The Mosaic of Plenitude

It might still be difficult to assess the influence Octavio Paz exerted over Mexican literature--especially over poets and poetry--throughout the 20th century. Like T.S. Eliot in Britain and the United States, Paz was at once a role model, a source of inspiration and a fearful tyrant. His charisma, voracious appetite, encyclopedic knowledge and eclectic talents opened up Mexico to the world. But he also eclipsed others, and his gargantuan standing distorted a landscape that was understood abroad only through his personalized lens.

“Reversible Monuments,” an ambitious anthology of present-day poetry from Mexico edited by Monica de la Torre, a translator and graduate student at Columbia University, and Michael Wiegers, the managing editor of Copper Canyon Press, is as appropriate an instrument as any to estimate the health of poets south of the border and to ponder the landscape after Paz’s aesthetic battles were fought.

The title comes from one of Paz’s “Topopoemas,” which, the editors write, is a “concrete poem in the shape of a rhombus that has different images that reflect on each other vertically as well as horizontally. The poem can be read in many different directions, in the same way one can read poems in translation. The poem is circular, has neither a beginning nor an end.”

They add: “We like to think in these terms about translations, which are never final, and about generations of poets who owe as much to the poets who came before them as to the ones ahead of them who in turn will keep their poetry current.”

The anthology is made up of 31 authors, handsomely rendered in English. The format is bilingual, with Spanish and English versions facing each other. The volume was born in a 1998 exchange, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets and the Mexican Cultural Institute in New York, which enabled six poets from each country to read del otro lado--on the other side of the divide. Once the exchange was finished, De la Torre and Wiegers invited dozens of other Mexican poets born since the middle of the 20th century (with one justifiable exception, born in 1934) to submit samplers of their work.

The result is, for the most part, enthralling. On occasion a translation stumbles, but this is to be expected when more than two dozen translators, both experienced and untrained, are involved. Some of the editorial choices are questionable too, but no anthology can fully satisfy the conflicting demands of its readership. This work succeeds in that it makes a statement about the state of the universe at a given time and place. Through his numerous translations of other people’s poems (from the French, English, etc.) and also in his capacity as editor in chief of the monthly literary magazine Vuelta, Paz served as a bridge between Mexico and the rest of the world. As one of his legion of assiduous followers south of the Rio Grande, I became acquainted with Joseph Brodsky and Nadezhda Mandelstam, with Milan Kundera and Hans Magnus Enzensberger.

The impact of such acquaintance is everywhere in “Reversible Monuments,” composed of works from the generation of Mexican poets that came of age in the 1970s and ‘80s as contemporaries of the world and not, as was the case before World War II, in a parochialism that turned the country into an island of sorts. The authors are multifarious in their inspiration: echoes of Isaac Babel, Novalis, “The Iliad,” Seamus Heaney, the poets of the Spanish Civil War, the critic Damaso Alonso and the colonial nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz are amplified in this box of resonance.

This is also a generation that moved away from a dogmatic ideological engagement that was sine qua non in 1960s Latin America. Take David Huerta, born in 1949 and responsible for “Incurable,” arguably the longest poem in Mexican literature. Huerta’s father, Efrain (born in 1914, the same year as Paz) is known as Mexico’s Pablo Neruda: a committed leftist whose poetry ranges from propaganda to moments of rare candor. Efrain belongs to the generation that matured around the magazine Taller, whose readers used the Spanish Civil War, fascism and Stalinism as points of reference. His poetry is one of battle, hope and denunciation, enlightening people to the inhumanity of capitalism.

In David Huerta’s verses, ideology is pushed to the margins. Even though his model remains the politicized but sentimental Neruda (“it happens that I grow tired of being a man”), Huerta is far more individualistic and more cynical than his father. His verses are ornate, cerebral, bookish, apocalyptic to the point of abstraction, as in his “Bolero at Armageddon:”

Let the world under law be smashed to bits, startled fingernail

covered in grime, silent path, and last conflagration.

The saxophones of Jericho, the plutonium crossbows, the goodbye

you gave me with a frown: what way is this

for things to end, what cluttered form of collapse, I, you, the

cacophonous shadow deleting the world ....

The spirit that emanates from “Reversible Monuments” is the product of migrations--a pluribus, a symphony able to celebrate Mexico not as a collection of folkloric paraphernalia. Fabio Morabito is Egyptian and Italian; Gerardo Deniz (a.k.a. Juan Almela) is a descendant of Iberian emigres; and Gloria Gervitz’s Judaism infuses her explorations with an inquisitiveness allowed only to itinerant souls. (She is the author of the memorable “Shajarit” and “Yiskor,” only fragments of which have been published in this country.) Mexico emerges as a mosaic of backgrounds, Emersonian in its quest to establish a connection between the poet and the Muses. The Frida Kahlo syndrome, the emphasis on the autochthonous at the expense of authenticity, is, fortunately, absent.

These are poets in conversation with their ancestors: Quevedo, Jorge Luis Borges, Vicente Aleixandre. Sounds become voluptuous. The endless possibilities of alliteration are delved into without hesitation. Poets like Coral Bracho, Antonio Deltoro and Eduardo Milan squeeze the music out of words and the result is hypnotic. Female voices are handsomely represented, which, to my knowledge, is an exception in anthologies of this sort, from Paz’s “An Anthology of Mexican Poetry,” published in 1958, bizarrely translated by Samuel Beckett, to an anthology edited by Mark Strand in 1970 and onward to volumes published in the early ‘90s under the editorship of Forrest Gander and Juvenal Acosta.

For example, poet Pura Lopez Colome is fascinated by the melodiousness of rhetoric exemplified by her translations of Paul Celan. There is an atheistic religiosity in her oeuvre, a lack of sincerity that is effective. (To her translator, she said: “Sincerity and veracity are distinct.”) She seems to be stationed in a single place while the labyrinthine universe rotates around her. Her poetry is an alchemy through which she lets herself travel, as if in a dream, though the layers of stimulation that envelope her, such as in her work “Death of the Kiss:”

formed of loving, desiring, deciphering the pure,

the impure figure, a language that says

In the beginning

conjugated and sublimated:

I am that I am,

come to me,

approach with your mouth open,

feel my breath,

fill yourself on the Name,

open your eyes and you will see

Nothing.

The most enjoyable feature in “Reversible Monuments” is the inclusion of non-Spanish-language poets, the palpitating verses of poets active in pre-Columbian tongues, such as Nahuatl, Tzeltal, Zoque, Mayan. Among them is Buffalo Conde (a.k.a. Pedro Perez Conde), whose pieces in the guttural Tzeltal are paraphrases of the Song of Songs. Conde’s choice of ur-text is significant: He seeks to reconcile the Bible and pre-1492 mythology, to chant the affairs of King David in a non-European speech--a subversive endeavor, no doubt, yet one perfectly in tune with the mestizaje, the cross-fertilization of races and languages that has formed Mexico since the arrival of the Iberian conquistadors. One of the three poems by Conde in the volume is “Xnich k’anal tak’in” or “Flower of Gold:”

Fountain in the orchard of my beloved,

watermill sanctified in my honor,

that flows from the fields where the buffalo rests:

come here my legendary Beloved.

“I’ve come to my field, oh beloved, my companion;

I’ve drank of my water and my juice, my wife:

now you should drink plentifully of this juice, my beloved.”

It is the voice of my husband that calls.

The poetry of Juan Gregorio Regino, who writes in Mazatec; and of Victor Teran and Natalia Toledo, who write in Zapotec, is stirring. Its inclusion is an accomplishment. In the past “alternative” voices have seldom had a large audience. Not too long ago, W.W. Norton released an estimable anthology, “In the Language of Kings,” edited by Miguel Leon-Portilla and Earl Shorris, in which Mesoamerican letters were traced from the 13th century to the present. The continuity proved that Spanish, the weapon of imperial Spain in the 16th century, managed only halfheartedly to homogenize the population on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, and that aboriginal traditions remain alive, even under the mantle of modernity.

This is evident in the wake of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas that erupted in 1994 just as the North American Free Trade Agreement was implemented: The Indian past has not been altogether erased; it is simply ignored by the status quo. The widespread popularity of vocalists like Lila Downs, the daughter of a Mixtecan mother and a gringo father, able to deliver her rhythms in English, Spanish and in various pre-Columbian tongues, is proof that the return of the indigena is not exclusive to literature and politics.

Paz’s magisterial presence is felt almost everywhere in this volume. Indeed, he himself is a monument: a lighthouse, a map, a compass. A few of the poets in this anthology invoke him directly, yet the threshold he passed through is crossed instinctively, almost mechanically, by his successors. Their habitat isn’t a little town made of tortillas but Western civilization as a whole.

Paz, of course, inaugurated this trend, but they have gone beyond his horizons: They have awakened to a democracy, a complicated system of government that imposes demands on them that Paz never experienced before he died in 1998, pluralism, and with it the eruption of an Indian self in search of its place in the national pantheon. This Mexico is polychromatic, and perhaps rowdy too--a welcome change.