In this interview, Mario Montalbetti returns to one of the key points of his recent reflections: the difference between “language” and “tongue.” Starting with this distinction, he follows the tracks of the poem, the verse, their multiple possible assemblages, and the partial materializations between them. This is also a potential entryway into the “thought of the poem,” a proposal through which Montalbetti inquires into the consciousness and/or unconsciousness of works of this nature. The backdrop to this dialogue is made up of his perspectives on the poetic, on the greater or lesser weight of the poet’s biography, on reading and technology, and on the discrepancy—fluctuating and consecrated—between recyclable systems of narrative support.
Victor Vimos: The first time I interviewed you, fourteen years ago in Lima, you said you found it more interesting that César Vallejo was a poet than that he was Peruvian. Nevertheless, it’s hard to read Vallejo without thinking of certain territorial markers: his Quechua-inflected language, his unique form of Catholicism, the injustice so natural to his Andean region, etc. Where might we place these contextual elements, which also dwell within and mark the poet’s work?
Mario Montalbetti: Strictly speaking—and I could be wrong—I did not say I found it more interesting that Vallejo was a poet than that he was Peruvian, but that I found it more significant that he was a poet than that he was Peruvian. I find it very interesting that he was Peruvian due to the conditions in which one writes in this country. The material-intellectual conditions into which one is inserted while writing are obviously indispensable. But also indispensable—and particularly in Vallejo’s case, in Trilce for example—is a certain musicality, a certain prosody, connected with a certain way of speaking Spanish. His being Peruvian was, let’s say, an accident. He could have been Ecuadorian, Bolivian, or Uzbek. And probably, in any one of these historical circumstances, Vallejo would have produced something equivalent to what he produced. I am not unaware of the conditions in which Vallejo or any other poet writes, no. But if we take a step further, and start talking in terms of nationalisms, the whole thing seems less interesting to me.
V.V.: The cultural context surrounding a poet also defines, for example, what is understood to be “a poem.” The general notion is to see it as a set of verses, simple as that. Your work suggests a tension between poem and verses, a possible distancing between them, a potential conflict between them. How do you see that relationship?
M.M.: If we consider the historical circumstances in which we’ve started talking, I believe there’s a difference between what a “language” means and what a “tongue” means. A tongue—as I would use the term—is a construction made by human beings, based on habits, uses, and conventions, but also based on authorities like academies, dictionaries, etc. It is a historical object; it changes over time. For example, there are certain forms of medieval Spanish that are no longer used. This is different from language, which is—as I understand it—a biological object; there are certain biological factors that allow the human being, the Sapiens, to construct tongues. In these terms, one does not speak a “language”; rather, one speaks a “tongue.” But language imposes certain very abstract, very formal conditions upon tongues. In tongues—not in language—the historical circumstances we mentioned at the start of our conversation are revealed. Poets write in tongues; we write in Spanish, in Aymara, whatever it may be. And, in these tongues, we construct the objects we call poems.
Now, the notion that the poem is made up of verses is something we cling to because we’re not quite sure what to cling to. And, allow me to add, in the late nineteenth century many things changed, especially starting with Mallarmé, his poetic practice, his theory of the verse and the poem.
V.V.: How so?
M.M.: Until the nineteenth century, if you wanted to write a poem, you did either a sonnet or a décima or a letrilla, etc. That is to say, you used a structure with a pre-established form. A sonnet can be changed or altered to an extent, but not beyond the rules that define it—rules that are also known to the poem’s reader, who recognizes them and says, “Ah, this is a sonnet, because it has fourteen lines, it rhymes,” etc. And this allowed readers to know if a verbal object was a poem or not. When Mallarmé says, “The poem is no longer a shared object,” since the rules are no longer known to the reader and the poet, what we call “free verse” appears. And it brings a new problem because now, when we read a verbal object, we don’t know if it is a poem or not. There are no preconceived rules to make this determination. So, we have to mentally reconstruct the rules that the poet employed to construct the poem at hand. We accept, for a start, that it is indeed a poem, and then, eventually, we judge it. Thus we come to the terrible question—and it’s a question I hope you don’t ask me—about what makes something a poem. And here I’ll circle back to what you were saying about my claim: the verse seems to be one of the keys to knowing we have a poem on our hands. But the verse cannot be a simple matter of cutting up lines just because. From here on, there is a lot of guesswork on the subject. Giorgio Agamben developed a vision of it that I find interesting; in the cutting of discourse with verse, he sees a discrepancy between sound and meaning.
V.V.: Returning to the relationship you suggest between verse and poem, I have the impression that you see the verse as an unstable unit—one that, semantically, can only be partially decoded, inasmuch as there is a region of the poem, let’s say, that has a traceable meaning within what we call culture. Right? But there are other regions of the poem in which this ability to trace semantically is in crisis, in discrepancy. Are there other ways to trace this relationship between verse and poem? What about, for example, the possibility of seeing them as energetic frameworks, points of contact between auralities? We might think, along these lines, that the poem is not exhausted in its cultural dimension; rather, it surpasses it.
M.M.: Yes. But this unstable assemblage of the energetic part would be found in the prosodic, rhythmic, acoustic part. And that is what moves the poem, in an energetic sense. The poem moves because it sounds a certain way—it may be good or bad, but it sounds. And a footnote: certain people have no ear. Those people cannot write poems. And it’s the first thing you notice. The first thing they should find out in those famous creative writing workshops is if the person has an ear or not. There are texts that are very interesting, very intelligent, very enlightened, but they are not poems because they don’t sound. This is essential for the poem, which can never be separated from song. We can come up with very abstract poems, but in the end there is that thing you call “energetic,” and it’s so powerful that it too produces the discrepancy with the other part, the semantic part. It’s the tension we find at the end of a verse, which shows the idea is not yet concluded, the movement goes on. And it seems the poem should end there, but, semantically, it ends elsewhere, it comes to its conclusion elsewhere. There is something in this discrepancy that announces that the old idea we once had of the Saussurean “sign”—the signifier fit within the signified as if they were two halves of one eggshell—which was called the linguistic sign, doesn’t work in the poem.
V.V.: You’re far from weighing the sign as something essentially adapted, then, and closer to thinking of the sign as something that fits in and negotiates with its circumstances.
M.M.: The linguist’s idea in general is that prosody, sound, and concept make an object, the linguistic sign. When I say the word “dog,” the sound “dog” and the concept “dog” fit perfectly, each into the other. That’s a fiction; it’s not true. And it’s even less true in our domestic, everyday exchanges. And it’s all the less true in a poem.
V.V.: That has led, in one sector of culture, to the poem’s being read under parameters of certainty, as an extension of representation: a poem that says things about identity, migration, violence, love, etc. In your ars poeticas, though, the poem dissents from this position: in the end, you claim, it says nothing. Nothing about external reality, much less about various social motivations. It’s a less transaccional mechanism, less susceptible, for example, to the literary world’s conventional view of the poem. A poem that is not saturated with literature.
M.M.: I do not think poems talk about reality, or represent it, or say anything about the outside world. The problem is more interesting than that: the poem always talks about language. And the poem’s reflection, even in political cases, even in sentimental cases, in whatever case it may be, is centered on words that claim to speak about the world. The poem does not speak directly about the world. It says, generally, that this discrepancy exists, and that what we’re using in our everyday communication has a problem. I can express this based on political, romantic, religious, or any other kind of content. But the center of the poem’s attention is language. Programmatic poems, with “values”—which are popular at the moment—be they civic, military, economic, etc., tell us things we already know. Think of “el pueblo unido jamás será vencido”; yes, I agree, but I already knew that. “Capitalism is the root of all evils,” yes, yes, but I know that already. What the poem does is not produce knowledge in that sense, but rather in a basically linguistic sense.
V.V.: What you call “the thought of the poem.”
M.M.: Fifteen years ago, the Chilean poet Nadia Prado said something that has stayed with me: “The difference between the philosopher and the poet is that the philosopher thinks while he writes and the poet writes while he thinks.” The philosopher has a thought and puts it to text. The poet does not. The poet writes, and that produces thought. It is not necessarily logical thought, nor does it produce the cognitive structures to which we’re accustomed; rather, it produces things that we see precisely in the prosodic flow, in discrepancy, in the cut. That produces a thought. And that thought is not necessarily something signified, hidden behind something else, which falls to us to analyze and discover. It’s a thought that emerges through the practice of the poem.
V.V.: The thought is happening there, in real time.
M.M.: Exactly. It emerges from this verbal plot we’re looking at. A thought that is not exhausted after one reading. We are always returning to the Greek tragedies. We still read Shakespeare, Vallejo, Gangotena. That means this verbal plot is still producing thought. Defining the nature of this thought would imply a more cautious task. But there is a great deal of evidence that exists in and emerges from these verbal plots.
V.V.: Let’s take a step back. To extrapolate from thinking of the poem as repeating things we already know, we also equate the voice that is within the poem to the voice of its writer.
M.M.: The voice of the poem is a voice that, on the one hand, forces us to say things automatically, independently of ourselves. For example: if I want to write a verse in Spanish, it will be in one of the three grammatical persons. I cannot write outside of that. There are certain things that tongue and language force me into. When I write, nonetheless, there is also an autonomy of the voice of the tongue as structure, and an autonomy of the voice of that tongue’s user, the poet. In Vallejo, especially in Trilce, this is recognizable and more or less palpable. It’s a voice that says there is something being said. What that voice wants is to instate its own enunciability, and this is a different enunciability in the case of the poem than it is in prose. It is also different from that which appears in our everyday exchanges, in which we trust in language and believe we are saying what we mean to say.
V.V.: It gets more complex when we think about your work as a professor. I assume a poet, in any given moment, does not separate his poetic vision from the rest of his activities. Is this the case with pedagogy?
M.M.: I am a professional linguist. I’m a linguist before I’m a poet. Linguistics is what I do, and I believe the poem is linguistics by other means. My interest in language is greater—and maybe someday I’ll come to regret this—than my interest in the outside world. My relationship with pedagogy is mediated by the way I write. I believe there is an energetic source—as you would say—a prosodic flow, in the development of a class, a seminar, a lecture. I learned this reading The Deleuze Seminars, whose movement I found fantastic. I tried to analyze that movement in a book I titled Notas para un seminario sobre Foucault, inspired by Deleuze’s seminar on Foucault. This is always present in my poems. I sometimes use my poems as exercises in my classes on linguistics or morphological analysis. Luckily, there is ever less tension between my work as a linguist and as a poet. My work as a poet is part of my work as a linguist.
V.V.: In Notas para un seminario sobre Foucault, it is indeed clear that you’re working on a very fine line between the poem and the essay—two containers, as you have mentioned, in which language can do something to reality.
M.M.: Cajas was my first attempt to do that, although it leans more closely toward the essay. That book is from 2012, before Notas… But it’s a matter of triggering what I call “the thought of the poem.” The poem thinks and emerges from said thought; it’s a sort of assemblage between the prosodic flow, the cadence of the rhythm, proportion, form, and the work that’s happening in their midst.
V.V.: Placing yourself on that line, of course, is not just a matter of being there; it’s a matter of exploring knowledge in a different way.
M.M.: For that very reason, I consider myself more of a linguist than a poet. That’s why, in the end, I’m not part of the literary world—although they place me in it, that’s for sure.
V.V.: In the canon of Peruvian literature, we might say.
M.M.: But I’m not that interested in literature as a cultural form. I’m much more interested in linguistics as a tool for the research of language. Sometimes through poems, sometimes through essays. In the end, the goal is the same: to make the seams less noticeable. To make that connection a little more natural. It’s not easy.
V.V.: And, nonetheless, it’s no secret that you hold a central space in the panorama of Spanish-language poetry. Your work has exerted a clear influence on many poets, of different ages and from different places, despite this not having been your intention, as you say. Is that an unswerving position?
M.M.: If I have an intention, it is simply to demonstrate or manifest the fact that you can do a great many things with a poem. That there’s not necessarily anything to what Foucault used to say, as has saturated a good measure of Western literary criticism, suggesting that “literary” texts mean something and, furthermore, have a hidden, secondary meaning that must be sought out. I don’t think that’s the case. There are other paths by which to approach the poem. It’s more of a personal search for the things that interest me. And that produces a certain interest in other people, above all outside my own country, who are also interested in these subjects and inquiries.
V.V.: In a broader panorama, this figure of the linguist-cum-poet is not unheard of. Within the U.S. academy, for example, there are cases of anthropologists-cum-poets, psychologists-cum-poets, etc., whose work has a certain kinship with yours. What do you make of this in the Peruvian context?
M.M.: I was surprised to learn there are, more or less, two contemporaries of mine who have the same condition: they are philologists who write poetry. José Cerna and José Morales. We are three linguist-philologists—or whatever you want to call it—and, at the same time, we write poems.
V.V.: It’s very stimulating to talk about the poem, its verses, its discrepancies, its balances and imbalances. Is there room in the midst of this for emotion?
M.M.: My intention is not to press any buttons defined in emotional terms. There’s no need to do to the reader what the reader can do for himself. I think what might affect the reader’s emotionality comes from the poem’s structure, in relation to a certain way of reading the poem. Perhaps, over the years, a poem will make you respond differently from how you respond now. Because, then, you’ll be seeking something else. We pay little attention to how poems are read. We think there is a predetermined reading, or the poet directs the reading of the poem a certain way. I don’t think that’s the case. The poet is also a reader of his own poem. There is not only a discrepancy between prosody and content; there is also a discrepancy between the poem and its maker. The last thing you should do is ask a poet “what did you mean to say,” not because it’s a stupid question, but because the poet has no idea. The question should be “what did you mean to read” in the poem. The poem doesn’t mean to say it; it’s what you want the poem to say. And that’s fine. You do what you can with the instruments of reading you have at your disposal.
V.V.: The poem is still a territory that resists capitalist standardization.
M.M.: And it is under attack. Now we’re telling ChatGPT to make poems, which seems inconceivable to me, among other reasons, because we can’t be lazy enough to make machines do poems for us when the whole trick to writing a poem is doing it, that’s where the thought of the poem is produced. All artificial intelligence serves, apparently, to take language away from us. To take away that which constitutes human language. For example: denying or asking questions. These possibilities are present in language as a biological object, and we cannot lose them. This is a matter of not losing our humanity. And we simply must not delegate language to certain machines.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
