In the introduction to Dark Times Filled with Light, Paul Pines writes that “a poet of [Juan] Gelman’s depth can bring the dead back to life.” The circumstances of Gelman’s life: the son of Ukrainian Jews who experienced the Russian Revolution and emigrated to Argentina, himself an exile for much of his adult life, he lost his son and daughter-in-law to state terror in the period known as the Dirty War as well as many friends and associates during that dark time and in the years before.
The long poem “Letter to My Mother,” written following his mother’s death, is a lament over their separation and the pain of their relationship. In the lines of the poem, he may well have proved Pines’ point: He resurrects his mother on the page.
[…]
you / who held off your death so long / why
couldn’t you wait for me a little longer? / did you fear
for my life? / was that your way of protecting me? /
did i never grow up for you? / did some part of your
body go on living after my childhood? / is that why
you turned me away from your death? / as you had once before
from you? / because of my letter? / did you somehow know? /
we seldom wrote each other during these years of exile /
it’s also true that we spoke little before then /
even as a boy, the one you brought up turned against you / and
your confining love / and i swallowed my share of rage and
sadness / you never laid a hand on me /
you whipped me with your soul / oddly enough
we were close /
Gelman went on to interrogate his mother, now gone, over their relationship and how it led him to where he was in 1984, living in exile in Geneva and Paris:
are those the ghosts i haunt myself with now /
at my age / like when i was swimming in your
water? / is that why i am so blind, so slow
finding out, as if i didn’t want to, as if
the important thing were still the darkness in your womb
or home pulled over me? / darkness with its infinite
gentleness? / where the brightness far off doesn’t punish
with the stone-world or pain? / is it life with its eyes
closed? / is that why i write poems? / to retreat
into the womb where each word will be born? / by
a tenuous thread? / is poetry a substitute for you? / your
sorrows and your delights? / do you destroy yourself with me like the
word in the word? / is that why i write poems?
do i destroy you this way? / you’ll never be born of me? / are
words these ashes that make us one? /
you always knew what exists between us but never
told me / was i at fault? / did i blame you all this
time for casting me out of you? / is that my
real exile? / did we blame each other for that love
we sought through separations? / did it set
bonfires to light up our distance? / was each
non-encounter proof of the last encounter? /
is that how you measured infinity? /
what oblivion is ever peace? / of all your living faces
why do i recall with such detail only one
photograph? / Odessa, 1915, 18 years old,
you’re studying medicine, there’s nothing to eat/but
two apples had risen to your cheeks (that’s how you
described it to me) (tree of hunger that yields fruit) / did those apples
have red tints of fire from the pogrom that
had been yours? / at the age of 5? / your mother leading
several siblings from the burning house? / and your
young sister dead? / with all that / because all that /
against you / do you love me? / did you ask me to be
your small sister? / is that why you gave me this woman, / inside /
and outside of me? / what is this legacy, mother / that
photograph of you a lovely 18-year old / with long
hair as blue-black as the night of the soul / parted
in the middle / the flared dress marking your
breasts / the two girlfriends lying at your feet / your
eyes looking at me so i’d know i love you
irrevocably /
— excerpted from “Letter to My Mother” by Juan Gelman
“There are losses,” Gelman wrote. “The important thing is how returning to them transforms them into something new.” Part of what makes Gelman’s transformation of his losses so effective surely has to do with his masterful manipulation of language, what Lisa Rose Bradford notes in Between Words that Gelman called “amphibian” words that grow and become permutations.
The Spanish language lends itself beautifully to these manipulations, allowing Gelman to create new words that can be readily understood, such as turning the word “child” (niño) and making it into “to child” (niñar), or taking the noun “son” (hijo) and making “to unson” (deshijar) from it. Perhaps one of the most poignant examples appears in a poem he wrote to his son after he was disappeared by the government and refers to Gelman’s wish to “undie” him.
IV:
Crestfallen My Burning Soul
crestfallen my burning soul
dips a finger in your name / scrawls
your name on the night’s walls /
it’s no use / it bleeds dangerously /
soul to soul it looks at you / becomes a child /
opens its breast to take you in /
protect you / reunite you / undie you /
your little shoe stepping on the
world’s suffering softening it /
trampled brightness / undone water
this way you speak / crackle / burn / and love /
you give me your nevers just like a child
— Juan Gelman
Lately I’ve been spending a few minutes at the end of most days translating poems from Gelman’s collection Mundar, its very title yet another example of Gelman’s permutating text, changing the noun mundo, which means world, to a verb, to world. In the poem “Que,” he asks a question:
¿Qué alegra la noche oscura? Una
palabra. ¿Qué
enalma la noche
oscura? Una palabra.
My translation of these lines goes like this:
What brightens the dark night?
One word.
What ensouls the dark night?
One word.
I can’t find the word enalma in a Spanish dictionary. Alma means soul. He transforms soul to something you do. Ensoul, like undie or unson, is not a word in English either, which creates something of a dilemma for the translator: follow suit with manipulation of the recipient language, or craft a phrase with equivalent meaning. Gelman had his own feelings about translation, writing in “Exergue” that
translation is something inhuman: no language or face lets itself be
translated. you have to leave the beauty intact and supply another
to go with it: their lost unity lies ahead
that’s what the tower of babel was all about: not essential discord
but a partial science of the word. reality has a thousand faces and
each, its own voice. science, but also patience to let the face and its
word rise from the fear that binds them all the way to the love that
will unite them. time and its pain, like patience, burn deep into the
night where each word is a cold star, a sun that is still to come.
Gelman also accomplishes this dramatic manipulation of language through the use (or omission) of punctuation and other conventions. Reading his work chronologically, which is how Dark Times Filled with Light is organized, a person can see a shift in his later poems where he begins to write in lower case. I can’t say his intention but for me, the effect is one of shrinkage, a way of presenting himself as a smaller man with a smaller voice, or perhaps with less of the gravitas of his youth before his losses had so completely stacked up. One also finds a growing use of slashes in his later poems, about which Heather Cleary, in her review at Words Without Borders, observes: “Tiny cuts to the body of the text, these fissures, sometimes several in a given line, never quite resolve into breaks. In this, they suggest constant, violent incursions into private worlds and the denial of closure that was a key part of the government’s strategy of control.”
Ultimately, what Gelman does with language and his poems is best expressed in the epigraph to “Relations,” included in Unthinkable Tenderness where Gelman supposedly quotes José Galván. Galván himself is another of Gelman’s means, using a heteronym (an imaginary character whose identity he assumes, as in The Poems of Sidney West, in which he purports to “translate” the poems of an American cowboy). In the voice of José Galván, Gelman writes:
Hay que hundir las palabras en la realidad
hasta hacerlas delirar como ella.
(You have to bury the words in reality,
make them hallucinate the way reality does.)
We’ve been reading the poetry of Juan Gelman together this month, from the collection Dark Times Filled With Light. Join us in the comments with your thoughts on the poems featured this week. We conclude our discussion this week, but you can catch up on previous posts below:
Dark Times Filled with Light Book Club Announcement post
Dark Times Filled with Light: Things They Don’t Know
Dark Times Filled with Light: The Art of Poetry
Photo by Yann, Creative Commons via Flickr. Except where noted otherwise, poems by Juan Gelman, translated by Hardie St. Martin, reprinted with permission of the publisher. Post by LW Lindquist.
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Sandra Heska King says
I’ll have to come back to this later. These poems are so powerful. But I had to stop when you began to talk about the slashes, “tiny cuts to the body of text,” because it brought to mind the physical act of cutting to release pent-up emotional pain. I saw a loved one’s arms…
Will Willingham says
It is a powerful image.
Gentle thoughts for you this morning.
Sandra Heska King says
I didn’t stop reading because of the pain in remembering. But to think about how physical slashes to text might accomplish something similar. That’s real word bleeding.
Will Willingham says
Yes, that exactly.
L.L. Barkat says
Just this:
“where each word is a cold star, a sun that is still to come”
Will Willingham says
Yes.
Maureen says
You’ve guided three excellent discussions of Gelman’s work, LW. Thank you.
The “undie” poem (“Crestfallen My Burning Soul”) is a wonderful address to memory; what I find so notable is that here, memory serves to recall the son as child. And this makes sense, because it’s in our children we invest hope for the future. I especially like “you give me your nevers just like a child” – a line that conveys the child’s way of believing that anything is possible.
“Soul” is one of those word I that only Latin and South American poets get by using.
The line L.L. quotes is remarkable, also hopeful, also full of possibility.
Will Willingham says
Thank you, Maureen. I will have to admit I’ve not worked harder in the background on a book club before. This was challenging. But such beautiful work to be handling. It felt privileged somehow.
Crestfallen was so moving the first time I read it, and it may have been the “undie you” and the “nevers” that touched me most. I agree with you about the word soul. It means something different.
I’m grateful for your introduction to a poet I should have already known.
Rick Maxson says
Such a powerful phrase: “do you destroy yourself with me like the “word in the word”
and in the second poem: “you give me your nevers just like a child”
Will Willingham says
His question, “is poetry a substitute for you?” is also arresting.
I was struck by these lines you quote here as well. The nevers, especially.
Laura Lynn Brown says
So many questions in that letter to his mother. So many unanswerable questions, sometimes decades later, after a parent is gone.
The one that gets me most, today, anyway: “what oblivion is ever peace?”
And, yes, you’ve done a great job in these series.
Will Willingham says
Thanks Laura. His questions are wrenching. The entire poem is really something.
Barbara says
Hi Will,
Thanks for sharing these remarkable poems.
My Argentine husband tells me the word “enalma” means to embody.