las revelaciones de “Detrás del Monasterio”? Las ideas se ven en las cosas. Uno encuentra las cosas gastadas en un cementerio al lado del camino y detrás del monasterio. Todos construimos nuestros caminos y para hacerlos hay que sacar arena, piedras, y a veces, destruir campos agrícolas, la calle principal de un pueblo para lograr la meta, el camino—que podría llevar a uno hacia Itaca o Valhalla. ¿Pero toda la basura que uno ha acumulado en la vida—es solo eso, o también tiene vida, sentimientos, que a su vez está esperando la resurrección?

Cardenal es maestro del epigrama, la verdad dicha de manera económica, lo esencial sin toda la narrativa de la vida. De hecho este poema es un epigrama muy detallado. Sin embargo cada detalle añade un elemento imprescindible a esta visión—que me hace pensar también en las cosas gastadas flotando en ‘Frisco Bay del “Sunflower Sutra” donde Allen Ginsberg experimenta una visión de Blake y su girasol en las aguas negras—y hay, por cierto, una influencia de la poesía de Ginsberg en la conciencia de Cardenal. Ginsberg celebró lo que llamaba “crazy wisdom” o sabiduría loca. Pero siempre fue un poeta engagé que veia el papel de vate de manera muy tradicional, interprete de la verdad para todos lo demás. En la época mas conocida de Ginsberg, Cardenal, Bob Dylan, Merton, entre los cincuentas y sesentas, había grandes entrecruzadas….ahí se encuentra la guerra en Vietnam, la campaña anti-nuclear, los principios del movimiento ecologista…también la droga, el amor libre….y claro el espacio, el primer viaje del hombre a la luna.

Para un sacerdote encargado de llevar su rebaño al paraíso Cardenal ha dedicado bastante energía a su estancia de paso. Y es una energía de compasión, de cuidar lo frágil, de envolverlo en un manto de cariño. Su “Oración Por Marilyn Monroe” sirve como ejemplo amplio de esta compasión que forma el núcleo de la visión política, social y espiritual del poeta (que es además una manifestación de lo mismo en la vida de Jesús con Maria Magdalena, con los usureros del templo, con los guardianes de las reglas, los sacerdotes mayores entre los judíos.) Es un poema completo que empleo para representar la gama de exploraciones poéticas (y psíquicas) que ha hecho en diversos poemas a lo largo de su carrera.
`
SEÑOR
Recibe a esta muchacha conocida en toda la tierra con
el nombre de
Marilyn Monroe
aunque ese no era su verdadero nombre
(pero Tú conoces su verdadero nombre, el de la huerfanita
violada a
los 9 años
y la empleadita de tienda que a los 16 se había querido
matar)
y que ahora se presenta ante Ti sin ningún maquillaje
sin su Agente de Prensa
sin fotógrafos y sin firmar autógrafos
sola como una astronauta frente a la noche espacial.

Ella soñó cuando niña que estaba desnuda en una iglesia
(según cuenta el Time)
ante una multitud postrada, con las cabezas en el suelo
y tenía que caminar en puntillas para no pisar las cabezas.
Tú conoces nuestros sueños mejor que los psiquiatras.
Iglesia, casa, cueva, son la seguridad del seno materno
pero también algo más que eso…
Las cabezas son los admiradores, es claro
(la masa de cabezas en la oscuridad bajo el chorro de luz),
Pero el templo no son los estudios de la 20th Century-Fox.
El templo—de mármol y oro—es el templo de su cuerpo
en el que está el Hijo del Hombre con un látigo en la mano
expulsando a los mercaderes de la 20th Century-Fox
que hicieron de Tu casa de oración una cueva de ladrones.

Señor
en este mundo contaminado de pecados y radioactividad
Tú no culparás tan sólo a una empleadita de tienda.
Que como toda empleadita de tienda soñó ser estrella de
Cine.
Y su sueño fue realidad (pero como en la realidad del
tecnicolor).
Ella no hizo sino actuar según el script que le dimos
--El de nuestras propias vidas—Y era un script absurdo.
Perdónala Señor y perdónanos a nosotros
por nuestra 20th Century
por esta Colosal Super-Producción en la que todos hemos
trabajado.
Ella tenia hambre de amor y le ofrecimos tranquilizantes.
Para la tristeza de no ser santos
se le recomendó el Psicoanálisis.
Recuerda Señor su creciente pavor a la cámara
y el odio al maquillaje—insistiendo en maquillarse en
cada escena—
y cómo se fue haciendo mayor el horror
y mayor la impuntualidad a los estudios.

Como toda empleadita de tienda
soño ser estrella de cine.
Y su vida fue irreal como un sueño que un psiquiatra
interpreta y archiva

Sus romances fueron un beso con los ojos cerrados
que cuando se abren los ojos
se descubre que fue bajo reflectores
y apagan los reflectores!
y desmontan las dos paredes del aposento (era un set
cinematográfico)
mientras el Director se aleja con su libreta
porque la escena ya fue tomada.
O como un viaje en yate, un beso en Singapur, un baile
en Río,
la recepción en la mansión del Duque y la Duquesa de
Windsor
vistos en la salita del apartamento miserable.

La película terminó sin el beso final.
La hallaron muerta en su cama con la mano en el teléfono.
Y los detectives no supieron a quién iba a llamar.
Fue
como alguien que ha marcado el número de la única voz
amiga
y oye tan sólo la voz de un disco que le dice: WRONG
NUMBER.
O como alguien que herido por los gangsters
alarga la mano a un teléfono desconectado.

Señor
quienquiera que haya sido el que ella iba a llamar
y no llamó (y tal vez no era nadie
o era Alguien cuyo número no está en el Directorio de
Los Angeles)
contesta Tú el teléfono!

Desde la primera estrofa estamos conciente que leemos un poema imprescindible, que va a enseñarnos cómo responder a la tragedia y la comedia de la vida y la muerte de Marilyn que es igual al la de nuestras vidas y muertes en esta planeta donde el poeta William Blake nos escribió una vez “pisamos la tierra por un breve paso para aprender cómo soportar los rayos de la luz…we are on earth a little space to learn to bear the beams of love. “

Dice Cardenal que el verdadero nombre de Marilyn era ”el de la huerfanita/violada a los 9 años.” De inmediato, el cuchillo entra al corazón. No podemos escapar sentirnos triste, la empatía con esta niña cuya inocencia se ha sido robado tan joven. ¿Y quienes somos para enjuiciar la pobre empleadita de tienda por el sueño de ser actriz? El primer mensaje del poema entonces cuestiona nuestro papel en la tragedia de Marilyn, uno de nosotros como cualquiera. ¿Cómo podemos dejar que el violador anda husmeando nuestros hijos? ¿No tenemos responsabilidad alguna por la mala suerte? ¿Es meramente una cuestión de suerte, o de leyes y su puesta en acción, o de establecer una sociedad, un reino en la tierra, donde somos verdaderamente guardianes de nuestros prójimos?

Ahora Marilyn se presenta sin maquillaje ni representación ante el Dios “sola como una astronauta frente a la noche espacial.” Cardenal en los poemas de Cántico Cósmico deja libre su imaginación a viajar por las estrellas con el lenguaje científico además de otros lenguajes reunidos con la métrica de una poesía lírica, cantada. Aquí prefigura ese libro con esta muestra de su asombro ante el universo.

El asombro ante la grandeza de la obra de Dios, además de los pecados de los hombres, me parece una imagen útil para expresar la actitud de Cardenal. Y viene frecuentemente con un tinte de ironía y del escepticismo estoico. Ve como describe Cardenal el gran pecador Somoza en “Ha Venido La Primavera” “el dictador/gordo, con su traje sport y su sombrero tejano,/en el lujoso yate por los paisajes de tus sueños.” También el asombro se presenta con tonos heroicos en la oración por Marilyn (y nosotros) y en otros poemas como Hora 0. Cito la parte de “Hora 0” que trata de la muerte de su amigo Adolfo Baez Bone:

En abril los mataron.
Yo estuve con ellos en la rebelión de abril
Y aprendí a manejar una ametralladora Rising.
Y Adolfo Báez Bone era mi amigo:
lo persiguieron con aviones, con camiones,
con reflectores, con bombas lacrimógenas,
con radios, con perros, con guardias;
y yo recuerdo las nubes rojas sobre la Casa Presidencial
como algodones ensangrentados,
y la luna roja sobre la Casa Presidencial.
La radio clandestina decía que vivía.
El pueblo no creía que había muerto.
(Y no ha muerto)

Porque a veces nace un hombre en una tierra
que es esa tierra.
Y la tierra en que es enterrado ese hombre
es ese hombre.
Y los hombres que después nacen de esa tierra
son ese hombre.
Y Adolfo Báez Bone era ese hombre.

“Si a mí me pusieran a escoger mi destino
(me había dicho Báez Bone tres días antes)
entre morir asesinado como Sandino
o ser Presidente como el asesino de Sandino
yo escogería el destino de Sandino.”
Y él escogió su destino.
La gloria no es la que enseñan los textos de historia:
es una zopilotera en un campo y un gran hedor.


Vuelvo ahora a otra muerte, bajo otros reflectores, los del cine. ¿Es la muerte de Marilyn más apetecible que esta gloria de Báez Bone bajo el aleteo de los zopilotes, un cadáver con un gran hedor?

¿Es mas heroica?: “ella tenia hambre de amor y le ofrecimos tranquilizantes.” Cardenal es severo con las alabanzas de los textos de historia en el caso de Báez Bone—y por implicación los que escriben las historias-- y igualmente critico de nuestra complicidad en la muerte de Marilyn. ‘Ella no hizo sino actuar según el script que le dimos. ‘

¿Cómo podemos cambiar ese script? Con la mancha de Cain, el pecado original, los siete
excesos, digo la lujuria y los demás, con toda este peso del hombre caído que llevamos—y hablo solamente de la carga católica y tal vez en otras religiones hay menos condena genética—¿cómo podemos contestar el teléfono cuando Marilyn nos llama?

Cardenal pide a Dios que le contesta. ¿Y a Dios que le importa la suerte de una empleadita de tienda que soñó ser actriz? ¿O el cadáver de Báez Bone comido por los zopilotes? Estas últimas son mis preguntas. Surgen de una lectura parcial, como todas las lecturas, de la poesía de Cardenal. Pero esto no es toda la historia. Hay una razón por la cual Cardenal tomó su derecho de sitio en ese poema que escribí hace 22 años, que Adolfo Báez Bone forma parte de la tierra misma de Nicaragua, que Marilyn sigue alimentando los sueños de los seres humanos ( ahora sabios después de haber leído “Oración Por Marilyn Monroe,”), que detrás del monasterio hay cosas gastadas que también requieren la resurrección, que “el hombre que no sigue las consignas del Partido…será como un árbol plantado junto a una fuente.” (Salmo 1)

Y esa razón se llama Ernesto Cardenal—el que trae el fuego y amor a la tierra, el que nos da la hostia de su visión cósmica y entretenida, el que escribió una vez esta maravillosa epigrama sobre la comedia del amor y la política:

Me contaron que estabas enamorada de otro
y entonces me fui a mi cuarto
y escribí ese artículo contra el Gobierno
por el que estoy preso.

Me pregunto si Dios lo tiene preso o más bien sin la tensión terrenal que viene de ser atado a Dios no hubiera escrito la obra maestra que nos ocupa el día de hoy y todos los días. En fin, Cardenal es hombre y sacerdote, poeta y profesor. Y se viste con sombrero, no tejano, pero con la boina de Che. Y tampoco esto es Cardenal porque enfrente de mi espejo no es la boina ni la barba ni el revolucionario, lo que me queda, lo que me consuelan son sus oraciones por mi, su papel en perdonar el pecado de haber dejado morir a mi prójimo.


El autor da permiso a citas breves de este ensayo. Favor de enviar cualquier cita, referencia a la siguiente dirección de Internet indranmx@yahoo.com

About Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said

I met Edward Said once in New York about 1988, and he was dressed splendidly in a mackintosh that rainy night , smart and engaging about the heart, exile, the Palestinian parliament, New York. I used to be rather shy and mumbled before the great readers of the world, my father, Said. They were close friends through reading (my father championed Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism) although I don't know if they ever met. I remember giving Said my poems about my particular vanished culture, identity, island.

I discovered Darwish in an early poem about an identity card, a powerful subject addressed by writers throughout our planet. I remember Jean-Marie Adiaffi's novel, Carte d'Identite, just one among many reflections on the conversation between the free and caged man and the State.

Stateless now, flying in the air between Earth and Olympus, where does the soul of Mahmoud Darwish find a home?

On October 5th poets throughout the planet gathered to read Darwish's poems. He died like Yeats on a day one did not quite expect, on August 9th, 2008.

Here is Darwish writing about the basic matter of his poetry: home, exile, friendship. He wrote this poem to bid Edward Said farewell. I cite it here to say goodbye as well to Mahmoud Darwish.
Thank you Mona Anis for your beautiful translation.


New York/ November/ Fifth Avenue

The sun a plate of shredded metal
I asked myself,
estranged in the
shadow: Is it Babel or Sodom?

***
There, on the doorstep of an electric abyss,
high as the sky, I met Edward,
thirty years ago,time was less wild then...
We both said:
If the past is only an experience,
make of the future a meaning and a vision.
Let us go,Let us go into tomorrow trusting
the candor of imagination and the miracle of grass/

***

I don't recall going together to the cinema
in the evening. Still I heard Ancient
Indians calling: Trust
neither horse, nor modernity

***

No. Victims do not ask their executioner:
Am I you? Had my sword been
bigger than my rose, would you
have asked
if I would have acted like you?

***

A question like that entices the curiosity
of a novelist,
sitting in a glass office, overlooking
lilies in the garden, where
the hand
of a hypothesis is as clear as
the conscience
of a novelist set to settle accounts
with
human instinct... There is no tomorrow
in yesterday, so let us advance/

***

Advancing could be a bridge
leading back
to Barbarism.../

***

New York. Edward wakes up to
a lazy dawn. He plays
Mozart.
Runs round the university's tennis
court.
Thinks of the journey of ideas across
borders,and over barriers. He reads the New York Times.
Writes out his furious comments. Curses an Orientalist
guiding the General to the weak point
inside the heart of an Oriental woman. He showers. Chooses
his elegant suit. Drinks
his white coffee. Shouts at the dawn:
Do not loiter.

***

On wind he walks, and in wind
he knows himself. There is no ceiling for the wind,
no home for the wind. Wind is the compass
of the stranger's North.
He says: I am from there, I am from here,
but I am neither there nor here.
I have two names which meet and part...
I have two languages, but I have long forgotten
which is the language of my dreams.
I have an English language, for writing,
with yielding phrases,
and a language in which Heaven and
Jerusalem converse, with a silver cadence,
but it does not yield to my imagination.

***

What about identity? I asked.
He said: It's self-defence...
Identity is the child of birth, but
at the end, it's self-invention, and not
an inheritance of the past. I am multiple...
Within me an ever new exterior. And
I belong to the question of the victim. Were I not
from there, I would have trained my heart
to nurture there deers of metaphor...
So carry your homeland wherever you go, and be
a narcissist if need be/
The outside world is exile,
exile is the world inside.
And what are you between the two?

***

Myself, I do not know
so that I shall not lose it. I am what I am.
I am my other, a duality
gaining resonance in between speech and gesture.
Were I to write poetry I would have said:
I am two in one,
like the wings of a swallow ,
content with bringing good omen
when spring is late.

***

He loves a country and he leaves.
[Is the impossible far off?]
He loves leaving to things unknown.
By traveling freely across cultures
those in search of the human essence
may find a space for all to sit...
Here a margin advances. Or a centre
retreats. Where East is not strictly east,
and West is not strictly west,
where identity is open onto plurality,
not a fort or a trench/

***

Metonymy was sleeping on the river's bank;
had it not been for the pollution
it could have embraced the other bank.

***

- Have you written any novels?
I tried... I tried to retrieve
my image from mirrors of distant women.
But they scampered off into their guarded night.
Saying: Our world is independent of any text.
A man cannot write a woman who is both enigma and dream.
A woman cannot write a man who is both symbol and star.
There are no two loves alike. No two nights
alike. So let us enumerate men's qualities
and laugh.
- And what did you do?
I laughed at my nonsense
and threw the novel
into the wastepaper basket/

***

The intellectual harnesses what the novelist can tell
and the philosopher interprets the bard's roses/

***

He loves a country and he leaves:
I am what I am and shall be.
I shall choose my place by myself,
and choose my exile. My exile, the backdrop
to an epic scene. I defend
the poet's need for memories and tomorrow,
I defend country and exile in tree-clad birds,
and a moon, generous enough
to allow the writing of a love poem;
I defend an idea shattered by the frailty
of its partisans
and defend a country hijacked by myths/

***

- Will you be able to return to anything?
My ahead pulls what's behind and hastens...
There is no time left in my watch for me to scribble lines
on the sand. I can, however, visit yesterday
as strangers do when they listen
on a sad evening to a Pastorale:
"A girl by the spring filling her jar"
With clouds' tears,
"Weeping and laughing as a bee
"Stings her heart...
"Is it love that makes the water ache
"Or some sickness in the mist..."
[until the end of the song].

***

- So, nostalgia can hit you?
Nostalgia for a higher, more distant tomorrow,
far more distant. My dream leads my steps.
And my vision places my dream
on my knees
like a pet cat. It's the imaginary
real,
the child of will: We can
change the inevitability of the abyss.

***

- And nostalgia for yesterday?
A sentiment not fit for an intellectual, unless
it is used to spell out the stranger's fervour
for that which negates him.
My nostalgia is a struggle
over a present which has tomorrow
by the balls.

***

- Did you not sneak into yesterday when
you went to that house, your house
in Talbiya, in Jerusalem?
I prepared myself to sleep
in my mother's bed, like a child
who's scared of his father. I tried
to recall my birth, and
to watch the Milky Way from the roof of my old
house. I tried to stroke the skin
of absence and the smell of summer
in the garden's jasmine. But the hyena that is truth
drove me away from a thief-like
nostalgia.
- Were you afraid? What frightened you?ï
I could not meet loss face
to face. I stood by the door like a beggar.
How could I ask permission from strangers sleeping
in my own bed... Ask them if I could visit myself
for five minutes? Should I bow in respect
to the residents of my childish dream? Would they ask:
Who is that prying foreign visitor? And how
could I talk about war and peace
among the victims and the victims' victims,
without additions, without an interjection?
And would they tell me: There is no place for two dreams
in one bedroom?

***

It is neither me nor him
who asks; it is a reader asking:
What can poetry say in a time of catastrophe?

***

Blood
and blood,
blood
in your country,
in my name and in yours, in
the almond flower, in the banana skin,
in the baby's milk, in light and shadow,
in the grain of wheat, in salt/

***

Adept snipers, hitting their target
with maximum proficiency.
Blood
and blood
and blood.
This land is smaller than the blood of its children
standing on the threshold of doomsday like
sacrificial offerings. Is this land truly
blessed, or is it baptised
in blood
and blood
and blood
which neither prayer, nor sand can dry.
There is not enough justice in the Sacred Book
to make martyrs rejoice in their freedom
to walk on cloud. Blood in daylight,
blood in darkness. Blood in speech.

***

He says: The poem could host
loss, a thread of light shining
at the heart of a guitar; or a Christ
on a horse pierced through with beautiful metaphors. For
the aesthetic is but the presence of the real
in form/
In a world without a sky, the earth
becomes an abyss. The poem,
a consolation, an attribute
of the wind, southern or northern.
Do not describe what the camera can see
of your wounds. And scream that you may hear yourself,
and scream that you may know you're still alive,
and alive, and that life on this earth is
possible. Invent a hope for speech,
invent a direction, a mirage to extend hope.
And sing, for the aesthetic is freedom/

***

I say: The life which cannot be defined
except by death is not a life.

***

He says: We shall live.
So let us be masters of words which
make their readers immortal -- as your friend
Ritsos said.

***

He also said: If I die before you,
my will is the impossible.
I asked: Is the impossible far off?
He said: A generation away.
I asked: And if I die before you?
He said: I shall pay my condolences to Mount Galilee,
and write, "The aesthetic is to reach
poise." And now, don't forget:
If I die before you, my will is the impossible.

***

When I last visited him in New Sodom,
in the year Two Thousand and Two, he was battling off
the war of Sodom on the people of Babel...
and cancer. He was like the last epic hero
defending the right of Troy
to share the narrative.

***

An eagle soaring higher and higher
bidding farewell to his height,
for dwelling on Olympus
and over heights
is tiresome.

***

Farewell,
farewell poetry of pain.

Translated by Mona Anis

READING POEMS ALOUD,...on SEPTEMBER 25th

READING POEMS ALOUD


I went to hear poetry the other night in Vancouver and the Muse slammed her fist in my face.
Instead of warbling or shower stall arias I heard the cold, precise clink of scientific observation. I listened to prose presented as a form of poetry, lines about businesses and dreams that have disappeared from the sidewalk.

Every utterance belongs to the great, complex symphony I can hear the initiated say. What is wrong with prose smacking against the ear with a dull drip drip?

The matter with drip, drip, drip is that the sound may drive the poor reader mad, move him to storm into the bathtub and yank the tap off its hinges…and without the tap how can future generations drink the original waters that feed our imaginations, that help us bathe in brooks that babble, in tickling streams, in the raging sea?


If you are to be in Vancouver on September 25th come to Simon Fraser University’s library at their Burnaby campus, to the 7th Floor where the Special Collections are housed, where my friend Tony Power directs a marvelous selection of American and Canadian poetry from the Beats onwards. At 12.30 p.m. I will read there with the California and Vancouver master George Stanley who just published Vancouver: A Poem.

AFLAME: Remembering Black July, 1983

AFLAME

-- remembering Black July, 1983


What is a poem
to a man hiding
in the cellar
of his neighbor’s house,

breathing the way
his hostess spices
lentils and mutton,
while son and daughter

keep quiet,
not one word
allowed
in the mother tongue,

and wife strokes
her neck,
the golden wings
of her thali,

and across the lane
a mob, ruffians,
tontons macoutes,
lynch squad, a few

holy men, politicians
in white vershtis,
light rage
and sew pestilence

in summer fires
that turn houses
to foundation stones
and stoke residents

out to shelter
at neighbors,
St. Peter’s College,
the police station

near Bambalapitya Flats,
before three days
voyage on a ship
hungry to Kankesanthurai

where soldiers
have been swinging
cricket bats
and teenage boys

have stopped
playing cricket,
disappeared,
coerced

into resistance:
this war, these
flames burning
every day since,

and even before,
50 years ago,
1958, when mobs
first enforced

what was deemed
the people’s will.
by unleashing
latent and dark

social energies,
microbes that murder,
that insist on power
as well as alms,

that circulate
in the body politic
and can only
be diffused,

diverted,
distracted, educated,
burned
out of existence

so Ceylon
may take a bow,
step out
of retirement,

save the side
with sixes,
and at the
victory party

speak of boar
and partridge,
gotukola and
other medicinal

greens, traits
of the veddah,
and how
good neighbors

gave food
gave shelter
denied
the goondas?


-- Indran Amirthanayagam, July 16, 2008

UN POEMA Y UNA MANGOSTA

ODA A LA MANGOSTA


En Abidjan
un hombre
me trajo
una mangosta
a casa.

Quise
comprar
el roedor,
guardarlo
como mascota.

Mi esposa
me negó,
le negó
a la mangosta.

Ahora
me quedo
sin esposa
y sin
mangosta.



-- Indran Amirthanayagam, dr) 2008

Where Is Your Village?

WHERE IS YOUR VILLAGE?

The blog acquires new readers yet the blogger has gone to bed. Days pass, then weeks. August. Doldrums. Dog days. Much needed rest. How much rest? Time to take the temperature, play with the children, put them to bed, read about the caterpillar waking up and the elephant who flew to the stars. The blogger will not lie down. His hero, the writer from Miraflores, writes his column every Sunday after a week spent on his latest novel. I come from Colombo, parents from Jaffna, grandparents from Alavetti and Atchuvelli.

I watch the globe and I see an island. The island burns. The island calls with treacle and curd while the bull lashes me with its tail. I wear a sarong, a vershti. I wear sandals made from cow hide. I wake up on a rock where a leopard once swung its head before pouncing on my trembling bones.

I shake my bones. I shake my bones. I shake my bones.

"I am going home. You can come if you want," my grandfather cried, in a white sarong, spectacles heavy on the nose, body thin after a stroke, lucid for a few minutes, at the top of the lane, Rosmead Place, a day's journey by car from home.

I will not rest until the island can go off to sleep. I want to get back to bed, to dream of early morning bathers in a tank built in some ancient century where disputes were resolved astride elephants or under a palaver tree.

The duel may offer a neat solution. A fight among the leadership. With rubber bullets. Queen of Marquesberry's rules.

Alavetti, Atchuvelli, villages on a map, pockmarked with shrapnel, excavated by bombs.  Jaffna, once a fort, a city resilient still, will continue its daily labor of searching for food, a battery, on a bicycle.