Giving your book a title containing the words ‘contemporary’ or ‘modern’ ensures that, given enough time, it will be living a lie. The copy of An Anthology of Contemporary Latin-American Poetry that arrived in the post this week (Fig. 25) was contemporary with Casablanca and the initial success of ‘White Christmas’, having been first published in 1942. My copy is from the revised 1947 edition. I finished an initial read through of it on Saturday evening.
In his Preface, the editor, Dudley Fitts, begins by outlining his book's focus on poetry written in the quarter century from the death of Rubén Darío in 1916. To my mind, this broad geographic coverage over a relatively narrow temporal span works to the book's advantage. The nearest equivalent to it I've read — The FSG Book of Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry (ed. Ilan Stavans, 2011) — rather suffers for condensing a considerably wider-angled view into what is only a slightly thicker volume. All the text is given in the original languages, faced with their English translations. Naturally the great majority of the originals are Spanish, with a smaller number in Brazilian Portuguese and a handful in Haitian French. Unlike in the FSG volume, indigenous languages aren't represented at all. I'm unqualified to judge the quality of the translations, but I was impressed by how fluent and natural many of them seemed.
Among the highlights for me were the poems by Jorge Carrera Andrade that open the volume; José Lezama Lima's strikingly intense poem ‘Rhapsody for the Mule’; and the beguiling surrealism of César Moro, especially ‘You Come in the Night with the Fabulous Smoke of your Hair’:
…With the fabulous smoke of your hair
With nocturnal beasts in your eyes
And your body of embers
With night that you sprinkle in fragments
With blocks of night that fall from your hands
With the silence that takes fire at your coming
With the upheaval and the surging
With the swaying of houses
And the oscillation of lights and the most solid shadow
And your words a street like a river...
I was left, too, wishing to read much more by Moro's fellow Peruvian César Vallejo. It was interesting to read of Octavio Paz at a time when he was still making a name for himself; and to see Jorge Luis Borges considered as a poet first and foremost, with his famous Ficciones only having seen daylight between the first edition of this Anthology and its '47 revision.
Not all of my musical acquisitions of late have been altogether successful. I first heard the pianist Vijay Iyer on Love in Exile, the record he made with Arooj Aftab and Shahzad Ismaily. I didn't fully warm to that album but was intrigued by what I heard of Iyer in other settings when exploring his music at YouTube. A few weeks ago I bought Uneasy, the first album he made with Linda May Han Oh (bass) and Tyshawn Sorey (drums). Having played it through a few times now it still has yet to properly connect with me. While the musicianship is excellent throughout and some of the tunes are good, I feel like I'm missing something in it. Memorable moments & striking contrasts come along a little too seldom over its seventy-odd minutes' duration for my liking.
Mountain in the Clouds is a re-issue of the debut album by the Czech bassist (and founder-member of Weather Report) Miroslav Vitouš. It was originally released under the title Infinite Search. I bought it having had good luck with some of the other ‘70s re-issues in the same series. The lengthy opening number ‘Freedom Jazz Dance’ got things off on the wrong foot, giving me more a sense of congested aimlessness than of any airier kind of liberty. I liked some of the other tracks a little better, and there's no disputing the calibre of the musicians involved (among them Jack DeJohnette, Herbie Hancock, John McLaughlin & Joe Henderson). For now though, the appeal of this kind of free-form fusion continues to elude me.
Last Tuesday’s entry was written in the midst of an early heatwave that brought temperatures of 33-34C to these parts, numbers never before recorded here in May. Although it’s cooler now, I’m nevertheless apprehensive about what discomforts the fullness of summer might bring.