Editor’s Note: In our thirty-eighth issue, we present another finalist essay from our third annual literary essay contest in bilingual edition: “Poetry as Rupture of Lexical Solidarities: Notes on Defamiliarization in Recent Latin American Poetry,” by Argentine poet, researcher, and translator Marisa Martínez Pérsico: “All poetry that seeks to innovate should be an attempt to turn against idiomatic nature, fixed meanings, the crystallized forms of language. If it incorporates such elements, it should be in order to transgress them, to invert them, to restructure them. Nor should we lose sight of the fact that we are talking about living languages, so fixed structures and free groupings are subject to diachronic changes: some fall into disuse, other new ones are coined.”
Much of a poem’s novelty lies in its ability to disconcert the reader’s perception, offering her a new vision of the world, as the Russian formalists suggested with the concept of “defamiliarization” (Shklovsky, 1917). The effect of aesthetic deautomization in reader response—which we might call “astonishment”—tends to be concentrated in different levels of poetic expression: semantic, lexical, morphological, syntactic, visual, intermedial, and, more recently, transmedial planes. Here, I will make note of a few cases of poems by Latin American authors in which defamiliarization is found in the rupture of lexical, phraseological solidarities of everyday, colloquial language. These poets turn to the deconstruction of fixed, prefabricated formulas in order to awaken the unfamiliar.
In every language, there exist prefabricated structures that speakers employ in their linguistic production. Along with creative freedom and free combinations, there is a vast reservoir of stable forms: “free discourse” and “repeated discourse,” respectively (Coseriu, 1981). Prefabricated forms are used, among other reasons, in the interest of economy and speed in language processing, and are lexical by nature. A priori, it is risky to suggest that poetry is nothing like this and—at best—is the opposite of the cliché and of repeated, empty discourse (or discourse emptied by the erosion of use) because poetry lacks the eminently communicative aim of the main discursive genres. Its function is aesthetic. Nonetheless, the shared nature of these stable forms means their transgression—through rupture or decontextualization—can provoke surprise, irony, and novelty.
According to Gloria Corpas Pastor in her now-classic manual of phraseology, phraseological units are groupings of two words at minimum that are institutionalized, stable with varying grades of fixedness, and frequently used. The more a combination is used, the more opportunities it has to grow consolidated as a fixed expression, as native speakers will thus store it more easily in their memory. Here I will focus on three categories, starting with locutions. This term refers to a stable group of words that function as a lexical unit with its own meaning, not derived from the literal meaning of the words that make it up. Some examples in Spanish, with approximations in English, include “una verdad como un templo” (“true as the day is long”), “salir a las mil maravillas” (“to go swimmingly”), “ojo de buey” (“porthole”), “caer en la cuenta” (“to wise up”), and “llevar a cabo” (“to carry out) (Corpas Pastor, 1996). These are context-dependent units that require a larger phrasal framework to be understood. Also, importantly, they are invariable: when one word in any such phrase is changed, it loses its overall sense and thereby its idiomatic nature.
One example of this type of lexical rupture is the title of Andrés Neuman’s book Vivir de oído (2018), or “living by ear,” which alters the verbal locution “tocar de oído” or “playing by ear.” The literal sense of this locution is to play an instrument without having studied it, through imitation, while the figurative meaning is to improvise, to act without prior planning. The familiarity of the locution “playing by ear” is replaced by the innovation of “living by ear.” The title is a threshold to what awaits us within the book: the idea that life is improvisation, a score to be played without preconceived formulas. But if we, as readers, lacked the rich phraseological baggage we have built into our “mental library,” we would be unable to discern this association. We might say, then, that phraseologisms allow for a sort of oral, anonymous, and popular intertextuality.
A similar case is the title of the book by Spanish poet Gloria Fuertes, Mujer de verso en pecho (1995), or “woman with poetry in her chest.” Colloquially, the prepositional locution “with hair on his chest,” is used to describe a virile, valiant man. The author disrupts gender and semantics, suggesting a transition from physical to intellectual strength (writing), from man to woman, and from the surface (the hairy chest) to the heart. Chilean poet Óscar Hahn likewise inverts and recontextualizes the verbal locution “ser del otro mundo” (“to be out of this world”) in his poem “A mi bella enemiga”: “…para serte franco / tu belleza no es del otro mundo. / Pero tampoco es de este” [“…to be frank / your beauty is not out of this world. / But nor is it in it”] (1981). This poem’s opening, which seems to downplay the poetic interlocutor’s value by suggesting she lacks notable qualities, is abruptly inverted in the poem’s closing, which sings the beloved’s praises.
As I said, to interpret these verses and titles that display a rupture of prefabricated forms, the reader needs prior knowledge of this repository of popular knowledge that serves as instructions to correctly decode the phraseological game. This claim can be verified by translating these passages from Spanish to other languages; thus, we see that these forms are most often translatable only with functional—rather than literal—equivalents. Umberto Eco gives us a good example in Dire quasi la stessa cosa: “It’s raining cats and dogs” (2003).
The second phraseological category I shall address are paroemias: utterances that hold referential meaning and enjoy textual autonomy, unlike locutions. This group includes sayings, proverbs, aphorisms, maxims, and quotes. We see the disruption of a paroemia in the two lines of “Paisaje interior,” a poem from the book De amor y furia: Epigramísticos by Mexican poet Minerva Margarita Villarreal: “Más vale pájaro en mano / y siento volando” (“A bird in the hand / and I feel flying” (2015), a play on the Spanish version of the paroemia “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” Her wordplay with paronyms “ciento” (“hundred”) and “siento” (“I feel”) and her substitution of the coordinating conjunction for the quantitative comparative give new meaning to the paroemia, thus inverting its original moral advice—realistic and practical—to instead privilege desire and fantasy, though they promise no security. We find another such case in the sonnet by Colombian poet Germán Pardo García, “Entre la espada y la pared,” in which he makes use of the paroemia we recognize in the title, itself the Spanish version of the paroemia “between a rock and a hard place”: “Partí la espada / y escribí en la pared descascarada / cosas que el pueblo a la pared confía” [“I snapped the sword / and wrote on the peeling wall / things the people confide to the wall”] (2002). This poem lays out a passage from the individual sphere suggested by the paroemia (a situation in which a person must choose between two equally unpleasant or unfavorable options) to a collective sphere, allowing us to read the poem in a social key. The inversion or recontextualization of paroemias is also a classic element of the Spanish-language flash fiction and microfiction tradition.
The third and final category I shall address, collocations, could be defined by a line from Jaime Gil de Biedma: “palabras de familia gastadas tibiamente” (“gently used family words,” from “Arte poética,” in Compañeros de viaje, 1959). Technically, they are defined as frequent combinations of lexical units; in other words, groupings with high frequency of use. Unlike the previous categories, collocations are semi-idiomatic constructions that lie halfway between free and fixed constructions. The forefather of this concept was Ferdinand de Saussure, who, in his Course in General Linguistics, referred to usual groupings and phraseological series, although the term itself was coined by Firth in 1957 and later reworked by Halliday and Coseriu. In short, collocations are governed by the principle that the words have, in a sense, a “force field” around them that determines their combinatorial possibilities, which Coseriu called “lexical solidarities” (1977). Some examples in Spanish, well-worn by everyday use and again with English approximations, would be “fuente fidedigna” (“reliable source”), “visión global” (“overview”), “desear fervientemente” (“fervently desire”), “tableta de chocolate” (“chocolate bar”), “enemigo acérrimo” (“sworn enemy”), “desatarse una guerra” (“to break out,” referring to a war), and “desempeñar un papel” (“to play a role”). The lexical solidarity of collocations is considered an oriented relationship, meaning it is not obligatory or fixed, because if one substitutes one of its components for a synonym, the collocation’s meaning is maintained, unlike in the case of locutions and paroemias. As a general rule, we might claim the “best practice” in poetry would be to distance oneself from these solidarities of vocabulary that lead to cliché, trying instead to coin new or less common associations. Nonetheless, I believe if there exists a novel use for collocations in poetry, it is when they are recontextualized, betraying the expectations of meaning (or tone) that grant them their frequency of use in commonplace language.
One example of a novel twist on a recontextualized collocation appears in the poem “Metaldom” by Dominican poet Frank Báez: “Al igual que en los versos / de una epopeya griega / tu columna de humo se alza frente al mar / para aplacar a los dioses, / pero los dioses se fueron ya / y no dejaron sus direcciones. / (…) Recuerda, tú nunca serás la General Motors / y yo nunca seré García Lorca” [“Just like in the verses / of a Greek epic / your plume of smoke rises by the sea / to appease the gods, / but the gods already left / and did not leave their addresses. / (…) Remember, you will never be General Motors / and I will never be García Lorca”] (2008). Here, the “plume of smoke” loses its typical idiomatic use (a fire, a war, a hecatomb celebrated to gain the benevolence of the gods in classical antiquity) and comes to represent, through ironic analogy, the smokestacks of Metaldom, a steel foundry in the Dominican Republic. Another recontextualized collocation appears in the title of the book Asuntos internos, or “internal affairs,” by Honduran poet Murvin Andino (and in its titular poem). This solidary combination is often used to describe some sort of ministry (depending on the country, “ministry of internal affairs,” “ministry of the interior,” etc.), but, in this book, internal affairs seem to allude to poetic writing as a form of meditation on intimacy.
The poems and titles selected in these pages break with the principle of idiomatic nature: a semantic property displayed by certain phraseological units through which the global meaning of said unit is not deducible from the isolated meaning of each of its parts. As I said above, a good way to confirm the idiomatic nature of these structures is to submit them to a literal translation. Contextual dictionaries and translators who use artificial intelligence rely on an ever more fine-tuned repertoire of idiomatic phrases and, generally, manage to arrive at functional equivalences. What they do not succeed in translating aptly (thus far) is the rupture or recontextualization of prefabricated phrases proper to literary language and its idiolects.
All poetry that seeks to innovate should be an attempt to turn against idiomatic nature, fixed meanings, the crystallized forms of language. If it incorporates such elements, it should be in order to transgress them, to invert them, to restructure them. Nor should we lose sight of the fact that we are talking about living languages, so fixed structures and free groupings are subject to diachronic changes: some fall into disuse, other new ones are coined. The same is true of poetry, which is always anchored to History: all poetic novelty is relative because it is subjected to the erosion of time, to its eventual normalization and canonization. Returning to Theodor Adorno’s notion of the historic avant-garde, a rupturist, experimental attitude in art will end up being institutionalized; it can be absorbed and domesticated by the system, thus losing its disruptive power. In a general sense, and beyond this critical exercise in which I have focused on the poetic uses of phraseology, poetry is (or should be) an attempt at astonishment.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
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