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- Herausgeber: Pampia Grupo Editor
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Spanisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
Well-established as a poet, essayist and novelist, the writer Luis Benítez needs little introduction. His books have been published in Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Uruguay, the United States and Venezuela. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Among other things, he is a member of the Latin-American Academy of Poetry, the International Society of Writers, and the Argentinian Foundation for Poetry. His work has brought him international recognition and he has been the recipient of many prestigious awards including the La Porte des Poétes International Award (Paris, 1991), the International Award of Fiction (Uruguay, 1996), the Primo Premio Tusculorum di Poesia (Italy, 1996) and the International Award for Published Work "Macedonio Palomino", (Mexico, 2008). Over the years, many of his poems have appeared in the small press magazines and journals in the USA and the UK but this is the first time that a substantial body of his work has been translated into English and presented as a full-length collection in its own right. The editorial team at Ravenna Press are to be congratulated on making a selection of his work available to the English-speaking world. This can only serve to enhance the poet's reputation by bringing his work to a wider audience. As with all great writers, his themes are universal. The way in which he chooses to convey these themes is masterful. Each poem has a conciseness about it, an ease which can be deceptive at first reading, because it belies the weight of the subject matter that lies beneath the surface. There is no florid language, no superficial excess; Benitez cuts to the chase and makes his statements with the minimum of fuss. "This Morning I Wrote Two Poems" is a good example. The almost conversational title might bring to mind William Carlos Williams (I am thinking of his poem "This is Just to Say…"). The conversational tone continues throughout the poem because the words fall easily down the page. It is, of course, a work that concerns itself with the mysterious craft of writing—where does the Muse come from and why is it that the finished object is more than the sum of its component parts? I wonder about the origin of those two things that are now on the table, not exactly made of paper and ink. Always modest about his own achievements and wise enough to know that the perfect poem is in all probability an impossible thing (but worth pursuing), he goes on to wonder About the men who have said it better and are now dead about the length of time, expressed in superlatives, that it can take for a work of art to come to its full maturity, and how, at the last, a poem can have a transformational effect which can be out of all proportion to its existence on the page: I wonder why, a short while ago, this world has changed twice. Animals and birds feature in a number of his poems. In all of them, they are celebrated for what they are. His powers of observance are acute, the shape of the heron is concisely described as resembling the letter "S"; a leopard is a beast always under the rain (because of its spots) and an insect whose diaphanous wings are almost transparent is hardly distinct from the air in his elementary design. There is a metaphysical feel to these poems. His consideration of the salmon, in "The Extravagant Upstream Traveller" is a beautifully honed metaphor for mankind "swimming against the tide" in a world threatened by pollution: Then I saw him in the oily water, a gift of industry and the hatred for what lives, climbing upstream: the impossible salmon… unusual iridescence amid the garbage of the condemned river… In "Aurochs" Benitez succeeds in capturing a real sense of antiquity. He reaches back to ancient Greece and Rome and also, perhaps, to primitive forms of writing. The animal knows what he writes because before he existed it was already a name.
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Benítez, Luis
Complete poems : 1986- 2006 / Luis Benítez ; dirigido por José Marcelo Caballero. - 1a ed. - Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires : La Esquina de los Vientos, 2018.
Libro digital, EPUB
Archivo Digital: descarga y online
ISBN 978-987-46606-5-7
1. Antología de Poesía. I. Caballero, José Marcelo, dir. II. Título.
CDD A861
© 2018 Luis Benitez
© 2018 de esta edición Pampia Grupo Editor
Alberdi 872, C1424BYV, C.A.B.A., Argentina
www.pampia.com
Director Editorial: José Marcelo Caballero
Coordinadora de edición: Marcela Serrano
Ilustraciónes de cubierta: Departamento editorial
Primera edición eBook: Agosto 2018
Reservados todos los derechos. Ninguna parte de esta publicación puede ser reproducida, almacenada o transmitida por ningún medio sin permiso del editor.
Any unauthorized transfer of license, use, sharing, reproduction or distribution of these materials by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise is prohibited. No portion of these materials may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever, without the express written consent of the publishers.
Published under the Copyright Laws 11.723 Of The Republica Argentina.
Hecho en Argentina – Made in Argentina
LUIS BENÍTEZ
COMPLETEPOEMS
(1980-2006)
Translated by Beatriz Allocati
Luis Benítez by Neil Leadbeater 1
Well-established as a poet, essayist and novelist, the writer Luis Benítez needs little introduction. His books have been published in Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Uruguay, the United States and Venezuela.
He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Among other things, he is a member of the Latin-American Academy of Poetry, the International Society of Writers, and the Argentinian Foundation for Poetry. His work has brought him international recognition and he has been the recipient of many prestigious awards including the La Porte des Poétes International Award (Paris, 1991), the International Award of Fiction (Uruguay, 1996), the Primo Premio Tusculorum di Poesia (Italy, 1996) and the International Award for Published Work “Macedonio Palomino”, (Mexico, 2008).
Over the years, many of his poems have appeared in the small press magazines and journals in the USA and the UK but this is the first time that a substantial body of his work has been translated into English and presented as a full-length collection in its own right. The editorial team at Ravenna Press are to be congratulated on making a selection of his work available to the English-speaking world. This can only serve to enhance the poet’s reputation by bringing his work to a wider audience.
As with all great writers, his themes are universal. The way in which he chooses to convey these themes is masterful. Each poem has a conciseness about it, an ease which can be deceptive at first reading, because it belies the weight of the subject matter that lies beneath the surface. There is no florid language, no superficial excess; Benitez cuts to the chase and makes his statements with the minimum of fuss.
“This Morning I Wrote Two Poems” is a good example. The almost conversational title might bring to mind William Carlos Williams (I am thinking of his poem “This is Just to Say…”). The conversational tone continues throughout the poem because the words fall easily down the page. It is, of course, a work that concerns itself with the mysterious craft of writing—where does the Muse come from and why is it that the finished object is more than the sum of its component parts?
I wonder about the origin
of those two things that are now on the table,
not exactly made of paper and ink.
Always modest about his own achievements and wise enough to know that the perfect poem is in all probability an impossible thing (but worth pursuing), he goes on to wonder
About the men who have said it better
and are now dead
about the length of time, expressed in superlatives, that it can take for a work of art to come to its full maturity, and how, at the last, a poem can have a transformational effect which can be out of all proportion to its existence on the page:
I wonder why, a short while ago,
this world has changed twice.
Animals and birds feature in a number of his poems. In all of them, they are celebrated for what they are. His powers of observance are acute, the shape of the heron is concisely described as resembling the letter “S”; a leopard is a beast always under the rain (because of its spots) and an insect whose diaphanous wings are almost transparent is hardly distinct from the air in his elementary design.
There is a metaphysical feel to these poems. His consideration of the salmon, in “The Extravagant Upstream Traveller” is a beautifully honed metaphor for mankind “swimming against the tide” in a world threatened by pollution:
Then I saw him in the oily water,
a gift of industry and the hatred for what lives,
climbing upstream:
the impossible salmon…
unusual iridescence amid the garbage
of the condemned river…
In “Aurochs” Benitez succeeds in capturing a real sense of antiquity. He reaches back to ancient Greece and Rome and also, perhaps, to primitive forms of writing. The animal knows what he writes because before he existed it was already a name. Rightly or wrongly I detect here a reference to the second letter of the ancient runic alphabet, the “Fuþark,” in which the letter “u”—“ur” in the Anglo-Saxon Rune poem, is described as a fierce bull, literally an aurochs, with implications from the Old Norse word urdr of fate and destiny. It is also Caesar’s aurochs, as mentioned in his “Gallic Wars”— “that cannot be tamed or accustomed to human beings”. It is earthy and not without menace. To the poet, it is:
sometimes something that leaves huge drops of blood
in the boughs and a footstep
going away, solid, invisible.
Poets, too, are celebrated in this volume. There are poems addressed to Vallejo, Pound and Rimbaud. The title of his poem “To Deprive Death of It’s Arrogance” carries an echo of Dylan Thomas’s poem “And Death Shall Have No Dominion.” There are other echoes of Thomas in “Conversations” where Benitez proposes to battle the Great Night as did Dylan Thomas in his “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” The references are no accident. Dylan Thomas was, and continues to be, a great influence on Benítez. Benitez has said of him, “he was my master”.
In “Kustendjé, By The Black Sea” the whole poem, which is a meditation on change, revolves around the central figure of another writer from the past, this time Ovid, and his work “Metamorphoses.” The reference is to the time when the Roman Emperor Augustus banished Ovid from his native Rome to a period in exile in Constanza. Again, as with so many of the poems in this collection, there are several layers of meaning working their way into the reader’s conscience at the same time. In this case it is the skilful interplay between past and present: the ever-changing events of history.
“Naïve” reveals another facet to his art. In some ways, the title of the poem is ironic. It is far from naïve—it is in fact rather complex. The girl in the poem lives in her own universe, one that is, according to her, of her own making. It is full of everything that she loves: her clothes, her friends, her home. She believes that everything is a true reflection of herself and that nothing will change without her say-so. There is, however, one word in this poem that unhinges all of this and that is the word uncertain. She is living in an uncertain country. We are not masters of our own destiny. Benítez is aware of the fact that there are things which lie beyond our understanding. On one level this may be a spiritual force, on another, it may be the uncertainty of living under a political system where change could occur at any time.
In summary this book offers the reader meticulously observed, intelligent and moving poems by a writer whose reputation deservedly extends beyond his native country.
1Neil Leadbeater is an editor, author and poet living in Edinburgh, Scotland. His poems and short stories have been published widely in anthologies and small press magazines and journals both at home and abroad. His first full-length collection of poems,Hoarding Conkers at Hailes Abbeywas published by Littoral Press in 2010 and a selection of his Latin American poems,Librettos for the Black Madonna, was published by White Adder Press earlier this year. This text was published by the magazine Galatea Resurrects #17, December 2011, as review about the Benitez’s bookA Heron in Buenos Aires.
POEMS OF LAND AND MEMORY (1980)
BEFORE YOU SAY ANYTHING
You go about the world, queen of the infinite eyes’ country,
with your mouth salty and ready, not knowing that everything
has been split and delivered.
Before you say anything, life and death have taken
their places and the orchestra bursts into
the bloody symphony of birth;
(the naked actors weep when going up the stage)
as a wild executioner switches the lights
off and on as he pleases. Before you say anything,
listen to life’s heart beating with fury
in others as it beats in you. By that beating
we let skin and bones flow like rivers.
We are men and therefore we forget it.
Before your red mouth opens in a kiss or a bite
everything will be already on its way, the kiss already given
and the wheels of day and the whirlpools of night
will have their mad dancer runaway among wheels;
you are the awe and the grief
that never close their eyes.
And before you say anything, the pack will be shuffled, cards dealt.
But it’s for that useless wrath of yours, as alert as an ear,
beautiful and meaningless like flowers that I follow
your steps, Inés Sandín, of the infinite eyes,
with the few things that I know so wrongfully:
my books, my past and my words.
LAND AND MEMORY
Memory is the past forgiving us
saying that it does not matter that we forget it,
for all its inhabitants remember us.
How we were then, how we’ll be tomorrow
bone and mud no longer matter.
Remembrance is the future that greets us from afar,
remembrance is someone who comes to say goodbye
time and time again, for the penultimate, penultimate time.
And we are all going to sleep: land and memory
share their dead and their living
without closing their eyes or mouth,
without telling them that they are beyond time
nor entrusting them the barren secrets we knew as children.
But hush! Let me forget and remember you
as I love you now and bury you alive and furious
for you to live forever in land and memory.
LIFE AND SPECTRES
Those papers tinged by your tread went along
like the drivel of snails
do not remember your name:
they are devices of imagination,
voices lost in the outcry of time.
Their absurd scales and pulleys
go up and weigh fainting landscapes,
objects to be some time by your grave.
The spectres I was peer behind words
the stir of life, more copious than time,
for I was a spectre and spectres are things
and men. Life, that secret foe,
wields its picks and spades, demolishes voices
and tongues rest empty in front of its face.
In front of its face, that doesn’t see, or hear or talks to man.
WITHOUT A LIGHT OR VOICE TO SUMMON ME
I was haunting the spaces of dream
without body or self, swollen with air and music
I floated I was a furious balloon in the dark.
Without a light or a voice to summon me,
free from God and myself,
I was the man.
Dante and Shakespeare and Ibsen and Malraux:
what penalty would they give to skyscrapers?
what hell is there worse than the underground train?
what storm is greater than any day?
How dead they are.
What gravestones carved of Octobers and Januaries,
my brothers and friends,
my only venerable family.
I am only an orphan without back or front
who does not cling anywhere
and has nowhere bed and table set.
That one, he who will build a cabin in the Waste Land.
IN THE BEGINNING
A half of my father and of my mother
and a fourth with the law on earth,
my world came to this one to learn I would return to naught
and nine months before being born to death
I already knew grief haunting behind liquid walls
And I saw the seasons and the eras
weird characters in transit under my elf eyes,
asleep and held in the belly.
I discerned day from night,
stole birds’ eggs from the tiled roofs,
swimming in the inner lake, I knew water;
I danced, before having legs, on the fields’ lawn.
Peeping through my mother’s navel,
I saw the secret tricks of dawn,
when it shifts the day’s objects into those which are night’s,
and what surrounds us stretched then
its cold hands to my tender cheeks.
The sour odour of that sadness rambling about faces
hurt my mind and my senses answered
howling a desperate smart;
naught let go its prey to escape along that long corridor,
where one by one, I recognised the forthcoming faces,
friendly and unfriendly, who would forge my life beaten by their gestures.
Love and its masks, from the belly I placed
with clumsy fingers on the faces of bitter strangers,
exceeding them, made me furious and precocious pound
the warm brick that tied me.
Upside down, with sex already setting fire to my first roots,
I dreamt I fled amidst a rain of blood
towards a stage of conceited madmen,
where I too wore a fragile pitiful suit
wherein all my wishes were in danger.
Until the moment when someone whipped me.
And I woke up crying.
SHOULD I FLEE OR STAY?
Should I flee to the house of silence,
smiling with motionless eyes, always nodding,
or stay to receive the gestures of strangers
on my chest, ignoring their swords under the gestures?
Should I flee or stay with my hand stretched offering them the fruit,
watching their foreign glances, their ship’s motionless sail
in the bay of my life, trading words with them without fear of pirates?
Or escape up the steep slope of my destiny and safe from the ridiculous grin
contemplate myself, hide the sight of my days in secret chests,
sealed to deceit? Should I flee or stay homeless,
exposed to the inquisitive finger and the cunning eye, forced by fear
to engrave my history on sand labs?
FROM THE UTERUS TO THE GRAVE A DREAM WILL TAKE YOU
From the uterus to the grave a dream will take you,
naked, the pump and the shroud made of the same silk.
A dream with petal cheeks hammering in your mind,
a frozen kiss, a blow on the nape struck
by a stranger with iron guantlets,
striking at your door by the lock.
A metal ghost your body,
from the short trousers to the old man’s cane
treaded by foreigners approaching to inspect your
viscera
and the signs from heaven with their deadly fingers,
astonished, you will see how the full spoon
lays both kisses and bites in your concave soul.
From the uterus to the grave,
nailed to the soil that only opens twice,
your eyes romancing with photographs
will see the boy free from sin and scars,
transparent, although his weeping foresees
and the iron of love engraving your groin
and the mill of oblivion turned by a wind of bones.
From the uterus to the grave a dream will take you,
the reins torn to pieces in that whirlwind,
in two seconds of seventy years,
only a notch, in a huge clock.
A SEASON ROTS
A season rots and under it there’s another one,
the grain running along the tree heart falls,
shakes invisible on the grass and in four spasms
dies, as time sandpapers things until leaving only the heart,
offering words and rugged stammerings of emptiness.
The sap, the frozen leaf, the flower and the fruit go into the eye
as a unique body which never dies, and from man
the mortal bone falls down to the fist of the root and the cycle renews
even to the widow’s lip. Wet and without eyelids under the sheets
of the wood, the dead man and his hunter rest, brothers at last,
in a blameless darkness that brings them to light.
SOMETHING FLOWS WHEN NOTHING FLUTTERS ANY MORE
Something flows when nothing flutters any more.
And its pace unnoticed by the darkness sleeping with us
will turn the blindness of misery into an exasperated light.
From the bottom, a well or a marsh of numbers,
where harassed by the world and its thousand heads
we’ve fallen 15 tongues within flesh,
something that can only be touched wearing
the gloves of despair,
something flows, when we think that nothing flutters any more.
It compels the sore heart muscle
and the locked bone of the mind
to eat and drink, even within their cells.
It is a strength roughly taking us by the hand
and inventing a path of unusual color,
along which we run naked away from the blind.
Obedient, it will stir the eyelids of the dead
and will have the fly, patiently waiting,
hanging from gluttony, go away.
The sun will hang again, when the moon comes down.
We’ll be able to see it beat amidst our black shadows,
even when we open-mouthed, may see day to day
our own funerals passing by.
Something flows when nothing flutters any more.
Through its mercy there will be a fruit in the faded flowers
(its magic will grunt in the vertebra)
it will scatter old men and scythes in the air with flood steps;
our young white hairs blacken,
at the silver whistle kissed at the last moment
with trembling hands throwing the wind away from beds.
And when our pale bones
give daisies strength and vigor, they will still beat
from the grave.
Because something flows when we think nothing flutters any more.
O! BRING THE BLACK WINE
O! Bring the black wine
carrying its grove, the land with the dead men and blinding virgins
in a desperate flow to my mouth,
it mixes man’s blood and semen
to give out a child with a blurry glance.
I want the eyes of fire and tides,
not allowing death into my words,
but with wings of wet papers they bring me near
the shallow laughter of my bones,
the only and faithful mates in the sailing years
that descended from the uterus with me
to this world of bugs and misfortune.
Bring the black wine with the stopper of a dried skull
making me hear pianos played by my spectre
in the neighboring rooms,
as time slowly flows between the fingers
and I can play with it and with its rude dancing temples.
Only so can I watch the world of night quietly,
as the dried countenance of love
slowly puts out cigarettes on my stomach
and the throat that pronounced its name becomes a gutter,
where frogs, triangles, confused centaurs in
disorder splash.
Bring the black wine.
Tonight I want all my ghosts in my veins.
They will wake up glory with their kisses,
in our saddened hearts.
GIVE ME A HUGE LIE
Give me a huge lie, to make the pulses of age tremble
with its grave and meaningful footstep,
to drive away from me the black birds and the worms
that I collect in the dock of fear with no intention
that it may manage to make me believe that man
can get away from himself,
and be one with a woman and love her without destroying himself.
Something to last a moment that comes from your lips,
for me to hide so that the haughty and the obstinate may not see me.
Behind those fragile ornamentations he’ll live happy and tiny,
far from boredom and from the eyes peering in the night.
Without fear of silence and beasts,
after the lie was pronounced,
the heels of misfortune would run as by a brief enchantment
and neither this nor misery would fish any more in my
dulled senses.
The anguish of man would burn like a phoenix-witch
and these eyes and these poor hands praying without reaching
God’s tail in the heights, would throw down
in pieces the old heart of bitterness, to the ground,
joyful in their new mask.
Give me a huge lie,
to make time turn back on the clocks
and lull me within,
until the frozen smile of the idiot
shows on my lips.
I’M LOOKING FOR YOU THROUGH THE SYMBOLS OF THIS CRUEL HARMONY
Here I love you.
On this ship which rolls among suns and stars,
in the greatest and most silent of nights,
a man only attends to your silence;
pending on your eyes more beautiful that novas,
he sees that in their blackness someone discovers wheels and fire.
Here I love you,
here I love you,
tojoin you I would lighten steps of the worlds toward nothingness.
I’m looking for you through the symbols of this cruel harmony:
My love is one that like the rest of things
on dwindling down, enlarges itself,
penetrating, migrating as we all are, young and old,
to a new world sending two obscure miracles in your eyes,
to a new world which anticipates
its dark miracles in your eyes.
MASS-MAN
He was by himself among things
like an only star in the sky
and a dead man in the centre of the earth.
Around him men traded
wire necklaces and life raised it babel
like a precise and silent spider. For years and years
the seasons’ strings tied him to their knots
with the rope of death as silence
signed his mouth. Because he fled amongst screams
horrible howling, of the hand beating
the hungry table in the centre of the soul.
And in all things and in all men
the sign of death glistening in the shadow.
ALONG THE ROADS I TAKE I CAN BE WHEREVER YOU ARE
In the eyelid closing all the landscapes
in the eyelid dropping the curtain on all landscapes
but my soul
in the voice talking to us when we are alone
in the tree leaves copybooks of rough weather
in the eyes of the dead who watch forever
in the hands of children who play deep inside
in the time in the word linking the idiot and the scholar
in your naked mouth and your mouth dressed by the first sob
and the last whining for the seed to be born and mistake the road
for the mineral dreaming of being the spoon for a sad man
for the triumph of he who lost everything to win the sight of wrecked landscapes
for the mist of the past and the flashlight of the future and for the tassel
to make the lovers’ sheets when the sun still bathes it and not the moon
for the love uselessly infuriating the waiting and that only sight and touch
