2023-06-28 01:57:00
MEXICO CITY (appro) embodied in the sonnets of an author as famous as William Shakespeare, as well as in Sir Walter Raleigh, better known as a pirate and ship raider.
Both, along with Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry Hovard (Duke of Surrey), Edward de Vere (Duke of Oxford), Elizabeth I (Queen of England), Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Mary Sidney Herbert (Countess of Pembroke), Samuel Daniel, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Donne, Lady Mary Wroth and John Milton, make up the anthology Violence and Immensity in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Some English poets.
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The 378-page bilingual publication by Ediciones El Tucán de Virginia, directed by Víctor Manuel Mendiola, also a poet, “is the result of admiration for many of the great English poets of the Elizabethan period –perhaps a period longer than the life of Queen Elizabeth I herself”, indicates the editor, who translated the selected poems, in an introductory essay. And explaining the title, he writes:
“We live in violence. Either he attacks us directly, in a massive assault, or he attacks us because of everything we know regarding in the newspapers, the movies, the internet or social networks, where we see, in amazement, that boys, girls, young people and many old people suffer all kinds of harassment, not only once morest his body, but, no less important, once morest his dignity.
“We can also experience violence as violent women or men, because the world we live in exasperates us or, in the best of cases, because we are outraged. We might well say, as Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote: ‘Air shut up and dirty siege my soul.’
“We cannot escape from this dark, gloomy, unfortunate force that is definitely not just an evil from the past, it is here, imperiously, in our present and forever.”
The time in which the work of the English poets gathered in “Violence and immensity…” is gestated, the reign of Henry VIII and the Elizabethan reign itself, were not exempt from that violence. And the volume mentions the names of various poets who died in prison, beheaded, in battle, assassinated, all authors of great poems.
In short, he says, “European poetry (not only English) of the 16th and 18th centuries is incredibly refined, lively and unforgettable”, and cites, among others, Torquato Tasso, Pierre de Ronsard, Luís de Camões, San Juan de la Cruz, Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, Lope de Vega and Luis de Góngora.
In the presentation of the volume held a few weeks ago at the Casa del Poeta “Ramón López Velarde” in the Roma neighborhood, there were comments by Mendiola himself, Eva Cruz (responsible for reviewing the book) and the poet and singer Sweet Chiang and Spinase.
Chiang y Espinasa precisely explains, in an interview with Proceso, that the book reveals that the 16th century was a very violent century in England, and allows us to see, at the same time, that the violence we are experiencing today has many precedents.
“We tend to identify the poet with another attitude, so it also shows the evolution over two centuries of an idea of love that comes from Ovid, from Petrarch”, the latter -according to him- introduces the concept of “courtly love” in medieval times, which clearly transforms into Shakespeare in his love sonnets.
“I find it very attractive that it is not an anthology regarding an author, but regarding a period long enough to draw a parable for us, a journey through those two centuries, with few samples of each poet, which has to do with what It happens in Mexican literature, especially the most recent, which is paying attention to poetry from other languages.”
As an example, he mentions the book Versiones y diversiones, by Octavio Paz, and adds that Mendiola, who “has rarely shown his skills as a translator, here he does it splendidly, complies with Paz’s request that the translated poem should sound like poetry.” , not to translation”.
love vs. violence
It is striking that the translator does not fall into the temptation of creating new sonnets in Spanish:
“On the day of the presentation to the public, I told Víctor Manuel that whoever translates a sonnet should have as their horizon to write a sonnet in the target language, but sometimes it is not possible because the rules of the sonnet are so rigorous, so strict, that you can mess up the translation by wanting to be too close to the original, and I think Víctor Manuel rightly chooses not to push things too hard.”
He emphasizes that the bilingual versions are published in Elizabethan English, which may be a bit difficult to read, but can be contrasted with the Spanish version.
To Proceso’s question, he answers that, although poetry readers are in the minority compared to those of other genres, such as novels or history, he always has followers, even recently an anthology of Romanian poetry in Spanish, medieval poetry or poetry from the East appeared , For example.
When reading a poem like Christopher Marlowe’s (picked at random),
It is not in our power to love or hate,
because the will follows the destiny.
When two get naked, something happens
and we long for one to win and another to lose.
We choose one and not another,
like choosing between two gold bars;
no one understands the reason; It’s enough
with the simple warning of the eyes.
Where two speak, love is little.
Who has loved, did not love at first sight?
There are questions: why Violence and Immensity…? Where is the violence.
Espinasa agrees with Mendiola that it is in the period or in the authors, and explains that this is why introductory notes for each one are included. “It is surprising that they are traitors, conspirators, pirates, condemned to death… Sir Walter Raleigh is a pirate and his poetry was like a dilettante detail, but he was a bad pirate, one of those who burned forts and raided ships.
“It is that contrast, because not only is the poem not violent, it is also that they are very kind, they are smiling, playful, they flatter whoever reads them, they look for a smile on their lips. And there is no transfer of that violence that they live in their lives to writing, it is something quite curious because there is a tendency, naturally, to identify life with work, and it is not necessarily true.”
–How does this process occur in which a person of that nature writes a work of a contrary nature?
–Those are precisely the mysteries and secrets of creation. Sometimes I gave the extreme example: if you read George Bataille’s essays, you might think that the author goes out at night looking for girls in the street, and no, he is a man who goes to bed with his wife at nine o’clock at night. wife and read in bed with the nightstand light. But that comes from the tendency to believe that life and work are equivalent. There may be communicating vessels and biographical data often help us to explain certain things, but sometimes they also confuse us.
“The interesting thing regarding this book is that it does not enter into those discussions, but instead presents the reader with a series of poems, most of them regarding love. He tells her: ‘read them, and maybe they’ll even help you flirt; you can tell your wife, your girlfriend or your boyfriend’.
“These are texts that do not have an academic reader on the horizon –and Mendiola saw this very well–, nor a professional one, like me, who constantly writes regarding poems and novels; they are for an audience that reads for pure pleasure.
“It is a very enjoyable book, very joyful that at the same time can help a specialist to enter a time.”
The volume, adds the critic and poet, will fulfill its mission if the reader looks for the complete books when they arrive in Spanish or, if they can read them in their language of origin, when they look for them anyway.
–Mendiola commented in the presentation that the anthology includes political or social poetry.
–Yes, poetry always has spices from different strata. Starting from French symbolism, the modern trend has been to look for a love poem in every poem, but it is not the only thing.
“Political poetry has always existed and it is natural that gentlemen who are up to their heads in the political world of their time make poems to reflect their ideology, their attitude, to bear witness to their political vicissitudes, even by contrast, when they do not talk regarding it. and you find out that they were conspirators and warriors, you say: ‘how curious, because in their poems they talk regarding the lady and the other thing does not appear’.”
And then he mentions that in the work “The Fairy Queen”, by Edmund Spenser, of which a fragment is included in the book, one can find “an idea more linked to political poetry, as we can understand it in the Divine Comedy, which It is first and foremost a political poem.”
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