READIN

Saturday, July 9th, 2011

🦋 The links of Tarca

Here are a few resources for the "el maestro de Tarca" poems and more broadly, Songs of Cifar and of the Sweet Sea. I will add to this list over the coming weeks if I find more that seem worth including.

• Sergio Ramírez, a member of Nicaragua's Academia de la Lengua, delivered a paper on El maestro de Elqui: la narrativa de Pablo Antonio Cuadra when he entered the academy in 2003. It is online at Ramírez' home page. A shorter version of the same paper is at La Prensa Literaria. Ramírez also has a short piece in Ancora from 2002, in which he seems to indicate that el maestro de Tarca is Cuadra himself.
• Folk musician Carlos Mejía Godoy recorded his album "Cantos de Cifar" in 1992. A few tracks are online at YouTube, and I found "El maestro de Tarca" (the first poem in the series) online at Radio La Primerísima.
• The full text of the book is online at turtleislands.net.

posted afternoon of July 9th, 2011: Respond
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🦋 Lo desconocido

In the third "teachings of el maestro de Tarca" poem, the customary introduction is reversed: here Cifar is speaking to the teacher. This suggests to me that the other poems in this series, where el maestro is speaking "to me" or "to us", are told from the POV of Cifar.

The two main difficulties for me in translating this poem were the conditional tense of "juraría" and the parallelism in the final two lines. I'm not really sure what conditional tense does -- from its name it sounds like it has a similar function to subjunctive. Schulman translates "juraría" as "I would swear", which sounds ok, but makes me ask what the condition is. I am going with "I could swear" which sounds a little more natural to my ears. (As a weak bonus, "I could swear it" scans the same as "juraría" -- though in the rest of the poem, I am not doing much to preserve the metric pattern.)

The last two lines, el maestro's response to Cifar, are the koanic element of this poem. In the original there is a strong parallelism: "Lo conocido/ es lo desconocido." I am going with a literal rendering to preserve this parallelism even though I think it mangles the meaning of the words slightly. Schulman uses the wordy "That which is known/ is the unknown", which I think is slightly closer to Cuadra's meaning, but not nearly as pleasant to read.

EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (Ⅲ) Maestro, dijo Cifar, seguí tu consejo y crucé el Lago buscando la isla desconocida. Fui con viento benévolo a la más lejana, virgen y perdida Pero que yo conocí esa isla juraría! que su sonoro acantilado devolvió mi canto un día juraría! que era la misma mujer la que allí me esperaba casi lo juraría! Sonrió el maestro y dijo: Lo conocido es lo desconocido.

EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â…¢) Maestro, said Cifar, I followed your counsel and crossed the Lake in search of the unknown island. I sailed with a gentle wind to its farthest point, untouched and lost But I knew this island I could swear it! her echoing cliffs had once already returned my song I could swear it! it was the same woman who was waiting there for me I could almost swear it! El maestro smiled and spoke: The known is the unknown.

EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â…£) Dijo el maestro de Tarca: Coge la cigarra del ala Al menos llevas en la mano el canto.

EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â…£) Thus spoke el maestro de Tarca: Seize the locust by its wing At least carry in your hand its song.

posted afternoon of July 9th, 2011: Respond
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🦋 La Alegradora

Scattered throughout Cuadra's Songs of Cifar and of the Sweet Sea are eleven short (even "koanic") poems titled "El maestro de Tarca" -- these seem different from the rest of the text. They are printed in italics, and they all begin with the phrase "El maestro de Tarca was telling us" or "was telling me" or similar. I think these poems might be the framework around which the rest of the book is built... Not sure, but that is anyway an interesting idea. Tarca is not known to Google Maps; other Internet sources suggest it is on the island of El Carmen, off the western shore of Lake Nicaragua. Schulman translates "maestro" as "master"; it could also be translated "teacher". My impulse is to leave the phrase "el maestro de Tarca" untranslated.

I'm interested this morning in the ninth poem of this series, one which Schulman and Zavala do not include in their edition. It presents a few challenges for the translator; key among them is the term "La Alegradora". "Alegrar" is "gladden", so "alegradora" would be "someone who makes you happy" -- span¡shd!ct.com gives it as an archaic term for "jester". This is pretty clearly not the meaning intended in the poem; a little digging around with Google* turns up a blog entry from No-Nan-Tzin [you will get an adult content warning when clicking this link, you can safely ignore it], who tells us that "alegradora" is the Spanish rendering of the Nahuatl term "tlatlamiani", a prostitute in pre-Columbian Mexico.

Well: "prostitute" works semantically in the poem; but why did Cuadra not use "La Prostituta"? Was "alegradora" still idiomatic in 20th-Century Nicaragua? Is the usage intentionally archaic, hearkening back to ancient times (this seems likely)? I believe the Aztec empire included Nicaragua; so this is my working assumption, and I am going to leave "La Alegradora" untranslated. But if a Nicaraguan reader would recognize it immediately as meaning "prostitute", this may be a poor choice.

EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (Ⅸ) El maestro de Tarca me decía: La Alegradora con su cuerpo da placer, no con su recuerdo. Con la mano hace señas con los ojos llama, no con su recuerdo. La Alegradora es el puerto la tierra que sólo es del pobre en la noche.

EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â…¨) El maestro de Tarca was telling me: La Alegradora gives you pleasure with her body, not with her remembrance. With her hand she beckons with her eyes she calls you hence, not with her remembrance. La Alegradora is the port is the land which the poor man only knows by night.

* The same round of searches also brought to my attention this ode by Aztec prince Tlaltecatzin, who praises his love as a "precious toasted huitlacoche". The original Nahuatl is here.

posted morning of July 9th, 2011: 3 responses
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Monday, July 4th, 2011

🦋 Brandished back against the lances of the sun

Source material for a poem I posted today in comments at Dave Bonta's Morning Porch -- this is from Pablo Antonio Cuadra's Songs of Cifar and of the Sweet Sea (which, happy day, I discover Tony Bigras of turtleislands.net has uploaded in full). Translation is my own, with reference to that of Grace Schulman and Ann McCarthy de Zavala.

Caballos en el Lago Los caballos bajan al amanecer. Entran al lago de oro y avanzan -- ola contra ola el enarcado cuello y crines -- a la cegadora claridad. Muchachos desnudos bañan sus ancas y ellos yerguen ebrios de luz su estampa antigua. Escuchan -- la oreja atenta -- el sutil clarín de la mañana y miran el vasto campo de batalla. Entonces sueñan -- bulle la remota osadía -- se remontan a los días heroicos, cuando el hierro devolvía al sol sus lanzas potros blancos escuadrones de plata el grito lejanísimo de los pájaros y el viento. Pero vuelven (Látigo es el tiempo) Al golpe enfilan hacia tierra -- bajan la frente -- y uncido al carro el sueño queda atrás dormido el viento.

Horses in the Lake The horses come down at daybreak. They enter into the golden lake, and on -- wave after wave the long arched necks, the manes -- into the blinding clearness. And naked boys are bathing their haunches drunk with light they're lifting up their ancient image. They listen -- ears perked up -- to the morning's subtle trumpet and they gaze on the enormous field of battle. And then they dream -- and glimpse remote effrontery -- rising back up to the days of glory, when steel met the sun's proud lances stallions white and squadrons silver the cries of distant birds and of the wind. But they return (Before the whip of time) And struck move slowly back to land -- they bow their heads -- they're yoked to the wagon the dream remains behind asleep the wind.

posted afternoon of July 4th, 2011: Respond
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🦋 Happy Independence Day!

posted morning of July 4th, 2011: 1 response
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🦋 Not a soul to tell our troubles to

Woke up with a song ringing in my ears and a poem drifting through my head.

My shadow has no memory of
that frantic, panicked, pell-mell flight --

No pain or expectations, craving,
dying to escape his bondage.

Look, he's crouching, vibrates with
desire that only shadows feel;

He's poised to spring, to pounce, as if
the shadow of some predator,

Some dusky, fleeting contrast on
the sidewalk of my consciousness,

Some ragged blank impression on
the sand dunes of my memory --

We move, the spell is broken, sliding
frictionless along the garden

Seeking our reflection in
the pools of last night's rainfall,

In the golden machinations of the sunlight from the east.

posted morning of July 4th, 2011: Respond
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Saturday, July second, 2011

🦋 A Softer Cocktail

Thanks to young urban bicycle enthusiast Dorothy Gambrell, today I found out about Saveur's Recipe Comix -- right now I am drinking (courtesy of A Softer World's Emily Horne) a Black Mischief -- this is Horne's take on a Kingsley Amis cocktail recipe, and boy oh boy is it smooth.

In general I am all in favor of mixing comix with other forms. Gambrell's recipe for Chocolate Ice-Cream is a good one, and the peripheral cartoony stuff adds to it, gives it resonance. I will remember this cocktail recipe because of how good it tastes, and also because of the A Softer World tie-in.

posted afternoon of July second, 2011: 5 responses
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🦋 Secret Canyon in West Orange

A year or so ago, I was talking with Woody about interesting things to see in West Orange -- he told me how one time he had been walking up Valley to Northfield and had taken a meandering route... Eventually he found himself on "one of those dead-end streets behind Northfield" and had found a secret canyon, with a pedestrian bridge linking dead-end streets on either side of it. Ever since then I've been interested to find this place, and today (I'm pretty sure) I did.

The canyon I found doesn't precisely meet Woody's description -- it looks like there has been some construction in the intervening years. Riding up Northfield past Seton Hall (a long slog of an uphill, but not steep enough to make me give up midway along), there are two streets to the left marked "Dead End", Carter Rd. and Beverly Rd. I road up the hill and then back down, and turned right on Beverly -- Turns out it is no longer a Dead End as the road has been looped around to connect it to Carter. (This must be a fairly recent development, Google Maps at least still thinks both streets dead-end.) Right where it loops around, there is the canyon Woody was talking about. No pedestrian bridge anymore, the loop crosses over the canyon and the stream is in a culvert there -- very pretty waterfall where it pours out of the culvert, I tried to get a photo but the maple tree in front of me had its own ideas... There is still no connection to the south -- the dead-end street south of the canyon, also called Beverly, is a private street and gated off.

posted morning of July second, 2011: Respond
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Friday, July first, 2011

🦋 Wallpapers from a Multiverse

posted evening of July first, 2011: Respond
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Thursday, June 30th, 2011

"However much you feed a wolf, it always looks to the forest. We are all wolves in the dense forest of Eternity." This was written by the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, the man said softly as he stroked the silver fur of the animal crouched in his arms. The animal pricked up its ears, then strained to look back at the dark copse of trees where shadows moved as if alive. As if alive and waiting to move out into the open.

Listen, this process called poetry is an exercise in imagining memory, and then having that memory snare and cherish imagination. Yet, every poem is and will be a capsule of territory in the perpetual present tense, a vessel taking on the ever-changing colors of the sea.

-- Breyten Breytenbach
"Poetry is the Breath of Awareness"
Intimate Stranger

(The Tsvetaeva quote is from her book of essays, Art in the Light of Conscience, tr. Angela Livingstone.)

posted evening of June 30th, 2011: Respond
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