Review Essay: Antonio Gamoneda's Castillian Blues

                                          Drawing Words from a Well: Antonio Gamoneda’s Castilian Blues

In our early childhood my brother and I used to eat meals on plastic placemats with a map of the world on one side and other practical information on the other. Mom, an elementary school teacher, spent that time (a) letting us know we were marvelous little people and (b) exposing us to enriching material as grounds for learning. She also held the ideas that would induct us into the world, like notions of time, place, before and after, and causality. My brother, all lit up at lunch one day after a morning kindergarten prep program, announced to us, “Did you know there’s such a thing as a calendar?” He couldn’t believe it, and his wonder at the announcement, his understanding of a duty that something so astonishing must be announced, was like Gabriel’s.

The calendar was one of the concepts my mother had been laying the seeds for, for years. There were calendars nailed to various walls in the house; there were my mom’s weekly and yearly planners; there was a handmade advent calendar at Christmas, and my brother and I took turns affixing its felt ornaments to the felt Christmas tree. But the concept of the calendar, what it was, came to my brother in its own time, finally crystallized in a lesson by the kindergarten prep teacher that the rest of the family could only wonder about.

Early in the fall of 2020, the notion of bottomlessness came into a register of my thinking (ideas also seem to be affixed by time). Something that is bottomless can be returned to again and again, is the well that impossibly never dries up. And each time what is taken from the well shifts slightly from its last view. Now imagine taking a photograph of an object over time that is fixed in place, and the position from where you shoot migrates just a few centimeters each time. But here the well’s material also shifts—your position and the material are both shifting slightly each time. So it can be that bottomlessness endlessly promises an eventual completeness—and the promise is simultaneously fulfilled as it is not. The gesture of the bottomless is also vertical.

Bottomlessness stands in opposition to the infinite, which is horizontal, and if instinct can be trusted, is bound up in terror. The infinite is busy wildly replicating itself for all time. The infinite has to be so quick and so vast you can never actually see it. You have to look away before you even begin because you’re already late. You are eternally frozen in the moment just before you will be buried in it. Think of Benjamin’s angel of history: the angel, facing the pile of debris growing skyward, is confronted with the infinite.

Gamoneda’s poetry is overrun with obsessive words that I have come to understand as bottomless. In Descripcion de la mentira (1977), “obsessive words” like tongue, faces, substance, health, truth, silence, betrayal, womb, whiteness, yellow, and furor ring out and call to one another. They are reiterated again and again part of the waves that establish the fundamental rhythm of the work. Here we can follow what Aldo Pellegrini writes of Trakl’s poems:

 The poem acquires a particular texture by being run over by obsessive words that become conducting threads of a poetic discourse […]. All these obsessive words create a sort of reverberating surface in the text, then, in spite of their reiteration, they are never the same, their meaning changes ever so slightly each time and so refine the discourse.¹

Gamoneda’s obsessive words also have a home in Blues Castellano (1982). Some of them (e.g., paste) find their confines within that collection, and some of them (oblivion/forgetting, boils, and enters in the heart) reverberate all the way into Descripcion de la mentira.

Description of the Lie  (2013; translator Donald Wellman) was the first of Gamoneda’s books published in the United States. Castilian Blues (2021), translated by Benito del Pliego and Andrés Fisher and appearing in a bilingual edition, marks the second. Del Pliego and Fisher identify these two collections as existing in very different cycles of Gamoneda’s poetry—cycles separated by stylistic difference and a historical sea change: the end of Franco’s fascist dictatorial regime in 1975. Gamoneda wrote Blues Castellano between 1961 and 1966, but it wasn’t published in Spain until 1982, five years after the publication of Descripción de la mentira, which was actually composed afterward. (Watch here how time circulates.) Antonio Gamoneda, a working-class man who lived his life in a provincial town, was never an advocate for the publication of his work.²  But the twelve-year gap from the time the collection was completed and its publication was the result of the regime’s censorship. The censorship report³  required poems, quotes, and references antithetical to the dictatorship ideology to be removed for the book’s publication, something Gamoneda refused. Del Pliego and Fisher say their translation also took twelve years to be published, for different reasons. Of course, the difficulties of publishing translation in the US signal another kind of insidious suppression, but that’s a story for another time.  

Another way to understand the timeframe of Gamoneda’s poetry is to say that those obsessive words that span Blues Castellano and Descripcion de la mentira were moving around inside of Gamoneda for at least ten years. They moved around in English in Wellman and Del Pliego and Fisher, and in the readers in both languages. When those bottomless words come off the page, you can sense a strangeness that destabilizes a fixed meaning; there’s a slow turn of the word as it comes out of the well, and, as the perspective of it widens, the word (language itself) changes as do the writer, translators, and readers.  

The question of consciousness in relation to poetic practice comes to point in Del Pliego and Fisher’s interview with Gamoneda. The poet complicates the division between writers “who are conscious about the language they use to express themselves and those who are not”⁴  by reordering the chain of events. It’s not that the poet first has a message and then consciously chooses the right words that will ultimately deliver it. The words “appear,” not in a burst of illumination or from a divine power, as Gamoneda conceives it, but as something more prosaic. Their appearance is related to music and disruption; they are guides to knowledge in a process that is no less intentional.

There’s a kind of musical beat in the language that disrupts or confuses the idea one wishes to express. This confused idea, this not-knowing, this lack of rational control doesn’t impede a certain intuition about where the poem will go, but you don’t know the exact words, or the precise contents, nor the reality that will take place in the language of the poem. And that poetic language, moreover, will be somehow excited by its musical cause, as will the actual idea or information the poet posits, of which he is neither totally nor instantaneously conscious. One might even argue that this lack of complete consciousness, which is far from psychic automatism, is what accounts for the appearance of language. I deliberately use the word appearance because what appears is what you’re not expecting, what you do not know, which creates in you a value of surprise. The appearance is linked to some musical data that are still formless, that will continue being elaborated with the appearance. I used to say I discover what I think only when I’ve been told by my own words. In this sense, my language, my own language, is what creates consciousness and knowledge, not the other way around. I have the knowledge after my words. Does this mean I didn’t know anything and knowledge came from the “holy spirit”? No. It means that knowledge is, so to speak, dynamized for those words that “appear.” Appearance, then, as a way to saying.     

My intuition says the words that appeared to the poet are also those that read as bottomless—these two gestures are bound in those words. "Paste," translated consistently by Del Pliego and Fisher from the Spanish pasta, for example, is pulled from the well in Castilian Blues. It first appears in the first stanza of “Humming Nazim.”
    
    For seven years now, doctor,
    instead of thought I had a noise
    and a very sad paste in my head.⁵

The illness, the noise in the head, oblivion enter the mind surreptitiously, and, in Gamoneda’s case, through translated sounds and music; it’s a disruptor/conductor that makes words and ideas appear. Concretely Gamoneda attributes the origins of Blues Castellano to the musical traditions of Black America⁶  and the writings of Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet (1902–1963). Both came to him through translation, requiring Gamoneda to make them his own, rendered into versions he could feel in his own Spanish—the sad paste that inhabits the mind, away from thinking.

Again, "paste" appears in “Legume Flavor.”

    Now we have on our tongue⁷  the same ground paste,
    I can forget my heart and resist the spoons.⁸    

"Paste" is now a poetic noise in the head and a source of nourishment for Spanish families surviving the conditions of their time. Finally, it appears in the first stanza of “Hiding This?” where it becomes human blood.
    
    I know some beaten face
    will soon come to stare at me, and it will open his mouth,
    and the red paste will flow out of it and out of his eyes;
    the paste I love, the thick
    endless river of earth.⁹   

In their ringing throughout the collection, these incongruous imaginings of "paste" settle happily together as if their very difference made them equivalent.

The obsessive words are one unit, and moving in circles out and in, we can see other patterns in Castilian Blues. Especially in the blues poems of the collection’s second section, repetition carries words in waves. Look at “Stairway Blues”:

    A woman climbs the stairs
    with a boiler full of sorrows.
    The woman climbs the stairs
    With the boiler of sorrows.

    I stumbled upon a woman on the stairs
    and she lowered her eyes when she saw me.

    I stumbled upon the woman with the boiler.
    I’ll never be at peace on the stairs.¹⁰

And retracting back to the writing’s inner edges, we can identify what Gamoneda refers to as “the rhythm of ideas”: “the rhythm related to how meaning gets articulated,” where even before sound happens, thoughts are adjusted to the music (the paste) in the mind: “Before meanings get articulated from a phonetic point of view, there occurs a rhythmical adjustment of thoughts according to the triggering musical cause.”¹¹     

Some questions circulate around Castilian Blues that I won’t pretend to answer but would like to set down. What sources do we use when a dangerous external authority cuts us off from our own? What placards can stand in when we can’t say what we mean? How do we choose an alternate code without consuming and possessing it? Gamoneda found a way by what he saw in Jean Paul Sartre’s introduction to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s anthology of Black francophone poets: “Black Orpheus, by Sartre, persuaded me (with the mirror of the French-speaking Black poets from the Antilles and Madagascar) that when the oppressed can only express themselves in the language of the oppressor, that language becomes revolutionary.”¹²

Lately in these questions, I turn to Celan, who noticed something in the horizontal/vertical and the infinite different than I have. Celan says that poetic language requires “movement, you see, something happening, being en route, an attempt to find a direction. Whenever I ask about the sense of it, I remind myself that this implies the question as to which sense is clockwise. For the poem does not stand outside time. True, it claims the infinite and tries to reach across time—but across, not above.” It may need to reach across horizontally, to be addressed to a “you,” after the obliteration of stable originary sources—this is what Joanna Klink argues. Exiled in France, writing in German, surviving the loss of his parents and homeland, no source was left for Celan to hang from or float above—the social, cultural, and spiritual realms all overwhelmed.¹³  While other High Modern poets relied on world-legitimizing systems either established (Hopkins) or invented (Yeats), whose work accessed and drew from those sources vertically, Celan could only reach out horizontally for the hand of an unknown “you”—someone he could intuit was there, at the same level.

The instability of Celan’s poetic enterprise—the blurring between invoking a source of meaning and producing that source—is a function of his position as someone who has been denied cultural assurance, denied the institutional framework which makes it possible to distinguish a principle of meaning from an instance of meaning. It is the contingency of a well-functioning institution which enables the High Moderns to recognize a difference between the vertical appeal to a source of meaning (as in Crane’s “Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal”) and the horizontal address to a particular, concrete you (“but there is a line/You must not cross.”)¹⁴      

Where do these poets (Gamoneda, Nazim, Celan) and musical figures (Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Louis Armstrong, and Sara Vaughan¹⁵ ) reach and toward what? In which direction and seeing what exits? (Like after all good questions, our grid [horizontal/vertical, infinite/bottomless] has warped slightly. There are implications still unseen leading to knowledge. Settle over it then, adjust the map, reconfigure the calendar, and wait.)
        

Notes: