Review of Claudio Rodríguez, Collected Poems, Trans. Luis Ingelmo and Michael Smith

Shearsman Books, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-84861-009-5. 414 pages. Bilingual Spanish-English.

Road Building

The English poetry highway is on the whole insular and gridlocked, with well-policed toll gates and numerous speed cameras. I’m not talking about the readership here — reading habits are rich, varied and unclassifiable. What I mean is that access to visibility is tied up in a handful of names who receive curriculum attention, race the festival circuits endlessly, and actually, on occasion, get a chunk of hard cash in their marketing engines, rather than relying on the pedal power output of our brilliant (and somewhat insane) small press editors. I state this as fact, at the beginning of this review, so I can move on. Any criticisms or questions, please direct them to Horizon’s editor. [Thanks, George. Ed.]

Many questions therefore spring to mind, when receiving a book like the Collected Poems of Claudio Rodríguez for review. Foremost in my mind was the thought that this book shouldn’t exist on today’s English poetry map. It fits in neither on the performance-festival-open-mic circuit, nor on the traditional middle-class-glass-of-wine-and-polite-applause circuit, which is to say, anywhere in the rich and varied terms that the media describes the poetry world with. So why does Rodríguez’s Collected exist in English now? It’s an aberration, surely.

Writing recently in the New Yorker, Zadie Smith (humour me, she’s married to a poet and this will at least explain the abundance of road-based metaphors I’ve used so far) very eloquently outlines a divide in contemporary literature: “a breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked.” This is not only a well-grounded assertion in English poetry, but also a statement that can be reasserted, with minor adjustment, in connection to the attitudes of many specialist publishing industries. In poetry, the short lyric has had freedom of the highway. The eighty-page (or thereabouts) single author collection has dominated. In academic fields, the monograph of 250 pages, and the journal article of 20 pages, has had freedom of the highway. In translation publishing, one translator cruises the motorways of each country, towing behind them trailers full of immigrant writers trembling in dark compartments, desperate to cross into the elusive, Anglophone markets.

The publication of Rodríguez’s poetry in English, then — a book with no predetermined audience within range of the publisher, and a four hundred page heft to it (half of which, the original Spanish, most readers would barely glance at) — comes about despite a very specific and, some might say, detrimental, characteristic of the poetic landscape. The real aberration is not this book — far from it, Rodríguez is a wonderfully talented poet, despite my reservations, which I’ll discuss shortly — but the conditions of the marketplace that leads a publisher to release such a title in such a way that it cripples the book’s chances of reaching a wider audience.

I don’t mean to sound unfair to the editor, or the translators. It’s clear from the outset that the book’s target market is the specialist on Rodríguez’s writing. He only has three titles available in English; this edition is preceded by two academic studies of the poetry, published a decade and two decades before this book, respectively. From the perspective of market-oriented publishing, any collected edition is for the obsessive, the already-converted, so the issue is only marginally one of selecting what poetry goes in to the book. Instead, definitive editions, such as of Ted Hughes’ work, or of John Clare’s or Elizabeth Jennings’ — even of JH Prynne’s work — must be beautiful doorstops, that will sit on shelves, gathering dust, perhaps read once through by the most dedicated fans, but otherwise dipped into on whims, satisfying the reader’s urge to have everything. Never mind the intensely hard work the editor puts in to deciding whether an item on a scrap of paper (yes, someone really does read everything), or whether that out of print and god-awful juvenalia, really need to make the final cut; never mind the labour of translation that a poet like Rodríguez endures. Leave all this nuance aside; the reader wants the sense of ‘definitive’, as close to authenticity as the book’s binding, design and typesetting will allow.

Claudio Rodríguez’s Collected Poems has an ugly cover. The monotone mauve photograph is grainy, pixellated; the long blurb on the back could serve as an introduction, there’s so much in it, though it tackles head-on the poet’s importance in relation to his peers. This is judging the book by its cover; step inside and it’s clear from the off that this is a definitive book. This is the only book in English by Rodríguez any reader will need for a long time, showing clearly the arc of his career and the building quality of his writing, book by book. This is also the only book any reader is likely to see for a long time because of the lack of market, and not for the lack of beautiful writing.

Anything I could say about what I found in the poetry has already been said, and eloquently, by the translators, Luis Ingelmo and Michael Smith. They express the mystical secularism, the philosophical Romanticism and the French surrealism that characterise Rodríguez’s writing in their generous and thorough introduction. They situate the poet in relation to his European ancestors and contemporaries. They describe the pitch and tone of particular words, the impact of certain poems — such as ‘Espuma’ — which epitomise certain aspects of his oeuvre. To be honest, I only skimmed it after I’d read the poetry and I skipped most of it even then. I’m not a part of the only possible audience for this book — the academic one — and I wanted to make my own mind up. It’s not merely a coincidence that my ideas chimed with those expressed in the introduction; the translators have covered all the key influences excellently, and then some.

I was just exercising my prerogative as a reader to make my own mind up. My reaction to his first book, Gift of Inebriation, was that it was steeped in Romantic nature writing. Published when Rodríguez was nineteen years old, the collection is passionate, but loose, full of first person, free verse musings that wouldn’t be amiss in Lyrical Ballads, and would sit well alongside the tone of Keats’ Odes. The translation at this stage in the book seems somewhat bumpy, as if there isn’t quite enough passion in the structures of the Spanish poems to provide an English version with the rhetorical energy the poet is aiming for.

By the second collection, the poet has matured fast, but at twenty-four is still youthful. There are poems that get the heart racing, in translation and in the original, though the theme is predominantly the same. An issue of tone has shifted somewhat in the original. The poet is more definite about what he wants to say; the first person voice is now coupled with a second person voice, as if to show that the narrative voice has chosen who it is addressing. You might say an awareness of audience has set in, and it is interesting to see how Rodríguez copes with this intrusion. The philosophical undercurrent is much stronger, the speaker more confident about stepping forward in front of the subjects that have caused the occasion of the poem, to make leaps of meaning. The hieratic voice is clearer.

By the third collection, Alliance and Condemnation, the poet has come of age. Finally I will give you some of the poetry:

It’s not old women’s sayings
nor matter of eyeless needles or headless
pins. It doesn’t burst,
like salt in a fire, this simple
spell, this old
curse …

There, where the lottery
of the sense seeks
property, there, where
being curdles, in that
living stamen, witchcraft
lodges.

(‘Witches at Midday (Toward Knowledge)’)

This is the first poem in his third collection and where I thought this compendium should have started. The poet emerges from behind the scrim, where he had performed the silhouette of a poet. Leaving aside the clunky wording in the opening (and, sadly, the translators’ need to convey every ‘it’ in the original, throughout the book, at times to the detriment of sense) this first poem trumpets and stamps its foot entirely to its own rhythms.

Utilising the list form beautifully, working within this negative, denying structure of logic, the poet grabs with both hands the alien, mutable, magical sense of life and bottles it in a poem that neither reduces, nor ironically gives up on the impossible strangeness of it. Place this poem against any number of contemporary poems that try to capture the magic of being alive, and they’re all left looking like an unfinished parody of Charles Schultz. Where many poets might well simply shrug their shoulders and fail to express the inexpressible, here it is, glorious, richly-voiced and imagined, metaphor bursting and pushing at the edge of sense, moving smoothly from philosophical reflection to solid image, the thing itself.

The voice noticeably shifts gear once again, going up a notch, from the intimate address in the second book to a public, almost political, first person plural. The poet knows what he wants to say and he has earned his audience. There are moments when the voice narrows in, as if the speaker has suddenly paused mid-lecture to draw a bead on you just long enough to make you feel as if you and you alone are being addressed by the poem. The trick is wonderfully liberating and also liberal; it forced me, time and again, to draw on personal memory, to associate the sentiment in the poem with myself. I was given the chance to take ownership of these poems.

There are duds here, of course, moments when the poet has allowed the understanding of poetry in the earlier books to carry through. There’s something of the modern ‘workshopped poem’ to them by this stage of his ability. I was reminded of one of Rodríguez’s Greek contemporaries, Titos Patrikios, who developed his craft in an island prison camp under Yiannis Ritsos. Ritsos would set his little coterie a theme each day — ‘the sky’, ‘the sea’, the island they were on — and the poets would meditate on the theme and produce the kind of reflective ponderings that Rodríguez is so fond of. The joy in these particular poems is in finding how far the poet can stretch the imagination on the subject and Rodríguez certainly roams far, folding disparate associations with great competence. They aren’t failures in what they intend, but to my ear and eye seem to be exercising muscles and could easily have been lost from the book this should have been.

The later two collections begin to return to earlier techniques in a more controlled fashion, showing the poet’s maturity as he assimilates his practice, comes to terms with himself and his poetry. There’s more of the same, in places, but the maturity of practice is visible by virtue of the form of a Collected edition. This is probably the best argument against the reservations I have about the book: that it provides an overview of a single author which no other book can do. The interest here is more than academic; there are hints of an imaginative autobiography, as the poet’s moods, his desperation and passion, his joy and wonder, fluctuate.

I noticed this initially in the third book’s increasing concerns with social themes. The ‘fibres’ of community are given greater attention; the images of grain become a metaphor for togetherness, the many people of the rural landscapes and settlements that Rodríguez is in love with. Images of work, of reaped rewards, vie with injustices — often urban ones — that take urbanity as their target:

so much orphanhood, the bitter, harsh poverty
of this silent building that is almost
in the countryside and lodges
a vivid, vibrant sowing …

And you’re alone,
you, night, crazed with justice,
stunned with mercy,
above this quivering neighbourhood to which no one
will come

(‘A Night in the Neighbourhood’)

The poem draws its flow through long chains of thought, ideas folding and mingling in the energy of the voice’s stream. It seems no issue that even these brief lines are ebullient with ideas of town and countryside in conflict; liminality; people as grass; justice and poverty. The language is simple but the ideas are rich and, by association, the poetry becomes more than the sum of its parts.

The final book is the voice of a grand master preparing for death. There is something indulgent about poetry so full of life, even at its most morbid, but the fearlessness of the writing reaches its zenith here. The poems grow longer, the narrator soars from idea to idea, but at the same time, the language is distilled. In the ‘Second January Interlude’ Rodríguez writes about witnessing “a crucifixion from behind. I smell now / like this resin, like this sawdust without dust” (‘Ballad of a 30th of January’). The poet seems to attempt self-redemption through language, but also prefigures his own death in an astonishingly self-aggrandizing fashion. It seems neither a late turning to religion for sanctuary, nor a metaphorical adoption of Christ’s death, in light of the earlier, almost too-blunt phrase, “Believing / is painful.” The imagination is applied to philosophy to push back the limits of how the world might be seen by others.

Rodríguez’s strengths as a poet are many, but what captivated me above all is his ability to roam. Sure, his first collection is born out of long walks through Castile’s countryside and the rhythm is distinct in the poetry, but there is also the sense of the mind roaming, with purpose, further than others will go. His influences, his reading, lead to a collaging effect in his work; at times I was reminded of Odysseas Elytis in how he re-enacts French surrealism for his own experiences; at others, Eliot’s higher modernist style slips through. The Romanticism of his writing is obvious, but he also draws on folk traditions, short lyrical moments, references nursery rhyme and local ballad in his rhythms and even directly at times. There’s something generous in this ranging; the poet isn’t claiming greater authority by this range, but instead offers up the treasures of what can only be a personal obsession, for others to share in and take ownership of.

Perhaps, on one level, I’m kind of pleased to have read this book for how it sets me apart from others. Reading, as an activity, is one that defines people, creates and explains the individual. This is apparent in Rodríguez’s life and work, and I felt some of that having clawed my way through this mountain edition of a poet I had never heard of. And yet, I wonder if this title isn’t too generous in what it offers, to the detriment of the poet and, perhaps, potential readers. I am thinking about the poetry I read in this book and the poet I now want to encounter after reading.

Claudio Rodríguez could be one of the best European poetry treasures we have from the second half of the twentieth century. Spanish poetry’s influence beyond its borders seems to have stopped after the Generation of ‘27. This book is a landmark publication but I can’t help feeling that it won’t be the title to establish the poet’s reputation. I have as much my own laziness to blame as market forces. That Rodríguez’s Collected Poems are now available for readers in English is both a sign of poetry’s ability to flourish, despite market forces, but also a sign that reading habits — my own included — are not always amenable to the inconsistencies that come from an all-encompassing edition. It’s the first, brave step towards creating Rodríguez’s reputation beyond academies, but this must lead to something more accessible and partisan, to spark real debate about the poet’s importance.