Tag: magic realism

The Invisible Presence: Sixteen Poets of Spanish America 1925-1995 (poems selected by Ludwig Zeller; translation and introduction by Beatriz Zeller)

Reading outside our comfort zone stimulates and urges us to experiment with our own writing. The Invisible Presence reawakens the link between dreams and life, between the unconscious and awareness, between magic and reality. These poems (and the introduction to them) speak to nature and love, to politics and change. They push tradition and bridge formal Spanish forms and create space for surreal movements of the 20th century. Read as a writer and push your writing into new spaces.

I first read the sixteen poets — Rosamel del Valle, Enrique Molina, Olga Orozco, César Moro, Enriue Gómez-Correa, Braulio Arenas, Jorge Cáceres, Ludwig Zeller, José María Arguedas, Pablo de Rokha, César Dávila Andrade, Gonzalo Rojas, Aldo Pellegrini, Alvaro Mutis, Eduardo Anguita, and Humberto Díaz-Casanueva — in The Invisible Presence while vacationing last winter in Baracoa, Cuba. It seemed fitting to consider the rhythms, subjects, and shifting poetic traditions while on a Latin American island. Since then, I have read the collection many times, each reading taking me into another sensibility and place.

Beatriz Zeller’s introduction provides insight into Latin American poetry during this critical transitional period. My only wish is that I could have read the poems in Spanish, but, alas, my skill is barely sufficient for the street (and this book does not provide the original poems). Zeller writes that the poets in The Invisible Presence were influenced by “the ideas and forms of the Parnassian poets of France,” freeing them from the “constraints” of traditional Spanish forms. A door opened, allowing the “cadences of indigenous folklore” and the “marvelous” into new work of the twentieth century. Through movements like Mandrágora of Chile, Surrealism grew. These poems lead us through the door, away from traditional forms into magic, landscape, erotica, and voices that connote emotion and conversely to reality where a place of transformation becomes possible.

Of Rosamel del Valle’s poems, Beatriz Zeller writes, “The impact of reading and translating his poetry is comparable to the effect of barely perceptible breeze shaking a tree down to its roots. The irrational, the marvelous…the sumptuous imagery [results in] the invisible worlds…made palpable with a naturalness that makes it irresistible.” Her introduction includes insightful profiles of each of the sixteen poets, a useful guide into reading these unfamiliar authors.

My favourites include Enrique Molina’s “En Route,” 18-stanzas, four-lines each, that reads like a graphic dream (Argentina 1962). The passion in “High Tide” rides through; its form leans toward prose poem, but still there are line breaks:

…
there is no sun no sea the mad pigsty of the ports
    is not there wisdom of the night whose song I hear through
   the mouths of waters and fields with the violence of this planet
   which belongs to us but escapes us

In this poem, like many others in the collection, we experience chaotic nature as well as erotic passion.

César Moro’s “The Illustrated World moves me with every reading (Peru 1938-9). Unlike the separation of a man and woman that is Molina’s subject, Moro celebrates love:

…
To better moisten the feathers of birds
This rain falls from great heights
And locks me alone within you
Inside you and away from you
Like a road fading into another continent

Pablo de Rokha’s operatic prose poem “Diamond Toy” enchants and intrigues (Chile 1929) in a Lolita-like breathless onrush:

…
     she is like the immense fog which causes the sunset’s seeds to grow she sobs and she resembles a sea chick on her bent knees and her compact in a to-and-fro of the world her chest with torn roses
…

These poets deepened my appreciation of what we commonly call magic realism, and they have led me to renew an interest in Latin American writers. This summer, I also visited an exhibit of the poetry of Octavio Paz (Mexico) paired with the art of Robert Motherwell at the Art Gallery of Northumberland, an extraordinary (dare I say magical) journey through 34 pages of soul-moving poetry and lithographs. In September, I read Gabriel García Márquez’s The General in His Labyrinth (Columbia), the story of Símon Bolívar’s last seven months’ voyage down the Magdalena River. (Bolívar was the general who freed Latin America from political Spain and who dreamed of a united continent.) García Márquez takes the well-known legend to mythic levels as his Bolívar drifts, dreams, and reimagines his life from the stupor of illness and approaching death. Now I am on the search for a copy of Dust Disappears by Carilda Oliver Labra (Cuba).

49 The Invisible Presence

Available through your local bookstore or online: The Invisible Presence: Sixteen Poets of Spanish America 1925-1995

 

 

Chasing the Author (The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, translated from Spanish by Lucia Graves)

“I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. It was the early summer of 1945, and we walked through the streets of a Barcelona trapped beneath ashen skies as dawn poured over Rambla de Santa Mónica in a wreath of liquid copper.”

A tumultuous story of intrigue, The Shadow of the Wind leads us on an ever-deepening mystery much like the unpacking of Russian stacking dolls. At times, the novel feels like a gothic thriller, at others like magic realism. Like Gabriel García Márques’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, in Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s novel we find the fabulous mixed with the mundane of everyday. In some ways, the story’s twists and turns reminds me of A.S. Byatt’s Possession (previously reviewed). Zafón reveals Barcelona as Charles Dickens reveals London. His labyrinthine plot winds through the post-war city and through a boy’s curiosity over a writer whose work is systematically being destroyed. The story unfolds in often surreal and soul-wrenching ways.

On Daniel’s fourth birthday, his mother is buried, a victim of cholera. At ten, he still misses her but cannot remember her face. Perhaps to distract him or simply to celebrate the first double-digit birthday, his father (a bookseller himself) takes Daniel to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books:

“This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived d dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens….In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader’s hands. In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend. Now they have only us, Daniel. Do you think you’ll be able to keep such a secret?”

My gaze was lost in the immensity of the place and its sorcery of light. I nodded, and my father smiled.

Daniel chooses a book, The Shadow of the Wind by Julián Carax, a book and its author cloaked in mystery.

As Daniel grows up he is surrounded by books in his father’s bookshop, but obsessed by one. He meets Bea and is smitten. He wants her to understand that Carax’s book is a true story and to know what it means to him:

I began my story with that distant dawn when I awoke and could not remember my mother’s face, and I didn’t stop until I paused to recall the world of shadows…. I told her about my first visit to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and about the night I spend reading The Shadow of the Wind. I told her about my meeting with the faceless man and about the letter signed by Penélope Aldaya that I always carried with me without knowing why…. I told her how…this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.

The Shadow of the Wind weaves through Barcelona to Paris and back to Barcelona. It is a detective story: Daniel in search of Carax; Daniel in search of ghosts. But it is far more than mystery; Zafón takes us into the heart of yearning where Daniel eventually becomes aware that “In Carax’s lost footsteps, I now recognized my own, irretrievable.” This is a story of love and betrayal, of despair and hope.

This is the first book I’ve read by Carlos Ruiz Zafón and loved this post-war glimpse into Barcelona, magic realism, and of course the ode to literature and writers that runs throughout. I echo Entertainment Weekly’s claim that the novel “is ultimately a love letter to literature, intended for readers as passionate about storytelling as its young hero.” It is a book to become lost in and ultimately to come away from enriched.

 

16 The Shadow of the Wind

Available through your local bookstore or online: The Shadow of the Wind