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Destruction or Love: Vincente Aleixandre
Translated by Robert Mowry
Susquehanna University Press, Price: $49.50
A book about erotic love and death,
Destruction or Love depicts a
highly-charged universe, deeply
eroticized in the tradition of other
great mystical poetries ...
Like other poets of my generation, I came to the poetry of Vicente Aleixandre a quarter century ago primarily through the editing efforts of Robert Bly-who favored the Surrealism of the Spanish and Latin Americans over that of the French-and through the translations of Bly, Lewis Hyde, and Willis Barnstone and David Garrison. Aleixandre's 1977 Nobel Prize for Literature brought international recognition to his pioneering and long-laboring voice, yet until recently, only selected cross-sections of his work have been available in English translation, and even those have been far too few for a poet of his monumental stature.
Aleixandre, a member of Spain's fabled 'Generation of '27," helped forge a dynamic new poetry in pre-Civil War Spain, along with Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, Jorge Guillen, Miguel Hernandez, Federico Garcia Lorca, Pedro Salinas, and others. That Aleixandre is less known to American readers than some of these other figures owes as much to the challenge of his deeply internal mode of Surrealism as it does to the fact that unlike most of the poets who survived Franco's onslaught, he did not embark on outward exile but remained in Spain during Franco's Falangist regime. Never a political poet, Aleixandre spent the first two years of the War bedridden with tubercular nephritis, with continued bouts of health for the rest of his life. Always adhering to his democratic ideals, he embarked on an 'inner exile" after his convalescence, and his home served as a meeting ground for numerous younger poets who came to meet him and seek some embodied connection to that enormous poetic flowering of the 1920s and early 1930s. Thus, Aleixandre's presence helped guide a remarkable new generation of poets, Blas de Otero among them.
For years the only translations of Ateixandre's available in English were selections of his work, the most available being Bly's and Hyde's Twenty Poems (The Seventies Press), Hyde's more expansive A Longing for the Light (Harper and Row), and Bamstone and Garrison's A Bird of Paper (Ohio University Press). Finally in 1987, a complete volume of Aleixandre's'poetry, Shadow of Paradise (his most widely read work, begun at the close of the Spanish Civil War and published in 1944) was translated by Hugh A. Harter and published by the University of California Press. It took a decade from Aleixandre's award of the Nobel Prize for that to occur. Now, Destruction or Love, perhaps Aleixandre's most pivotal book of his early period-and certainly his most experimental and surreal-has been translated in its entirety. This is certainly a long-awaited event to be celebrated for some time to come. While a limited edition of selections from this work was Published in 1976 (translated by Stephen Kessler), the publication of the entire 54 thematic-related poems not only grants the reader access to the foundations of Aleixandre's middle and later periods, but it elucidates more fully the poetic and cultural context that shaped a generation of Spanish experimentalists.
Born in Seville in 1898,Aleixandre, the son of a civil engineer, moved in 1902 with his family to Malaga, where he spent his child- hood amidst the sunny Mediterranean seascapes that would later shape his poetry, infusing it with a lush yet roughly burning light. When he was II, the family moved to Madrid (where he would remain the rest of his life), and he completed high school by age 15, entering the University of Madrid the following year and graduating in 1920. In 1917 he discovered poetry during a mountain village vacation in Avila, encountering the work of that great Nicaraguan modernist Ruben Dario as well as that of the two monumental poets of Spain's 'Generation of 1898,"Antonio Machado and Juan Ramon Jimenez. His biography is significant to an understanding of his verse, for Aleixandre became seriously ill in 1922, becoming a semi-invalid; he then retreated into solitude and began to devote himself to poetry. This sickness, retreat, and solitude parallels the journey of the great seers, lending a mystical, almost pantheistic, air to Aleixandre's verse.' Solitude and meditation gave me awareness, "Ateixandre has written, "a perspective which I have never lost: that of the Solidarity with the rest of mankind." This is a core paradox at the center of Destruction or Love and throughout his oeuvre: that solitude and meditation enlarges one's sense of self to embrace not only all of humankind but also the vast workings of nature and the cosmos.
Indeed, this sense of an underlying generative yet tenuous (and often violent) unity permeates the pages of Destruction or Love, long considered Aleixandre's earliest poetic masterpiece-and, along with Lorca's Poet in New York, one of the most disturbing, -daring, and intense pieces of 20th-century Spanish literature. As AleLxandre's fourth book, begun in 1932 and first published in 1935 just prior to the Civil War, Destruction or Love demonstrates the poet's capacity of language, his cosmic reach into the consciousness of seahorses, sharks, ocean muck, panthers, jungles, beetles, wasps, starlight, and his ever-present birds-as well as his intuitive understanding of Freud, whom he started reading during his convalescence. A book about erotic love and death, Destruction or Love depicts a highly-charged universe, deeply eroticized in the tradition of other great mystical poetries such as those of Bhakti and Tantric yogi-poets. Like those poets, Aleixandre continually names the dualities of primeval experience in order both to demonstrate a vigorous conflict and commingling and to neutralize opposites, as well as (in some cases) to use the magical power of naming as the very method of destroying opposition and dissolving disunion. Yet, unlike those poetries, the surreal manner with which Aleixandre does this naming heightens the mysterious force of nature, often cloaking it in a language that belies rational explanation and that reinforces the dreamlike aspect of that power and the similarly intuitive practice the perceiving subject must use to penetrate that veil across the expanse of psychic interconnection and cosmic identification.
The title itself presents us with an 'either/or," yet it can also be read as a tenuous consonance (that two contradictions can collide in, yet survive, the same sentence), as well as an ultimatum instructing readers to choose love over their own demise. It is his practice of layering one seeming opposite over another that is Aleixandre's primary methodology, a practice that rejects the scientific objectivism of Hume and others. lake many mystics before him, he explores the fifth, scientifically-neglected element, describing it as a propagating ether in which the destruction of worlds /is a single fiery heart wholly consuming itself." By placing several divergent images alongside one another he equates them, thus evoking a depth of consciousness that can accommodate what Cartesian observation cannot. He tells us,'I want to kill or love or die or give you everything," and that "the kissing time has not arrived ... [it is] late or soon or never.'
One aspect of Aleixandre's discursive practice is to yoke together a series of images with the word 'or,' as in 'nearly tangible phantom / of moon or blood or a kiss at the end'; 'your barrenness of rock or even coal"; and 'felled or reclining body or beach exposed to a gentle wind" The effect is to equalize difference into a relationship that is complementary rather than contradictory (while simultaneously suggesting a level on which opposites, conceived as such, can never meet). In so doing, he extends the Surrealist juxtaposition of distant realities into an 'interpenetration of landscapes," a development Annex Balakian, that great scholar of Surrealism, attributes to Surrealist practice in Central and South America (see her "Latin-American Poetry and the Surrealist Heritage"). Aleixandre's interpenetration of landscapes appears not only hallucinatory but purposeful. His perception of interconnection not only records the velocity of his automatic vision but simultaneously advances the discourse of interconnection as a deliberate method of engaging and dissolving all oppositional thinking. In "Tomorrow I Will Not Live," he depicts the unknowable, as he typically does, in multi-dimension- al terms whose seeming contradiction again reaches toward dissolution of those very opposites, this time again with the aid of the word "or": "unknown panthers-corpse or kiss/ only shadow or extinguished sound, the day will find me."
In addition to the generative quality of the word "or," the redemptive image of the kiss enters many of these poems, nearly always as the embodiment of the possibility of a new language, an eroticized psychic struggle that creates a new, more physical "naming' 'While early in the book Aleixandre proclaims, "I am a nameless warmth moving over cold rocks' and that there is "a moaning solitude transmitting its sadness,' the erotic moment allows the poet 'to feel my flesh dissolve against your incinerating diamond." Still, it's the often violent erotically-charged universe that lasts, and it lasts only because of the human capacity to embody desire in erotic action, thus connecting to the oneness of cosmic plurality: 'your kiss endures like stars' impossible collision.'
Like the vastness of creation itself, Aleixandre's voice is intimate yet impersonal, almost abstract at times. He compares the intimacy of love to planetary movements,"Like an orbit fated to die in my arms." He speaks tenderly, almost physically, of a 'contagious sadness / amid the desolation of nothingness' ' He describes the "human voice' as "painful," comparing it to 'the rooster's feathers ... with so many colors,' to 'the yellow soul . . . or a slow hazelnut," to 'the deceitful wasp. Through his customary accretion of images, the abstract becomes concrete, as he convincingly demonstrates in concluding his great poem "Human Voice":
Pain is painful. I love you.
It hurts, It hurts. I love you.
Earth hurts or a fingernail,
mirror In which these letters are reflected.
The embodiment is a result of numerous images of 'mouths' and Tears, "again demonstrating language as the source of both sadness and psychic wholeness. "Beetle" opens: 'Behold at last also finding its way into language the tiny beetle, / saddest of moments,' and Aleixandre later unpacks 'love' as the redemptive quality of this sadness, naming it as 'the secret of greenness weighing heavily within an ear. "The love and sadness the poet hears, however, is completely resolved in a later poem, "There is More," into a necessary union where "only love exists,' primarily because of the human capacity to speak and keep silent, and it is the integrity of knowing this balance that grants access to healing:
You and I feel being born on our mouths what is not alive,
what an indestructible kiss is when mouths are wings,
wings smothering us while our eyes are closing,
while golden light remains inside our eyelids.
Come, come flee with me like love in silence;
life like the warmth of everyone alone, ...................................
like one body or two souls, like a final bird.
Ultimately, AleLxandre's ever-present and totemic birds thickly populate this book and enable the poet to imagine the shamanic journey between dark and light, pain and joy, destruction and love, recasting seeming contradictions into a visionary path of mystical complexity. This gorgeously produced volume, translated by Robert G. Mowry, is also lushly illustrated by Mowry's original artwork, which benefits from the book's larger format. Mowry's simple yet profound black and white drawings foreground Aleixandre's struggle to neutralize the seeming contradiction of dark and light and appropriately lend an almost primordial feel to this wild, complex collection of poems. Also, unlike most other translated works, the companion poems are not on facing pages, but follow one another-not only lending necessary space in this larger format to Aleixandre's often dense, long poems, but also adding a further dimension to the layering of Aleixandre's "oppositions",' in this case that of the Spanish and English following one mother and interacting, say, as 'new' poems as opposed to the .same' poem competing on opposite pages. The translations are fitting renditions of Aleixandre's incredible power, even if they are more formal, at times, than the translations of Bly and Hyde. They offer a somewhat more removed version of Aleixandre's urgency, which isn't a bad thing given his paradoxical play and intimate reach into the impersonal nexus of universal forces. We are fortunate to have them alongside the translations of others, and even more fortunate to have, finally, the complete translation of one of the most important books of Surrealist literature.
Destruction or Love depicts a
highly-charged universe, deeply
eroticized in the tradition of other
great mystical poetries ...
Like other poets of my generation, I came to the poetry of Vicente Aleixandre a quarter century ago primarily through the editing efforts of Robert Bly-who favored the Surrealism of the Spanish and Latin Americans over that of the French-and through the translations of Bly, Lewis Hyde, and Willis Barnstone and David Garrison. Aleixandre's 1977 Nobel Prize for Literature brought international recognition to his pioneering and long-laboring voice, yet until recently, only selected cross-sections of his work have been available in English translation, and even those have been far too few for a poet of his monumental stature.
Aleixandre, a member of Spain's fabled 'Generation of '27," helped forge a dynamic new poetry in pre-Civil War Spain, along with Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, Jorge Guillen, Miguel Hernandez, Federico Garcia Lorca, Pedro Salinas, and others. That Aleixandre is less known to American readers than some of these other figures owes as much to the challenge of his deeply internal mode of Surrealism as it does to the fact that unlike most of the poets who survived Franco's onslaught, he did not embark on outward exile but remained in Spain during Franco's Falangist regime. Never a political poet, Aleixandre spent the first two years of the War bedridden with tubercular nephritis, with continued bouts of health for the rest of his life. Always adhering to his democratic ideals, he embarked on an 'inner exile" after his convalescence, and his home served as a meeting ground for numerous younger poets who came to meet him and seek some embodied connection to that enormous poetic flowering of the 1920s and early 1930s. Thus, Aleixandre's presence helped guide a remarkable new generation of poets, Blas de Otero among them.
For years the only translations of Ateixandre's available in English were selections of his work, the most available being Bly's and Hyde's Twenty Poems (The Seventies Press), Hyde's more expansive A Longing for the Light (Harper and Row), and Bamstone and Garrison's A Bird of Paper (Ohio University Press). Finally in 1987, a complete volume of Aleixandre's'poetry, Shadow of Paradise (his most widely read work, begun at the close of the Spanish Civil War and published in 1944) was translated by Hugh A. Harter and published by the University of California Press. It took a decade from Aleixandre's award of the Nobel Prize for that to occur. Now, Destruction or Love, perhaps Aleixandre's most pivotal book of his early period-and certainly his most experimental and surreal-has been translated in its entirety. This is certainly a long-awaited event to be celebrated for some time to come. While a limited edition of selections from this work was Published in 1976 (translated by Stephen Kessler), the publication of the entire 54 thematic-related poems not only grants the reader access to the foundations of Aleixandre's middle and later periods, but it elucidates more fully the poetic and cultural context that shaped a generation of Spanish experimentalists.
Born in Seville in 1898,Aleixandre, the son of a civil engineer, moved in 1902 with his family to Malaga, where he spent his child- hood amidst the sunny Mediterranean seascapes that would later shape his poetry, infusing it with a lush yet roughly burning light. When he was II, the family moved to Madrid (where he would remain the rest of his life), and he completed high school by age 15, entering the University of Madrid the following year and graduating in 1920. In 1917 he discovered poetry during a mountain village vacation in Avila, encountering the work of that great Nicaraguan modernist Ruben Dario as well as that of the two monumental poets of Spain's 'Generation of 1898,"Antonio Machado and Juan Ramon Jimenez. His biography is significant to an understanding of his verse, for Aleixandre became seriously ill in 1922, becoming a semi-invalid; he then retreated into solitude and began to devote himself to poetry. This sickness, retreat, and solitude parallels the journey of the great seers, lending a mystical, almost pantheistic, air to Aleixandre's verse.' Solitude and meditation gave me awareness, "Ateixandre has written, "a perspective which I have never lost: that of the Solidarity with the rest of mankind." This is a core paradox at the center of Destruction or Love and throughout his oeuvre: that solitude and meditation enlarges one's sense of self to embrace not only all of humankind but also the vast workings of nature and the cosmos.
Indeed, this sense of an underlying generative yet tenuous (and often violent) unity permeates the pages of Destruction or Love, long considered Aleixandre's earliest poetic masterpiece-and, along with Lorca's Poet in New York, one of the most disturbing, -daring, and intense pieces of 20th-century Spanish literature. As AleLxandre's fourth book, begun in 1932 and first published in 1935 just prior to the Civil War, Destruction or Love demonstrates the poet's capacity of language, his cosmic reach into the consciousness of seahorses, sharks, ocean muck, panthers, jungles, beetles, wasps, starlight, and his ever-present birds-as well as his intuitive understanding of Freud, whom he started reading during his convalescence. A book about erotic love and death, Destruction or Love depicts a highly-charged universe, deeply eroticized in the tradition of other great mystical poetries such as those of Bhakti and Tantric yogi-poets. Like those poets, Aleixandre continually names the dualities of primeval experience in order both to demonstrate a vigorous conflict and commingling and to neutralize opposites, as well as (in some cases) to use the magical power of naming as the very method of destroying opposition and dissolving disunion. Yet, unlike those poetries, the surreal manner with which Aleixandre does this naming heightens the mysterious force of nature, often cloaking it in a language that belies rational explanation and that reinforces the dreamlike aspect of that power and the similarly intuitive practice the perceiving subject must use to penetrate that veil across the expanse of psychic interconnection and cosmic identification.
The title itself presents us with an 'either/or," yet it can also be read as a tenuous consonance (that two contradictions can collide in, yet survive, the same sentence), as well as an ultimatum instructing readers to choose love over their own demise. It is his practice of layering one seeming opposite over another that is Aleixandre's primary methodology, a practice that rejects the scientific objectivism of Hume and others. lake many mystics before him, he explores the fifth, scientifically-neglected element, describing it as a propagating ether in which the destruction of worlds /is a single fiery heart wholly consuming itself." By placing several divergent images alongside one another he equates them, thus evoking a depth of consciousness that can accommodate what Cartesian observation cannot. He tells us,'I want to kill or love or die or give you everything," and that "the kissing time has not arrived ... [it is] late or soon or never.'
One aspect of Aleixandre's discursive practice is to yoke together a series of images with the word 'or,' as in 'nearly tangible phantom / of moon or blood or a kiss at the end'; 'your barrenness of rock or even coal"; and 'felled or reclining body or beach exposed to a gentle wind" The effect is to equalize difference into a relationship that is complementary rather than contradictory (while simultaneously suggesting a level on which opposites, conceived as such, can never meet). In so doing, he extends the Surrealist juxtaposition of distant realities into an 'interpenetration of landscapes," a development Annex Balakian, that great scholar of Surrealism, attributes to Surrealist practice in Central and South America (see her "Latin-American Poetry and the Surrealist Heritage"). Aleixandre's interpenetration of landscapes appears not only hallucinatory but purposeful. His perception of interconnection not only records the velocity of his automatic vision but simultaneously advances the discourse of interconnection as a deliberate method of engaging and dissolving all oppositional thinking. In "Tomorrow I Will Not Live," he depicts the unknowable, as he typically does, in multi-dimension- al terms whose seeming contradiction again reaches toward dissolution of those very opposites, this time again with the aid of the word "or": "unknown panthers-corpse or kiss/ only shadow or extinguished sound, the day will find me."
In addition to the generative quality of the word "or," the redemptive image of the kiss enters many of these poems, nearly always as the embodiment of the possibility of a new language, an eroticized psychic struggle that creates a new, more physical "naming' 'While early in the book Aleixandre proclaims, "I am a nameless warmth moving over cold rocks' and that there is "a moaning solitude transmitting its sadness,' the erotic moment allows the poet 'to feel my flesh dissolve against your incinerating diamond." Still, it's the often violent erotically-charged universe that lasts, and it lasts only because of the human capacity to embody desire in erotic action, thus connecting to the oneness of cosmic plurality: 'your kiss endures like stars' impossible collision.'
Like the vastness of creation itself, Aleixandre's voice is intimate yet impersonal, almost abstract at times. He compares the intimacy of love to planetary movements,"Like an orbit fated to die in my arms." He speaks tenderly, almost physically, of a 'contagious sadness / amid the desolation of nothingness' ' He describes the "human voice' as "painful," comparing it to 'the rooster's feathers ... with so many colors,' to 'the yellow soul . . . or a slow hazelnut," to 'the deceitful wasp. Through his customary accretion of images, the abstract becomes concrete, as he convincingly demonstrates in concluding his great poem "Human Voice":
Pain is painful. I love you.
It hurts, It hurts. I love you.
Earth hurts or a fingernail,
mirror In which these letters are reflected.
The embodiment is a result of numerous images of 'mouths' and Tears, "again demonstrating language as the source of both sadness and psychic wholeness. "Beetle" opens: 'Behold at last also finding its way into language the tiny beetle, / saddest of moments,' and Aleixandre later unpacks 'love' as the redemptive quality of this sadness, naming it as 'the secret of greenness weighing heavily within an ear. "The love and sadness the poet hears, however, is completely resolved in a later poem, "There is More," into a necessary union where "only love exists,' primarily because of the human capacity to speak and keep silent, and it is the integrity of knowing this balance that grants access to healing:
You and I feel being born on our mouths what is not alive,
what an indestructible kiss is when mouths are wings,
wings smothering us while our eyes are closing,
while golden light remains inside our eyelids.
Come, come flee with me like love in silence;
life like the warmth of everyone alone, ...................................
like one body or two souls, like a final bird.
Ultimately, AleLxandre's ever-present and totemic birds thickly populate this book and enable the poet to imagine the shamanic journey between dark and light, pain and joy, destruction and love, recasting seeming contradictions into a visionary path of mystical complexity. This gorgeously produced volume, translated by Robert G. Mowry, is also lushly illustrated by Mowry's original artwork, which benefits from the book's larger format. Mowry's simple yet profound black and white drawings foreground Aleixandre's struggle to neutralize the seeming contradiction of dark and light and appropriately lend an almost primordial feel to this wild, complex collection of poems. Also, unlike most other translated works, the companion poems are not on facing pages, but follow one another-not only lending necessary space in this larger format to Aleixandre's often dense, long poems, but also adding a further dimension to the layering of Aleixandre's "oppositions",' in this case that of the Spanish and English following one mother and interacting, say, as 'new' poems as opposed to the .same' poem competing on opposite pages. The translations are fitting renditions of Aleixandre's incredible power, even if they are more formal, at times, than the translations of Bly and Hyde. They offer a somewhat more removed version of Aleixandre's urgency, which isn't a bad thing given his paradoxical play and intimate reach into the impersonal nexus of universal forces. We are fortunate to have them alongside the translations of others, and even more fortunate to have, finally, the complete translation of one of the most important books of Surrealist literature.
George Kalamaras, Rain Taxi, Review of Books, Vol. 9 No.2 Summer 2004 p. 20-22 <Top>
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