{"id":11154,"date":"2020-01-07T12:27:32","date_gmt":"2020-01-07T11:27:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11154"},"modified":"2020-01-15T09:53:40","modified_gmt":"2020-01-15T08:53:40","slug":"impossible-loves-by-dario-jaramillo-carcanet-12-99-reviewed-by-david-cooke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11154","title":{"rendered":"Dario Jaramillo | Impossible Loves<\/em><\/strong> | reviewed by David Cooke"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dario Jaramillo | Impossible Loves<\/em> | Carcanet: \u00a312.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Impossible Loves<\/em> by Dario Jaramillo is a bilingual selection from the work of Colombia\u2019s greatest living poet translated into English by Stephen Gwyn, who has also written a helpful afterword. It\u2019s the first time that Jaramillo\u2019s poems have been made available to an English-speaking audience, an opportunity that is long overdue, since one can have little doubt that one is in the presence of a master, a writer in the front line of Latin-American poetry and one who is revered in his own country as a love poet. \u2018Reasons for his Absence\u2019, the opening poem, is one of several where the poet invents a persona who may be his alter ego. Here, the protagonist, like Browning\u2019s Waring or, in the real world, Weldon Kees, has gone on a fugue, vanished, \u2018given us all the slip\u2019:<\/p>\n

If anyone asks after him,<\/p>\n

tell them that perhaps he\u2019ll never come back, or else<\/p>\n

on returning no one will recognise his face;<\/p>\n

tell them also that he left no one any reasons,<\/p>\n

that he had a secret message, something important to tell them<\/p>\n

but he\u2019s forgotten what it was.<\/p>\n

A study in apathy and ennui, the poem is reminiscent also of Neruda\u2019s much anthologised poem, \u2018Walking\u2019, although Jaramillo\u2019s imagery is less overblown than Neruda\u2019s. Interestingly, both poems were written when each man was in his early thirties, yet Jaramillo sounds older, more philosophical. \u2018Penultimate Imaginary Biography\u2019 is another tour de force in which the cadences of Jaramillo\u2019s long loping lines are eloquently rendered by Gwyn:<\/p>\n

He lived the two or three moments that constitute life, his life, so intensely<\/p>\n

that his memory had died and with it the chance to remember them:<\/p>\n

but a stigma bound him to the certainty that in some way<\/p>\n

those moments were still his;<\/p>\n

if he were to hear me, he would not allow me to speak to you of these things \u2026<\/p>\n

In a later poem \u2018Testimony Concerning My Brother\u2019, he adopts a tougher, more self-assured persona; \u2018But my brother has always been strong and wise, \/ with the wisdom of one who knows the limits of his self-destruction.\u2019 In an exquisite sequence of twenty-one brief poems called \u00a0\u2018Cats\u2019, he admires and perhaps aspires to the characteristics of that enigmatic species and joins a band of poets, one thinks immediately of Smart, Baudelaire, MacBeth, who have been obsessed by it. Here are the opening lines of the first poem:<\/p>\n

The moon gilds the rooftops.<\/p>\n

Unannounced, the shadows of cats appear.<\/p>\n

They are so stealthy<\/p>\n

they are only their shadows.<\/p>\n

For the poet, cats are \u2018not of this world \u2026they are idlers, bored by the world, witnesses.\u2019 Perhaps, also, it is their lack of self-awareness that is admired because a cat is \u2018so idle \/ that it can\u2019t be bothered with being a cat.\u2019 Above all they don\u2019t need words: \u2018Why words \/ when silence is possible?\u2019<\/p>\n

This is of course a paradox because Jaramillo is a poet and a novelist who is obsessed with words. In \u2018The Trade\u2019, poetry is seen as \u2018that battle of tired words; names for things that the noise whisks away.\u2019 In \u2018Another Ars Poetica <\/em>I: Time\u2019, he seems the antithesis of all those classical or Renaissance poets confident that they would leave behind them \u2018a monument more lasting then bronze\u2019. By way of contrast, Jaramillo writes of \u2018time that continues \/ far beyond the vain words of the poem.\u2019 In fact, Time, as Stephen Gwyn points out in his afterword, is one of this poet\u2019s major obsessions. It is his heightened awareness of time and his yearning for an imagined world beyond it that explains his affinity with the Pre-Socratics and the paradoxes of Zeno. In \u2018Photograph Album\u2019, his grief for a dead friend hints at a Platonic transcendence: \u2018He is something beautiful that now does not exist.\u2019<\/p>\n

Jaramillo\u2019s poems are informed also by his Catholic inheritance, particularly that loss of innocence we associate with the Fall of Man. In \u2018Penultimate Imaginary Biography\u2019, we see that the protagonist cannot escape his sense of guilt: \u2018the blame that surrounded him like a viscous sea.\u2019<\/p>\n

In the sequence, \u2018Nostalgia\u2019, the poet evokes the prelapsarian world of childhood, a world where it is often difficult to draw a line between what is real and what is imagined. Here the poet reminds one of Wordsworth in his great ode, \u2018Intimations of Immortality: \u2018Turn wheresoe\u2019er I may \/ By night or day, \/The things which I have seen I now can see no more\u2019. Here is Jaramillo in \u2018Nostalgia I\u2019:<\/p>\n

I remember only that I\u2019ve forgotten the accent of the voices<\/p>\n

I most loved,<\/p>\n

and that I\u2019ve lost forever the smell of the fruits of my\u00a0 childhood,<\/p>\n

the precise taste of a peach,<\/p>\n

the flurry of cold air between the pines,<\/p>\n

the excitement of discovering a walnut fallen from its tree.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In\u00a0 \u2018Dead Friends\u2019 he imagines ghosts \u00a0returning from their timeless zone and how they might react to seeing him so changed: his grey hair, his paunch, his apathy. In \u2018Job Again\u2019, it seems that one can only aspire to some kind of hard-won stoicism: \u2018Habit or virtue, monotonous patience that I learn painfully, \/ slowly day by day.\u2019<\/p>\n

In this selection of Jaramillo\u2019s work his love poetry is represented by two sequences: \u2018Love Poems\u2019 and \u2018Impossible Loves\u2019. The number of these which can be listened to on YouTube is testimony to their popularity in his native land and, again, a comparison might be drawn with Neruda, whose early collection Veinte Poemas de Amor<\/em> is still hugely popular. Again though, Jaramillo\u2019s tone is quieter and less ornate. Here are the opening and closing lines of the first one: \u2019That other who also lives in me, \/ the owner perhaps, or a squatter or exile in this body \u2026 \/ that other, also loves you\u2019. In #4 he playfully dismantles the traditional scaffolding of love poems: \u2018One day I will write you a poem that does not mention the air or the night \/ a poem that omits the names of flowers, that contains no jasmines or magnolias \u2026\u2019<\/p>\n

What is so affecting about these poems is their truth and simplicity allied to the \u00a0hypnotic effect of their cadences. The lover\u2019s smell is her \u2018unique halo;\u2019 her voice \u2018lists the things we must do together\u2019; her tongue \u2018invents\u2019 his skin. The sequence, \u2018Impossible Loves\u2019, was written, as Gwyn informs us in his afterword, as a kind of \u2018antidote to \u2018Love Poems\u2019. Here, as elsewhere, he points up a contrast between the world we know, where nothing is permanent, and some elusive Platonic realm which can only be imagined. \u2018Impossible love is the happiest of loves\u2019, claims the poet, realising, however, that it is a \u2018miracle\u2019 or perhaps even an illusion. Having suggested on various occasions Plato\u2019s Theory of Forms, he specifically evokes him in \u2018Plato, Drunk.\u2019 The poem opens confidently enough: \u2018I have experienced absolute clarity,\u2019 an assertion which is undermined by the fact that the sage is drunk, borracho<\/em>. Even the deity in \u2018Conversations with God\u2019 is unable to explain what time is and, by extension, has nothing to tell him about the meaning of life.<\/p>\n

Just occasionally, one discovers a new poet who is indisputably in the first rank, a poet who seems, almost effortlessly, to be able to move and challenge the reader. Dario Jaramillo is such a poet and one who has been lucky to find a translator as self-effacing and skilful as Stephen Gwyn, whose versions are rhythmically adroit, musical, and true to the text and the spirit of their originals.<\/p>\n

by David Cooke<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dario Jaramillo | Impossible Loves | Carcanet: \u00a312.99 Impossible Loves by Dario Jaramillo is a bilingual selection from the work of Colombia\u2019s greatest living poet translated into English by Stephen Gwyn, who has also written a helpful afterword. It\u2019s the first time that Jaramillo\u2019s poems have been made available to an English-speaking audience, an opportunity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nDario Jaramillo | Impossible Loves | reviewed by David Cooke - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11154\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Dario Jaramillo | Impossible Loves | reviewed by David Cooke - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Dario Jaramillo | Impossible Loves | Carcanet: \u00a312.99 Impossible Loves by Dario Jaramillo is a bilingual selection from the work of Colombia\u2019s greatest living poet translated into English by Stephen Gwyn, who has also written a helpful afterword. 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