2023-12-24 07:24:03
I once asked Ricardo Zelarayán why he had never written an essay, and he answered: “Because the essay is a paranoid genre.” Zelarayán, like Fogwill (who strictly speaking never wrote an essay, but rather journalistic articles, interventions, opinion pieces, beyond the fact that they were key – and still are – to understanding the transition to democracy) were already paranoid enough like to skip the passage through the essay. But beyond the boutade, it is true that the essay is above all an interpretive genre, and interpretation always includes a certain kind of hermeneutics, of conjectural abyss, the putting into relationship of texts that apparently have no relationship; the slightly paranoid idea that everything has to do with everything. The essay is a recursive genre by definition: it thinks regarding other things at the same time as it thinks regarding itself. Of the various subgenres of the essay, there is one that is usually called the “writers essay.” And within that subgenre, there is one called “poet essay.” Well, nothing is more foreign to me (or maybe it is: the films with Francella) than the division into genres, subgenres, etc. I will say then that literary essays do not necessarily become interesting because they are written by poets (it is enough to read Hugo Mujica to verify the veracity of that phrase), but there are poets who have also written great essays. Years ago, the Editions of the Diego Portales University, in Chile, published – under the care of Ignacio Echevarría – a series of essays by extremely sharp North American poets. At that time I read three of them, and I still remember them well: Poetry, Essays and Interviews, by George Oppen, The Great License, by John Asbhery, and The Necessary Invention, by William Carlos Williams. As is known, Williams was well received among us, especially among some of the so-called “poets of the 90s.” His novels, such as Thus Life Begins (Santiago Rueda, 1946) or his stories, such as Histories of Doctors (Montesinos, 1986), had less circulation. And even fewer of his essays are known in Spanish, with the exception of The American Language, which was published in countless magazines, sometimes under the title of The North American Language. So that edition of The Necessary Invention was, at the time, a small event for Williams’ readers in Spanish. Read as a whole, the book presents a completely anti-intellectual Williams, if intellectual is understood, as he thought it, as what TS Eliot dedicated himself to. Williams loses sight of the fact that between the cold and academic perfection of Eliot and the perception that he himself had of North American culture (that of an honest doctor from New Jersey) there is a set of radical literary experiences, on which he hardly dwells. He stops, yes, at Marianne Moore, which speaks highly of him, but also at EE Cummings, coloring his tastes with a blanket of doubts. It happens that a certain vitalism runs through his essays, as indeed also his poetry; Only this one is extraordinary and his essays are not. The translation and the prologue by Juan Antonio Montiel are good. As when Williams, in The American Language, 1940, states: “Only the Russians who censor correspondence surpass us in stupidity.”
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