Lezama

opening of Américan Expression

Only the difficult stimulates; only challenging resistance can raise our eyebrows, provoke and maintain our powers of knowing, for in reality ¿what is the difficult?, ¿the submerged, so solo, in the maternal waters of the dark?, ¿the originary without causality, antithesis or logos?

from Pascal and Poetry

Poetry is the notation of response, but the distance between response, humanity and word is almost illegible and inaudible. In The Book of the Dead, at the entrance and exit of the subterranean chamber, voyagers hold “saffron cakes in Tanenet.” An example of indecipherable hieraticism, this entering and exiting the subterranean chamber while eating a saffron cake, can be seen in a funerary relief. Perhaps the two cakes represent sky and earth. It is said that the saffron cakes are the eyes of Horus. Tanenet is the tomb of Osiris. The fact of entering into death eating a saffron cake enraptures and unsettles. But the relief, as graven, communicates unto itself the gravitation of poetic truth. Suddenly, before this enigmatic relief, Pascal’s reclaiming regains its enchantment: an art incomprehensible yet reasonable. Incomprehension that is reasoned, an indelicacy that aquires a tempo [time, weather, season, clime, tempo], small airs worthy of humankind, are the needle that marks the touched form. All touched matter irradiates a kind of glow, the wound in its side, by which it is seen and penetrates.

[...]

In humanity, to give back is to intuit the choice of the gods. We are behested only with this choosing of divinity’s, its correspondence in the giving-back of humans. Moreover, this giving-back is the root of the image. Giving-back with increased endowment is to live within grace. Superabundance of endowment corresponds to grace’s infinity. Giving-back, as, in the order of charity dreamt by Pascal, the only imprurient region, illuminates as if we had gotten from the mirror but also simultaneously given to the mirror. To the “to an enigma in the mirror” we can respond “to the increase in the mirror” and seek an amicable correspondence between humanity and divinity.

[...]

Before this obscurity which lacks mystery, this stupid clarity, Pascal, on pointing out his unsettling entre-deux as a first position to surmount, marks, perhaps without intent, the region of poetry. In reality, poetry, the only fact or category of sensibility wherein antithesis is not possible, is the total rupture of the Pascalian entre-deux. We are approaching a wood without trees where, nevertheless, the wind intones among the trees, and where the star, over a region cold and also free of trees, receives its necessary quantity of evaporated arboreal perfume. A wood without trees where, paradoxically, fire receives a prodigious combustion that demands its inexorable raw matter: resins and ramifications.

One Bridge, One Great Bridge

Amid waters frozen or roiling,
one bridge, one great bridge not given to be seen,
but which crosses the fair copy of its own work,
its own self-doubts about taking possession
of the parasols of gravid women,
with the gravity of a question borne
on the back of a mule charged with the mission
of transforming or extending recessed gardens
where the boys trust their curls to the waves,
for the waves are as affected
as the yawn of God,
as the game of the gods,
as the snail that covers the village
with its dice-roller voice,
lustra and animals that cross
the bridge with the last Edison safety bulb.
Fortunately, the bulb explodes,
and I amuse myself sticking pins
in the worker’s other cheek,
for he was one of my most handsome friends,
and I envied him in secret.

One bridge, one great bridge not given to be seen,
a bridge that bears drunkards
who say they must be nourished by cement,
while poor, lion-souled cement
offered its miniaturist’s riches,
for, know you all, on Fridays, bridges
pass the time passing dethroned kings
unable to forget their last chess match
played between a wolfhound with chronic microcephaly
and a rampart caving in,
like the skeleton of a cow
seen through a skylight geometrically Mediterranean.
Transported by the astronomical ciphers of ants
and by a camel made of smoke — now the bridge must allow it passage —,
a great silver shark,
truly there are only three million ants
and, in an enormous, herniating struggle
they bear the silver shark at midnight
over the bridge as if it were another dethroned king.

One bridge, one great bridge and behold, one cannot see it,
its honey-colored armatures could be Sicilian vespers
painted on a tiny placard,
painted with a great roar of water,
when all ends in salt silver,
that we must run through, despite the swollen,
silent army besieging the unsilent city,
for it is known that I am there,
that I stroll and see my struck head,
and unmoving squadrons exclaim:
it is a parade drum,
we lost my lover’s favorite flag,
today I wish to remain asleep and dig into the sheets.
The great bridge, heed of my head,
and the drumrolls that prowl my dwelling,
I do not know what happened afterwards, but now it is midnight,
and I cross what my heart feels to be a great bridge.
But the great bridge’s back cannot hear when I say,
That I never could be hungry,
for since I went blind
I placed in the center of my bedroom
a great shark of silver
from which minutely I pluck fragments
that I mold into the shape of a flute
the rain diverts, defines and chases into a corral.
But my nostalgia is infinite,
for this victual lasts a hard eternity,
and possibly only hunger and envy
can replace the great shark of silver,
that I placed in the center of my bedroom.
But neither hunger nor envy nor that animal
most favored of Lautréamont will move single and vainglorious
over the great bridge, for the kid goats of hellenic stock
exhibited, in the last world’s fair,
their collection of flutes, and even today there is an echo
in this nostalgic sailboat morning, when the breast of the sea
opens its little green cape to view the showcase filled
with briar pipes where so many bats did burn.
Carolingian roses grown on the edge of a bent switch.
The cone of water mules buried in my garden
plow in the fourth part of midnight
the bridge desires to make its exquisite own.
Little hands of old idols, absinthe blent into plunder
of highest birds make soft that point of the bridge
supported above watered cement quasi-medusary.

But now to save the head metallic instruments
must allow being stunned into mirroring
the peril of saliva exchanged in a varnished mussel
for the acid of the inexcusable kisses
morning slides over to the fresh coin pouch.
Can it be that the bridge in turning envelops only
the loranthe of serenity olivaceous,
or does it become a hunchbacked, scraped violin
that rasps the flank of the bridge adrip?
And not even morning’s drip can turn
the roseate flesh of the memorious mollusk
into varnished mussel’s dental embrasure.

One great bridge, one unbound bridge
that huddles with its roiling waters
while dream’s charge softens the flesh it gores
and the finale of unhoped-for moons sounds till the finale
sirens that run down its new coastal declensions.

One bridge, one great bridge not given to be seen,
its roiling, frozen waters
collide against the last defensive rampart
and ravish the forehead and the sole voice
crosses the bridge once more, like the blind king
who does not know that he is dethroned,
who smoothly dies, bound to nocturnal fealty.

•—•—•—•—•

The poem needs further baroquization and is still fairly literal in places. It’s my fondest (and likely forsaken) hope that I’ll be able to translate a chapbook’s worth of Lezama’s poetry and prose before I die. Many thanks to el compa querido, the fabulous poet and translator Kent Johnson, for his help with the poem. I also rely on Portuguese translations by Josely Vianna Baptista, Haroldo de Campos, Irlamar Chiampi, Claudio Daniel and Luiz Roberto Guedes.