BPR 50 | 2023
He sang the story of the deathless gods and of the dark earth, how at the first they came to be, and how each one received his portion. —“Homeric Song of Hermes”
These are the arguments of a life earned by reflection. —“Trash”
Like many good things in my life, the art of Ricardo Pau- Llosa was a late discovery. Late, but not untimely. The poet and I had had contact twenty years before when Maestro Aurelio de la Vega—until his recent passing, one of the great classical composers—first introduced us. But it was only years later that I backpedaled into his work, and gathered a truncated first reading, by way of a side interest, when I began translating into Cuban Spanish, Cuba-themed poems written by Anglo poets. I started with Stevens and Crane, who famously penned such works, but almost as an afterthought began doing some of the excellent Cuban- American poets who write in English and concentrated on Pau-Llosa’s two early books, Cuba and Vereda Tropical. I was led at the time by haunting lines like the ones that evoke his childhood exile: “My mameyes were the snows of Chicago / and the sounds that were not, could not be / words coming out of every mouth.” Thus, I set out to retrieve “sounds that were not,” the Cuban Spanish words that had not made it into verse. One crazy question framed that project: how would English Cuba-themed poems sound in Cuban Spanish? It was reframed by yet another, far wackier doubt that rendered the whole thing suspect: is there such a thing as Cuban Spanish? To this day, the answers escape me. But I do know that my later, broader acquaintance with Pau-Llosa’s art enabled me to know a major living poet, regardless of language or theme.
Nine volumes and forty years of poetry made Pau-Llosa major. Not just out of volume and length of service. It’s the power and strangeness of the language in those books, which owes little to his native Spanish, and over the years has evolved a unique vision and style. The strangeness comes from a chiseled verse that conjures a vocabulary wealth, a syntax often so tortured, and an allusive texture so rich that they defy coherence, delaying sense but in the end rendering luminous apothegms that border on the oracular. Making few concessions, his is a language of cosmopolitan urbanity, learned elegance, and aesthetic dignity, even when it deals with the everyday, as is often the case, or kids around with frivolous anecdotes, as the trickster in Pau-Llosa is wont to do. Such would be the essence of lyric he has mastered over the years, culminating in the forthcoming Fleeing Actium.
The cadence of Pau-Llosa’s verse can wax Shake- spearean; his extended metaphors, grounded in a very personal context, recall Rilke and Stevens; Walcott and Lezama Lima haunt the baroque echoes of his Caribbean visions—and all that, rising in a language harbored within an archive of world poetry stored since acquiring English as a child. The linguistic strangeness I invoke can only be compared, I believe, with prose masters like Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, or Alejo Carpentier, or with two mid-twentieth-century poets, Borges and Brodsky—all five “extraterritorial” natives of tongues foreign to the ones each ultimately chose as literary destiny. The more reason to restate the obvious: Pau-Llosa is very much an American poet who writes superb English verse, tout court. And I say this while vigorously opposing any view to pigeonhole his work as “Cuban American” or “Latino,” which would acquiesce to that mild form of discrimination that too often limits the importance of emerging U.S. poets. In turn, the right to U.S. citizenship hardly strips the poet of a native identity. To quote from the interview that appears in this issue: “an artist’s ‘Cubanness’ or ‘Mexicanness’ is not determined by palm trees, maracas, pyramids, or sarapes but by how they use metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and other tropes in their visual thought.”
And then there’s Pau-Llosa’s sheer volume of work: not only those nine collections but a good amount of prose, to this day uncollected, devoted mostly to art criticism that would easily make up a goodly tome. Hence, added diversity of theme and obvious merit, one is left with the three requisites of Paul Valéry’s definition of a classic: quantity, variety, and excellence. Centuries before Valéry, Cervantes had called Lope de Vega, his contemporary polymath, a “monstruo de la Naturaleza” (monster of Nature) to describe the same phenomenon. Because there certainly is something monstrous about Pau-Llosa, well beyond the surface issue of linguistic mastery. I mean monstrous here in the original sense of “deviating from the stated order of nature” that Dr. Johnson, closer to Cervantes than to Wikipedia, once elucidated to reference the sheer excess of his production: exuberance as a brand of teratology. An exuberance that, one might add, goes well beyond his art. Step into the poet’s lair, which houses a world-class art collection—walls teeming with canvases, large and small; room corners camouflaged by sculptures, old and new; mantels overflowing with objects, strange and familiar—and take the personal tour—Bacardí in hand, Padrón in snout— to experience in body the sort of monstrous event to which I refer, the kind of awe one associates with the cornucopia of a Picasso or the breadth of a Richard Taruskin.
Indeed, monstrosity, exuberant or not, happens to have been in Pau-Llosa’s mind, in relation to himself or at least his persona, in at least one important poem from Man (2014), arguably his most original book. In each of the book’s seventy poems, the trappings of Christian theology launch a kaleidoscope of self-caricatures—the title’s “Man.” Thus, “Monstrance Man,” the seventeenth, exploits the homonym monstrance-monstrous:
As a boy he had trouble speaking,
past three before a real word preened
from his lips. And for the longest time,
malaprops haunted him. His older sister
did what she could to train the bitten seal
of his brain to twirl the red ball
on the nose of eloquence, and his grandmother
tired of insisting he utter the names
of toys or foods—for every desire
was coded—and gave him whatever
he grunted and pointed to.
O, the man then a boy
thought, when I tower among them
I should invent my own speech
and leave others empty and afraid
that they did not know it, could not ask
or plead their case in the one tongue
that mattered. I shall have them
look upon the simplest things,
the man then a boy thought,
and fill up with stolen awe,
and point with their faces,
their pupils wide as blackened coins,
and hope with all the revenue
shattered heart-glass can muster
that someone had grasped
their need as need and not
as the monstrous coupling
of sounds in a trance of whims.
Then, the grind of his teeth
vowed, then the plazas of my city
will fill with my name,
and their blood will matter
as little to them as to me.
Here we have one of many texts where Pau-Llosa reflects upon extraterritoriality, his and others’, linguistic or not. First, bouncing memories of his sister’s preening of actual words and the doting grandmother’s short- circuit, a counterpoint to which the grown “Man,” the book’s recurring mask, attributes to the freakish origins of artistic fate. And then, as a result, the Zarathustra-like invention of a speech so unique that it bars response, save for those silent cues of “stolen awe” that forces presumed interlocutors to grasp “their need as need and not / as the monstrous coupling / of sounds in a trance of whims.” The end result of this Man’s identity, then, would be to pit monstrance—a sacred or transcendent offering, as in the Christian ostensory—against the monstrous, here defined as doggerel, metaphor for any negative aesthetics. If, on the one hand, transcendent monstrance breaks out of aesthetic media, including language, to move souls, then monstrous, on the other, is condemned to dissipate. In the end, having reached the immediacy of monstrance, Zarathustra cannot help embodying the monstrous himself, as he boasts indifference to human suffering. Dr. Johnson would agree with such redefinitions: true monstrosity would be the banality of evil; monstrance, well beyond “the stated order of nature,” surpasses it, even when its producer, too, happens to be a monster. Monstrance makes the good visible; monstrous shows up the ugly and evil.
Born in Santiago de Cuba in 1950, Enrico Mario Santí earned degrees from Vanderbilt and Yale and taught literature at Cornell, Georgetown, and the University of Kentucky, where he served as University Professor and held the William T. Bryan Chair in Hispanic Studies. Santí, who writes in both English and Spanish, is the author of fourteen books, most recently Enduring Cuba: Thirty Essays, and twenty critical editions. In addition to teaching, writing, and translating, Santí is a sculptor and voice actor. Currently, he lives in Southern California, where he is Research Professor at Claremont Graduate University.