Editor’s Note: This is one of the three finalist reviews of LALT’s first-ever book review contest, held in 2023. We are pleased to share the selected reviews in this issue of the journal.
Barcelona: Pre-Textos. 2022. 144 pages.
Adalber Salas Hernández (Caracas, 1987) is one of the most widely recognized poets of present-day Venezuelan and Iberoamerican literature. His poetic oeuvre is made up of eleven verse collections to date, as well as translations and essays featured in other books. His most recent work is 2023’s El mar atrás del mar.
Nuevas cartas náuticas is Salas Hernández’s third publication from Spanish press Pre-Textos, after La ciencia de las despedidas (2018) and Salvoconducto (2015). These “new nautical charts” tell us that other, older charts existed before, and any of them might serve to describe a portion of sea; they are a guide with which to sail timeless waters. The book offers us eighty-eight poems, numbered with Roman numerals, most of which recall more antique texts—here, sailing is historical, textual. Their typographic register shifts; free verse and prose become ways to confront currents left behind by other tongues/voices. There are no dividers to group poems together; the poet appeals, instead, to the fragmentary. Their numbered succession is the only thing that lends the book cohesion, a sort of artificial channel within its sinuous poetic currents etched in verse.
Intertextuality—the act of appropriating and reformulating the works of other authors—is a defining trait of this collection. Again and again, it refers through parenthetical quotes at the start of many poems to (hypo)texts belonging to other literary currents. This is a broad-ranging compendium: countless authors have spoken of the sea, whether through myths, seafaring annals, tales told out loud, or laws. These “cartas”—which, in Spanish, could be read as either “charts” or “letters”—feed on all this sediment left behind by time, for the sea is old and the word has always been one way to row across its surface. The act of navigation is perpetual; it feeds on wonder, constantly bearing us to the unfamiliar shores of human history and language.
These poems are spyglasses with which to catch sight of these other lands delineated by the word. In many of them, we find hints of inner currents, such as the artes de marear: manifestations of maritime disorientation in land-dwelling beings. Thus we perceive how a narrative arc—or barque, as the case may be—is (re)constructed, with seasickness, a certain dizziness, as an element inherent to any living being that crosses the sea, whether voluntarily or by force.
“Salas Hernández has written a work interwoven with communicating vessels that join it with other poetic traditions, both classical and otherwise”
Another of these currents salvages Ovid’s Tristia: episodes in the life of a poet who sings from and to exile, a sort of scriptural loop with particular resonance in a certain small tropical country ruled by capricious caesars. The poetic speaker dons the mask of Ovid in several poems, including “LXXXVII / Vestigia linguæ / ‘(Tristia, Publio Ovidio Nasón).’” A possible translation of the Latin phrase would be “Tracks of Language.” Here we read: “Escribiré este poema de nuevo,/ dentro de muchos siglos.// Lo escribiré cuando,/ de tanto haber muerto,/ haya empezado a vivir otra vez…” [“I will write this poem anew,/ many centuries from now.// I will write it when,/ from having died so much,/ I have begun to live again…”]. Here we find a circuit, a closed loop on which the poet will always be an exile who will always write the same poem. This is a readerly current ideal for those who enjoy verse in dialogue with the classics.
Every act of navigation is a voluntary displacement, bound for unfamiliar places. In these Nuevas cartas náuticas, the journey is bound for other means of production, other registers and expressive arts, for the poet knows that all that has been said about the sea cannot be found in books alone. The lyrical subject embarks from his reference points, for he was a viewer/reader before he was an author. As the pages are filled with this singular alphabet, his voice is diluted like just another body in the waters. Then we witness transfiguration, multiplication, acting perhaps like a school of fish that expands to amaze fearful readers, or to scare off certain predators. This poetic process of veiling—multiplying, submerging, or hiding—the voice of the self is a particularity that can be traced through Salas Hernández’s previous books, from Salvoconducto to La ciencia de las despedidas. As Mladen Dolar tells us: “The acousmatic voice is simply a voice whose source one cannot see, a voice whose origin cannot be identified, a voice one cannot place…” There can be no doubt that this “acousmatic voice” is made manifest in certain of these nautical charts, for the poems poured out onto these pages seem to work as sonar, always listening for the echoes of what has been written/said by others. This sounding-of-the-depths is also a poetics, a system of writing in which other voices swim.
A possible new current of reading appears in the poem “LXXXVIII,” where we read: “Dice Clitemnestra en Agamenón de Esquilo:… el mar entero, ¿quién lo podrá agotar?// El mar siempre es un nombre extranjero, el nombre de algo o alguien más…” [“Clytemnestra says in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon:… there is the sea—and who shall drain it dry?// The sea is ever a foreign name, the name of something or someone else…”]. The eternal tongues of the sea are moorings that hold down experience, a voyage through other lives crisscrossed by orphanhood, admiration, and mortality. This is the final poem, with which the book closes: “Nombres ajenos, algunos olvidados, como ensordecidos por la circulación de la carne… Palabras que nos pronuncian aunque no las sepamos.// Y bajo ellas, bajo la historia de estas voces, insistente el agua, su imperio ciego” [“Names of others, some forgotten, as if deafened by the circulation of flesh… Words that speak us though we know them not.// And below them, down beneath the story of these voices, the water persistent, the water’s blind empire”].
The poet puts forth new ways to feel—or have a feeling for—this sea, wide and alien as the world it eclipses. Salas Hernández has written a work interwoven with communicating vessels that join it with other poetic traditions, both classical and otherwise. And this delta of currents, daringly and uncommonly, flows toward an auspicious port, in a time of totalitarian bearings and discourses in Venezuela and other parts of the world.
I am unfamiliar with the sea. I know little of the salt it hoards or the corals that grow within it. Nonetheless, these charts inspire me to weigh anchor and become another presence in its waters. I invite you too to follow the coordinates the poet has written on these pages. These charts house the promise of a reading experience full of unpredictable tides, contemplative stills, fanciful constellations, expressions in strange languages, and ship’s plans sunken in time. This review outlines just a few ways we might sail—or read uncharted depths—in a book of poems called Nuevas cartas náuticas.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
