The case for high modernism / late modernism in Spain, being the movement of most vitality, is even stronger than I thought. Where my argument in The Twilight of the Avant-Garde was much more qualified and hedged, I am now prepared to make the case that modernism is a movement that we have not yet caught up with. No more apologies for hard-core late modernism in my next book Fragments of a Late Modernity.

The introduction is titled "Catching Tigers in Red Weather." Basically, the point here is modernism is still the strongest game in town, and that a full reckoning of the movement could not happen until much later. No one, single reader in 1930 could have had access to Pessoa, Cavafy, Rilke, Lorca, H.D., Vallejo, Mayakovsky, Stein, Williams, Breton, all at the same time. We're lucky even now to find a grad student who knows even the basics of modernism. Modernism, historically, was and is fragmented. Any reading of modernism is not a reconstruction of some knowledge that existed in 1930, but a recuperation of a past that never happened. Literary history is our own invention, but we have ample material with which to work.

Nor did modernism end in 1930, or 1939, or 1960. It was only something called "postmodernism" that seemed to put a final point to it. But what was postmodernism except a continued recuperation of the modernist heritage in all its richness?

So after the introduction, I will have two chapters on Lorca. Nothing to do with Apocryphal Lorca, but an attempt to recuperate him within international modernism and connect him with a later Spanish poetry that seems to neglect him.

After that, three chapters on the Zambrano / Valente nexus, two of which I've already written, so that should be easy.

The final section consists of four chapters. I wrote my dissertation on Claudio Rodríguez, but that was twenty years ago. It's time for me to revisit the strongest Spanish poet of our time. Another chapter on Gamoneda, which I've also already written.

A chapter that tentatively will address the work of Núñez and Ullán. A final one devoted to OGV.

I've written 3 of 8 chapters, plus an article in Spanish containing some of the ideas for the first Lorca chapter.

Here are my worries:

The book will be boring.
It will keep me from more interesting projects.
Nobody will read it.
The book will be too much a repetition of TWOTAG and AL.
I won't find a publisher.

(125)

*Olvido García Valdés. Esa polilla que delante de mí revolotea. 2008. 444 pp.

This second one percent of the 9000 books is taking me a bit longer, especially when I read Collected Works like this one, with a preface by our friend the Uruguayan poet Eduardo Milán. I got this from Spain a few days ago--a copy signed and dedicated to me by the author, which was nice. Finally I can see her development in sequential order--some of the earlier books I didn't know as well if at all.

This poet is all about subtlety and nuance. "The moth that flies about before me." I am sensing an article coming on...

***

9,000 books. So 1% is 90, 10% is 900, etc... I define a book as anything between two covers, so a chapbook and a collected works both count the same. Most of my reading is in the standard 70 pp. books. Two books are not mentioned by name in the series, because they didn't register with me, but they still count toward the total. When I finish I will write the book about it, like the guy who read the encyclopedia or the woman who read the OED cover to cover.

(69)

*Olvido García Valdés. Del ojo al hueso. 2001. 116 pp.

I should have a system for giving two stars instead of "just asterisk or no asterisk." But that would get too complicated. This book is amazing. This is in many ways Olvido's best book. I'm not crazy about Anselm Kiefer, to whom she devotes the last part of the book. But I'm glad he inspired one of favorite Spanish poets. I'll just pretend he's a better artist than he is, looking at him through Olvido's eyes.

Nothing reaches her or only
what is not formulated, in formulas
she defends her privacy. Together
we begin to lose each other. I see rooks
in a straight line making
their way to the west. Chance and spider
webs keep up busy, though in a dream
I hear they've come into the house.

[Nada le llega o sólo
lo que no se formula, con fórmulas
defiende su intimidad. Juntas
vamos perdiéndonos. Veo los grajos
que en línea recta hacen
su camino al oeste. Lo aleatorio y tela
de araña no ocupan, aunque en el sueño
oiga han entrado en la casa.]

(Here's another case where I had to indicate the gender of a person before the original poem does. In other words: something reaches "her/him" in the first line. At the end of the third line we have "juntas / vamos." Feminine plural first person plural. So the speaker plus another woman (assuming that we can impose some discursive continuity here and make the person referenced in the first few lines part of the subject of the next sentence.)

Cross your wings, three pairs of wings
--over the head, across the chest and the legs--
as a ballerina lets the others
descend and rest. Because of your wings,
an insect, a messenger figure. Do not twist
your eyes under the cross, a memory
bringing apricots; come, lower
your cup this far down and make
my dry lips able to drink.

[Cruza las alas, tres pares de alas
--sobre la cabeza, ante el pecho y las piernas--,
como una danzerina permite que las otras
desciendan y reposen. Por las alas,
insecto, figura mensajera. No tuerzas
bajo la cruz los ojos, memoria
que porta alboricoques; ven, baja
hasta aquí tu copa y haz que puedan
beber mis labios secos.]

The translation has to disambiguate the verb form. "Cruza las alas," making it a command form where in the original it could be a simple third person verb: "He/she/it crosses the wings." This kind of ambiguity is systematic in Olvido's poetry. On the other hand, "las otras" [the other female dancers] becomes simply "the others."

I am getting more and more into the poetry of Olvido García Valdés. There are three stages in reading. (1) It's interesting but I don't really get it. (2) It just keeps getting better and better. (3) Discrimination. Some poems are more interesting than others; some flaws might emerge; both positive and negative aspects become sharply delineated.

I'm at stage 2 now with her. What I like most is the way my thoughts adopt themselves to the meditative rhythm of reading. It takes you to another place.

***

Julia learned to play "St. Thomas" along with Sonny Rollins. (Just the melody for now, not the entire solo!) It's perfect for an eleven-year old because it is both simple and hip. You have to come in on the and of one so it's a little tricky. The trumpet plays an octave above the tenor sax. Then she learned "Moritat" from the same album (Saxophone Colossus.) (The tune is "Mack the Knife" but with an alternate title.) The same thing: simple and melodic, but extraordinarily hip, to get that phrasing right. It would have been a little easier if we'd had written music, but it's good ear-training to learn it from the recording. Plus it's fun to play along. I can find the notes on the piano and transpose to tell her what the notes are supposed to be. Her ear is better than mine, but notes are easier to find on the piano because you can "see them" in relation to one another.

A book read and reread
appears in her hands
as in alien hands. She fixes
in the tree-top the image
of emptiness, breathes calmly, raises
branches and leaves to the lung's rhythm,
they descend. She speaks a few
repeated words, consolation
seeks, knows that feared
animals find the one watching for them.

--Olvido García Valdés / (trans. JM)

[Un libro que leyó y releyó
aparece en sus manos
como en manos ajenas. Fija
en la copa del árbol la imagen
del vacío, respira sosegada, alza
ramas y hojas con ritmo de pulmón,
descienden. Dice algunas
palabras repetidas, consuelo
busca, sabe que animales
temidos hallan a quien los acecha.]


Cognates with Spanish original: aparece, ajenas, fija, ritmo, descienden, repetidas, consuelo, animales. I like preserving cognates because I think poets are thinking of the etymological substrate. What if I said "shows up in her hands / as in someone else's hands." Or "to the beat of her lungs."

The gender of the character in the poem is revealed in one participle, sosegada, in line 5. I've had to put it in the second line and again in the third. English wants a subject pronoun, though I've got away with using only two.

This is significant because Olvido likes not to reveal the "subject" when it is not necessary, even though this subject is often implicitly female. My students wanted to always claim that the subject was female even when not specified, but the gender indetermination is a meaningful technique in its own right.