Two Catalan poets set for visit to University of Glasgow this week

There’s more to be said of course. It’s never so simple. But Cunninghame Graham doesn’t make idle presumptions. Are there affinities beyond things superficial? In political terms? With reference   to what used to be called the “national character”? How would you prove them?
 
I first met Begonya Mezquita and Manel Rodriguez-Castelló some years ago when visiting friends in Spain and Catalonia.

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Their personal connections with Scotland are immediate – family, friends, visits and a long considered common purpose: independence from the dominant exploiter. That purpose goes beyond nationalism but includes the priority of self-determination, which is what every single poem is ruled by. Every poem has to work on its own terms.

I’ve been reading a selection of poems by Manel and Begonya and with great help from my friend Chris Larsen and Manel’s brother Cèsar Rodriguez Castello, I’ve been trying to make versions of my own from them.

There’s much to say again about the particularity and the universality of what poems are and how they work, and of how Scotland and Catalonia are similar, and different, in so many respects.
I won’t dwell on these things here. I’d simply like to introduce the poems and let them speak for themselves.
I’m going to present them in their original language, Catalan, not Spanish, and then offer my own English-language versions. These are not literal, word-for-word, line-by-line translations, but representations of what I take the poems to signify.

And there’s more to be said about that too – but later, later! Let’s start with this one, by Begonya Mezquita:
 

El cos que respira
Com un instrument de vent, com un sac de gemecs/
sents l’aire al bell mig del ventre. I tot està bé./
Ara una mica els peus, el fred als peus. Hi ha fet una parada l’aire/
i ha tornat a marxar, com un núvol que passava./
Ara una mica la coroneta, el món és a dintre teu,/
i ara la mà esquerra, que era simple i ara s’implica una mica més. Desa el/
pensament i desa les cançons que t’omplen els matins, desa el temps,/
aquesta música.//
Demà serà un suau bategar de l’aire, un oblidar els dies que et resten per/
viure. Demà serà un vaixell rumb a tu mateixa, sense port, sense culpa./
Has sabut d’un cos que respira, d’un fluir que t’alimenta d’una veu que és/
un paisatge a tocar, de sol, de dies i de silencis. Has tancat els ulls i la nit/
ha fet escala en el teu rostre./
I tot és present. I tot està bé./

The Body, Breathing
The air in your lungs, your belly, your centre,
Your pipes take it in & then, out: That’s all right,
Cold feet. Air stopped. A cloud, passed, gone.
Your skull holds a world inside, cradles & nourishes.
Your left hand is still, then moves again, a little.
The thoughts and the songs in the morning, hold safe,
Keep still, let them be, the music will stay. Keep it safe.
Tomorrow: soft air, one beat of the wing, forgetting
What remains, put that future life away for now,
Hold it safe. It will come without fault, without guilt.
You have known and will know the way a body breathes,
The flow that gives you nourishment, a landscape, a voice,
Sunshine and silence, then closing your eyes for a while,
While night holds your face, still, patiently, just
A stopover, one night. Everything’s all right.

You can read that as a personal poem, a love poem, a consolation, perhaps, and perhaps a way of saying farewell, and yet of affirming the rightness of things, the ultimate justice that nature confirms, what will prevail.

This is one aspect of the personal and universal application of what poems are and do. Now here’s another by Begonya:

Y cualquier noche la sombra se resguardará en la sombra:  provoca ahora/
un cataclismo/
enciende hogueras en el bosque/
atraviesa este rayo de sol/
y si todavía haces fuego funde la nieve de su iris.

Any night at all
Choose any night: the shadow
wraps itself within the shadow, and incites, ignites, sparks up
a cataclysm,
kindling flames within the forest –
This light beam of sunshine breaks through –
If you could still light such a fire,
the ice of the eye of the shadow would melt –

Manel Rodriguez-Castelló’s poems are closely related in some respects: in their imagery, their deep sense of resourcefulness and determination, and their sympathy and humour.

Such things come through in these poems, too. Here’s one that’s more explicitly “political”.

(Although there’s more to be said about the distinction between “personal” and “political” and whether we want to make one, or should, and if so, how!)

Recitatiu primer
Volíem atènyer el bosc
però vam perdre les ales
les amazònies de l’instant,
no vam solcar la mar i vam deixar la terra en flames,
perícies sense ponts,
antàrtides sense misteris ni ecos.
Pesava tant el fang de l’escissió del món
que ens va estimbar
al clos profund
on ens sumí tota impotència
i la roda repetida de l’horror
que ens feu traçar un vol de falenes cegues.
Camps de l’extermini, camps de desolació i quimera!
El cavall de la mort trepitjava el cor d’Europa
i emmetzinaven les serps tota la terra!

The poem’s title might be given as “First Recitative” and it was published in Dins Camps de l’extermini (“Cantata For The Future City”), Humus (Ed. Bromera, 2003). Its focus is the war in Bosnia. Here’s my version.

Boznia: The Future
We longed for the forest. We longed for the sea.
Then the fire’s high flames ran over the earth.
The sea rolled on out there, without us.
We had the skills. We could not apply them.
Competencies – but
Expertise – agency – mastery –
knowhow – test/evaluation/experiment
We could not build bridges.
We had not learned the skills.
There were no mysteries left in Antarctica. The ice was all silence.
No echoes. No voices. The clay of the earth split apart.
We were raised to the heights on the ledge of the fort,
Then plummeted down in an arc of sheer terror.
Like blind moths in flight, we traced over the tracks
To the death camps, saw ghosts of the dead, wispily turning
Through air above desolate fields. The black snakes had poisoned the land.
The black horse of death had trampled all Europe to waste.

The articulation of such experience in a poem, which involves the immediacy of evocation and the tempered thoughtfulness of consideration, is also characteristic of what poetry can do, beyond the accepted conventions of other media with which most of us are so unhappily familiar. 

We should never be familiar to the point of acceptance.

A good poem can remind us of that. So much might seem thoughtful work, the imagination calculating carefully what works in a poetic form, but one of the further delights of poetry is that it can celebrate personal experience as well, so here’s Manel’s poem (from Dins Seqüència d’Angus, Estranyament, Ed. 62, 2013), prompted by a visit to Scotland, bringing a fresh eye to a local landscape.

Brechin. El riu
A contracorrent de les aigües
ràpides que arrosseguen
tel·lúriques foscors de torba,
trepitjant la suau catifa de fulles
de faig, remuntem el camí que voreja l’Esk amb el plugim,
el fred i el vent de cara.
De l’esplendorosa fragilitat
de l’hora present pugem
a un passat que es rebalsa en la memòria,
riu amunt, i des d’allà sentim glatir
les combinacions de llum i foscúria
amb què papepelleja el vell estranyament
de les aigües,
infinitud del que mai no es tanca ni s’esgota
ans es recrea en cada revolt, i creix en cada salt
que fem d’oblit o permanència.
The Esk near Brechin
Oblivion, eternity, in see-saw balance here,
while river waters charge
Cross currents that carry the stain,
and the strong taste of peat –
We step on the carpet of beech leaves,
tread gently uphill,
On the edge of the Esk, with the watery air
blowing into our faces like mist,
Not strong enough to be rain,
but a softening blanket of wet seeps in,
And goes deep. The cold wind pushes it in.
The hour is a moment’s fragility, held.
We go up into memory, the whole past comes down.
It meets us, sinks in, it seeps through our clothes.
Then goes into the river, that rises and fills,
that overflows banks, and breaks past its borders.
The water flows fast in its silvery twists,
memories flicker and sharpen
Their blades in our quick recollection.
What’s lost is oblivion, gone
With the flow. We make what we can.
What stays will stay with us forever.

Perhaps, if you’ve come thus far, you’ll be seeing exactly how the recurring imagery and the varying subjects interweave and support each other. 

I’ll round this selection off with one of Begonya’s most explicit, even flamboyant, poems, and one of Manel’s most politically forceful, and poignant poems, historically precise in its location but as pertinent now as it was when it was written – or when the subject it addresses was happening.

This time, for reasons of space, I’m only giving my own English-language versions of them. Of course, they’re much better in Catalan!

Arrival / Begonya Mezquita
Among bougainvillea, submerged
in the autumn drench of their fragrance and touch, as if
underwater, I am suddenly
released, unformed and
advancing all contours of edges
of blades and of body, rising up into,
filling the space that the shapes of the flowers are creating,
covering all that once was myself,
turning all things to an essence of autumn pervasive,
a sharpness that occupies everywhere
the deepest refreshment of soul –
turning out, on all surfaces –
one blink of the eyes and the fires of the day are extinguished –
and the long afternoon becomes twilight and dusk –
and the life that we know is renewed in its value –
now, mid-week, in the centre of all
 
The rain came down too much that afternoon, a Friday –
Dark glasses and black leather jacket, you say
There’s no news – no word of us to speak of at all –
Conditions apply between telephone calls
You say you hold all the flowers
And that you’ve been holding them always,
At least since the day you were born.

 At the end of the street where the well retains water, the source,
The Lady Boss stands by the onion field
And all is in balance around her
Like a crowd of good people who know how to dance
To dance between roads and the forest
Here at the fork of the roads, surrounded by all of the trees
And all of the leaves that grow fresh on their branches.

Miguel Hernández, adult reformatory, Alicante (1942) Manel Rodriguez-Castelló
reformatory, Alicante (1942) Manel Rodriguez-Castelló
At a slow walk, through the dark empty cells,
While we search through the night of so many crimes
And the silence is still full of screams, the cold
Full of loneliness, and every wall, crumbling,
All the last details of cracks in them, clinging like salt
To the skin, frozen tears, hard skin, agonised flesh.
Mould and decay all around, bloodstains clotted in corners,
Yellow stains from winter sweats, the ice blue beyond
The iron bars to the sky, or beyond filthy windows,
A grey dusty sound: door slowly squeaks, keys in locks
Grating, and stopped. Here is the cartography of absence.
Here are the charts of pain. Time’s heaped-up slag,
Drawn up bucket by bucket from a well of despairing so deep,
That goes deeper down to 
oblivion, utterly, and then 
taken up,
Brought up to the crystalline fountain, the leaping of dawns,
Astonishment. Blinking. Trembling. Sore. Wounded, three times,
The poet returns with a voice to tear light from the shadows.
His voice is the rainbow of water in air, returned to the light
From the shadow, the stubborn old hold, unrelenting tenacity,
Darkness below. Returns to the hardest of work, against odds,
Shaking the road-signs all free of their lies, an offer instead
Of liberty’s fruit. Miguel returns, while the silence is echoes,
A cough and a hunger, words scribbled, sketched notes, emergency
Epitaphs, farewells breathed out with the ending of hope, returning
With nature’s deep thanks for the vision that shows him the walls
And the cracks in them, fists clenched in dignity, every one,
Affirming again, and over millennia, this depth of resistance,
Against what the darkness maintains, against all this brutal oblivion,
Against this deep kingdom of darkness, finding the loopholes,
Where they exist, the traces oblivion leaves in oblivion,
The light that the darkness ignores, the trace of ignition alive in the ashes,
The spark in the embers, when noise becomes itself a kind of music,
The reach beyond silence that silence contains, and then
Cannot contain, comes into the poem, the word overwritten,
The textures inscribed on the wall, the rising of matter,
The spirit from exiles, old, new, returned from the prison house,
Silence, the thrice-wounded flesh, never healing:
Of love, of life, of death. And each one of them working,
Releasing this light, revealing what lasts, this yearning, this need.

Begonya Mezquita and Manel Rodriguez-Castelló will read from their work from 4-5pm in room 101, at 5 University Gardens, Glasgow University on Thursday. Tickets for the event can be found HERE and it is free to attend.