“Ease is everything in poetry. It separates genius from the merely masterful, marks the spot where art leaves off and reality begins and the poet speaks not for the poets but for humankind. Enrique Lihn, a Chilean, is a foremost inheritor in [this] Latin American tradition.” ―Publishers Weekly
The Dark Room presents in a compact bilingual selection the extraordinary poetry of Enrique Lihn (1929-1988), winner of the prestigious Casa de las Americas Prize and one of Chile's most remarkable writers. Gathered here is Lihn's most representative work from 1963 to 1977, drawn from his major books.
- Publishers Weekly
The most fascinating
stories from the evolution of Latin American poetry in the 20th
century seem to come, quite unexpectedly, from Chile. The long and
narrow land that produced Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, and Vicente
Huidobro, already rich enough in its literary figures, proves to be a
more complex and experimental breeding ground for literary aesthetics
and philosophy than one would expect, due largely to successful
translations of lesser-known poets such as Dave Oliphant's study and
display of the works of Enrique Lihn in Figures of Speech. While many
of the Latin poets of the century focus on the development of an
American aesthetic distinct from the European tradition, relying
heavily on indigenous strands and patriotic motifs, Lihn falls under
the far more compelling rubric of poets who achieve that larger goal
by concentrating instead on personal themes that reveal artistic
issues in nude and telling forms. "Poet from head to toe,"
he calls himself in his own work. --David Garza, Austin Chronicle
The most fascinating
stories from the evolution of Latin American poetry in the 20th
century seem to come, quite unexpectedly, from Chile. The long and
narrow land that produced Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, and Vicente
Huidobro, already rich enough in its literary figures, proves to be a
more complex and experimental breeding ground for literary aesthetics
and philosophy than one would expect, due largely to successful
translations of lesser-known poets such as Dave Oliphant's study and
display of the works of Enrique Lihn in Figures of Speech. While many
of the Latin poets of the century focus on the development of an
American aesthetic distinct from the European tradition, relying
heavily on indigenous strands and patriotic motifs, Lihn falls under
the far more compelling rubric of poets who achieve that larger goal
by concentrating instead on personal themes that reveal artistic
issues in nude and telling forms. "Poet from head to toe,"
he calls himself in his own work.
As complex and
bizarre as Lihn's verse becomes, it requires a translator as
dedicated to the work and familiar with the poet as Oliphant is to do
the work its justice. Having translated the poetry of Chile for 30
years, he proves his sound critical sense by assembling a beautiful
selection of Lihn's work that displays his central themes and
concerns at the peaks of his powers. Perhaps the most important of
these themes is the troubled attempt to create the self, or to exist
in any convincing form at all, by means of writing poetry. In his
"News from Babylon," Lihn writes: "Grandmother of
writing, typewriter mine/blood no longer runs in my veins:/from the
sanctified water I'm a putrified spot."
Lihn is thoughtful
enough (or neurotic, he might argue) to counter his own attempts with
questions and refutations, insisting that language is doomed from the
start as any device of representation. This self-denying theory
fortunately does not rise to the level of self-extinction, as his
poetry seems to accomplish certain goals independently of the poet's
intentions. How damaging can these questions be, after all, when they
are the tired pet themes of lit crit classes throughout the world?
But where Huidobro shocks with his petulant claims to divinity as the
right of the poet, Lihn (in spite of himself) achieves a subtle and
quite accidental sanctification that is more delightful to
experience: "Orphan of the eagles, father to his own
increase/dark, shaded by an angel long deceased."
While previous
translations of Lihn's work, most notably David Unger's version of
the 1963 poem "The Dark Room," are adequate in their motion
and easy presentation of the poet's images, they tend to lack the
unhinged and chaotic, nearly broken shards of language so crucial to
the poet's treatment of his own Spanish. Oliphant doesn't quite
accomplish that impossible feat, but he impresses with generally
faithful and inspired translations of a man he obviously and
understandably admires. The translator understands well enough that
the image of the poet himself -- the deliberate image -- presents a
difficult symbol representative of his own fantastic struggle: There
are the bags below the eyes, an empty mouth turned downward, and most
important of all, the undefeated jaw stretched tight in polemics of
undisclosed importance. - Dave Oliphant
Figures of Speech is the only book by Chilean Enrique Lihn (1929-88)
to appear in the United States since 1978, when his first major
collection, The Dark Room and Other Poems, was published by New
Directions. This present volume contains sixty-two poems translated
by Austin poet and publisher Dave Oliphant, and is selected mainly
from later books. The collection includes signature texts on the
poetic process which rank among this hemisphere’s most powerful.
“There is no
lucidity like that of Enrique Lihn,” said Nicanor Parra, referring
not to the meaning of the poetry but to the poet’s self-awareness
and linguistic clarity while creating it.
Enrique Lihn was
obsessed – in a self-critical and imaginative way – with the
paradoxical nature of art, and the limits of communication. From
perception to naming in his work there emerges poetic evocation; from
text to reader opens internal listening, the source of dialogue; and
from the original idiom to the translated language, cross-cultural
interpretation. What we read is a series of resemblances – never
equivalency. What we experience is the metaphorical process.
“Those who insist
on calling things by their names / as if they were clear and simple /
cover them simply with new ornaments,” proclaims Lihn. “They do
not express things, they dig around in the dictionary, / they render
language more and more useless, / they call things by their names and
those answer to their names / but they undress themselves before us
only in the dark.” (“If Poetry Is To Be Written Right”)
In a thoughtful
introduction, Oliphant clarifies this judgment as: “…Lihn’s
preoccupation with the function of language, how it should be
utilized, how it can stand in the way of true understanding, and how
yet the poet would be nothing without his words. The idea that poetry
is ‘nothing’ is, from beginning to end of Lihn’s writing
career, the cause of his sense of futility as a creative artist and
yet remains for him the subject that he must forever confront and the
object that he must continue to make.”
Poems about poetry
are generally reflexive rather than reflective. But the effect of
Lihn’s texts prevents the reader from slipping into a cozy
romanticism about Ars poetica, and challenges one’s arrogance about
what the poem literally means. “By An Uncontrollable Force”
begins:
I hope these poems
have been written by an uncontrollable force, with the inadequacies
of such a case. I may have botched them, but will not forgive myself
if I have done so beyond the bounds of a certain sincerity that even
the words are permitted; and seldom did I believe I could write in
such a dated manner as this, naturally.
The voice pretends
to be speaking beyond the margin of these lines, as if the poet were
in the wings while his poem performs on stage. The passage is
grounded by comic self-deprecation, leaving open to debate the nature
of this “uncontrollable force”: is it neurotic and thus
uncontrollable, or is the poetry actually under artistic control?
I see a summer fade
where it finally existed and its knot is now in my throat that never
aspired to song yet neither to cold speculation. Overstatements
strike me as justified, in truth we live by them, each in his way
just as one can die of an excess of common sense. Sea and sun, for
instance, are naturally exaggerated or if one wishes: rhetorical
while of the logical mad we already have the most perilous supply.
Lihn characterized
his own poetry accurately – he was neither lyrical nor coldly
philosophical. His discursive sermons are littered with oxymorons,
wordplay, and political wit that illuminate his own truth, somewhat
like Parra’s sparer antipoems, which broke the mold of Modernismo.
He then begins to play with the absurd in the poem’s final passage:
Soon all the tricks
of language – and language itself is the original artifice –
wanted to place themselves here at the service of a poetry that’s
neither artificial nor natural; a no-man’s land it may be but a
familiar spot where those poles have come to touch and in the best of
cases by an uncontrollable force.
Since “language
itself is the original artifice,” what would this “poetry that’s
neither artificial nor natural” be? Lihn does not say directly, but
his poems map this “no-man’s land.” His “familiar spot”
cannot be reached by academic logic, psychoanalysis, or automatic
writing. The poetry cuts against these methodologies, yet it contains
a rigorous logic, a humane insight, and a painfully ironic
spontaneity.
These aspects are
strikingly evident in the nakedly honest Death Diary, a selection of
which closes this edition. Chileans have written memorable poetry
about death – Gabriela Mistral’s Sonnets of Death, Pablo Neruda’s
“Nothing but Death,” Parra’s gallows humor, Oscar Hahn’s The
Art of Dying, Marjorie Agosín’s books about the “disappeared”
– but only Lihn wrote about his own dying.
“Pain Has Nothing
To Do With Pain,” an eighty-line discourse, offers this warning:
“The words we use to mean those things,” (like pain and death)
“are contaminated / There are no words in the mute zone.” But
thirty lines later, the voice in the “mute zone” continues its
discourse!
A dead man who has a
few months of life would have to learn a clean language for hurting,
despairing, and dying which beyond mathematics would be accessible
only to specialists of an impossible and equally valid knowledge a
language like a body with all its organs operated on that would live
for a fraction of a second in a brilliant fashion…
If Lihn was
frustrated by the veils of language obscuring living reality, how
futile was his attempt to evoke the final unknown? His evocation of
death emerges as the image of a dying body. By “operating” on the
body of language, the poet transforms prosaic function into poetic
creation, in the eternal instant: the poem. The text of the body
becomes the body of the text.
However, the
narrator insists that “this is already stating / the merely obvious
with the help / of a figure of speech / my words obviously cannot
cross the barrier of that unknown tongue / before which I am like a
baboon called upon by extraterrestrial beings to interpret / the
human language….”
Within these fifteen
deathbed poems, Lihn searches for a way to transcend the melodramatic
rhetoric of death by facing the silent reality of dying. “Limitations
of Language” offers another perspective on the inexplicable:
“Language awaits the miracle of a third person / (but not the one
that’s absent from Arabic grammars) / neither a character nor a
thing nor someone dead / A real subject who may speak for himself, in
an inhuman voice / of what neither I nor you is able to say / blocked
by our personal pronouns…”
There is no such
person, of course, but the second stanza teases us with another
variation: “We have here a man, pressing the trigger close to his
temple / He sees something between that gesture and his death / Sees
it during an elemental bit of time / so short that it will form no
part of that / If something could prolong his death without placing
it in time / a drug (discover it!) / The first pallid echoes would be
heard / of an unpublished description of what it is not….” This
published version of “what it is not” ends without a period,
leaving open the search.
Closure comes in
“The Artificial Hand,” “that brought / paper and pencil in the
bag of the terminally ill,” but it will not “sign a decree /
making an exception that will return him to life.” Instead, he
rejects the hand and the false hope it represents, knowing he cannot
be saved from death.
His orthopedic hand
moves like an idiot who would play with a rock or a piece of wood and
the paper fills itself with signs like ants on a bone.
These last poems
take Lihn’s discourse on language to its final stage: silence
facing nothingness. His life, however, brimmed with words about
everything under the sun, written in various styles and in several
genres. According to Oliphant, the prolific poet also wrote novels,
stories, essays, reviews, “one-man dramatic shows, as well as
drawings and sketches.”
Oliphant has divided
Figures of Speech into six sections, revealing a range of styles and
themes. The first opens with “Portrait” – dated 1952, printed
posthumously in 1998 – and two rants against Catholicism. “As
‘Portrait’ indicates, Lihn could be psychologically incisive in
his clinical self-analysis, yet always with an ironic touch that
lends his observations a somewhat comic objectivity,” Oliphant
writes. “This is true as well of his treatment in ‘Belle Époque’
and ‘News From Babylon’ of the oppressive religious atmosphere of
his childhood, which yet inspired his writing and was the basis for
much of its vital ‘neurotic’ imagery.”
The second section
contains fourteen poems on writing – including sonnets, one poem
that also appears in The Dark Room, and “The Wailing Wall” –
which point up aspects of the translating craft. The sonnets
demonstrate the poet’s technical control and the translator’s
linguistic ingenuity, but these five are among the weakest and, when
the English feels forced into the rhyme scheme, the results are
pedestrian. But overall, Oliphant’s standard yet flexible language
reads smoothly and his edition should endure.
Of “The Wailing
Wall,” Oliphant relates this story: “The English translation was
first published in 1978, but without the Spanish, which Lihn and I
both somehow had lost along the way.” In 1987 Oliphant asked the
poet to reconstruct it in Spanish. In January 1988, Lihn said “that
he had ‘reconstituted approximately’ the original poem, even
though he went on to declare that ‘the reconstruction was
improbable.'” Lihn was not fluent in English, but the “improbable”
Spanish reconstruction holds up, and the exchange reveals the poet’s
confidence in his translator.
Section Two is a set
of nine poems about art, displaying fresh perspectives of Degas,
Kandinsky, and “Monet’s Years at Giverny.” While Lihn was
discursive, conversational, and often noisy, his contemplation of a
painting closes with a calm vision of “the moment that consumes the
substance / and leaves only the embers of Being / that conflagration
that comes from clouds and wind / and burns – spread out on the
waters – its image.” (“J.M.W. Turner [1775-1851]”)
The fourth section
includes thirteen poems about his travels from Chile (“this
horrendous / trivial country”) to Madrid, Rome, New York, Toronto,
plus two written during a 1985 stay as a visiting professor in
Austin. One of the seven love poems in Section Five, “Echo of
Another Sonata,” recalls several of Lihn’s themes and subjects,
in the memory of Eros (here in its entirety):
In your opinion one
love erases another and it’s so, dear, but in love not everything
belongs to the arrow and the quiver –the erasers–nor to the wound
that bewilders all pleasure all pain twin of death, metaphor of birth
The victims of Eros survive the crime of which, gladly, they are its
passive agents its authors in a mysterious moment and do not forget I
at least: my memory of you independently of love retains it. - Robert Bonazzi
https://www.texasobserver.org/824-a-voice-from-no-mans-land/
Christopher M.
Travis , Resisting Alienation:
The Literary Work of Enrique Lihn,
Bucknell UP,
2007.
Academic study of
Lihn's lifetime of work, addressing concerns relevant to 20th century
theory
Enrique Lihn
(1929-1988), winner of the Premio Casa de las Amèricas (Poesía de
paso, 1966), was one of Chile's most significant creative minds of
the twentieth century. Surprising his predecessors, inspiring his
contemporaries, and always venerated by younger inheritors of his
legacy, he is as important to the Latin American literary community
as Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, or Nicanor Parra. This book
provides a detailed study of all major stages of his literary
production, from his third book, La pieza oscura [The Dark Room]
(1963) to his posthumous Diario de Muerte [Diary of Dying] (1989). A
critical introduction provides an orientation to Lihn's work as
related to the critical apparatus of Western Marxism and postmodern
theory. An additional auxiliary section comes between chapters two
and three, accommodating the vary significant change in historical
period from the pre- to post-Pinochet eras, and further investigating
Theodor Adorno's provocative questioning of whether "art after
Auschwitz" can truly exist.
