Martín Adán - The most representative, and the best, of the Latin American avant-garde of the 1920s: happiness isn’t enough to make one happy

Martín Adán, The Cardboard House, Trans. by Katherine Silver, New Directions, 2012. [1928.]

Read it at Google Books

Published in 1928 to great acclaim when its author was just twenty years old, The Cardboard House is sweeping and passionate. The novel presents a series of flashes — scenes, moods, dreams, and weather — as the narrator wanders through Barranco (then an exclusive seaside resort outside Lima). In one stunning passage after another, he skips from reveries of first loves, South Pole explorations, and ocean tides to precise and unashamed notations of class and of race: from an Indian woman "with her hard, shiny, damp head of hair — a mud carving" to a gringo gobbling "synthetic milk, canned meat, hard liquor."

As the translator notes, The Cardboard House is as "subversive now as when it was written: Adán's uncompromising poetic vision and the trueness and poetry of his voice constitute a heroic act against cultural colonialism."

“I dreamt I was sixteen and Martín Adán was giving me piano lessons. The old man's fingers, long as the Amazing Rubber Man's, plunged through the floor and played a chain of underground volcanoes.”— Roberto Bolaño 

“This book is profoundly realist, but it is not a reproduction of exterior reality; it is rather the poetic, sensorial, intuitive, non-rational testimony of this reality.”— Mario Vargas Llosa 

“Wonderfully youthful, poetically miraculous, The Cardboard House is the most representative — and the best — of the Latin American avant-garde of the 1920s.” — César Aira

``Most critics have given up looking for any thematic or narrative development'' in The Cardboard House , maintains Silver in her introduction. If readers alike are willing to do without any thread connecting the fragments of this prose poem-novel, they will probably enjoy the richness of Adan's imagery and the musicality of his language. Written between 1924 and 1927, when the Peruvian author was in his early 20s, and first published in 1928, the narrative's detailed descriptions of his native landscape and its people exhibit Adan's talent and foreshadow his success as an important Latin American poet, if not his skill as a novelist. Lyrical fragments--rarely more than three pages in length--contrast the city of Lima with the surrounding countryside; link the sea, the sky and the people; and catalogue the first loves of the narrator and his friend Ramon. Together the youths walk the streets of Lima by day, observe changes wrought by the influx of foreigners, love and lose girlfriends, and ponder the meaning of life with youthful hope and fear. this last sentence doesn't add anything new. I think we need a wrap-up, though.ws As a stream-of-consciousness diary of sensual and emotional experience, this is an interesting study of a poetic sensibility. - Publishers Weekly

Martín Adán, the famously reclusive Peruvian poet and writer, was once approached by an Argentine doctoral student for an interview. He met with Celia Pachero but abruptly ended the dialogue after a few questions. Later he responded in his fashion by producing a poem addressed to her, “Written Blindly,” with these lines:
If you want to know about my life
go look at the Sea.
Why do you ask me, Learned One?
Don’t you know that in the World,
everything gathers from nothing,
from withering immensities,
nothing but an eternal trace
barely a shadow of desire?
Adán wrote but one novel, The Cardboard House (La casa de cartón), published in 1928 when he was just twenty years old. It is perhaps the most lyrically distinctive narrative of its time and place. Its premise: a man recalls his youth in the seaside resort of Barranco near Lima. His literary elders immediately recognized the work as exceptional and proclaimed it a masterpiece. Nevertheless, even today when presented to the American market (as in Publisher’s Weekly), The Cardboard House is described by what it’s not. (“If readers are willing to do without any thread connecting the fragments of this prose poem-novel …” etc., as if there are no connections!)
In brief segments of a few pages, the speaker envisions a place:
“With their brooms, sharp and straight like paintbrushes, the street sweepers make drawings along the tree-lined streets. The street sweepers have the hair of aesthetes, the eyes of drug addicts, the silence of literary men. There are no penumbras. Yes, there is one penumbra: a burst of light in vain spreads through the street that grows longer and longer in order to cancel it out. Here a shadow is not the negation of the light. Here a shadow is ink: it covers things with an imperceptible dimension of thickness; it dyes. The light is a white floury dust that the wind disperses and carries far away.”
There is one accompanying character, a friend and rival named Ramón, repeatedly invoked like the god of vanished youth. Other friends are sketched, and there are several adolescent girlfriends. But at the core of the narrative is the speaking voice, reluctant to credit itself with defined edges. The modernist attitude toward the first-person flares with a rapacious ferocity for life, reaching toward reality by calling up juvenescence with the classic pleasures and terrors of archetype:
“My first love was twelve years old and had black fingernails. In that village of eleven thousand inhabitants and a publicity agent for a priest, my then Russian soul rescued the ugliest girl from her solitude with a grave, social, sober love like the closing session of an international workers’ congress. My love was vast, dark, sluggish, with a beard, glasses, and portfolios, with sudden incidents, twelve languages, police ambushes, problems from everywhere. She would say to me, when things became sexual, ‘You are a socialists.’ And her little soul – that of a pupil of European nuns – opened like a personal prayer book to the page about mortal sin.”
Strings of lush or stark description give way to angles on culture, the provisional but omnipresent nature of authority, the driven and aimless heart of human nature. But the cultural seeps back into the more dominant landscapes, the weather and the quality of light. This is memoir, but there is no implied mastery of the past, no primacy awarded to the facile. Yet every sentence hinges on an urgent clarity.
To explain the nature of his single “novel” and his poems, he told the grad student, “The real isn’t captured: it is followed.”
He wanted his sentences to be like the “hard and magnificent prose of city streets without aesthetic preoccupations.” Every so often, the first-person tentatively appears: “I am not wholly convinced of my own humanity; I do not wish to be like others. I do not want to be happy with the permission of the police.” He did not presume that the world’s lavish qualities existed for him to turn into sententious conclusions that reflect credit on the writer: “The world is insufficient for me. It is too large, and I cannot shred it into little satisfactions as I would like.” And a previously omitted fragment: “What were our ideas? The truth was, we didn’t have any. We believed vaguely in very vague vaguenesses.”
Graywolf Press published Katherine Silver’s original translation of The Cardboard House in 1990. The reissued version from New Directions includes “significant though not extensive changes” along with the poem “Written Blindly.”
“The city licks the night like a famished cat,” he wrote. The hunger for the real in The Cardboard House is exuberant, the self-view often mordant: “A crippled little dog walks by: the only compassion, the only charity, the only love of which I am capable.”  - Ron Slate

We recently published a new edition of The Cardboard House, a modernist novel written in 1928 by Peruvian poet Martín Adán. Since he's largely unknown in the English-speaking/reading world, we thought we'd offer an informal introduction. 

To begin with, however, we should offer the caveat that there really isn't a great deal to be offered simply because, as translator Katherine Silver points out in her preface to the book, "biographical information is sparse and anecdotal." She goes on to say:

Rafael de la Fuente was born in Lima in 1908. By the time he was a young adult, he had lost every member of his immediate family: his younger brother died who when they were children, his father, his mother, and finally the aunt and uncle under whose care he had been placed. He attended the German High School, where many of his classmates and teachers were or would become leading figures in Peru’s artistic and intellectual life of the twentieth century.

When "The Cardboard House" appeared in 1928, it was received with high critical acclaim, published within the warm embrace of a prologue by Luis Alberto Sánchez and an afterword by José Carlos Maríategui. Adán was hailed as a great innovator of Peruvian literature and the most promising young writer of his generation. For several years he moved in Lima’s literary circles and marginally participated in the political and cultural debates that raged at that time. 

Soon thereafter, the traces of his life fade into an alcoholic haze. There are anecdotes about the coffee houses he visited, the odd scrapes of napkins on which he wrote his poems, his increasing isolation, and the long periods of internment in hospitals and clinics of various kinds. He died in 1985, his final years spent shunning all public attention and only allowing visits from his editor.

"The Cardboard House" is the only prose text Martin Adán ever completed. Some six or seven volumes of poetry were published during his lifetime and this due largely to the painstaking and devoted labor of Mejía Baca, who collected the bits and pieces of paper Adán left strewn along his path. He is now considered to be one of the greatest Latin American poets of all time. 

*   *   *

Allen Ginsberg visited Lima in the '60s, and met with Adán in a hotel lobby, where they spent a long night talking about — what else — poetry. Ginsberg's poem "To an Old Poet in Peru" was written shortly after, and is, though he doesn't name Adán, about him. (You can listen to Ginsberg reading it here.)

"To an Old Poet in Peru"

Because we met at dusk
Under the shadow of the railroad station
                                     clock
While my shade was visiting Lima
And your ghost was dying in Lima
            old face needing a shave
And my young beard sprouted
            magnificent as the dead hair
                         in the sands of Chancay
Because I mistakenly thought you were
                                melancholy
Saluting your 60 year old feet
            which smell of the death
                        of spiders on the pavement
And you saluted my eyes
                 with your anisetto voice
Mistakenly thinking I was genial
                                    for a youth
(my rock and roll is the motion of an
                        angel flying in a modern city)
(your obscure shuffle is the motion
                          of a seraphim that has lost
                                 its wings)
I kiss you on your fat cheek (once more tomorrow
Under the stupendous Desamparados clock)
Before I go to my death in an airplane crash
                        in North America (long ago)
And you go to your heart-attack on an indifferent
                        street in South America
(Both surrounded by screaming
            communists with flowers
                        in their ass)
—you much sooner than I—
            or on a long night alone in a room
            in the old hotel of the world
                        watching a black door
            . . . surrounded by scraps of paper

*   *   *

What we do have, however, is The Cardboard House, which Silver suggests is the notebook that houses his life's words. Of the book, a series of fragmented scenes composed as the narrator travels around Barranco, a a seaside town on the outskirts of Lima, she says:

Each fragment, and even each image within each fragment, is a world unto itself, vibrating through Adán’s power of evocation. Most critics have given up looking for any thematic or narrative development, and only the narrator and Ramón — his friend, alter ego, and rival — could possibly qualify as characters Adán borrows — from Proust, from Joyce, from Góngora — but he laughs at himself for doing so, as he laughs at his nation for that native and premature desire that Europe will make of us men. He makes no bones about who he is: a provincial boy in a semicolonial world who experiences the modern world as it is exported to him.

As mentioned above, this is a new edition. Graywolf published Silvers's original translation in 1990, and for this edition she has gone back to make "significant though not extensive changes." Of this re-reading and re-translating, she says:

Coming back to this text twenty years later, I find this small, unique gem from the seacoast of the south shimmering even more brightly, but I now perceive more fully the swirls of darkness that would so overwhelm the poet’s life.

The praise may seem a bit biased coming from the translator, but Publishers Weekly, who reviewed the book back in 1990, said that if you are willing to accept the fragmented style, you "will probably enjoy the richness of Adan's imagery and the musicality of his language."

Martín Adán is known as a poet, and The Cardboard House is his only work of prose (and even so it includes some 'Underwood Poems' as well as a longer poem, 'Written Blindly', here included as an Afterword). The book is composed of short texts, focused on the Barranco area of Lima, and while there is some narrative progression -- a friend, Ramón, often features, and eventually dies -- it is largely a book of impressions, with Adán often veering off on rather creative tangents, or letting himself be carried away by language itself.
       Early on, Adán suggests: "the city is an oleograph we contemplate, sunken under water: the waves carry things away and alter the orientation of the planes" -- which conveys as well as anything what Adán is doing in this book. An oleograph is a color lithograph -- a layering of colors to achieve effect (apparently to imitate the look of an oil painting) -- and Adán's prose can seem like that, seen distorted under water .....
       Typical is a relatively extended riff on seeing a gringa (an Englishwoman) photographer in the shapes of a jacaranda tree, with descriptions such as:

The gringa was a roaming road, blinded by the sun, leading to the tundra, to a country of snow and moss where a gaunt, gray city of skyscrapers loomed as mysterious as the machinery in a dark factory.

       From childhood and schoolday memories to the effect of literature (in one of the most impressive texts) on him and his friends in their youth, the collection offers hints of autobiography, but also obscures them behind a rush of sensation and impression. He constantly gets carried away:

Streetlamps -- the trunks of shrubs the light twists and the shadows turn green. At six in the morning, at six in the evening, the streetlamps are the most vegetable thing in the world, in an analytic, synthetic, scientific, passive, decisive, botanical, simple way -- the upper edges of the trunks support crystal jars that hold yellow flowers.

       The pithy 'Underwood Poems', like a sequence of aphorisms of a line or two ("Your heart is a horn prohibited by traffic regulation"), are an appealing change of pace from the dense, twisting prose. Much simpler, they include some nicely turned ideas:

Now I can board a transatlantic liner. And during the crossing fish adventures like fish.

       The Cardboard House feels fragmentary, as Adán is quickly led by each new memory or observation to spin out new ideas which quickly spin themselves out, at which point he moves to the next. There are connections, but Adán can not bring himself to force the more artificial ones that would allow this to form one larger and more cohesive text.
       His language and his leaps make The Cardboard House an intriguing read, but it is not entirely satisfying. - M.A.Orthofer

The Cardboard House is a short, beautiful book. The Peruvian writer Martín Adán originally published the work in 1928, when he was only twenty years old, and in the decades since, The Cardboard House has been praised by numerous Latin American authors, from Mario Vargas Llosa to César Aira. Graywolf Press published a translation by Katherine Silver in 1990, and now New Directions is reissuing the book with sections omitted from the original, and with Silver correcting her previous mistranslations. To Aira, the book is “the most representative—and the best— of the Latin American avant-garde of the 1920s.” Without narrative structure, characters, or plot, The Cardboard House is clearly the work of a poet, and Adán’s prose deserve to be read out loud.

It is a book of imagery: “In the morning, on the sharp edge of dawn, from the casement windows of the towers and in the awkward flight of frightened birds and soggy bells, the old lay-sisters descend through their witches Sabbath of trees and poles.”

It is a book of categorized lists of description: “The slope of the cliff plunged into fig trees, moist earth, trenches, moss, vines, Japanese pavilions; from top to bottom, from the parish church to the beach.”

It is a book of sensation: “Breakfast is a warm ball in the stomach, the hardness of the dining room chair on the buttocks, and the solemn desire in the body not to go to school.”

It is a book of metaphor: “The streetlamps are the most vegetable thing in the world, in an analytic, synthetic, scientific, passive, decisive, botanical, simple way—the upper edges of the trunks support crystal jars that hold yellow flowers.”

It is a book of beautiful writing: “Liquefied Mozart poured down the staircase and formed puddles in the hollows like a torrent of rain that had soaked through the roof.”

Above all, The Cardboard House is a book of a young man’s thought process. The young narrator struggles to find love within himself. He knows he should be good. But he also knows that “happiness isn’t enough to make one happy.”

As an adult, Adán became reclusive and alcoholic; despite immense talent for transcribing observations in epiphanic and aesthetically masterful sentences, the philosophical house of humanism that he’d constructed turned out to have been made of cardboard. - thecoffinfactory.com

Written Blindly
Martin Adán
Translated by Rick London and Katherine Silver

The following was written in response to a letter to Adán from Celia Paschero, an associate of Jorge Luis Borges, who was coming to Lima to do research for her doctoral thesis, Contemporary Peruvian Poetry. The letter read: The reason for this letter? In addition to expressing my affection for you, I have another purpose: to ask you for information about your life, if possible, told with all the spice you know how to sprinkle on everything you say and write, because I have suggested writing an article about you for La Nacion . . . I have just started publishing articles with them, and I want to write a human article, through which one can feel your blood and your skin . . . I know that this whole business could be loathsome to you. But in the name of the warmth there was between us when we met, in the name of the affection I feel for you, in the name of my profound admiration for you, please respond to my request. Leave aside all your bohemianism and spill it all out in what you write to me and . . . speak to me about yourself. Can you?

You want to know about my life?
I know only of my passing through,
of my weight,
of my sadness
and my shoe.
Why ask who I am, where I’m going?
Because you know plenty about the Poet, the difficult
and sensitive volume of my being human,
which is a body and a vocation,
nonetheless.
Yes, I was born,
the Year remembers my birth,
but I don’t remember,
because I live it, because I kill myself.
My Angel isn’t a Guardian Angel,
my Angel is of Satiety, of Remnants,
and carries me endlessly,
stumbling, always stumbling
in this dazzling shadow
that is Life
and its deceit
and its charm.
When you know everything . . .
When you know not to ask . . .
Just chew on your mortal fingernail
and then I will tell you my life,
which is nothing but a mere word more . . .
The whole of your life is like the wave:
knowing how to kill,
and knowing how to die,
and not knowing how to tame plentitude,
and not knowing how to wander home to the source,
and not knowing how to quiet longing . . .
If you want to know about my life,
go look at the Sea.
Why do you ask me, Learned One?
Don’t you know that in the World,
everything gathers from nothing:
a shrinking immensity from here to the next star,
nothing but a trace
eternally barely the shadow of an appetite?
The real task, if that’s what you aspire to,
is not to understand life, but to imagine it.
The real isn’t captured: it is followed,
and that’s what dreams and words are for.
Beware your innovations . . .
Beware your distances . . .
Beware your thresholds . . .
Beware your refuge . . .
Who am I?
I am I,
ineffable and innumerable,
the figure and soul of rage.
No, that was at the end . . . and it was the beginning
and it was before the beginning began.
I am a body of spirit fury,
which is serene
and of harsh irony.
No, I am not the one who seeks the poem,
nor life . . .
I am an animal hunted by its own being
which is a truth and a lie.
My being is so simple and so breathless,
a piercing of a nerve, of flesh . . .
I was looking for another,
one who has been my search for myself,
I didn’t want, and don’t want now, to be me --
but another who has saved himself,
or who will,
not the being of Instinct, who gets lost,
or of Understanding, who steps back.
My day is a different day,
some days I don’t know where to be,
I don’t know where to go in my jungle,
among my reptiles and my trees,
my books and mortar
and neon stars
and women rising around me like a wall,
            or like no one at all, or like a mother . . .
and the newborn who cries over me
and through the streets
and all the wheels,
primal and for real.
Such is the whole of my days,
unto my last afternoon.
The Other, that companion, is a ghost.
Is there air
on which you choke and yet delight
in breathing,
in your inane body?
No!
Nothing equals the endless surprise
of finding yourself again,
always you, the same selves among the same walls
made of distances and streets . . .
And the same skies, roofs
that never kill me because they never come down . . .
And I’ve never achieved the turbulence of the divine
nor affection for the human.
I’m this way without regret.
That’s not how I feel.
By day I am the Outsider
and, if I think about it, the Absolute of Zoology.
Or like the ferocious carnivore if I take hold.
Am I the Creature or the Creator?
Am I Matter or Miracle?
You ask: what is mine and what is another’s . . .
Who am I?
Do you think I know?
But no, the Other doesn’t exist,
only I am, fiendish and orgasmic!
With all my dreamed-again dreams,
and all the coins collected,
and all of my body
resurrected after every coitus,
blind, vain, without a reflecting pupil . . .
When you’ve become nothing more than being,
and if you reap the age of dying,
and when you have learned, and truly know,
that life and death are yoked together . . .
Then I will tell you who I am,
certainly, yes, and without a voice, my friend!
They heal themselves with potent herbs,
those pure animals who speak to you,
there, among immaterial stones,
in the world of our reality and our sciences
where putative foul-smelling boys
have had some fun.
Indeed, life is thus a delirium,
and yet my nothingness,
never revealed in this life,
nothing of it,
yes, is real, like the exalted blue,
or volcanic.
How late Time comes to forgetfulness
and detection.
It comes dragging — like a deluge —
aggregations, earth, the human.
How one comes to oneself at the wrong time!
How unforeseen and desperate is every now,
every I that collapses within Time,
forever always and always never.
Eternal unsleeping dawn
in which I resign myself to my deeds
and my thinking!
Loneliness is the hard rock
against which the Air hurls itself.
It dwells in every wall of the City,
complicit, hidden.
Ceaselessly I hurl myself,
my own hazard, my own creation.
Poetry, my friend,
is inexhaustible, incorrigible, indwelling.
It is the infinite river,
wholly blood, wholly meandering, wholly ruin
dragging along what we live . .
What is the Word
but a vain and varied shout?
What is the image of the Poetic
but a log quickly shifting beneath the nullity of a cat?
It’s all a deluge
and if it weren’t
nothing would be real, be the same.
Love knew only
to swallow its own substance.
This is how Creation renewed itself.
For me, the world is yesterday, but I’m alive,
and sometimes I believe,
and the moment suckles me
I’m not one who knows.
I‘m one who no longer believes.
Not in man,
or in woman,
or in a single story house,
or in a pancake with syrup.
I ‘m nothing more than a word
flying out of my forehead,
taking pity on itself, perhaps nesting
somewhere high above this sad spring.
As for Being,
don’t ask me again,
I no longer know . . .
And I knew simply I was no longer
what I was not,
I don’t know how,
and that things were,
even this nothingness of me.
I was seeking,
I don’t know when,
numinous and ensnared
within it . . .
I, born scrawny, already fully armed
and seeking the word with every step,
any word,
one that burrows
or one that leaps.
If this isn’t my life,
what could life be?
Divinations?
May time from within itself give me Time
and I will remake my eternity,
the eternity I no longer have
because I discarded it . . .
having held it for one moment too long.
Have you heard of the abandoned ports
of lunacy and taking leave,
of the cetacean with its drenched costume
that can’t swim and keeps falling?
Have you known so much about a city
that rather than a city
it seems like a dismembered corpse,
myriad and infinitesimal?
You know nothing.
You know only to query.
You know only wisdom.
But wisdom is not to be with no thought
of anything at all:
but rather to keep on,
on foot: into now.


Excerpt:
Winter in Barranco has already begun -- a peculiar, daft, and fragile winter that might just cleave the sky and let a tip of summer peek through.  The mist of this small winter, affairs of the soul, puffs of sea breeze, the mist of a boat trip from one pier to another, the sonorous flutter of rushing lay-sisters, opaque sounds of Mass, winter newly arrived...  Now, off to school with cold hands.  Breakfast is a warm ball in the stomach, the hardness of the dining room chair on the buttocks, and the solemn desire in the entire body not to go to school.  The frond of the palm tree hovers over a house: flabellate, gently somber, pure, pink, glistening.  And now you whistle with the streetcar, boy with closed eyes.  You do not understand how one can possibly go to school so early in the morning, especially when there are esplanades and the sea below.  But as you walk down the street that traverses almost the entire city, you smell the perfume of distant vegetables in nearby gardens.  You think of the lush, wet fields: almost urban behind you; limitless in front of you, between the ash and elder trees, toward the bluish sierra.  Barely the outline of the first foothills, the mountains' eyebrow...  And now you pass through the fields surrounded by muffled beehive sounds of fleeting friction over rails and a flourish of athletic though urban gymnastics.  Now the sun grinds to golden a mountain peak and an ancient burial mound, a yellow knoll like the sun itself.  And you do not want it to be summer, but rather winter vacation, tiny and weak, with no school and no heat.