“It must also be said that many naive poets are like these naive professors: they do not understand the game, they have not seen that the poetry ‘you can understand’ is harder, not easier, to make.”
There seems to be no great controversy, be it even unwitting, surrounding the two essays published in Hispanoamérica 15 on the poetry of José Emilio Pacheco. For unfamiliar readers, José Miguel Oviedo offers an informative essay (“JEP: La poesía como ready-made”), which also leads those of us who are familiar to see new things. It is an essay with a thoughtful approach to poetry and its readers. On the other hand, Hugo Rodríguez-Alcalá offers another (“Sobre la poesía última de JEP”) that says more of his tastes than of the texts at hand. Just one example: both cite Octavio Paz’s “game” in Poesía en movimiento, according to which the poetry written by Pacheco (until 1966) was so perfect it was in danger of becoming stagnant. Oviedo points out how, starting in 1969, Pacheco broke away from this first phase and left his safe path behind, instead choosing one full of risks. Rodríguez-Alcalá does not understand the game: he turns a discreet warning into an exhortation, applies it anachronistically, and interprets it backwards: he calls that which he dislikes a stifling limitation, while disliking it precisely because it ruptures limitations. Everything becomes unintelligible, but for a poem like this one not being to his tastes:
Dichterliebe
La poesía tiene una sola realidad: el sufrimiento.
Baudelaire lo atestigua; Ovidio aprobaría
afirmaciones como esta,
la cual por otra parte garantiza
la supervivencia amenazada de un género
que nadie lee pero que al parecer
todos detestan, como una enfermedad
de la conciencia, un rezago
de tiempos anteriores a los nuestros,
cuando la ciencia suele disfrutar
del monopolio entero de la magia.
[Poetry has just one reality: suffering.
Baudelaire attests to it. Ovid would approve
of such declarations.
And this, on the other hand, guarantees
the endangered survival of an art
read by few and apparently
detested by many
as a disorder of the conscience, a remnant
from times much older than ours now
in which science claims to enjoy
an endless monopoly on magic.)
Translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez
Is this not pure discursive prose? The trained ear identifies, in these lines, traditional meters: alexandrines, hendecasyllables. But the composition’s language is lacking in the galvanization, let’s call it, proper to poetic expression. There is, in this language, another sort of “limit” that stifles every possibility of the poetic. It might be said that the author feared he would write a pathetic lament on the extemporaneity of poetry and the rise of science, choosing instead to stick to a simple reflection. The poet simply tells us, refusing to be tainted by emotion, that today’s poetry is no longer of interest; science holds the monopoly on magic. So what? If all of today’s poetry were like that of “Dichterliebe,” who would be shocked at the popular disregard for a literary genre that speaks only in clichés?
It is far from clear what the limits are that, according to Rodríguez-Alcalá, stifle the poetry of this poem. If he said its music was too perfect, the poem is too well-rounded, its syllables fall like a clean, dry stream into a lake that then returns to its silence, his complaint would make some kind of sense: with different resources, Pacheco recreates the perfection of his early poems. But this is not the case; the critic’s ear reaches no further than recognizing a few traditional meters, it hears nothing of the text’s “galvanization,” it misses a certain pathos that sounds, to it, like poetry. One has the right to prefer sickly sweet liqueurs, but not to claim that a dry drink is tasteless.
Nor is it clear what he understands as discursive prose. Read as prose, the poem becomes a highly unusual prose, more poetic than discursive:
La poesía tiene una sola realidad: el sufrimiento. Baudelaire lo atestigua; Ovidio aprobaría afirmaciones como esta, la cual por otra parte garantiza la supervivencia amenazada de un género que nadie lee pero que al parece todos detestan, como una enfermedad de la conciencia, un rezago de tiempos anteriores a los nuestros, cuando la ciencia suele disfrutar del monopolio entero de la magia.
[Poetry has just one reality: suffering. Baudelaire attests to it. Ovid would approve of such declarations. And this, on the other hand, guarantees the endangered survival of an art read by few and apparently detested by many as a disorder of the conscience, a remnant from times much older than ours now in which science claims to enjoy an endless monopoly on magic.]
On the other hand, is it true that “the poet simply tells us, refusing to be tainted by emotion, that today’s poetry is no longer of interest?” Let us take it in steps. What the poem’s first-person speaker says is not said by “the poet,” if we take this to mean José Emilio Pacheco Berny. This amateur error leads the professor to criticize the poem’s title for being in German, a language whose “unfamiliarity frustrates the poet.” And how does he know Pacheco does not know German? From a claim made by a character in a different poem! There is always something at play between a body of work’s characters and its author, but not something so innocent…
“There is a troubling misunderstanding of the poetry ‘you can understand.’ Paradoxically, it turns out that professors have read more carefully, and have ended up understanding better, that which ‘you can’t understand.’”
Dichterliebe (poet’s love) sounds romantic and almost corny. It is the title of a song cycle by Schumann on poems by Heine, but it could well be the title of an operetta. It is the perfect proclamation of a melodramatic opening: “Poetry has just one reality: suffering.” This statement is not and cannot be from Pacheco, who, according to Rodríguez-Alcalá himself, refuses to be tainted by emotion. What Pacheco “says” is neither formulaic nor discursive, but it is there: it is a melancholic vision of the corny poet we all carry within ourselves, with whom we no longer identify and with whom, nonetheless, we must ultimately agree. The art by which Pacheco “says” this consists of casting out and then “reclaiming” a rush of innocent pathos. The character lets loose a pathetic broadside. It is a prosaic recitative, which comes about from a fluid reading of what are, in fact, three verses, of five, nine, and five syllables:
La poesía tiene
una sola realidad:
el sufrimiento.
[Poetry has
just one reality:
suffering.]
Everything that follows is a musical and emotional reconciliation of this corny broadside with Pacheco’s unformulated “declaration.” Note, for example, that the poem has only two periods (the one with which this first claim concludes, and the one at the end). That the poem consists of two integrated and opposing sentences: all the claims made in the second are a discourse on the first. That, in metrical terms, there is a contrast between the first prosaic line and the musical “reclamation” of the following lines, undertaken with the usual combination of heptasyllables and hendecasyllables, interspersed with less common verses in a series of enjambments (7+7; 9; 11; 13; 5+7; 5+7; 5+4; 11; 11; 11).
Said enjambments are difficult and perfect. For example: “Ovid would approve of such declarations” would indeed be discursive prose. It would not be too violent (in prose) to read “Ovidiua probariá.” But, in the poem, the pause that introduces the enjambment elongates the “i,” eliminates the “ía-a” syneresis, cleans up the syllables’ pronunciation and establishes an interesting, fitting suspense in which the musical pause and the pause in the discourse’s thought coincide.
Likewise, the character’s discourse does not “simply tell us that today’s poetry is no longer of interest; science holds the monopoly on magic.” It says something very different: that poetry is suffering, not magic (as has been said so many times) and that, therefore, there will always be poetry. Today’s magician-poet is the scientist, but all science crumples against the pain of Ovid, of Baudelaire, and of that corny paradigm that is the poet wounded by melancholy.
Through this discourse, it turns out that the first line, unacceptable for an uncorny reader (or one who cannot easily be reconciled with corniness), starts to become acceptable. The three final hendecasyllables, which are the opposite pole to the prosaic first line and the well-rounded end of the two heptasyllables with which the second part opens, close out the broadside’s musical and emotional “reclamation,” reconciling us with pain; blunt truth, prosaic banality, and corniness that, nonetheless, move poets. This is not a pathetic poem. Nor is it a poem that should be a poem but does not dare to do so. It is not a reflection (in this regard we must dissent from Oviedo as well, unless his use of the word would consider even a sonata for piano a “reflection”). It is a vision (which becomes literature) on the pain that becomes literature (Ovid, Baudelaire, etc.). Dichterliebe: poet’s love. In German, to be all the cornier.
I regret having to explain this to a professor of literature. There is a troubling misunderstanding of the poetry “you can understand.” Paradoxically, it turns out that professors have read more carefully, and have ended up understanding better, that which “you can’t understand.” It has given them the chance to apply for grants, to research and organize an entire hermeneutic industry. On the other hand, the poetry “you can understand” takes them by surprise. They understand nothing because they think they understand. They abandon the most elementary prudence. They think a poem that is not difficult to read clumsily is a clumsy poem. They think what they find easy to read was easy to write. They feel nothing of what they think they should feel, and a new taste, for which they have no preconceived expectation, passes them by unperceived.
It must also be said that many naive poets are like these naive professors: they do not understand the game, they have not seen that the poetry “you can understand” is harder, not easier, to make. They produce clumsy, easy, tasteless texts. In this regard, Oviedo’s comparison to Duchamp’s readymades is interesting: a urinal presented as a sculpture lends itself to the easy critiques of critics who do not understand, and to easy imitations from sculptors who do not understand. Perhaps there is no solution. Half a century ago, García Lorca complained about those who said they did not understand his poems, and recited verses by Davío, which everyone thought normal, clear, and poetic. For example, from his “Responso a Verlaine”:
Que púberes canéforas te ofrenden el acanto
[May pubescent canephores offer you the acanthus]
Translated by Will Derusha and Alberto Acereda
To which he added: “All I understand is ‘May’…” The situation persists in a different guise. Now too, they do not understand, but they are disappointed and upset because they think they do.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
Gabriel Zaid, “La poesía que sí se entiende,” in Leer poesía, in Obras de Gabriel Zaid Vol. 2, 2nd ed.
(Mexico: El Colegio Nacional, 2020), 234-238.
Published with the author’s permission.
