Valerie Mejer Caso, Edinburgh Notebook,
Trans. by Michelle Gil-Montero, Action Books
2021.
https://www.valeriemejercaso.com/poems-articles-videos
A book-length epitaph for her late brother Charlie, Valerie Mejer Caso's EDINBURGH NOTEBOOK is a captivating, startling expression of grief. Following a trail of breadcrumbs, Mejer Caso's poems shift between memories, cities, philosophies, echoes and landscapes of quicksand, oceans, deserts, apocalypse. Featuring photographs by Barry Shapiro, EDINBURGH NOTEBOOK contains a profound archive of cultural history coursing with elliptical, illuminating poems. Even without being / you are what exists and what does not exist, / the looming night.
The language that emerges is one pierced by the world and by our actions in the world. Constructed from the limit of experience, these poems have relinquished all rhetorical temptation, any purely verbal exploration, in order to insist on an infinitely more risky investigation: that of capturing the instant just before things turn to shadows. - Raul Zurita
At its best a book of poetry can capture the solitary intellectual vexations we have with memory and death, which live at the center of all our reckoning. EDINBURGH NOTEBOOK is such a book. Valerie Mejer Caso, deftly translated by Michelle Gil-Montero, is an exquisite archivist of the evidence we rely on to revisit our histories: stained photographs, bats, and fleeting glimpses, the palimpsests that flitter from gorgeous nocturnes: 'I'll wreck the piano, and the dust of its bones will sound mournful, and that possible song will replay like a canon.' I love the haunted library of this book and the cool blue eye that dizzies then rights me with both heart and head.- Carmen Gimenez Smith
A Key
Early in my translation of Edinburgh Notebook, the fifth book by Mexican poet Valerie Mejer Caso, I find a key. It is the epigraph to the final section, a line by Edmond Jabès: ‘All shattered writing has the form of a key.’ Not only is Jabès – the 20th century Jewish Egyptian poet who was long exiled in France – a fascinating reference point for Mejer Caso, whose own migratory poetics extends from a family history of immigrations and disrupted ties to place. It is Jabès’s notion of “shattered” writing, his model of writing brokenness, that unlocks the book for me.
Mejer Caso wrote the intensely autobiographical poems in Edinburgh Notebook after a series of painful personal events in 2012, just after temporarily moving to the United States with her young daughter. That December, she had left her marriage after discovering a long-standing infidelity.The previous December,, her brother had committed suicide by jumping from a window in Edinburgh, Scotland. Throughout Edinburgh Notebook, she writes about these events – or, rather, she writes the rupture and dislocation that they effect in her – by turning to collage rather than unified narrative. The poem ‘December, 5 p.m., Edinburgh,’ for example, is composed in part from sentences taken from her brother’s suicide note.
That poem, as metaphor for the broken body of her brother, as effigy for his unreturned remains, is shattered writing. It refuses to succumb to the expectation, which comes with trauma, of closure; much less to the expectation, which comes with autobiography, of a unified self. Instead, like the work of Jabès, it is marked by shifts, deflections, unanswered questions: ‘Last thoughts? / The strange arrangement of clouds? / The window, waiting? / Nothing, nothing, nothing? / Or the faces of his girl and boy?’ With these questions-answering-questions, the poem remains open, in motion: it refuses to settle for the closure and false security of answers.
Translation, also a kind of shattered writing, answers a question with a question. No translation is ever the final word, but one phase of a necessarily incomplete process, a deferral that compounds meaning instead of resolving it. Incompleteness, in this way, is what makes translation an ongoing and repeatable art, a perpetual migration. Through translation, the poem is really never finished.
Collage
The method throughout Edinburgh Notebook is collage, coordinating exiled pieces in startling ways. But mostly, collage holds us at the edge that confronts what is no longer present. As Chilean poet Raúl Zurita writes: ‘It is that confrontation with loss, and how what is lost endures in memory, that lends this poetry its profoundly autobiographical dimension.’ The autobiographical self in Edinburgh Notebook is, mostly, a negative shape, contoured by loss. ‘I will introduce you to my dead, one by one,’ Mejer Caso writes in her long poem This Blue Novel. And here, in the poem ‘The Creature,’ a series of negations cobble a body together: ‘I’m not this’ ‘I won’t be that’ ‘I don’t have this.’ The poem’s accompanying visual collage is similarly a portrait of absence: disparate objects float in white space, hands reach for nothing; a single shoe sits lost, belonging to nobody in particular.
Entredeux
Mejer Caso offers that the book started with its title: a blank notebook, named for a city she has never visited. How do you make loss present? I think of how the painter Robert Rauschenberg painted absence, not as blank paper, but as an erasure of a prized De Kooning drawing. All shattered writing, including translation, arrives at creation by way of destruction.
In these poems, absence is far more than the opposite of presence, more even than the loss of something that should be present; it is the destruction of what was once beautiful, through violence. It is Mejer Caso’s brother, whom she imagines gazing out his window, just before jumping, at a boy across the street. The boy, who resembles him as a child, calls up his own destroyed sense of possibility, renders his past suddenly present, and thus prompts his jump: ‘a blonde boy running in the park, a flash of his own ruined perfection, but that boy will never be the object of cruelty.’
His death, and every foreshadowing violent event in these poems, makes the past present. As such, the poems sidestep traditional elegy’s charge to lament, to express and facilitate grief. Instead, they write brokenness: the brutal newness of trauma, the language of being plucked out of the rhythms of daily life and tossed into an unrecognisable present. Trauma is the ultimate displacement, and continuing to live is to be an immigrant in one’s own life. As Hélène Cixous writes:
Human beings are equipped for daily life, with its rites, with its closure, its commodities, its furniture. When an event arrives which evicts us from ourselves, we do not know how to ‘live’. But we must. Thus we are launched into a space-time whose coordinates are all different from those we have always been accustomed to. In addition, these violent situations are always new. Always. At no moment can a previous bereavement serve as a model. It is, frightfully, all new: this is one of the most important experiences of our human histories. At times we are thrown into strangeness. This being abroad at home is what I call an entredeux.
I offer this translation, then, if I may, as a work in kind. In English, the language of the book’s title city and deepest grief, the poem might learn, again, to live inside new coordinates, to be ‘abroad at home.’ - Michelle Gil-Montero
http://cordite.org.au/translations/gil-montero-caso/
High Vacuum
Pregnant with bats, the great poplar.
Below, the droning
of flies just before ten on the corner
of Anapamu and State. To a distant barking,
strollers hissing en route to their day on the moon.
First a place is a wound in the mind.
Reasoning tied up
and kicked into a pit of despair.
At the cafe, I watch the armless veteran walk in.
In his wake, hallucination:
my battered brother crawls
the long hallway to the window ... he watches
a blond boy running in the park, a flash
of his own ruined perfection,
but that boy will never be the object of cruelty.
Afternoon shadows
his shattered body, across from the hostel
at 5 West Register Street, Edinburgh.
That street is somewhere else.
It can’t exist in the mind.
It can’t be a street.
I orbit it in outer space,
where language
lacks the jacket and tie required for entry.
Space sounds like the stammer
hollered by a falling gardener.
That’s why Edinburgh doesn’t exist,
except in a high vacuum.
Constantly proving the power of pain.
Outside the cafe, tortoises,
dark and small, tumefy the roots of giant trees.
Strolling in range of their shadows,
families, people, gardeners. The living.
Al Alto Vacío
Embarazado de murciélagos, el gran álamo.
Abajo planea el zumbido
de las moscas un poco ante del las diez en la esquina
de Anapamu con State. Hasta donde llega el remoto ladrido del perro,
el siseo de las carreolas que avanzan hasta su día en la luna.
Un sitio es antes una herida en la mente.
Razonamientos presos
y apresurados hacia un pozo de llanto.
Al café veo entrar al veterano sin brazos
y detrás de él viene la alucinación:
mi hermano se arrastra con sus huesos rotos
por el largo pasillo hasta la ventana… desde ahí mira
el parque donde corre un niño rubio y paralelo
a una momentanea perfección que tuvo él mismo
sólo que este nunca será objeto de crueldad.
Allá la tarde sombrea
aquel cuerpo quebrado, frente al hostal
ubicado en el número 5 de West Register Street, Edimburgo.
Es otra calle ese sitio.
No puede existir en la mente.
No puede ser una calle.
Orbito alrededor de ella en el espacio exterior,
en donde al lenguaje
le falta el saco y la corbata para ser admitido.
El espacio suena a balbuceos
a gritos de un jardinero que cae.
Por lo tanto es así que Edimburgo no existe
más que al alto vacío.
Donde inexorablemente se demuestra el poder de la pena.
Afuera de este café las tortugas
mínimas y oscuras, ensanchan las raíces de árboles gigantezcos
bajo la esfera de su sombra deambulan
familias, gentes, jardineros. Vivos.
http://cordite.org.au/translations/gil-montero-caso/2/
http://cordite.org.au/translations/gil-montero-caso/3/
http://cordite.org.au/translations/gil-montero-caso/4/
http://cordite.org.au/translations/gil-montero-caso/5/
from Edinburgh Notebook
Echo
Once the ocean is spent, its hollow converts to steel, and all the oddly propped boats are ready to tumble onto that empty plate. I have no sun in this world, no ocean. What can I do with these daggers, heaped where the mountain used to be? Some piece of history has left us shaking, like when a great wind jingles the bangles on a frightful crown, has dragged the rain and waterfalls to a distant atmosphere. Water’s time is captive. In it, the groom clenches his eyes and takes in the night of another body, and that breath flickeringly lights the shack, the palm trees, the people drinking in silence. It brightens his face like a planet. Light enough to burst the sphere and spill its liquid down the street where the sea is still evaporating and the boat, with no way to steady itself, lurches. On their bloody evening, the trees stir, the broken jugs rejoin along empty paths. There is a mountain made of teeth. The last of our water hovers around the king, in his bath. No river feeds into the sea. Its runnels are just writing. Stories about water, reedy paradises, cities looped in canals. Debouchment tales. And to think that you and I were right there, standing, when you were alive, in Veracruz, in that effluvium where the sand shone blue and the orange moon had the glint of a good omen. On that rocky reef into the bay, we watched the bride melt in the milk of clouds and new stars. On the mountain, the trees could stand witness. Now is the echo. The landscape is a big spoon, and the words are still searching themselves, alone in the storm.
Riding the Crocodile
This is my fresh blood: their bodies.
My husband entering her. Covers her, thickens her,
unties her hair, her mouth.
I howl
through the halls of their new house. My daughter and her headless mother
buy two tickets to the apocalypse.
A crocodile ferries a woman over the waves.
(It’s a painting by Kobayashi Kiyochika.)
One of my sentences hits an atmospheric peak.
Rises to that godless night where dogs gnaw
butterflies in repose.
Come down, my God. Unlock
your bite and blow, nudge the clouds.
Nudge the waves. So we reach the beach. So our bleeding clots.
Or let it dissolve in the ocean’s dusk.
So, in a window in the future, an old woman forgives.
Paulina
I was reading the Portrait d’une femme and listening to Janet Barker
when I thought of your eyes
and other fugitives from ultramarine minds.
Reading and listening was your stage, when the proscenium
spilled over with marbles (you watched your step)
rolling like worlds.
But you walked forward.
The curtain lifted, and the seats were packed with fathers and mothers,
as if it were a school play.
In that scene, Ezra Pound told you, “You're patient,
on the ready for whatever floats up,”
and the parents didn’t understand, but they shed a few tears,
which they wiped with the backs of their hands. At the sight of them,
Pound rose
and stood for the rest of the play
gazing at the sky on set.
He did right, because the rest of the poem does you no justice,
and the air tinted indigo, and the gathered tears
left under the sea.
There the marbles melted like sugar cubes.
As you swam to the surface, I thought back
to your favorite novels and told myself,
how great, how great, what a blue intelligence. And the song ended.
Your children mopped the theater
as you walked out onto a French street, to cry for the rutty water,
the grim tablecloths with mildewed silverware,
and with a single step, you abandoned
that audience, which glimmered like gold on the dead.
Sixth Movement (Transfigured Night)
“I assume this is the closest I’ll ever be to a dragon.”
—Oriana
The green meteor already crossed the dawn. The ones who fought in real life for equality and freedom were already old. One was in the hospital. The other wrote books. They lived separate lives, but now and then, they remembered a shirt, a drink, a song, like medals of bravery, for having tethered their feet to the other shore. They made that place in the distance by walking on water, trailing fish. Someone betrayed them, and they lost their battle. Having lost, one turned into a pigeon; the other went to jail. Years passed, and their battlefield littered over with propaganda and domestic animals. The meteor on its long trajectory swept through our sky sometimes, and the pigeon took wing on the eve of deceit. From dusk to dawn, the prisoner lured it with crumbs. The green glow crowded out the constellations, and all acts of cowardice waited for dawn. I knew about the meteor’s never-ending rounds, and I always walked home scolding myself: Aren’t you sick of this spectacle, of how it feeds your painful hope? Why don’t the pigeon and the prisoner write the names of the brave in the sky, until that glittering list crowds out the stars? But the lemon-green flame was unforgettably luminous, and before I even reached my house, before I opened the door, its brightness had entirely occupied my mind.
translated from the Spanish by Michelle Gil-Montero
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/valerie-mejer-caso-edinburgh-notebook/
Gil-Montero writes: These poems belong to the final section of Edinburgh Notebook, an ars poetica series entitled Movements. Their epigraph comes from the Book of Questions by Edmond Jabès: “All shattered writing has the form of a key.” The Movements are shattered writing. They represent a time of grief when the poet comes to question the meaning and value of poetry. Instead of answers, of course, she finds that the questions keep proliferating—and like that, poetry proliferates, moves on. In my translation, I began at the end of the book, with the Movements; they are the key to the rest of the book.
*
Seventh Movement
In the desert, my love, in the desert I saw an elephant born. Its mother thought it dead, and in her desperate rage, she dragged it with her trunk, struck it with her giant foot. That black smudge in the distance is, my love, a birth. Its weight falls like an egg that cracks open, it burns like an aerolite in the empty night and resembles death. We’d like to overcome the distance, span the desert, my love, fix the lightbulbs in all the houses. But the desert is a wall in a town under siege. A tumbledown wall, the one in the house you’re building now with your own two hands. That house that glimmers with the gold under the world. The lamp lit in a faraway house is the amber glow of your old eyes. Around that world where the house rears up, blood circulates, sand scatters, the lobster stand goes up in smoke, gravediggers mumble, and a fisher boy grabs his father’s hand, each of them hoisting his rod like a mast, and far away, in the faraway, like a planet, the spot where the elephant tumbles born. Dead, his mother thinks and thrashes him until the great creature rises to his feet like a young king. Men hanging from the walls, the men fleeing that place like shadows, loosed shadows. If you pay attention, my love, right now you will see a constellation of rungs, a stairway to the sky made of rope, of girls’ braids, of wheat, of straw, of longing.
You have to reach the horizon, climb to the top of the wall, to see if this is true.
Eighth Movement
A sketch far from the street and from hunger. A sketch far from the wind that blows into Saint Patrick’s cathedral, The Church of Saint Thomas. A Belgian sketch in a room proclaims that death stalks the masses. A man in the foreground clutches his head, he is the son of a poet, he’s hungry, the wind has shoved him to the front of the paper. He is a child drawn with a tragic grimace. His name is Pablo, and he hasn’t long to live. He is a bird that forgot how to fly. It’s forgetting that makes us heavy, prey to gravity. So mortals are a bevy of birds walking, rubbing shoulders in the streets. Why does death wear fins like a diver? Why does its black, transverse scythe look like a flag? The sun flashes delineated teeth. Not that it smiles, it’s just that it knows the story. Whorls of fire send the building on the corner into bloom. Men on the tower, their flaming feathers are the streak of a scream. One of the dead has unfolded her butterfly wings. On the balcony: a pregnant woman and a nude woman. They, and the poet, will die soon. In the margins of the sketch, my brother is still falling, and death’s scythe is a flaming flag, a torch with no republic. The same birds that swarm poetry books sit on the cornices of every street. They exceed every sketch. Without flying, their tiny hearts flutter, out-of-tune radios crying for help that won’t come.
On another canvas, Ensor has painted himself in a plumed hat. Pink and orange feathers. Souvenir of the end of his days.
On another, he has painted “The Domain of Arnheim” in black and orange. The Republic of Poe.
And on another, he has painted a woman whose hands clutch a handkerchief. Patient hands on a lap. The handkerchief is foam-white, damp with marine tears. There were divers who got lost looking for it. And she had it all along, it was hers, a flag for the oceans. She remembers it all at once. She holds onto those scenes with the full force of her mind. In that way, she attains the illusion of weightlessness and almost floats.
My country, a sad painting.
https://pen.org/from-edinburgh-notebook/
Valerie Mejer Caso, This Blue Novel, Trans. by
Michelle Gil-Montero. Action Books; Bilingual
ed., 2015.
Full of smoke and ghosts and giant saints, Valerie Mejer Caso's THIS BLUE NOVEL traces maps layered onto maps: desert spaces, family lineage, and memory filtered through watery paper. Mejer Caso leads the reader through dark tangles of vegetation on tattooed horses, hot on the trail of a damaged recollection under the elemental sky. Reading THIS BLUE NOVEL is like a rapture never quite complete, like being caught in a moment of "rotational velocity," simultaneously dizzying and thrilling.
This bilingual edition of Valerie Mejer Caso’s This Blue Novel presents the story of the author’s multigenerational family, immigrants from Spain, Germany, and England, in images that have the heft of myth and the unpredictability of dreams. A work of metafiction that explores the difficulty of evoking the past through unstable language, it nonetheless makes the case for probing history through oneiric memory. The resulting novel becomes less a linear sequence of events than a compelling montage. Michelle Gil-Montero’s translation ably renders the lushness of Mejer Caso’s idiom, even as it interrogates the “lie [that] is language.”
In announcing her latest collection as a "novel," Mexican poet Mejer Caso (Rain of the Future) calls immediate attention to boundaries. This is a mesmerizing verse narrative of returning to one's home only to find it gone, with nary a "whiff of garlic or spilled paint" left, as well as a mournful meditation on being caught in life's seams, "Along a bend of light" or in the "cracks in the page." It is also a book of borders, of the frail line separating memory from truth and life from death. (The book's en face translations make all of these borders literal.) Mejer Caso, who is also a painter, draws the reader through images of lush vegetation, fogged afternoons, and the glittering shards of her ancestors. Black-and-white photographs punctuate the narrative, further blurring genre considerations. In the seams, in the blue line between sea and sky, against the faint blue of fresh death, even the blackest ink looks blue, observes Mejer Caso. "The ashes, blue," she writes, "The soul, blue." Mejer Caso demonstrates an extraordinary ability to balance obfuscation and clarity to render a mesmerizing, dynamic, layered collection that is both vertiginous and knowable. - Publishers Weekly
Michelle Gil-Montero’s translation of Mexican poet Valerie Mejer Caso’s This Blue Novel – longlisted for the National Translation Award in October of 2016 – is flauntingly genre-bending: despite its title, it’s written in verse, and also includes a number of pages of photographs. Like Eleni Sikelianos’ You Animal Machine and Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, it participates in a tradition of documentary poetics, bringing together image and text to gradually assemble a portrait of a person (or people). As the poems unfold, images and descriptions reveal Mejer Caso’s Spanish, German, and English heritage. This is poetry concerned with memory and the holding of memory.
As a reader, I had the sensation that without the paratextual matter accompanying This Blue Novel (photos, introduction, translator’s note, writer’s biography, and a page of photo captions), I would have had a different kind of relationship to the book. The front and back matter, and the interspersed images, ground the poems in a specific family’s experience. The photo guide tells the dates and location of each family photograph included in the book, placing my reading in a specific point in time, as I learn that Mejer Caso’s ancestors immigrated to Mexico from multiple European countries in the early 20th century. I connect lines of the poems to visual cues; for example, after seeing a photo of a group of people gathered around a dining room table with pictures hanging on the walls, the line “ten brothers monologue / while their father’s portrait absently looks on” is no longer in my imagination, but grounded in the photo.
Some readers may find that the extra material provides a helpful framework for reading the poems. But my sense of these poems on their own, and of Gil-Montero’s translations of them, is far less grounded in the facts of Mejer Caso’s family history than in rich images enacting the play of personal and collective memory. Characters step in and out, places and homes are suggested, and there is a rich remembered object world, but memory is distorted, as though by a wash of (blue-tinted?) water spilled over the pages of a diary. An undetermined second person is frequently used in the poems, as though to include the reader and amplify the possible connections they might make to the text via their own memories. “The century is all of this, condensed in a fist,” she writes. There’s no clear linearity to the family history as told through the poems: different voices speak, and the surreal is allowed to mingle with the real, making us question the certainty of memory. Paradoxically, “Dates are clean daggers / that pen a foreign language.” “This Blue Novel invents nothing. Neither is everything true,” Mejer Caso writes through Gil-Montero’s translation. The text seems not to want to be indebted to anything or anyone, even to its own writer and her family’s story — which is all the more present through the paratextual material, especially the images.
With this in mind, what I admire most about these poems in Gil-Montero’s translations is the restraint she demonstrates. Many of these poems are dream-like, surreal: “Behind our eyelids, we dig for a flag behind a tulip / while Dido’s lament drowns in the dining room.” Though a justified impulse might be to use the translation as an occasion to help clarify images that seem strange, or connect seemingly unconnected lines, Gil-Montero’s translation resists this.
In fact, she even inserts periods at the ends of some of her lines where Mejer Caso doesn’t use them. Grammatically, this often occurs where Spanish can use a string of phrases connected by commas which would be comma splices if the punctuation were transferred exactly to English. But I think the choice to insert these periods serves a larger function, which is to show the English reader how discrete many of Mejer Caso’s lines are, the extent to which they can stand alone, even when they are enjambed. The double-spaced lines in both texts reinforce this, also.
In addition to Sikelianos and Ondaatje, I thought about Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor while reading This Blue Novel. In the preface to that poem cycle, the speaker says, “And now my parachute drops from dream to dream through the spaces of death” (from Eliot Weinberger’s 2004 translation). In This Blue Novel, everything is similarly suspended, hanging, caught in fog, under the threat of death, falling: “I saw my grandparents’ houses go down / like anchors. They sink, I ascend,” she writes, and “The weight of my body sinks with things,” and “Luz is a name that tumbled / the rungs of the generations.” In keeping with the floating sensation in the poems, Gil-Montero often chooses words that lead the reader to a broader appreciation of an image or description—remarkable given the fact that English is such a precise language, and it would be easy in these translations to make images more concrete. A good example is her use of the word “undone” for the Spanish inacabado (unfinished, incomplete) in the line “An undone valley still encircles a young girl, / fan in hand.” “Undone” in English has both physical connotations (like untying a knot) and metaphorical ones (like coming apart emotionally or psychologically), effectively helping the English poem take on the drifting, ephemeral quality of the Spanish poems as a whole.
It is obvious how much attention has been paid to sound as well as sense in the translations. “I shoulder the bridge, I stain / and shine it like the coin of a waning civilization” uses “shoulder” as a verb for the Spanish sostener, rather than getting caught with the ugly hard rhyme repetition of “sustain” or “maintain” (more standard translations of the verb) with “stain.” Often, Gil-Montero’s translations find alliterative possibilities: “at the tart tip / of my fever” captures the sharpness of “en el ácido vércite / de la fiebre.”
This Blue Novel is set out in the traditional en face format, with the Spanish poems on the left and the English poems on the right. I was somewhat surprised by this choice, given that Action Books is known for its experimental and avant-garde books. I assumed that some other bilingual presentation might be better suited to the hybrid quality of This Blue Novel. For the most part, knowing Spanish, I don’t prefer this formatting because my eye wants to track back and forth between the two pages, comparing versions and nitpicking minute choices on the part of the translator. Páginas means “pages,” not “papers,” I tell myself petulantly (however, reading this way did reveal to me the unfortunate loss of a line of poem XIX, which appears in the Spanish but not the English). My reading of either text is disrupted, and it is difficult to appreciate the translations as poems on their own.
And yet, this is a book about “how two families converge and divide to arrive at the life of the speaker. In fact, things tend to come in twos throughout the work.” The en face display adds something to the idea world of the book that would have been impossible without parallel texts, and which reinforces themes the original work concerns itself with. As Alex Niemi writes in her beautiful review of the book for M-Dash: “Reading the Spanish and the English side-by-side is like seeing a ghost behind you in the mirror. They are doubles. They haunt each other.” Talk about form as an extension of content. Here, the very layout of the translation with the original adds to thematic elements of the text.
The double version provided by the en face presentation is like a retelling, recounting, which is what we do when we remember our histories. The line “English is a language of water and good for recounting disasters” reads like meta-commentary about these translations. English is good for Gil-Montero’s versions of Mejer Caso’s poems. - Kelsi Vanada
http://www.full-stop.net/2017/03/07/reviews/kelsi-vanada/this-blue-novel-valerie-mejer-caso/
Valerie Mejer Caso’s ghosts make a home in the cavities of This Blue Novel. In houses, bodies, and names, any image of beauty can suddenly reveal an element of decay or the remnants of a disaster: “The pit still has a pulse. Maybe mine.” The moments of light turn out to be will-o’-the-wisps that lead to the edge of a maw:
thanks to something light-like
that isn’t light
and, still quite dead, she says and said and will say
that she wedded that German young man because he could
devour a whole cake in one bite.
The dead often speak this way in This Blue Novel, with a resonance in every part of time. Past, present and future, they say, said, and will say. The book constructs itself around the instability of time in the measure of the dead, dependent on people and spaces rather than linearity to complete the picture of its haunting. And time isn’t the only innovation. Formally, This Blue Novel is a novel largely by its own declaration. A painter and poet and translator, Mejer Caso brings us through several forms of artistic limbo. The poetry of her novel forces the boundaries (because we don’t need those anyway) of the genre to bend for her; the interplay of the living and the dead forces us to consider the closeness of the two:
Yesterday, I traced the line I’ll cross tomorrow.
Yesterday, holding vigil as the foam
closed over my mother’s body,
I saw my grandparents’ houses go down
like anchors.
They sink, I ascend.
Yesterday, in free fall, I drew the door that now I open.
This Blue Novel is autobiographical, spiritually, and sometimes factually. Several personal photos of Mejer Caso’s family in Mexico appear throughout, including a four-year-old version of the author holding her father’s rifle, smiling innocently. But the book is not only the object of Mejer Caso’s lineage and rifle. The process of writing grows out from under her control. The second half of the book begins with an unmarked passage:
This part of the book is illegible
because it deals in a vegetal language.
were I water I’d know what it says.
The book transforms into something out of human hands, “a vegetal language,” and gains an upper hand:
The book reads me
thought I’m not water,
Though I can’t walk through this jungle,
once a garden.
The book is the one reading me.
It reads the novel scrawled from my neck to my shoulders.
The book itself becomes half-alive reading the novel-in-skin. Once written, reading here becomes an act of reciprocity. The object begins to breathe, the door drawn on the first page, as we were told, is a real portal to walk through.
As a translation, Michelle Gil-Montero’s work from the Spanish is fluid, precise and a little uncanny in the context of the novel itself. As a half-living thing, this book has several odd resonances with the act of translation. One of the most famous translation metaphors, one of Benjamin’s (maybe a tired one), is that translation is “fragments of a vessel that are to be glued together.” The shattered vase that appears in Mejer Caso’s work, however remains broken, intentionally: “The vase shatters and sings the song of the broken./ I squeeze a shard in my hand and bleed:/ I shoulder the bridge, I stain/ and shine it like the coin of a waning civilization.” The novel is very aware, and it knows that language is broken and it knows how to let the brokenness of language pierce into the skin. Reading the Spanish and the English side-by-side is like seeing a ghost behind you in the mirror. They are doubles. They haunt each other:
You wanted to say I, she,
ghost, la nieve, la neige, the snow,
as if another language could save you
from the thaw.
What comes after the thaw? More words, as real as the thing itself.
-Alex Niemi
Painter and poet Valerie Mejer Caso was born in Mexico City into a family of European immigrants. She is the author of the poetry collections EDINBURGH NOTEBOOK (Action Books, 2021), RAIN OF THE FUTURE (Action Books, 2013), translated by C.D. Wright, Forrest Gander, and Alexandra Zelman; de la ola, el atajo (2009); Geografías de Niebla (2008); Esta Novela Azul (2004), which was translated by Michelle Gil-Montero as THIS BLUE NOVEL (Action Books, 2015); and Ante el Ojo de Cíclope (1999). Her book De Elefante a Elefante (1997) won the Spanish Government's Gerardo Diego 1966 International Award. Mejer Caso has collaborated with photographers, among them Barry Shapiro and Russel Monk. With the photgrapher D.S Borris, Mejer Caso and Forrest Gander co-authored Time's Playing Fields, a book about empty football fields in Mexico (Blue Star Contemporary Art Center, TX). She has translated poetry by Charles Wright, Ruth Fainligth, and Pascale Petit. From 2016-17, she participated in the Bienalle of Kochi-Muziris in India, where she exhibited her unfolded book Untamable Light. Her poetry has been translated into English, Slovenian, and Korean.
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