{"id":4582,"date":"2015-03-24T07:52:38","date_gmt":"2015-03-24T06:52:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=4582"},"modified":"2016-01-23T15:52:37","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T14:52:37","slug":"tomaz-salamun-soy-realidad-dalkey-archive-press-2014-e9-00-reviewed-by-joey-frances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=4582","title":{"rendered":"Toma\u017e \u0160alamun, Soy Realidad<\/em> (Dalkey Archive Press) \u20ac9.00, reviewed by Joey Frances"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cLa syntaxe est une facult\u00e9 de l\u2019ame.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

So opens \u2018The Bird Dove\u2019, with a Paul Val\u00e9ry quotation, in the French.<\/p>\n

One of my favourites of the contradictory things Walter Benjamin says about translation is: \u201call translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of language.\u201d<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t merely relevant because Soy Realidad <\/i>was written in Slovenian, and appears in English here for the first time; only the ninth of \u0160alamun\u2019s almost forty collections to do so, it\u2019s a small glimpse of his work for those who speak only English, where translation is of course only anyway a partial and oblique glimpsing.<\/p>\n

Soy Realidad <\/i>wasn\u2019t written in Slovenian, or not only in Slovenian. It\u2019s littered also with French, Latin, a lot of Spanish, just as its poems are rooted across the world, from Russia to South America. There are quotations given in their original language, and those which have left their original and travelled through Slovenian to us. \u2018Dangerous Thoughts\u2019 is a translation of Cavafy, in which the direct speech which makes up the main part of the poem appears to be someone else\u2019s translation of Cavafy, from Greek to English (though I don\u2019t know how it was presented in \u0160alamun\u2019s original). Only the opening lines which set the scene are \u2018translated\u2019 from Alexandria to Mexico, staging the poem as directed to a character of \u0160alamun himself.<\/p>\n

Especially when we consider that \u0160alamun co-translated Soy Realidad<\/i>, questions which are general to translated poetry take on a specific relevance to this work, and are articulated back to us in playful and sophisticated forms: Is a Spanish quotation in a Slovenian poem rendered with greater fidelity if its foreignness is retained? (There is no fidelity.) What then of the different relation of Spanish to English than to Slovenian? If a line is in a language we don\u2019t understand, and is left untranslated, are we to seek out its English meaning? And so on.<\/p>\n

There are three poems which are presented \u2013 as the work of a Mexican student, Francisco \u2013 entirely in Spanish. To an English reader especially, being so much less likely to speak other common European languages than most Europeans, these poems present a certain challenge. I find myself unable to converse with them in my usual ways, and unwilling to attempt to translate them when they are presented in this way. I am at once shamed for my ignorance, and dared to attempt to commit wholly to a partial encounter, with short glimpses of understanding, and a sense of the poem as an oblique, sounded thing. The challenge is whether the poem can reach me, or I it, despite this.<\/p>\n

As these poems bring the difficulties of multi-lingual communication to the fore, this becomes a question about communicability in general. The last stanzas of the collection\u2019s first poem, \u2018Childhood Mine, Palm Yours\u2019:<\/p>\n

And also, if I turn the clock
\nahead and watch the grass and the earth
\non my grave, for I always
\nenjoy my memories:
\n 
\nWhere is what could
\nruin our fraternity?
\n 
\nHey dew!
\nWhy don\u2019t you feel that I\u2019m dew, too?
\nIt\u2019s me.
\nThe dew is fine.<\/p>\n

These poems frequently suggest an addressee, sometimes named, sometimes implied by grammatical function. Their self-conscious troubling of the elliptical nature of translated language becomes a staging of language acts, direct speech, poems spoken to or for another, which long to be consummated as successful communications, as the possibility of understanding another human person. Translation as a point at which language meets the basic emotional need for companionship:<\/p>\n

Full Moon<\/p>\n

How sweet to meet the childlike soul resting in God!
\nEyeballs, lakes, and black hair as a beast might have.
\nThe neck you can hold better than a steering wheel
\nand the laugh the cannibals laughed that I saw in
\na movie when I was little. And your scent is real,
\nMichelangelo\u2019s slaves are not as fragrant as you, Francisco.
\nYou shouldn\u2019t cry, I cry. Look, even so, everything
\nhangs by a tiny hair. How could I explain this to any reasonable
\nbeing and to your mom. Do you really think that you\u2019re not
\nhandsome, ashamed to watch yourself
\nin the mirror? Stop carrying your comb so primitively
\nin your pocket. You breathe like bloom and
\nrower. I like everything you like.
\nI\u2019ve never made love listening to Tchaikovsky.
\nQue te pasa ni\u00f1o!<\/i>
\nHow do you make it so the air crunches and rustles
\nfor us both, and fall asleep like a dew,
\nso we swim and in the morning you tell me
\nyour dreams and they confirm
\nyou were truly where I had been.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like everything you like.\u201d The poetry is too clever and too self-aware for there to be any question of simple lyrical sincerity here, but the emotional content of this line thus presented, looking wryly and sadly at itself with the knowledge that it can\u2019t be true, is stronger for that. One of the best poems of a great collection, \u2018Full Moon\u2019 shows us \u0160alamun the name-function, the fictionalised poet-speaker, crying out for confirmation that his cries can be heard. But to say you were where another had been doesn\u2019t make it so.<\/p>\n

\u2018The Bird Dove\u2019 ends: \u201cshe is\/a baroque compass that then collapses so you can\/row in peace on the lake and say quietly:\/\/I love you.\u201d A brave way to end a poem, but the words are not said, only named as a possibility. The poem wishes to create and imagine circumstances where these words could be said, and also ogle sceptically its own imaginings.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t mean to suggest this work is wholly melancholic. It\u2019s tender as it\u2019s melancholic about the difficulties of tenderness, and it is playful, clashing objects, images and utterances together in a series of dream-like glimpsed moments, within poems and from each to the next. See, for example, the opening to \u2018Poppy\u2019:<\/p>\n

Cover the people when I step in the area.
\nThrow on them blankets, tents, and powdered milk.
\nDig them into the earth, I am a hamster.
\nWrap them in gauze.<\/p>\n

The poems combine pronouncements, often phrased almost as adages, with a strangeness of juxtapositions verging on nonsense, to create dream-like faux fables. \u201cThe turtle, with her poison\/geography and hard shell\/can alone breast-feed the star.\u201d Animals and people meet disparate objects, conflicts and the vast universe, creating stories like those we tell ourselves to make sense of the world (the appearance of Aesop in \u2018Swallow The Marbles Then!\u2019 makes the already implied connection), but without the final step of sense-making.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s in this context that I see the frequent religious references of the work. Though the poems deal with God and with Catholic ritual recurrently, they also touch on numerous other religious traditions, real or imagined. Religious articulations are parodied or ridiculed, as in \u2018Sierra Nevada\u2019: \u201cMy body hair sets the cosmos to delight\u2026. I\u2019m the body hair.\/I\u2019m the body hair\u2019s father.\u201d Yet this turns out to touch on the same constellations of problems as the rest of the work. As Aztec meets Catholic in Mexico City, the issue is again one of translation. Parodied religions, amongst fables and dreams, become one of many cultural and linguistic ways to encounter the enormity of the world; unable to answer questions of the sky itself, \u0160alamun writes, \u201cI spin it with a swift and religious\/gesture\u201d, and \u201cgesture\u201d is the key here. The problems of comprehending the universe turn back to that wish to communicate with other people, to meet half way their different languages of comprehension.<\/p>\n

The calling out towards other beings, shown to be always interrupted by the problems of translating one another\u2019s languages, is then also a calling out to the world itself, where comprehension and emotional connection are the same action, in the face of the same vastness and impossibility. In \u2018To The Heart\u2019 \u0160alamun writes, \u201cYou think I\u2019ll feed you like an hourglass\/that can be rotated by eternity?\u201d But the addressee of the poem \u2013 not his heart, but implicitly aligned with it \u2013 is \u201cRaucous black sky, my intimate!\u201d These poems go so far as to extend the longing for tenderness towards the sky itself, towards the very insurmountability of existence.<\/p>\n

I must note with sadness that Toma\u017e \u0160alamun has died since this collection was published. Without wishing to add too much biography or sentimentality to poems that resist any simple form of either, it seems fitting to end with the final offering of \u2018To The Heart\u2019, to the sky and the world which, in facing the longing for comprehension, these poems refuse to do anything so easy as to actually comprehend.<\/p>\n

Do you see these damp curved paws?
\nThey\u2019re yours if you agree to the rules of the game.
\nMelancholie should flow like a river through us both!<\/p>\n

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

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