Colección Támesis

SERIE A: MONOGRAFÍAS, 251

Spanish American Poetry after 1950

beyond the vanguard

Providing a basis for understanding the main lines of development

of poetry in Spanish America after Vanguardism, this volume begins
with an overview of the situation at the mid-century: the later work
of Neruda and Borges, the emergence of Paz. Consideration is then
given to the decisive impact of Parra and the rise of colloquial poetry,
politico-social poetry [Dalton, Cardenal] and representative figures
such as Orozco, Pacheco and Cisneros.
  The aim is to establish a few paths through the largely unmapped
jungle of Spanish American poetry in the time period. The author
emphasises the persistence of a generally negative view of the human
condition and the poets' exploration of different ways of responding
to it. These vary from outright scepticism to the ideological, the reli-
gious or those derived from some degree of confidence in the creative
imagination as cognitive. At the same time there is analysis of the
evolving outlook on poetry of the writers in question, both in regard
to its possible social role and in regard to diction.
Donald L. Shaw is Brown Forman Professor of Spanish American
Literature at the University of Virginia.
 Tamesis

Founding Editor
J. E. Varey

General Editor
Stephen M. Hart

Editorial Board
Alan Deyermond
Julian Weiss
Charles Davis
 donald l. shaw

Spanish American Poetry

after 1950

beyond the vanguard

TAMESIS
 © Donald L. Shaw 2008

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First published 2008 by Tamesis, Woodbridge

ISBN  978–1–85566–157–8

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 CONTENTS

1 Preliminaries: The Vanguard and After 1

2 Neruda and Parr 22
3 Borges and Cardenal 44
4 Orozco and Dalton 74
5 Pacheco and Cisneros 116
Conclusion 159
Bibliography 165
Index 177
 1

Preliminaries: The Vanguard and After

Before the mid-century

Why begin a book about modern Spanish American poetry using the mid-
twentieth century as the point of departure? Because, as William Rowe has
pointed out (Rowe, 2000, 17), Vanguardism as a movement had largely run
out of steam by the 1940s and “In the poets who began to write in the 1950s,
there is a concern with new starting points”. Other critics (cf. Salvador, 1993,
262) agree. We can now see that the clearest illustration of this concern is
to be found in the Poemas y antipoemas (1954) of Nicanor Parra. But as
we examine this collection we notice that, while it is highly innovative in
terms of its approach to poetry, its diction and even some of its themes, in
one important respect it is not original at all – that is, in its despairing view
of the human condition. Here Parra’s outlook connects directly with that of
a long line of earlier poets going back to the darker side of Romanticism
and to the “Devil World” hypothesis. When Parra writes that “El poeta anda
buscando la casa para el hombre actual, que está a la intemperie” (quoted in
Morales, 1972, 213), he is saying nothing new. What this compels us to keep
in mind is that the major poetry of Spanish America in the second half of the
twentieth century, in its various forms, has to be seen, not just in the context
of on-going innovation, but also in terms of an equally on-going crisis of
ideals and beliefs which links it very intimately to the past. Yurkievich puts
it cogently when he writes:

Una conciencia desgarrada y conflictiva será característica casi unánime

de la poesía contemporánea. Denota una agudización de la crisis que
comienza con el romanticismo, que penetra en Hispanoamérica a través del
modernismo, encuentra su expresión más cabal en Vallejo, en Neruda, en
Huidobro y se generaliza después de la segunda posguerra hasta involucrar
a las promociones más recientes. (Yurkievich, 1973, 277)

To go back briefly to the beginning of the twentieth century: it used to be

thought that modernismo, then in its heyday, was a movement preeminently,
if not exclusively concerned with modernizing the “arsenal poético” of its
members; that is, with purely technical innovation, as if this process were
 DONALD L. SHAW

somehow autonomous and could be kept largely separate from the evolving
world-view of (for example) its leader, Rubén Darío. This view of modern-
ismo has long been abandoned. Not for nothing does Olivio Jiménez, in his
excellent “Introducción a la poesía modernista hispanoamericana” (Jiménez,
1985, 9–66), speak of “esa poesía de temple agónico y existencial” (11), which
“prefigura espiritualmente la modernidad” (22). He quotes with approval the
title of Picón Garfield and Schulman’s collection of essays on modernismo:
Las entrañas del vacío (1984) in which the authors lay heavy emphasis on
the “desorientación social, buceo interno, pesimismo, acoso metafísico y
angustia existencial” (ibid., 31) which emerge from modernismo to char-
acterize modernity in Spanish American poetry. This is clearly what Cobo
Borda has in mind when he writes of the modernistas that “Sus preguntas
siguen siendo nuestras preguntas” (Cobo Borda, 1986, 54). In relation to
Darío, Rivera-Rodas, perhaps more clearly than anyone else, in the last two
chapters of his La poesía hispanoamericana del siglo xix (1988) develops the
idea that modernista poetics was deeply concerned with the “búsqueda del
significado escondido de las cosas” (321). He goes on to argue that it was
the realization of the probable futility of that quest that linked modernismo
with the Vanguard. It is interesting to observe how Octavio Paz was to take
up afresh the modernista notion of “la poesía como recurso gnoseológico”
(ibid., 326), and for similar reasons, despite its earlier collapse. In addition,
as Guillermo Sucre points out in what is still one of the densest books on
modern Spanish American poetry, La máscara, la transparencia (1975), we
must not overlook the fact that it was the modernistas who “prepararon una
actitud crítica frente a todo poder verbal” (14), prefiguring the movement
of modern “critical” poetry so well studied by Thorpe Running (1996). Nor
should we overlook the fact that Pacheco published an anthology of modern-
ismo in 1970.
When, therefore, we speak of the sharp reaction against modernismo
which is visible in the writings of the next generation of poets, we have to be
alert to the fact that it took place at levels which did not necessarily include
the deepest thematic level. Ernesto Cardenal has reminded us that when his
fellow poet of an earlier generation, José Coronel Urtecho, wrote his well-
known dismissive “Oda a Rubén Darío” he did not have in mind the Darío
of “la tortura interior” (Bellini, 1993, 77). The profound spiritual malaise
visible in several of the most memorable poems of Darío’s Cantos de vida y
esperanza (1905), which belie the collection’s title, notably the “Nocturnos”
and “Lo fatal”, lived on. Schopf, like Rivera-Rodas, Picón Garfield and
Schulman, and many others, insists that the heritage of the late nineteenth-
century religious and cultural crisis in the West was crucial to modernismo.
The modernista poet aspires at bottom to “un fundamento en que vuelvan a
reunirse el yo y la realidad externa. De esta carencia, de esta búsqueda exist-
encial y ­ cognoscitiva, surge el símbolo modernista y otros recursos expre-
 THE VANGUARD AND AFTER 

sivos” (Schopf, 1986, 14). The first major poet to break completely with
modernismo and move deliberately towards the foundation of Vanguardism,
Vicente Huidobro, picks up this heritage in his major poem Altazor (1931,
but begun as early as 1919), where Altazor himself is described as an “animal
metafísico cargado de congojas” (Huidobro, 1976, I, 393). Already in the
preface to Adán (1916) Huidobro has written of his “enorme angustia filo­
sófica” and his “gran dolor metafísico” (189). The main imagery of the poem,
especially in its early part, revolves around the concept of a “fall” into soli-
tude, “naufragio”, emptiness and anguish. Initially, Huidobro seems to have
had, like Darío before him and Paz after him, some degree of confidence
in the redemptive power of the creative imagination. De Costa has shown
that, having rejected modernista diction (“Basta señora arpa de las bellas
imágenes”, Huidobro, 1976, I, 406) Huidobro aspired to create a new pattern
of creacionista imagery which would, like the word of God, produce a libera-
tion from congoja. But the attempt failed (De Costa, 1981, 35; 1984, 161).
At the beginning of Vanguardism in the 1920s, that failure lay in the
future. It is important to emphasize that there is a palpable difference of mood
between early Vanguardism and the full tide of the movement in the next
decade. Gustav Siebenmann perceives clearly that “Las vanguardias de los
años 10 y 20 eran más bien estéticas, las de los años 30 se hicieron cada vez
más ideológicas” (Siebenmann, 1977, 211). But this is not the whole story.
As we read through the manifestos of the period of the “ismos” collected by
Verani, Collazos, Schwartz and Osorio, we hear a tone of youthful optimism,
vitality, even euphoria: a sense of liberation. Thus the Estridentista manifesto
of Manuel Maples Arce (1923) insists on “un arte nuevo, juvenil, entusiasta
y palpitante” (Verani, 1990, 94). The previous year in Puerto Rico there had
appeared, characteristically, a “Manifesto euforista” (ibid., 115–16) aimed at
“la juventud americana” and calling for “gestos seguros y potentes en nuestra
literatura falsificada y rala.” “Cantemos a lo fuerte y lo útil”, the author,
Tomás Batista, proclaims “Fortalezcamos nuestras almas entumecidas” (ibid.,
115). A similar spirit is discernible in Borges’s ultraísta manifestos. It derives
in large part from the notion that poetry should reflect what Jaime Torres
Bodet, in “La poesía nueva” (1928 published in the Mexican Vanguardist
magazine Contemporáneos), called “el espíritu de la vida moderna … la
intensidad del pensamiento actual” (ibid., 99). We find much the same insist-
ence on the need for poetry to incorporate “la fisonomía peculiar del tiempo
que vivimos” in Jorge Mañach’s 1927 article “Vanguardismo” (ibid., 133).
One of the most striking manifestos is Oliverio Girondo’s “Manifiesto Martín
Fierro” (1924; Schwartz, 2002, 142–3). After accusing the public of “imper-
meabilidad hipopotámica” and the younger generation of cultural paralysis,
Girondo proclaims “nos hallamos en presencia de una NUEVA SENSIBI-
LIDAD y de una NUEVA COMPRENSIÓN, que, al ponernos de acuerdo con
nosotros mismos, nos descubre panoramas insospechadas y nuevos medios y
 DONALD L. SHAW

formas de expresión” (ibid., 142). Like other Vanguardists, Girondo calls for
“pupilas actuales” and “un acento contemporáneo” (ibid.). Masiello (1986,
71) is right to contradict those earlier critics who were dismissive of Giron-
do’s manifesto and to insist that “merece especial consideración”. But she
accepts Girondo’s affirmations at their face value as offering “una forma
nueva de discurso para la tradición literaria argentina” (ibid.) without really
considering whether the “programa de acción” (ibid., 72) which Girondo
proposes was followed through, except perhaps in parts of his own poetic
work. Although he advocates modernity, novelty and americanismo, aware-
ness of tradition as well as openness to European influences, Girondo signally
fails to make clear what kind of world-view underlay the new sensibility
whose existence he proclaims. Leland correctly points out that the world of
almost ludic confidence to which Girondo’s manifesto belongs collapsed in
1930. Therafter, he asserts “The existential concerns operating fitfully within
much of the work of the Generation of 1922 became central” (Leland, 1986,
153). It is hardly surprising therefore to find del Corro asserting that by 1937
Girondo had become “un hombre atormentado” (63) This underlines the fact
that one of the most striking features of these early Vanguardist manifestos
is the complete absence of any significant attempt to define or analyse the
“modern spirit”, or “new sensibility” which Vanguardist poetry was supposed
to express. It seems to have been ingenuously taken for granted, by Girondo
among many others, that (as, for example, Marinetti and the Futurists in
Italy had proclaimed) modernity and especially modern technology were in
themselves automatically exciting, positive, vital and appealing to the young.
Thus Borges in “Al margen de la moderna lírica” (1920; Verani, 1990, 250)
could assert that ultraísmo “representa el esfuerzo del poeta para expresar la
milenaria juventud de la vida”. The modernista realization that the “enigma”,
the mystery of things, was not going to give way, as Darío at one stage hoped,
to a rebirth of the ideal, was temporarily forgotten.
Initially, the desire to have done with the past, to march ahead with the
times, to abandon what seemed to be a false and outmoded poetic tradition,
led young poets and writers to believe that the result would inevitably be
“un arte constructivo, afirmativo, eficaz”, as Martí Casanovas declared in
“Arte nuevo” (1927; Verani, 1990, 137), published in Cuba’s more or less
Vanguardist magazine Revista de Avance. It took time for it to be understood
that the “espíritu de la época” was to reveal itself to be neither construc-
tive nor affirmative. What was thought to be a moment of spiritual renova-
tion, potentially productive of new, possibly “American” values, turned out
to be a further moment of crisis. Few examples are more illustrative of the
misplaced optimism of the early vanguardistas than José Carlos Mariátegui’s
“Arte, revolución y decadencia” published in Amauta in 1926. The article
begins with a fundamental affirmation. Vanguardism is not just characterized
by technical innovation: “La técnica nueva debe corresponder a un espíritu
 THE VANGUARD AND AFTER 

nuevo también” (Verani, 1990, 182). Out of the anarchy of the “ismos” will
arise a “reconstrucción” explicitly associated with political change.
The figure who courageously attempted to prick the bubble of early
Vanguardist euphoria was César Vallejo. In characteristically far-sighted
articles published between 1926 and 1930 (Verani, 1990, 190–9), “Poesía
nueva”, “Contra el secreto profesional” and “Autopsia del superrealismo”, he
took up, like Mariátegui, the relationship between “poesía nueva” and “sensi-
bilidad nueva” in order to assert categorically that in the period of the “ismos”
that link had been lost. What Vallejo called the “timbre humano”, the “latido
vital y sincero” of true poetry, had disappeared, he declared, amid a welter
of attempts simply to renovate the poetic medium, to modernize diction and
symbolism (all, in his view, derivative from European models). No one in
Latin America, he affirmed roundly in 1927 (“Contra el secreto profesional”,
ibid., 194) was currently able to transmit through poetry this acute awareness
of “lo humano”. Like Mariátegui and Neruda, Vallejo came to believe that the
key to the reintroduction of truly human content into poetry would be brought
about by acceptance of “el verdadero y único espíritu revolucionario de estos
tiempos: el marxismo” (“Autopsia”, ibid., 197). It is hardly too much to say
that Vallejos’s articles mark a strong reaction against the ideas of Huidobro,
which are at the centre of early Vanguardism. In contrast to the latter’s notion
of a totally created poetic reality, a kind of parallel reality “independiente del
mundo externo” (“El creacionismo”, 1925; ibid., 219) and hence independent
of any value-laden, new “Spirit of the Age”, Vallejo demanded a poetry which
was new in technique, certainly, but which consciously expressed human,
social and political insights. What neither Vallejo, nor Mariátegui nor Neruda
could foresee was that the political allegiance which they assumed that the
new “human” (in Neruda’s term “impure”) poetry would embrace, would not
provide an enduring solution to the congoja, the spiritual malaise, as its re-
emergence in the three great works of mature Vanguardism: Altazor (1931),
Trilce (1922) and Residencia en la tierra (1935) would reveal.
In what follows, I have chosen to study poets who, I believe, best represent
the mainstreams of poetry in Spanish America after 1950. If we accept Jaime
Giordano’s postulate of four overlapping generations of poets in Spanish
America in the second half of the twentieth century (Giordano, 1989, 91–9),
it will be seen that leading figures from each of the generations have been
considered here. These are: Borges and Neruda from the first generation;
Parra and Paz from the second; Orozco and Cardenal from the third, and
Dalton, Cisneros and Pacheco from the fourth. A wide variety of choices
have been made by other critics for their own reasons, as I discuss in the
conclusion. For the purposes of this book, Neruda, Paz and Borges (despite
the latter’s lack of influence) are such towering figures in the poetry of the
last half of the twentieth century that it seemed impossible to leave them
out. In addition, Borges’s views on poetry, and particularly on diction, are so
 DONALD L. SHAW

challenging that they surely must be taken into brief consideration. Parra’s
Poemas y antipoemas clearly mark a watershed which has to be discussed.
Dalton and Cardenal best represent the current of committed poetry which
played such an important role in the period. Cisneros and Pacheco are widely
regarded as probably the major figures who have a more or less completed
body of work at this time. Among women poets Orozco seemed to me to fit
best into the broad pattern of development which I have tried to describe.
I did not wish to include younger poets, partly because of the existence of
Kuhnheim’s (2004) excellent book on poetry at the end of the twentieth
century and partly because I was unwilling to include poets who are still in
mid-career. In the broadest terms, my contention is that in the second half
of the twentieth century we can perceive several overlapping lines of poetic
development. These include among others: poesía pura, poetry concerned
with the metaphysics of the modern human condition; social and political
poetry; humourous and colloquial poetry; “Americanist” poetry; and meta-
poetry or poetry concerned with the problematics of poetry itself. If I have
chosen to emphasize the second of these principal lines of development, it is
because it so often underlies the others, as we can see quite clearly in poets
as different as Parra and Dalton, to say nothing of poets in whose work reli-
gion plays an open role, such as Orozco, Cardenal and Cisneros. In effect,
at the most basic level, we can postulate two major factors which govern
the development of Spanish American poetry after 1950. One, as I have
just argued, concerns the relationship of individual poets to the existential
theme emphasized by Carrera Andrade (1987, 81): “La angustia existencial
es el común denominador de los poemas que se escriben desde 1940 hasta
nuestros días.” Here we can situate Orozco and Cisneros on one side of the
issue, with strong residual religious overtones in parts of their work. On the
other side we have figures like Neruda and Dalton, whose response is via left-
wing ideology and a non-transcendental pattern of beliefs. Borges, Parra and
Pacheco represent different degrees of scepticism, while Cardenal specifi-
cally fuses Christianity and Marxism. There are, of course, many individual
divergences from this basic pattern, but an underlying theme of this book is
that the pattern is generally recognizable across the broad picture and useful
for that reason. The other factor is diction. On the one hand we have the
evolution of consciously poetic diction which descends, in the last analysis,
from Huidobro’s famous assertion in 1921 that “El valor del lenguaje de la
poesía está en razón directa de su alejamiento de la realidad” (1976, I, 716).
The result is the movement towards “poesía pura”. On the other hand, we
have the colloquial diction associated with Parra and accepted by Cardenal
and others. Once more there are many variations. But it is contended here
that these are the two chief factors.
I am aware that attempting to postulate reaction to a perceived cultural
crisis as a broadly unifying factor in the work of the poets selected for
 THE VANGUARD AND AFTER 

study is open to criticism as using an unduly “Westernized” or “metro-

politan” approach. It is, of course, one of several possible ones. I can only
plead that in fiction it is the dominant approach, as is revealed, for example
by Jesús ­ Rodero’s La edad de la incertidumbre (2006) among many other
similar works. I hold that in literature everything goes forward more or less
together – “tout se tient” – and I am unapologetic about seeking a parallel
pattern in poetry. Earlier I quoted Yurkievich (himself a poet) in defence
of the pattern which is here postulated. I do not think we can overlook the
statement, asserted as late as 1973, of another relevant poet, Jorge Carrera
Andrade (quoted above, page 6). Ten years later Ramón Xirau could write
in “Del modernismo a la modernidad”: “Muchas de estas ideas y actos que
caracterizan a la modernidad se engarzan en una tradición que nace con el
romanticismo y son consecuencia y parte de la crisis de los valores univer-
sales” (Xirau, 1983, 67).
Similarly it could be argued that more could have been included about the
reactions of poets inside Spanish America to one another’s work rather than
about the reactions of many English-speaking critics. My response is two-
fold. On the rare occasions where I have found such reactions relevant (as
for instance in the case of Cardenal’s remark à propos of Parra, or Pacheco’s
poems on Darío and Guillén) I have mentioned them. But, although, for
example, Pacheco published Descripción de Piedra de sol (by Paz) in 1974,
in many cases the real influences between poets have been between Euro-
pean, sometimes English-speaking, poets including some from the USA,
and Spanish American ones. Parra’s first antipoemas were written after his
contact with contemporary English poetry. Orozco’s few comments about
poetry clearly reveal French influence. Following the example of Alberto
Girri, Cisneros published an anthology of modern English poetry and a poem
on the death of Robert Lowell. Pacheco wrote poems on Matthew Arnold
and Juan Ramón Jiménez and, according to Cobo Borda was influenced by
Cavafis (1986, 91). Cardenal’s poetic formation was clearly affected, not only
by Darío, Coronel Urtecho, Pasos, Cortés and Cuadra, but also by Eliot, Frost
and especially Pound (Mereles Olivera, 2003, 123). These are only a few
instances among many others: Coronel Urtecho, for instance, published a
panoramic anthology of North American poetry in his time; Carrera Andrade
brought out an anthology of French poetry. The whole question of reciprocal
influences among poets, and of their relations with one another, is a mine-
field, and one which I have not felt capable of exploring further.

The mid-century
What, then, was the situation of Spanish American poetry like at the mid-
century, when Vanguardism had pretty well come to the end of its creative
cycle? Vallejo had died in 1938, leaving Poemas humanos and España aparta
 DONALD L. SHAW

de mí este caliz to be published posthumously the following year. Though he

was already famous among his fellow poets, his influence was still growing.
In total contrast, Huidobro who had been dead for only two years, having
published his Últimos poemas in the year of his death, 1948, was a spent
force, now quite overshadowed by Neruda. Even so, since the publication
in 1935 by Eduardo Anguita and Volodia Teitelboim of their important
Antología de la poesía chilena nueva, Huidobro had been recognized as the
pioneer of Vanguardism in Spanish American poetry and it has been argued
that his 1932 manifesto “Total”, in which he turns to some extent against his
earlier poetics, marks the end of the aggressively experimental phase of the
movement. We should not overlook the fact that Lagar, the last collection
of Gabriela Mistral, who represents the backward-looking other end of the
poetic spectrum, was not to be published until 1954, by which time it was all
but completely anachronistic. Nonetheless, the fact that her verse continued
to appear until after the middle of the century symbolizes one of the difficul-
ties of periodizing Spanish American poetry at this time.
Borges, as a poet, had been silent since Cuaderno San Martín in 1929 and
was not to publish a significant amount of poetry again until El hacedor in
1960. He had been a major figure in the renovation of the 1920s, but, as we
can see from his ultraísta manifestos, his contribution at that time had been
to all intents and purposes exclusively aesthetic. Although, like Huidobro,
Neruda, Vallejo and eventually Paz, he became deeply aware of the on-going
cultural crisis of his time, this awareness did not really emerge in his early
poetry. When it did appear, in his essays and short stories, and in later poems,
like “Ajedrez II” (El hacedor) where at the climax he asks:

Qué dios detrás de Dios la trama empieza

de polvo y tiempo y sueño y agonías?  (Borges, 1974, 813)

it reveals that his life-long interest in metaphysics and his suspicion that
life might be best seen as a circular labyrinth, with no entrance or exit, and
commonly with death at its centre, were clearly related to the cultural pessi-
mism of later Vanguardism. However, one aspect of Borges’s early poetry
is highly significant in view of future developments. We have seen that a
series of dichotomies were visible in the twenties and after. Tradition, espe-
cially outside the Southern Cone, continued to face radical innovation;
youthful optimism faced a growing sense of spiritual crisis; emphasis on “el
hecho estético” and the central role of imagery faced advocacy (especially
by Vallejo) of “lo humano”. But there is a fourth dichotomy: that produced
by the contrast between a vision of “pure” poetry, which was universalist by
definition, and the desire for a specifically American or Americanist poetry
which had surfaced in late modernismo and can be found in the later Darío,
Prada and above all Chocano. For a short time the latter produced ­Borges’s
 THE VANGUARD AND AFTER 

adhesion to a poetry which was highly Argentine in setting and deliber-

ately laced with argentinismos. We can see the same trend in Vallejo’s early
“Nostalgias imperiales” and in much Afro-Caribbean poetry, represented by
figures like Palés Matos and especially Nicolás Guillén. It fell to Neruda at
the mid-century to give this consciously Americanist poetry a strong ideo-
logical colouring in Canto general. This collection marked a striking return
to the “civic” tradition in Spanish American poetry, the notion of a patriotic,
value-laden, nation-building poetry dating from the nineteenth century. It
was destined in poesía comprometida, protest, guerrilla poetry and militantly
left-wing poetry of all kinds (with a major representative in Cardenal) to have
a major role in the second half of the century.
The final figure whom we have to mention briefly at this point is Octavio
Paz, whose early evolution illustrates afresh the change that came over
Vanguardism. Paz was a latecomer who dated the beginning of his authentic
work from 1949 with the first version of Libertad bajo palabra (Paz, 1988a,
16). In practice he had been publishing since 1931 when he was still in his
teens, but this was already more than a decade later than the first poems
of Borges, Huidobro or Neruda. The interval had seen the “ismos”, most
of the major Vanguardist manifestos, and in Mexico, the formation of the
Contemporáneos group at the end of the 1920s. Unlike the three poets just
mentioned, Paz did not go through the kind of Vanguardist phase we see in
Borges’s ultraísta poetry, nor that of Huidobro’s creacionismo or Neruda’s
Tentativa del hombre infinito. Santí points out that, virtually from the outset
of his work, Paz rejected “pure” poetry and specifically “la posición estética
de Contemporáneos” (Primeras letras; Paz, 1988b, 19), sharply criticizing it
in his early essay “Ética del artista”. Bowers, examining Paz’s earliest poetry
rightly suggests that the programmatic poem, No I of Luna silvestre (1933),
advocates a type of poetry which is equidistant between the two extremes
of thesis-poetry and “pure” poetry which Paz had discussed in the essay
(Bowers, 1999, 179). Subsequently, however, the outbreak of the Spanish
Civil War in 1936 and Paz’s visit to Spain the following year produced a
small but significant group of ideologically motivated poems which show
him aligning himself temporarily with Neruda, Vallejo and other poets from
Spain and elsewhere who were in sympathy with the Republic. This did not
mean that he had broken completely with the recent past. Santí correctly
insists that he and other poets in Spain at the time “rechazan el arte puro, pero
no el aspecto crítico, el rigor estético, de la vanguardia” (Paz, 1988a, 26).
Noteworthy is the lecture “Noticia de la poesía mexicana contemporánea”
(1937) given in Spain, in which Paz aligns himself completely with Vallejo,
criticizing some of the Contemporáneos because they “olvidaron al hombre”
and asserting that he and other younger Mexican poets (unnamed) “Preten-
demos plantear, poéticamente, es decir humanamente, con todas sus conse-
cuencias, el drama del hombre de hoy” (Paz, 1988b, 136). At that moment he
10 DONALD L. SHAW

saw this drama in revolutionary terms, but in the same lecture he mentioned
“la crisis metafísica” (135) of the times. It was this which soon prevailed,
emerging prominently in “Calamidades y milagros” in the late 1930s and
early 1940s. It led, as we have mentioned, to a mystique of cognitive poetry,
in which a combination of fully sexualized love and the creative imagination
of the poet could bring entry into “la vida más vida”.
The fundamental fact of the mid-century, sadly overlooked by Sucre
because of his astonishing decision to exclude Neruda from his superb book,
is the publication, precisely in 1950, of the first edition of Neruda’s Canto
general (preceded by “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” in 1945 in which the
change of direction in his outlook was already plainly chronicled). It was
followed by the first set of Odas elementales in 1954, with its extreme shift
both in content and diction from Residencia en la tierra. The embrace by
both Vallejo and Neruda of left-wing ideology, partly as a result of events and
conditions in Europe in the 1930s leading up to the Spanish Civil War and
the war itself, must obviously be seen in political terms. But it also attests a
reaction against their joint participation in the second phase of Vanguardism,
in which, as Yurkievich has pointed out, the “exaltación optimista”, which
we have noticed in some areas of the early movement, gave way increasingly
to “disfórica desolación, reificación, angustioso vacío, quebranto existencial
con la consiguiente carencia ontológica” (Yurkievich, 1982, 361). In the
1930s meaning had returned to poetry with a vengeance; but it was meaning
often of a highly disturbing kind. It could be life-rejecting, as in Neruda’s
“Walking around” or Vallejo’s Trilce XXXIII or even, as at the end of Huido-
bro’s Altazor, the rejection of any notion that language can convey meaning at
all. The Vanguardist advocacy of strikingly novel, newly minted images, new
symbols, new formal arrangements which did without some logical nexuses
and challenged the reader, was adapted to express this desolate outlook and
produced the masterworks of the period. But when Neruda and Vallejo turned
to Marxism in search of immanent values with which to replace a lost hope
of transcendence, the end-result, in Neruda’s case especially, was a return to
poetry of direct communication.
This return was not initially confined to left-wing, politically committed
poetry. Looking back in 1958 to the end of the 1930s, Nicanor Parra empha-
sized, in a talk, that he and a number of his fellow poets in Chile were
“en general apolíticos”. Yet, in the face of “los poetas creacionistas, verso-
libristas, herméticos, oníricos, sacerdotales” (the reference is clearly to the the
Vanguardists and in particular to the Neruda of Residencia en la tierra) they
declared themselves to be “tácitamente, al menos, paladines de la claridad y
la naturalidad de los medios expresivos” (Parra, 1958, 47). At the start, Parra
conceded, this was a step backwards. But eventually, he affirmed, it came to
mark a turning-point in Chilean poetry – implicitly with his antipoemas as
the spearhead of change. We shall see that the change in question was not to
 THE VANGUARD AND AFTER 11

be restricted to Chilean poetry. We can plausibly assert, therefore, that as the

Vanguardist period came to an end, a split was developing between poets in
the universalist “High Culture” tradition of a search for humanist values in
a world where they seemed to have disintegrated, and poets who were much
more interested in re-establishing direct communication with the reading
public, poets with a more down-to-earth relationship with the real, with the
here-and-now, with lived experience rather than abstract intellectual explora-
tion of the human condition. It is clear that the primary difference concerned
the matter of diction. We have seen that the leading figure in this area, Parra,
attacked “hermeticism”, one of the buzz-words of the times among poets
of the “Conversational” or “Colloquial” grouping to characterize what they
were against; it serves as an instant identification sign. Alemany Bay has
shown that this advocacy of clarity and naturalness found widespread accept-
ance. She cites as characteristic the statement by Mario Benedetti of Uruguay
that in Buenos Aires he had discovered the poetry of Baldomero Fernández
Moreno, “un poeta que tenía obsesión por la claridad” and had at once begun
to write “poemas que pretendían ser claros” (Alemany Bay, 1997, 16). In
different parts of Spanish America, and to different degrees, other poets,
including Roque Dalton in El Salvador, Roberto Fernández Retamar in Cuba
(who baptized the movement), Enrique Lihn in Chile, Jorge Enrique Adoum
in Ecuador, Antonio Cisneros in Peru, Francisco Urondo in Argentina and,
most famous of all, Ernesto Cardenal in Nicaragua, bought into the notion
that poetry must become much less writerly, and use a much less specialized
diction, one that was based on orality, everyday conversational Spanish. As
time went on this new anti-rhetorical, anti- “hermetic”, more populist poetry
in turn became polarized. One wing moved leftwards into committed social
poetry and militant protest. The poets of the other wing remained primarily
interested in exploring the everyday life they observed around them.
We can say, therefore, in broad terms that three primary figures were
exerting enormous influence, in different directions, after 1950. The first was
Octavio Paz, whom González and Treece (1992, 366) describe as “not only
an important poet, but the dominant influence on Latin American poetry
criticism for the last thirty or so years”. They describe him as setting out to
“resurrect or generate new universals, new general and global truths about
human experience in a world that has seen their collapse” (ibid., 200). Their
third relevant assertion is that “antipoesía was the diametrical opposite of
the poetry of Octavio Paz” (ibid., 193). Thus the second major influence,
alongside that of Paz, was Parra, who set out deliberately to demythify and
desacralize the “High” poetic tradition. The third towering figure, was of
course, the Neruda of Canto general. It is time to glance at these three figures
at the mid-century.
12 DONALD L. SHAW

Octavio Paz (Mexico, 1914–98)

Paz was the youngest of the five poets whom Yurkievich (1971) called the
founders of the new poetry of Latin America: Vallejo (b. 1892), Huidobro (b.
1893), Borges (b. 1899), Neruda (b. 1904), Paz (b. 1914). He was thus ten
years younger than Neruda, fifteen years younger than Borges and twenty-
two years younger than Vallejo. When he began publishing poetry in the early
1930s, Vanguardism was already firmly established and Neruda was only a
few short years away from the shift in his work after the first two Residencias,
chronicled in “Explico algunas cosas” (Tercera Residencia, 1947). Although
in his first collection of poems Luna silvestre (1933) Paz was drawn towards
“pure” poetry”:

      … volviste a mí, Poesía,

tan casta en tu desnudez, vestida de pudores.
(Paz, 1933, 9, poem no. 1 [untitled]),

it is clear that he refused to carry the notion to an extreme. The key expres-
sions in this tiny poem are the adjective “equidistante” and the phrase “en la
frontera exacta de la luz y la sombra”, both applied to his poetry. As we have
seen, they suggest a kind of poetry which is balanced between expression
which has been stripped down to juxtaposed images with some sort of rhyth-
mical support, which is basically what Borges had advocated in his ultraísta
manifestos, and expression which is strongly charged with meaning, tending
towards ideology, which was the direction Neruda was soon to take. While on
a visit to Spain during the Civil War, as we have mentioned, Paz went in the
second direction with poems like “Oda a España” and “No pasarán”, but this
was merely a brief interlude in the prehistory of his mature poetry. Once he
found his true poetic voice, it was that of a man seeking a home in a hostile
world, a man at odds with the human condition and at odds with himself,
“sin donde asirme”, as he says already in poem no. 4 of Luna silvestre. Words
(poetry, creativity) offer hope, but are always threatened, at this stage of his
work, by ambiguity or ominous silence; fully sexual love may open a door
of perception, but always there is fear of ausencia. Trapped between these
and other cognate dualities, Paz plainly underwent some sort of long-lasting
spiritual crisis in the 1930s and early 1940s, which has caught the attention of
critics, notably Brenda Segall and Frances Chiles, and which his most famous
poem “Piedra de sol” (1957), with its reference to:
         … una vida
ajena y no vivida, apenas nuestra  (Paz, 1990, 352),

(as distinct from the longed for “vida más vida” of “Más allá del amor” a few
years earlier) reveals was still casting its shadow. All of Paz’s greatest poetry
 THE VANGUARD AND AFTER 13

is in a sense a record of spiritual travail, a pilgrimage through words in search

of something ultimate which lies beyond words. But there are stages in the
pilgrimage and the mid-century marked a shift. “Alrededor de los años 50”,
Yurkievich affirms, “la poesía de Paz cambia de tono y de registro” (Yurk-
ievich, 1971, 217). Insofar as this is true, it has to do with Paz’s growing
awareness of the limits of language, of the fact, as Jason Wilson puts it, that
“being’s truth-experience is indecible” (Wilson, 1979, 111). This awareness
was to remain central to his later work.
Historically speaking, what marks Paz out after the mid-century and the
emergence of colloquial poetry is his uncompromising preoccupation with
abstract themes: life, being, language, time, identity, the duality of “real” /
visionary reality and the like. He was not concerned with orality, but instead
with evolving a specialized diction based on exploration of language’s ability
to express the gnoseological, truth-divining potentiality of the poetic imagi-
nation. He was less interested in communication than in creation. Not surpis-
ingly Carlos Magis could entitle his important contribution to Paz criticism
La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz (1978). Paz’s poetry directly challenges
the reader. But in contrast to the Neruda of Canto general, Cardenal and
committed poetry in general, Paz’s poetry challenges the reader not so much
to be aware of the problems of Society, but rather to be willing to contem-
plate those of existence and the human condition. Hence in an interview
with García-Huidobro in 1990 he characterized himself, along with Borges
and Mallarmé as belonging to the class of poets who are primarily preoccu-
pied with “el enigma del universo” (García-Huidobro, 1993, 120). All Paz’s
important poetry is predicated on a notion of crisis: the crisis of modern man,
for which one of the call-signs in his poetry is the word “abismo”. And as
Fein explains, “all of his work is unified by a utopian wish for the fulfillment
of man’s wholeness in individual creativity and in the building of society,
offering an ennobling vision of man to an uneasy world” (Fein, 1986, 4).
The wish generates a quest, a search for holism, for an integrating and
authentic response to the modern crisis. This constitutes the universal aspect
of Paz’s poetry. As Erich Fromm puts it in The Sane Society (Fromm, 1967,
31):

Man’s evolution is based on the fact that he has lost his original home,
nature … he has fallen out of nature, as it were, and is still in it; he is
partly divine, partly animal; partly infinite, partly finite. The necessity to
find ever-new solutions for the contradictions in his existence, to find ever-
higher forms of unity with nature, his fellow men and himself, is the source
of all psychic forces which motivate man … [Man’s] inner contradictions
drive him to seek for an equilibrium, for a new harmony.

These words are exactly applicable to the deepest level of Paz’s work. But
14 DONALD L. SHAW

it has to be said at once that his quest appears to fail. There are sporadic
moments of epiphany, when a solution seems to have been grasped. But they
are never more than momentary. At other moments Paz seems forced to agree
with Borges that there may be some mysterious order governing the universe,
but if there is, we are not programmed to understand it. At one point in
Pasado en claro Paz seems to re-embrace Darío’s key assertion in “Coloquio
de los centauros” (Prosas profanas):

¡Himnos! Las cosas tienen un ser vital …

cada hoja de cada árbol canta un propio cantar …
el vate, el sacerdote, suele oír el acento
desconocido …  (Darío, 1954, 643)

when he writes:

¿Hay mensajeros? Sí …
Animales y cosas se hacen lenguas,
a través de nosotros habla consigo mismo
el universo …
¿que dice? Dice que nos dice …  (Paz, 1990, 656)

This is at once portentous-sounding and anti-climactic: what the universe

seems to be saying is no more than that it exists within our consciousness.
What it does not say is that it exists objectively and meaningfully. But Paz
clung to the hope that somewhere there was a different reality which made
sense of the one around us. In other words, just as Cortázar postulated a
mysterious “yonder” which seems to lie outside the conventional limits of
metaphysics and yet which promises a lost but rediscoverable source of exis-
tential authenticity, so Paz at times postulates an “otra orilla” towards which
his on-going metaphysical quest is always directed. We need for Paz the
equivalent of Moran’s study of Cortázar’s quest, Questions of the Liminal in
the Fiction of Julio Cortázar (2000), relating his thought, especially in his
later work, to the outlook of radical modern thinkers who seek to deconstruct
the dualistic pattern of thinking (“either/or”) we take for granted, and replace
it with a “both/and” or an “oscillation between”. But what comparison of Paz
with Cortázar shows is that in both cases the attempt to go beyond the hith-
erto accepted boundaries of metaphysical thinking in search of a new source
of existential confidence leads either to a mystique or to a set of unresolvable
paradoxes. It strains language beyond what it will bear and in the end leaves
one with the suspicion that reaching the “yonder” or the “otra orilla” is no
more than an endlessly deferred illusion. As Wilson writes implacably: “Paz
pursues an elusive salvation” (Wilson, 1979, 6).
From this point of view, one of the most illuminating discussions of his
 THE VANGUARD AND AFTER 15

poetic stance is Lelia Madrid’s “Octavio Paz, el tú y la mirada” in her book

on the poetics of Darío, Vallejo, Borges and Paz. Madrid recognizes that, in
all four poets, their poetry is less concerned with eliciting aesthetic pleasure
in the reader than in operating as an alternative form of knowledge which may
ultimately reveal a lost unity, a more harmonious vision of reality, for which
all four poets are searching, by overcoming in some degree its own limits.
Thus she posits as one of the goals of poetry in Spanish America, from that
of Darío onwards, “el desciframiento del mundo, el conocimiento” (Madrid,
1988, 38). This is the key to her analysis of Paz’s innermost desire: to tran-
scend mere analogy and glimpse behind it identity. Repeatedly Paz links
poetry and religion, especially in El arco y la lira, in the sense that poetry
supposedly offers man reconciliation within himself and can bring a shift to
a new dimension of being. In a rare attempt to compare the poetic outlook
of Borges and Paz, Madrid correctly emphasizes that the former remains
trapped in a mysterious pattern of eternal repetition in which death alone
may ultimately bring a vision of the unifying archetypes, while Paz aspires to
the creation of a new reality. What is missing in Madrid’s book is any desire
to link the poetic outlooks of Vallejo, Borges and Paz, as Yurkievich, Cobo
Borda and others have done, with a wider Western pattern of spiritual unrest.
In addition, we miss a clear recognition that what Madrid acknowledges in
Paz as “ese tránsito de la profecía a un centro deseado, nunca alcanzado” (92)
cast a shadow of defeat over his whole poetic enterprise.
According to Paz himself, as we have mentioned, the mid-century marked
the beginning of his mature poetry: “Mi primer libro, mi verdadero primer
libro, apareció en 1949: Libertad bajo palabra” (Paz, 1988a, 16; subsequently
it underwent significant revisions). A year earlier, in Naples, he had written
a key poem: “Himno entre ruinas” (Paz, 1990, 233–5). It contains seven
stanzas of irregular length and versification. Its structure is based on contrast:
stanzas 1, 3, 5 and 7, in normal type, are increasingly positive; stanzas 2, 4
and 6, printed in italics are pervaded with negativity. But, despite the alter-
nation in the first six stanzas, we can easily see that the poem is a climactic
sequence leading to the triumphant affirmations of stanza 7. The language of
stanza 1 is strikingly up-beat, beginning with the majestic image of the sun-
drenched day as an eagle spreading its wings. In the following lines we find
benéfico, hermosas, and verdad supported by a system of references to one of
Paz’s most positive symbols: light (deslumbrante, resplandece, sol, luz). Even
the ruinas are vivas (because they recall classical culture, which lives on in
the present). But the climax of stanza 1 is a reference to the modern world:
“un mundo de muertos en vida”. We are immediately reminded of Canto
III of Neruda’s “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” with its evocation of the great
mass of mankind, suffering “cada día una muerte pequeña”, people whose
lives are trivialized by their lack of awareness. Equally we think of Vallejo’s
Trilce LXXV (“Estáis muertos”; Vallejo, 1986, 174) flagellating his acquaint-
16 DONALD L. SHAW

ances in Trujillo for their similar readiness to go on being “los cadáveres de

una vida que nunca fue”. All three poets locate part of the modern crisis in
mankind’s passive refusal to face it and react to it. “Himno entre ruinas” asks
for a vivifying word which will act on mankind like the water of life. As the
poem progresses, light overcomes shadow and when the sun reaches its zenith
there comes an epiphanic instant, expressed in eucharistic terms (“espiga
henchida de minutos / copa de eternidad”) and, as the poem concludes, man
reconciles his divided selves, consciousness becomes a well-spring of fábulas
(sources of wisdom?) and he is enabled to speak: “palabras que son flores
que son frutos que son actos” (Paz, 1990, 235).
But Paz was not able to sustain this instant of optimism. A scrutiny of
his poems about poetry both before and after the mid-century, such as “La
poesía”, “Hacia el poema”, “El río”(Libertad bajo palabra), the first poem
of the centre column of Blanco and others, reveals an on-going conflict. On
the one hand we clearly perceive Paz’s will to believe that the practice of
poetry-creation would both show him his truest identity and at the same time
reveal that this deepest self was somehow in tune with a realm out there “on
the other shore” which would give meaning to existence. But on the other
hand, we recognize his recurrent realization that this can never be more than
a hope or a leap of faith. As Paz himself writes at the climax of “Vrindaban”
(Ladera este): “A oscuras voy y planto signos” (Paz, 1990, 426). Sucre’s
attempt in La máscara, la transparencia to suggest that somehow, later, Paz
manages to overcome or at least come to terms with his vision of “un tiempo
que carece de centro” and “una realidad que se fragmenta y se desintegra”
(Sucre, 1975, 214) jars against the critic’s own recurring use in his chapter on
Paz of words like “posibilidad”, “precariedad”, “proyecto”, “problemática”,
“paradoja” and even “contradicción”: they are inescapable.
Piedra de sol (1957) has been described as “a summary of all that Paz
has said before concerning man, love and the experience of transcendental
communion with a sacred world” (Bernard, 1967, 13). Like “Himno entre
ruinas” it proceeds via alternations of positive and negative, ecstasy and
insight, but this time framed by the circularity of the Sunstone. There are
no full stops, only commas, semi-colons and colons, so that what is implied
is an endless uninterrupted flow. Somehow, like Borges’s Library of Babel,
reality is limitless and, at the same time, recurrent. More than anywhere else
in his poetry up till then, Piedra de sol illustrates two fundamental elements
in Paz’s outlook. The first is connected with his much discussed interest in
Surrealism. He has made clear on several occasions that what really drew
him to the movement was not connected with automatic writing or making
creative contact with one’s unconscious, but rather Surrealism as containing a
view of the human condition, as accepting the notion of the poet as visionary
and the belief that poetry had an important role to play in changing man
and society. More specifically, we need to see that he may have found in
 THE VANGUARD AND AFTER 17

­ urrealism a comforting confirmation of his deep need to believe in the iden-

S
tity of opposites, in man’s ability to see through contradictions to a unity
which has been lost because of a “fall” (another of his basic concepts). One
of the many symbols of that unity of opposites is, in Piedra de sol, Melusine,
half beautiful, half sinister. The second element of great significance is the
fact that Piedra de sol ends with a prayer: a prayer to an unknown deity to
awaken him from the sleep of reason which produces monsters, to reunite
him with his real identity, to save him from his own fall and reconcile his
divisions. The prayer is another manifestation of the theme of aspiration, of
quest, of pilgrimage, which runs right through Paz’s work. Here, typically,
the prayer seems to have been answered at the climax of the work, and yet
the circular pattern, re-emphasized at the very same climax, suggests that it
will always be uttered afresh.
All critics are agreed that Paz’s contact with Eastern thought and culture,
especially during his period as Mexican ambassador to India from 1962 to
1968, had an impact which was second only to that of Surrealism. What it
seems to have done was to intensify his quest for some form of “peak experi-
ence” which would be the climax of a process of self-actualization realized
through poetic creativity. The essence of that peak experience would be a
sense of unity, the perception that all aspects of reality are somehow linked.
The experience itself would not only seem uniquely real, but also uniquely
meaningful. It should be emphasized that such an experience would not be in
the narrow sense religious. It would not go beyond the relationship between
the psychology of the individual and the world outside. Rather than a faith,
we are concerned with a would-be cognitive schema, developed experien-
tially: a set of assumptions about what we perceive and how we perceive
it. Ideally it would allow the mind to go beyond immediate perception and
normal experience. From the early 1950s on, Paz’s mainstream poetry reveals
a gradual process of cognitive restructuring as the poet strove to integrate
his Aztec/Mexican cultural heritage with European and ultimately Indian and
Eastern influences.
The poems of the late 1950s reveal a deep sense of frustration, one of
the symbols of which (as in Neruda’s “Walking around” in the second Resi-
dencia) is the urban environment, as we can see from “Entrada en materia”
(Días hábiles) with its use of adjectives like “indescifrable”, “demente” and
“incoherente” to describe the life of the modern city. Another indicator is
Paz’s treatment of language, which is “escritura gangrenada” in “Repeti-
ciones” (Días hábiles) but in contrast:

la que sostiene el rostro, al sol, al tiempo

sobre el abismo  (Paz, 1990, 326)

in “La palabra escrita” (Días hábiles). The poet “vivo/entre dos paréntesis”
18 DONALD L. SHAW

(birth and death) in “Certeza” (Días hábiles) sees writing as the fragile guar-
antee of existence: “escribo para que viva y reviva” (“El mismo tiempo”). In
“Lauda” (Homenaje y profanaciones) eroticism again provides a momentary
and contradictory promise of deeper spiritual insight, which seems to grow
as we approach the early 1960s. The triumphant affirmation of “Noche en
claro” (Salamandra):

Todo es puerta
     todo es Puente
ahora marchamos en la otra orilla  (Paz, 1990, 351)

seems to be supported by a series of poems in which loving sexuality appears

to bring a return of existential confidence, culminating in the joyful comple-
mentarity of the male/female dualities in “Movimiento” (Salamandra). A
climax of this positive movement comes in Salamandra (1962) which brings
together ancient Mexican myths about the hero-God Xólotl and some Euro-
pean lore. What is crucial is the association of the Salamander, the crea-
ture of fire, with a whole range of positive symbols: “amapola”, “garra de
sol”, “grano de energía”, “espiga” and above all “puente”. Xólotl, the central
mythical figure of the poem, Rachel Phillips asserts (1972, 15) is “doubly a
symbol of sacrifice and redemption”.
The question at this point was again whether this more positive response
to life could be maintained. Paz’s experience of India and the East seemed
to provide part of the answer. All Paz’s serious critics have seen that his
frustration expressed itself increasingly in paradox. This is true even of his
symbolism. In Libertad bajo palabra we have a fairly clear distinction between
positive and negative symbols: “muro”, for example, versus “puerta”. But in
“Solo a dos voces” (1961) we read:

la piedra se despierta
lleva un sol en el vientre  (Paz, 1990, 388)

the negative contains the positive. From now on this is to be a constant. “La
lógica de la conciliación de los contrarios”, Manuel Ulacia writes (1999,
228),”a partir de Salamandra, opera en todos los planos de la escritura.” Much
has been made of the notion that Paz found support and confirmation of his
aspiration to harmony via holism in Eastern Tantrism, which brings together
a spiritualization of the erotic and the idea of the identity of opposites, which
the sexual act can be seen as symbolizing. This is a key to the understanding
of Blanco (1967), subsequently included in Ladera este (1969). It was Paz’s
most ambitious poem since Piedra de sol. The title can be read as referring to
the world as a blank space left by the collapse of earlier myths of meaning, or
as a goal or target. The poem was accompanied and partly explained by the
 THE VANGUARD AND AFTER 19

essay “Los signos en rotación” added to the second edition of Paz’s El arco
y la lira in 1967. There Paz attempted to outline the basis for a new poetics
derived from Mallarmé’s idea that poetry was a “glorious lie” uttered in the
face of nothingness. The formal arrangement of Blanco derives ultimately
from Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés, but the content of the poem contains an
attempt to contradict Mallarmé’s pessimism. The new poetry is not only set
out on the page differently from the way we are used to seeing it, but also
contains “signs”, which can be compared to Cortázar’s “figuras”, hinting at
a secret reality behind appearances, and which can reconcile us with “other-
ness” in a new Edenic, prelapsarian unity.
Thus Blanco has to be seen as beginning from a loss: the loss of the “Other”
– that reality which lies behind and envelops everyday reality in something
greater, which points towards all-embracing meaningfulness, love, religion,
art, destiny. Insofar as Blanco has a discernible theme, that theme is the
link between language, the poetic medium, and harmony. The typographical
organization of the poem in the first edition has been described many times
and is lost in more recent printings. As one originally unfolded the single
page, the poem appeared gradually as a symbolic movement in space and
time. The formal appearance was intended to become part of the meaning:
a “figura” in the Cortazarian sense. Similarly, the disposition of the poem is
that of a central text which can be read either as a unity or as six separate
poems interacting with the texts on either side. Each of these has four parts,
so that numerous permutations are possible. This was intended to illustrate
the idea expressed in El arco y la lira that the poem is a set of shifting signs,
seeking, rather than expressing, a meaning. The non-linear form represents an
attempt to avoid the traditional way of seeing a poem as a climactic sequence.
But this does not exclude meaning: Blanco is also a kind of mandala, the
Eastern object of contemplation which leads the contemplator from variety
to unity. In “Viento entero” (1965; Hacia el comienzo) Paz had written “Ver
duele”, awareness is painful. But at the climax of Blanco the fusion of loving
eroticism and language emerges and confers on the (poetic) gaze, on creative
insight, “reality”.
Enrico Mario Santí (1997, 301) asserts that the five major poems of Paz’s
production are: Piedra de sol (1957); Blanco (1967); “Noche de San Ilde-
fonso” (1974); Pasado en claro (1974) and Carta de creencia (1987). Critics
are divided on whether the implicit conclusion of Blanco is fully positive
and on whether Paz’s sometimes mechanical-seeming technique of succes-
sive affirmation and contradiction is a meaningful strategy. Fein in particular,
using the poem “Vrindaban” from Ladera este (1969) as an example, suggests
that “the victory is hollow, for the poet’s grasp of success is transitory” (Fein,
1986, 99). But he quotes afresh Paz’s often mentioned quotation from “John
Cage”: “The situation must be yes-and-no/not either-or” (“Lectura de John
Cage” [Ladera este]) which is key to Paz’s outlook during and after the
20 DONALD L. SHAW

1960s. In much of his later work he stubbornly presents paradox as if it

opened the way to synthesis and as if by reiteration of paradox he could beat
down the reader’s resistance to seeing the world in terms other than those
which remain conventionally and comfortably dualistic.
Paz continues to circle round the possibility of resolving duality into
unity, so that we become increasingly aware that, like Unamuno’s agonismo,
it becomes an on-going attempt to bend negativity back on itself, to attribute
to the struggle with ambiguity an intrinsic value, or to challenge the reader
to resolve the dichotomy. In real life, problems of this sort are sometimes
resolved, or more usually just grown out of. But in the case of writers like
Unamuno or Paz, to overcome the crisis taking place in the mind is to risk
losing the main source of creative inspiration. Thus Paz goes on trying, as
Fein puts it, “to define a reality beyond appearances and perception” (Fein,
1986, 115) and in the process to arrive at a new understanding with the
reader. The latter is expected to assume an ever-greater responsibility to
familiarize him- or herself with the background to the poetry (Surrealism,
Tantrism, Structuralism) in order to decipher it. The result is likely to be an
ever smaller, if more select and intellectual, audience. This being said, we
need for the present purpose proceed no further than Blanco, since Paz’s
subsequent poetry continues along the same track (Sucre, 1975, 217). It
is sufficient for us to understand why Paz, in the last half of the twentieth
century, represented one pole of poetic endeavour in Spanish America and
why two other groups of poets felt impelled to react against his increasing
complexity of both conception and diction, which eroded the already
limited public appeal of poetry, and to seek to move in a less “hermetic”
direction.
In “Fábula” (Libertad bajo palabra) Paz had evoked:

   una palabra inmensa y sin revés

Palabra como un sol
Un día se rompió en fragmentos diminutos
Son las palabras del lenguaje que hablamos
Fragmentos que nunca se unirán
Espejos rotos donde el mundo se mira destrozado
(Paz, 1990, 134)

But not all the poets of his time shared the belief that everyday language is
merely the debris of broken mirrors. Similarly, not all his fellow poets were
willing to place the emphasis squarely on the poet’s individual self-actualiza-
tion, however much the process of its achievement might involve others or
“the Other”. There were those who were more inclined to stress the collec-
tivity which involved the individual. And so, growing up alongside Paz’s
poetry of specialized diction (metaphor, symbol and paradox) there came into
 THE VANGUARD AND AFTER 21

being, in reaction to Vanguardism and its prolongation, two very different

strains of poetry, one deriving from Neruda’s Canto general (1950) and the
Odas elementales (1954) and the other from Parra’s antipoemas which began
to appear in the same key year of 1954.
 2

Neruda and Parra

Pablo Neruda (Chile, 1904–73)

Three factors are traditionally taken into account in explaining Neruda’s shift
from the Vanguardist thematics and diction of the first two Residencias to the
more Americanist and populist poetry in and after Canto general. One is the
formulation of the doctrine of Socialist Realism in Russia at the Moscow
Writers’ Conference of 1934, a doctrine which took on a new lease of life
after World War II. The second is, of course, Neruda’s reaction to the Spanish
Civil War which in his own view was the key to his poetic development
thereafter. The third is the evolution of politics and society in post-World
War II Chile, in which a relatively small but growing middle class, perhaps
20 per cent of the population, was acquiring a leadership role in an ideo-
logical and political struggle against the “Seventy Families” who spearheaded
the landowning and commercial-industrial oligarchy. Initially this struggle
appeared to be succeeding, with the victory of the only Popular Front experi-
ment outside Europe in 1936. However, after maintaining for a while an
uneasy coalition with the Left, President González Videla in 1948 outlawed
the Communist party, to which Neruda had belonged since 1945, only to see
the country turn to a general (Ibañez) in 1952. The economy stagnated and
at least half the population of Chile lived below the poverty level. But despite
setbacks, the Left was on the move and Neruda became its mouthpiece. It has
been persuasively argued by Hugo Méndez-Ramírez, in Neruda’s Ekphrastic
Experience (1999), on Neruda and the Mexican muralists, that contact with
them between 1940 and 1943 in Mexico was also an important factor.
The first objective indication of a change in Neruda’s poetics came with
the publication of Tercera residencia in 1947 with its famous remark, dated
March 1939, at the beginning of the poem “Las furias y las penas”: “El mundo
ha cambiado y mi poesía ha cambiado.” Already in 1935, in the magazine
Caballo verde para la poesía, Neruda had published “Sobre una poesía sin
pureza” which pointed towards his later notion of the poet as artisan. The late
1930s and early 1940s reveal a process of development which culminated in
the epoch-making Canto general at the exact mid-century. Arguably the most
important moment of this development came with Neruda’s rediscovery of his
American (and more specifically Chilean, roots). Méndez-Ramírez reminds
 NERUDA AND PARRA 23

us that “Neruda’s poetry … even as late as 1938, does not include America
as a theme” (Méndez- Ramírez, 1999, 114), a point of crucial significance
for Canto general. He goes on to point out that Neruda’s first Americanist
poem is “Un canto para Bolívar” (1940). By this time he had already begun
to prepare what was to become Canto general de Chile, which in turn was
the germ of Canto general. This last, therefore, is as much the culmination of
a process of change as the beginning of a new pattern visible in his poetry.
However, an important turning-point came with the composition of Alturas
de Macchu Picchu (1945), Part Two of Canto general, after his visit to the
place in 1943. All critics agree that the first five sections of Alturas hark
back to the negative tone and manner of the first two parts of Residencia
en la tierra. But section six: “Entonces en la escala de la tierra he subido”
marks an obvious articulation. It represents more than just a change of mood
and tone. On the one hand the densely figurative language of the first five
sections eventually gives way to a much more directly comprehensible mode
of poetic discourse aimed at immediate communication of meaning. On the
other, Machu Picchu increasingly comes to be seen as a source of Spanish
American identity and at a more universal level as a symbol of the triumph
of the collectivity over death. But the last cantos of Alturas, and especially
canto xii, the climax, to which criticism has hardly done justice, insist that
only by contributing the story of their sufferings, and thus raising the level of
historical and political awareness of the readers, can the ancient Inca workers
of Machu Picchu achieve renewal of life in the here and now. With the call
to action at the end, Alturas makes a full transition from the metaphysical to
the political, and indeed to the revolutionary (Shaw, 1988).
The consequence was that, before long, Neruda repudiated both his earlier
poetry, up to and including the first two Residencias, and the diction in which
it was expressed. In a speech in 1949 in Mexico he declared that his “antiguos
libros” belonged to a bygone period, implicitly one of decaying capitalism,
and that in a new post-World War II era “No quise que el reflejo de un sistema
que pudo inducirme hasta la angustia, fuera a depositar en plena edificación
de la esperanza el légamo aterrador conque nuestros enemigos comunes
ensombrecieron mi propia juventud”. He was thinking primarily of the Soviet
Union and its Eastern European satellites, but also, he makes it clear, of Latin
America (Sanhuesa, 1971, 205). Four years later, in 1953, he alluded explic-
itly to the shift away from Vanguardist hermeticism which, as we saw earlier,
was the chief feature of the times in poetry, saying: “El problema mayor de
estos años en la poesía, y naturalmente en mi poesía, ha sido el de la oscu-
ridad y la claridad.” He went on: “Yo confieso que escribir ­ sencillamente
ha sido mi más difícil empeño … Me propongo ser más sencillo, cada día,
en mis nuevos cantos” (Neruda, 1990, 18–19). As Parra was to do in his
1958 talk “Poetas de la claridad”, Neruda in his often-quoted “Los poetas
celestes” (Canto general) now fiercely criticized the Vanguardists:
24 DONALD L. SHAW

    gidistas
intelectualistas, rilkistas
misterizantes, falsos brujos
existenciales, amapolas
surrealistas encendidas
en una tumba, europeizados
cadáveres de la moda,
pálidas lombrices del queso
capitalista …  (Neruda, 1973, I, 479)

that is, the poets who did not accept the compromiso which he had
embraced.
Loyola (1971) posits two successive phases in Neruda’s poetry in the years
from near the mid-century to the late 1960s, with Estravagario (1958) as the
watershed between them. The first phase is naturally that of Canto general
itself, followed by Los versos del capitán (1952), Las uvas y el viento (1954),
Odas elementales (1954), Nuevas odas elementales (1956) and Tercer libro de
las odas (1957). The second runs from Estravagario through Cien sonetos de
amor (1959), Canción de Gesta (1960), Las piedras de Chile (1961), Cantos
ceremoniales (1961), Plenos poderes (1962), Memorial de Isla Negra (1964)
up to La barcarola (1967). The difference, which has been accepted to some
extent by other critics, such as José Carlos Rovira Soler (1991, 128), Jorge
Edwards (1990, 87) and Luis Sáinz de Medrano (1999, 67) has to do with
a change of mood derived from a deepened insight dependent on a number
of factors, which modified significantly the positive and optimistic tone of
Canto general and the immediately following collections. We recall that at
least two thirds of the 231 poems which comprise the more than 15,000 lines
of Canto general were written while Neruda was in hiding in different parts
of Chile from the repression unleashed by the González Videla regime during
1948 and early 1949. Disgusted by the treachery of González Videla to the
principles he had accepted during the 1946 election, in which Neruda had
helped to run his campaign, and profoundly moved by the solidarity of the
common people who helped him to escape arrest and eventually to escape
from Chile over the Andes, Neruda developed his fragmentary Canto general
de Chile into a vast, largely historical, frieze, covering aspects of the history
of Latin America from pre-Columbian times to the 1940s. Inevitably, given
the circumstances in which much of it was composed, Neruda’s ideological
stance as a recently joined member of the Communist party, and the growing
Cold War polarization which was its context, the main organizing principle of
the collection is the struggle between liberty and oppression, seen in largely
crude, black and white, Manichean terms. These make some of its political
diatribes unreadable today even by the most favourably inclined. It should
be said at once, however, that this savagely aggressive tone was highly influ-
 NERUDA AND PARRA 25

ential in later protest poetry over which it cast a long shadow. In addition
we need to remember that, while such poetry can seem grossly over-explicit
to many readers, especially outside Latin America, it is not intended to be
read critically. Like hymns and patriotic songs, these poems are expressions
of a pre-existent set of values designed to strengthen and articulate what
is already accepted. That is to say, their function is different from that of
some other kinds of poetry. Just as an American or a French person hears his
or her national anthem differently from the way it is heard by a foreigner,
so those who have suffered oppression respond to protest poetry differently
from those who only know libertarian societies.
The result is that the poem as raw statement often tends to prevail over the
poem as a well-crafted structure and the poem as an aesthetically satisfying
verbal artefact. Occasionally, as in “Miranda muere en la niebla (1816)”, we
meet with a challenging poem, 46 lines almost without punctuation evoking
episodes in the life of Miranda and his death:

… si en Trinidad hacia la costa el humo

de un combate y de otro el mar de Nuevo
y otra vez la escalera de Bay Street la atmósfera
que lo recibe impenetrable
como el compacto interior de manzana
y otra vez esta mano patricia este azulado
guante guerrera en la antesala
largos caminos guerras y jardines
la derrota en sus labios otra sal …  (Neruda, 1973, I, 407–8)

But in the main the poems are characterized by thickly layered, readily acces-
sible imagery, largely visual and much of it symbolic:

… Cortés afila puñales

sobre los besos traicionados  (“Cortés”, ibid., 349)
eres pan y raiz, lanza y estrella
(“Cuauhtémoc [1520]”, ibid., 377)
Túpac germina en la tierra.  (“Túpac Amaru [1781]”, ibid., 398)

The conception is not strictly narrative, though processes of historical change

are painted in with broad brush strokes, as when, in “La colonia cubre nuestras
tierras” the conquistadors die off and “vino el mercader con su bolsita”
(ibid., 392), and in “Las haciendas” the land is divided up into “haciendas y
encomiendas” (ibid., 394). The historical development of Latin America is
dramatized in terms of anecdotal presentation of individual historical figures
(oppressors and libertarians) in chronological succession. Although the richly
26 DONALD L. SHAW

figurative language (against which the Colloquial School of poets will react)
is fully within the reach of the average reader, this is not “popular” poetry,
at least in the sense that Neruda presupposes a certain level of historical
knowledge on the part of his audience. The poetic voice is sometimes that of
a participant in the action, sometimes that of a deeply involved commentator
for whom the common people are “brothers” and who on occasion addresses
the reader directly on their behalf, unless, as in some of the poems of the
section “La tierra se llama Juan”, they tell their own stories of hunger and
injustice. We are not in the presence of an organized pattern governing the
structure of Canto general. The collection grows by chronological accretion,
designed to create its consciousness-raising effect by re-emphasis and rein-
forcement of one overarching theme which we find throughout social poetry.
We shall see it again in Cardenal’s “Hora O”. It is that every set-back in the
onward march of the common people towards liberty and justice fertilizes the
ground for the next stage of the struggle. It is symbolized in the first poem
of the section “Los Libertadores”, “Aquí viene el árbol”, in which the tree,
representing in a typical nature-image the free people, survives and grows
amid cataclysms. Equally symbolic is the blood of Caupolicán:

Más hondo caía esta sangre.

Hacia las raíces caía.
Hacia los muertos caía.
Hacia los que iban a nacer.  (“El empalado”, ibid., 385)

And in the next poem:

La sangre toca un corredor de cuarzo.

Así nace Lautaro …  (“Lautaro [1550]”, ibid., 385)

The figurative language of Canto general is functional in the sense that it

tends to relate man to nature systematically in terms of harmony/dishar-
mony in order to reinforce the underlying dichotomy: liberty/oppression.
While there is no Edenic postulate of a (lost) total harmony, or fall, the
older, pre-Conquest native societies are seen as closer to nature than modern
ones, although priestly and aristocratic oppression is often foregrounded. The
use of organic nature-symbols (above all that of the tree) is regularly used
to suggest that, with a change of mentality, implicitly via Socialism, a new
harmony can be achieved. It is clear that at a deep level Neruda aspired to
a kind of utopian holism. Frank Riess (1972, 88–104) shows that Neruda
presents the Araucanian Indians as symbolizing a people whose close links
to nature underlie their power to resist oppression. Much of the imagery
in Canto general carries the implication that the process which led from
the Conquest to modernity was not just a process of exploitation of both
 NERUDA AND PARRA 27

nature and the common people but one of contamination and perversion,
which a better organization of society could reverse. But what Riess and
other critics seem unwilling to take into full account is that recognizing the
functionality of imagery is not just a matter of identifying the overarching
patterns to which it corresponds, but is dependent on a consideration of its
quality. Symbolic of the change in Neruda’s poetic outlook is the fact that
what had been chaotic enumeration, expressive of a world of often unintel-
ligible randomness, is now replaced by catalogues in which the elements are
clearly related to one another in what is intended to be a technique of re-
emphasis. But all too often in Canto general and the Odas Neruda’s flowing
creativity leads him to create sequences of juxtaposed images which instead
of reinforcing one another slide into banality:

… este organismo valeroso,

esta implacable tentativa,
este metal inalterable,
esta unidad de los dolores,
esta fortaleza del hombre,
este camino hacia mañana,
esta cordillera infinita,
esta germinal primavera,
este armamento de los pobres,
salió de aquellos sufrimientos …
(“Recabarren”, Neruda, 1973, 447)

The effect is over-explicit. For that reason among others “Alturas de Macchu
Picchu” remains the anthology piece from Canto general. Too much of the
rest is based on simple contrasts: common people/oligarchy, work/violence,
liberators/oppressors, fertility/ destruction. As we approach the contemporary
period, the poet’s compromiso in “La arena traicionada” and in “Que despi-
erte el leñador” becomes so accentuated and the partisan tone so shrill, that
parts of these sections (now that historical events have moved on) produce
embarrassment and are little more than short–lived literary curiosities of the
early Cold War period. We avert our eyes and turn with relief to the Odas.
Odes are celebrations, and the Odas elementales of Neruda are celebra-
tions of the simple things of life which make it satisfying. Their publication
in Argentina beginning in 1954 caused a minor sensation. Canto general
had introduced a revisionist interpretation of the history of Latin America
in which the native peoples and the masses play important roles and leading
historical figures are seen in a different perspective. Now the three books
of Odes and Navegaciones y regresos (1959), which completes the cycle,
represent a revisionist approach to poetry and the poetic, pushing back the
frontiers of what had been acceptable in “high art” poetry and colonizing
28 DONALD L. SHAW

new territory. The Odes still retain the “inspirational” quality of many of
the poems of Canto general. Neruda’s poetic voice identifies itself afresh
with the people and speaks to them and for them. Consequently, as in Canto
general, the least readable Odes today are those in which the poet (naively, as
we can see with hindsight) incorporates implicit utopian promises and aspira-
tions into the climaxes of individual poems. Having found a certain serenity
in his attachment to the Communist party and in his relationship with his new
partner Matilde Urrutia, the poet confidently envisions the emergence of a
new social order. In “Oda al edificio” (Odas elementales) the erection of a
building becomes a collective endeavour:

erigir entre todos

el orden …  (Neruda, 1973, II, 55),

subordinating the individual to the group-task, which then comes to symbolize

the construction of a new society:

El hombre
… seguirá construyendo
la rosa colectiva …
y con razón y acero
irá creciendo
el edificio de todos los hombres.  (ibid.)

In “Oda al cactus de la costa” (Nuevas odas elementales), the conclusion is

explicitly spelled out:

   … ésta
es la moral
de mi poema:
donde
estés, donde vivas
… hermano,
hermana,
espera,
trabaja …  (ibid., 230)

Three things are missing in this kind of poetry. They are: irony, ambiguity
and humour. The first two have no place in poetry of politico-social uplift.
Their role is to deflate and complicate any simplistic vision of things. Their
absence undermines Neruda’s claim to be a “realistic” poet; he is realistic
in the Odas only in the sense that he dedicates poems to everyday things
in familiar settings. But the tone in which he writes about them is not one
 NERUDA AND PARRA 29

of detached observation. Rather it is one of warm emotional involvement,

optimistic anticipation of a better future and heavy emphasis on human soli-
darity. The poet reaches out to things which provide a provisional reconcili-
ation with life, while we relish the prospect of what seems to be imminent
social change. Thus, in the deservedly famous “Oda a la alcachofa” (Odas
elementales), the special appeal of the poem lies in Neruda’s exploitation of
the artichoke’s appearance – like a hand-grenade. In the first half of the poem
the vegetable’s martial daydream is emphasized, only to be brought down to
earth as it is carried home, among commonplace items, to be cooked and
eaten. The housewife’s hands convert a potentially threatening symbol into
a culinary delight. But we notice that the contrast is heavily underplayed:
from the very beginning the artichoke is “de tierno corazón”, it is “la dulce
alcachofa”, even when it stands in a military rank. This is reality as we should
like it to be. Similarly the cheap and not very nourishing tomato is turned
into a memorable symbol of plenitude and abundance, while the olive and
the humble onion are both described as miraculous. The word which best
describes the poetic voice here is “benign”; the form of the poems is declara-
tory (not, as we tend to believe great art should be – exploratory) and on
occasion, sententious.
Not all the Odes by any means are celebratory. Since they were originally
stimulated by an invitation to contribute a weekly poem to a Caracas news-
paper (De Costa, 1979, 148), they turn into kinds of note pad, covering a wide
range of subjects and tones, from the sentimentality of “Oda a una lavandera
nocturna” (Nuevas odas elementales), to the sarcasm of “Oda a la crítica”
(Odas elementales), and from whimsicality in “Oda a los calcetines” (Nuevas
odas elementales) to the nostalgia of “Oda a la vieja estación Mapocho en
Santiago de Chile” (Tercer libro de las odas). Like Parra, Neruda was fully
conscious that he was spearheading a change in Spanish American poetry:

Yo me río,
me sonrío
de los viejos poetas  (Neruda, 1973, II, 9)

he writes, in “El hombre invisible” (Odas elementales). Specifically, we

presume, he was mocking the Vanguardists whom he accuses of excessive
self-centredness and ignorance of the life of the common people. In their
poems, he complains – self-servingly:

no pasan pescadores
ni libreros,
no pasan albañiles,
nadie se cae
30 DONALD L. SHAW

de un andamio,
nadie sufre …  (ibid., 9)

But, unlike Parra, as his “Oda a la sencillez” and “Oda a la poesía” (Odas
elementales) make clear, his aim was not to jab his readers in the head or
put them at risk on his rollercoaster: he was not at this time in the busi-
ness of shattering their complacency. In both poems he emphasizes that his
turn to colloquiality and simple diction was designed, not to disturb, but to
come into closer emotional contact with his fellow men and women, to bring
them “campanas”, joy-bells, and “pan”, nourishment of the spirit. Once again
Neruda declared his allegiance to poetry as

utilitaria y útil,
como metal o harina,
dispuesta a ser arado,
herramienta,
pan y vino …  (ibid., 154)

As the Odes declare on every page, it was by changing the pattern of his figu-
rative language, not by severely limiting it (as we see in Parra and Cardenal),
that he wanted to get his feelings of solidarity and his yea-saying to the
prospect of a better future. Half a century later, we read the Odes with the
uneasy pleasure that comes from contemplating a world which the poet tells
us is warmer and more comfortingly hopeful than we know it to be. Canto
general and the books of Odes are the works which influence a whole sector
of left-wing, socially orientated poets after the mid-century including, among
the better-known, the early Dalton and Cardenal, as well as Gonzalo Rojas,
Alvaro Mutis and Efraín Huerta, if we are to believe Cobo Borda (1986,
87). Subsequently Neruda wrote a great number of other works, in which
we can see among other things a certain diminution of his enthusiasm for
the extreme Left and a very obvious return to the love-ideal, especially in
the Cien sonetos de amor. But by this time his influence had largely been
internalized by the next generation.

Nicanor Parra (Chile, 1914–  )

Several critics, including Ibañez-Langlois and Schopf (in Gottlieb’s anthology
of essays on Parra, 1993), taking their cue from Parra’s own remark to Mario
Benedetti: “Neruda fue siempre un problema para mí” (Benedetti, 1972, 303)
have asserted that the antipoemas represent a conscious reaction against
Neruda’s poetry around the mid-century. Writing of Neruda’s shift of poetic
outlook in Canto general (1950) and Las uvas y el viento (1954) Federico
 NERUDA AND PARRA 31

Schopf writes categorically: “Ciertos rasgos esenciales de esta concepción

nerudiana de la poesía … despertaron un rechazo implícito y casi sistemático
en la búsqueda y la producción literaria de poetas como Nicanor Parra”
(Schopf, 1993, 144). It has also been alleged that much later, in Estrava-
gario (1958), Neruda got the message and introduced more down-to-earth
humour into his poetry. For the moment, however, we see Parra reacting
against the “hermeticism” of Vanguardism generally (and the first two sctions
of Residencia en la tierra); the ideological thrust of Neruda’s poetry in Canto
general and after; Neruda’s romantic concept of the poet as an Olympian
bard, prophet and visonary, leading the masses to victory over oppression
and injustice; and, connected to that, his solemnity of diction and sometimes
fustian grandiloquence.
In complete contrast Parra created and popularized the figure of the
antipoeta. Using, we notice, a reference to his own poem “El peregrino”,
he wrote

El antipoeta ha llegado a ser – ha sido empujado a ser – un sujeto marginal,

descontrolado, excéntrico, que recorre frenéticamente las calles en busca
de comunicación y conocimiento. Su soledad, su frustración, la inutilidad
de sus esfuerzos – ante la realidad impenetrable, ante su propia interioridad
– le hacen caer en un desastroso estado mental.
(quoted in Molina, 2005, 183)

We need to look closely at the language of this statement, replete as it is

with meaning. The antipoeta is a socially marginalized figure, lonely and
frustrated, desperate to understand the reality around him and to be able to
make meaningful contact with others, but unable to do so. Exterior reality
and his own interior reality resist his efforts to make sense of them and leave
him deeply troubled. In an interview in 1972 with Patricio Lerzundi, Parra
developed his view of antipoesía, creating a further distinction, this time not
between the antipoeta and the Bard, but between poetry which was concerned
with beauty and hence with goce estético, and poetry which was concerned
with life. Here he explained his reference to Aristophanes in “Advertencia
al lector”.

I found I had to admit [he declared] that what, ultimately, I didn’t like was
the Greek spirit. Geneerally, for the Greeks poetry and art were a hymn
to beauty not a hymn to life. Fortunately (this I know a posteriori), next
to the spirit of Aristotle, who is a typical classical spirit, is that of an anti-
Aristotle, Aristophanes. At the time I felt much closer to Aristophanes.
(Lersundi, 2005, 152)

This led him, he affirms, to two standpoints which he expresses together in

32 DONALD L. SHAW

the phrase “life is in the vernacular”. That is to say, on the one hand, “What
the antipoet looks for is not, fundamentally, beauty, but life, life in flesh and
bone”. On the other hand, in order to figure forth lived reality, the antipoeta
must abandon any specialized poetic diction as well as musicality: “it seems
to me that music blocks the achievement of a poet’s ultimate purpose.” This
purpose has to do essentially with BEING (in capitals in the text). Musicality
leads to what Parra called in the interview “sing-song”. To express life as it
really is, and to explore Being “what has to be done, it seems to me now, is
to capture the speech rhythm of our people” (153).
What, then, are the characteristics of the antipoemas which Parra created,
partly in opposition to Neruda’s all-pervading influence? First of all, the
antipoemas are strongly nihilistic and anti-romantic: they consistently de-
bunk ideals and hopes, especially those connected with love, sexuality and
femininity. Next, they tend towards narrativity and the incorporation of “anec-
dote”, pseudo-real-life incidents, which had been all but banned from “high”
poetry since at least the second decade of the century. The notion embraced
by Iván Uriarte (1980, 325) that it was Cardenal who first brought narrativity
back to Spanish American poetry and handed it on to Enrique Lihn, Roque
Dalton, Fayad Jamis, Jorge Enrique Adoum, Antonio Cisneros and Carlos
María Gutiérrez, among others, is quite simply wrong. For, despite the fact
that Cardenal was writing narrative historical poetry in the late 1940s, it was
Parra who was primarily responsible for the reintroduction of narrativity as
such via the great success of Poemas y antipoemas, years before Cardenal
came on the scene with “Hora O”. Thirdly, the poetic voice tends to be that
of an isolated, alienated, marginalized lower-middle-class anti-hero, who is
at first tricked, humiliated, exploited and victimized but later becomes more
reactive. So far as content is concerned, there is a prominent element of
absurdist social criticism and satire (which conflict slightly with the basic
nihilism) but underlying this is an unmistakable sense of anguished insight
accompanied by feelings of solitude and lack of communication with others.
Thus while it may be true that “No hay héroe trágico en la antipoesía”, as Rosa
Sarabia asserts (1997, 60), this should not be taken to imply that Parra stands
aside from the cultural crisis of the West in our time. On the contrary, in her
study of what she regards as the prevailing irony in the antipoemas, Sarabia
presents it along with scepticism as Parra’s “arma de defensa ante un mundo
absurdo, cruel e ilógico” (ibid., 74), “un mundo sin recuperación” (ibid., 75).
Rowe adds the very important point that Parra’s antipoetry reveals a strong
sense of the limitations of language itself “So that the speaker’s confidence
in the faithfulness of his own words is also grotesquely corroded” (Rowe,
2000, 39) However this cannot be carried too far; the antipoems are not
“critical” poetry in Paz’s sense of the word as Rowe seems inclined to suggest
(ibid., 41). If they were, their general ideological impact and frequent satirical
intention would be undermined. Finally, although the antipoems are clearly
 NERUDA AND PARRA 33

intended to jog the reader into some form of new awareness, it is impor-
tant to recognize that Parra, here in direct contrast to Paz, has no patience
with the idea, borrowed most recently from the Surrealists, that poetry may
offer an alternative form of knowledge. In “Advertencia al lector” (Poemas
y antipoemas) he is the first to admit that “Mi poesía puede perfectamente
no conducir a ninguna parte” (Parra, 1969, 37). This is a most important
affirmation in the context of the times.
At the technical level, we notice a marked change of tone and diction
from that of the Vanguardists, with heavy use of irony, cynicism, sarcasm,
anti-climaxes, irreverence, burlesque and parodic humour including black
humour: “un humor que no produce catarsis”, as Sucre puts it (Sucre, 1975,
312). Colloquiality replaces solemn poetic utterance. Musicality is at a
discount. Imagery, which had been regarded as the very stuff of poetry by the
Vanguardist poets, plays a reduced role, but there is plenty of new symbolism.
The tendency of all poetry to take the form of a climactic sequence is some-
times accentuated by use of sting-in-the-tail mechanisms, though at other
times there is a contrasting use of anti-climax or a deliberate avoidance of
organic unity of structure in favour of a special kind of chaotic enumeration.
What we cannot miss, as we read the antipoemas in the context of poetry in
Spanish America since the 1920s, is an obvious change in the implicit pact
between the poet and the reader. We are no longer challenged to figure out
the meaning, or startled by strikingly unexpected imagery. The relation of
the poet with the reader is almost collusive, at times confessional, but also
at times defiant. These characteristics do not appear all at once and they
evolve with Parra’s successive collections of poetry. As has frequently been
pointed out (though never developed) Parra himself asserted in his interview
with Leonidas Morales that Poemas y antipoemas contained Neoromantic
and post-modernista poems as well as Expressionist ones such as “Desorden
en el cielo”, “Oda a unas palomas”, “Autorretrato” and “Epitafio” which he
thought of as more brutal, bitter and aggressive than the rest (Morales, 1991,
104). These, especially the last, are interesting distinctions and one would
like to know more about what Parra understood by Expressionism and how it
related in his mind with antipoetry. Even so, critics are agreed that Poemas y
antipoemas represents a new start, after the false start of Parra’s first, imma-
ture, collection Cancionero sin nombre (1937).
Parra’s early mature poetry contains three separate strands: traditional
poems, antipoems and poems which use the folkloric model (such as those of
La cueca larga). The traditional poems (which persist in Parra’s later work) at
this stage clearly represent a transition away from vanguardismo. Described
by Tomás Lago (Lago, 1942, 9) as belonging to “un realismo neorromántico”,
they already include two of the major features of antipoesía: non-hermetic
diction and narrativity. Characteristic are the poems which appeared in 1942:
“Hay un día feliz”, “Es olvido” and “Se canta el mar”. The last, superbly
34 DONALD L. SHAW

analysed by Juan Villegas (1977, 183–206) is openly anecdotal, that is, based
on an actual experience of Parra’s boyhood, an experience which in familiar,
traditional fashion (and in standard hendecasyllables) the poet raises to the
level of a universal revelation. The diction, as Rowe points out (2000, 33),
is already striking. Sometimes it is clear and direct, to the point of prosaic-
ness:

Partí con él y sin pensar llegamos

A Puerto Montt una mañana clara  (Parra, 1969, 25)

the tone is relaxed and conversational, broken by chiefly conventional imagery

– “El mar que baña de cristal la patria” (ibid., 26) – and simple acoustical
effects, such as the repeated “a” sound in the line just quoted, or the allitera-
tive effect of the “s” sounds in:

Sin que en mi ser moviérase un cabello

¡Como la sombra azul de las estatuas!  (ibid., 26)

But elsewhere in the poem it is more conventionally “poetic” and non-collo-

quial, as when Parra uses three adjectives placed before the noun “espuma”
so that the effect is one of unexpected shifts of register. There is no ironic
presentation of the narrator. On the contrary, he is shown appealingly in the
one simile which looks forward to antipoetic diction:

Era mi corazón ni más ni menos

Que el olvidado kiosko de una plaza.  (ibid., 25)

charmingly emphasizing his lack of emotional self-awareness. If we glance at

the varied rhythmic and acoustical treatment of the hendecasyllables in “Se
canta al mar”, for example, the climactic line “La vOz del mAr en mi persOna
estAba” (ibid., 26), with its studied balance and musicality, and compare it to
the no less efective but rhythmically and acoustically different “Sobre la hAz
ondulAnte de las Aguas” (ibid., 25), we recognize a poet fully in command of
the medium he was to deconstruct so successfully in the antipoemas.
Six years later, in 1948, after marriage, fatherhood and a trip to the United
States in 1944, Parra published “La víbora”, “La trampa” and “Los vicios del
mundo moderno” (Poemas y antipoemas) which mark a major turning-point
in his work. We can see this quite clearly if we notice that in the seventy-
three lines of “La víbora” there is not a single simile or metaphor, so that,
paradoxically, the entire poem becomes a symbol of a non-poetic world: a
world of reversed values. Mereles Olivera sees the poem as exploring Parra’s
relationship with the muse of poetry (2003, 64–5). This is a possible, but in
my view less satisfactory reading than one in which love is presented as not
 NERUDA AND PARRA 35

merely irrational but degrading. Instead of ennobling, it brings out the less
estimable side of human nature. The poem also illustrates Parra’s use of anti-
poetic symbolic spaces: a boating pond in a park and a popular dance-hall.
The effect is to reduce the love relationship to banality, just as la víbora’s
actions reduce emotional and sexual contacts to mere ploys to avoid satisfying
the lover. After line 30 the poem begins to include nightmare symbolism: the
circular room near the cemetery where the love-making takes place, and the
rats which invade the bedroom. These serve to pre-empt la víbora’s offer
of a love-nest in line 62, and lead to the climax in which the relationship is
suddenly revealed to be an adulterous one and the lover ground down to a
level on which his need for rest and food is far more basic than any desire
for romantic dalliance. In total contrast to what was to emerge as Neruda’s
tender romanticism in the Cien sonetos de amor (1960) and to Paz’s mystique
of sexual love as a major component in breaching the “wall” separating us
from “la vida más vida”, Parra strips away all illusion. However, it is note-
worthy that in his interview with Mario Benedetti in 1969 he said: “A mí me
parece que el sexo es lo que hace marchar el mundo … Tal vez esto esté en
la base de la antipoesía, y explique de alguna manera el goce sexual extremo
que se pone en algunas líneas” (Benedetti, 1972, 59).
Another area where, as we have noticed, Parra confronts illusion is with
regard to the poet’s self-image as a figure with privileged insight or even with
a mission. Neruda, we recall, before his embrace of Marxism, saw himself
in “Sonata y destrucciones” in the Residencias as a sentry, keeping an eye
on life while others relaxed. Later, he re-invented his role as that of a char-
ismatic leader of the masses. Paz, throughout most of his poetic career, saw
himself as a visionary, seeking on behalf of mankind, or at least his readers,
a new level of existential understanding through the gnoseological power of
poetic activity. By contrast, in “Hay un día feliz” (Poemas y antipoemas)
Parra checks himself even for allowing an emotional reaction to stem from
his vision of life’s absurdity (“Vamos por partes, no sé bien qué digo”; Parra,
1969, 21). By contrast, in “Autoretrato” (ibid.) for example, we see a kind of
resigned self-deprecation, together with an element of bitter humour. Instead
of belonging to Victor Hugo’s symbolic “Phares”, or Darío’s “Torres de
Dios, poetas”, the poet in Parra’s work is a figure of fun, at best ambiguous
(“Epitafio”; ibid.) at worst “en un desastroso estado mental (“El peregrino”;
ibid.) Repeatedly Parra warns the reader that he is confused and unable to
articulate any reliable message about the human condition, except that it is
unbearable.
Parra’s poems themselves, however, tell us otherwise. All the major critics
have emphasized that they contain important satirical elements, and satire is
by definition judgemental. Not for nothing does Eduardo Parilla (1997, 127)
assert that “la antipoesía fue y sigue siendo un proyecto ideológico radical”.
Certainly Parra has more questions than answers. This is why he describes
36 DONALD L. SHAW

himself at the climax of “El peregrino” as “un árbol que pide a gritos se
le cubra de hojas”, that is, which begs to be offered some certainties. But
their absence does not leave him in a state of apathetic detachment. On the
contrary. At the end of “Manifesto” (Otros poemas), he writes advocating

Contra la poesía de salón

La poesía de la plaza pública
La poesía de protesta social.  (Parra, 1969, 214)

An important aspect of antipoesía, in effect, is its attack on the bourgeois

establishment in Chile. As Parra himself expressed it: “esa es precisamente la
finalidad última del antipoeta, hacer saltar a papirotazos los cimientos apolil-
lados de las instituciones caducas y anquilosadas” (Neruda and Parra, 1962,
13). So, despite his underlying nihilism, Parra feels compelled to denounce
and ridicule certain aspects of society and indeed to express his hostility to
those writers who remain detached:

palabra que da pena

ver a los Premios Nacionales de Literatura
silenciosos y gordos: satisfechos
como si en Chile no ocurriera nada.
(“Chistes para desorientar a la policía”; Parra, 1983, 142)

While practically all the major critics have noted that Parra’s poetry contains
clearly defined social attitudes, what has not been made entirely clear is
that his outlook is, as we might expect, dualistic. On the one hand, certain
aspects of Chilean society are shown up as grotesquely absurd, and the poet
reacts with anger; on the other, different aspects are seen as ridiculous and
treated satirically. It is necessary in other words, to distinguish between the
diatribes in which the poet’s frustration and hostility explode, and the more
genuinely amusing and caricaturist poems in which the poet makes fun of
the lower-middle-class individual in a highly stratified, hypocritical, appear-
ance-obsessed social environment. Both types of poem depend on their use
of the grotesque; but it functions in different ways. In the diatribe poem, for
example, “Momias” (Versos de salón), the tone is one of indignation and
disgust. This is quite unlike Vallejos’s Trilce LXXV accusing his acquaint-
ances in Trujillo of being spiritually dead. Vallejos’s tone is one of distress;
Parra’s is contemptuous:

Una momia conversa por teléfono

Otra momia se mira en el espejo.  (Parra, 1969, 92)

The whole poem is an amplification of his picture of the pathetic representa-

 NERUDA AND PARRA 37

tive of the lower middle-class in “Preguntas a la hora del té” (Poemas y

antipoemas):

Este señor desvaído parece

Una figura de un museo de cera.  (ibid., 19)

Ironically, this example of pseudo-intelligence asks himself questions about

reality and ultimate values but without interest, merely in order to pass the
time till the tea (with toast and margarine – not butter!) is ready. In “Los vicios
del mundo moderno” (Poemas y antipoemas), after listing a large number of
deplorable aspects of modern life, Parra is dismissive. There is nothing to be
done: “La suerte está echada” (ibid., 58). The poet can only stand aside and,
while visually proclaiming his rejection of conventional social standards (of
hygiene), smile pityingly at the antics of his fellow citizens:

Cultivo un piojo en mi corbata

Y sonrío a los imbéciles que bajan de los árboles.  (ibid.)

Here the grotesque surfaces in its true twentieth-century sense, as an expres-

sion of a deep sense of disharmony and alienation in the poet; one which
offers a new and disturbing perspective on reality. It reveals a world which
is absurd but not funny. The diatribe poems present, in Wolfgang Kayser’s
words: “an unimpassioned view of life on earth as an empty, meaningless
puppet play” (Kayser, 1981, 186) in line with Parra’s well-attested nihilism.
But in a more satirical vein we have poems like “El pequeño burgués” (Versos
de salón) which mock the recommended patterns of behaviour for the social
climber by substituting ludicrous absurdities which, it is implied, the socially
inept reader will be unable to recognize for what they are:

Preguntarle la hora al moribundo …

Presentarse de frac en los incendios.  (ibid., 115)

But, as we smile at the caricatured recommendations, the repeated “Y tragar

cantidades de saliva” reminds us that the only valid requirement for breaking
into the middle class from below is the ability to swallow endless snubs
and humiliations. Poems in this category illustrate the combination of the
grotesque with humour, so that the effect is comic, but at the same time
disturbing. The quality of the comedy is affected: the satire is robbed of any
gaiety or lightness of touch and is brought close to black humour.
It is presumably his satirical intention which allowed Parra to assert, in his
interview with Morales in the early 1970s, that his humour is not depressing
but healthy (Gottlieb, 1993, 369; also in Morales 1972, 218). However,
around 1970 he also told Elisabeth Pérez-Luna (in Flores and Medina, 1991,
38 DONALD L. SHAW

27 and 29) that his poetry arose from “un estado de angustia o desesperación
que conduce necesariamente a la creación” and that he was not a very opti-
mistic person. Angustia is indeed a word which recurs frequently in criticism
of Parra (Flores and Medina, 1991, 118; Parilla, 1997, 31; Ibañez-Langlois,
1993, 14, etc.). For this reason a key word in his Obra gruesa is abismo.
It has two sets of associations, in both of which it symbolizes the absence
of solid ground under our feet, that is, lack of existential security. One set
is psychological and spiritual. This is the abyss inside ourselves, an abyss
of darkness, mystery and despair, which neither faith, love nor reason can
illuminate. It corresponds to what Neruda in poem 5 of the Veinte poemas
de amor called “mi guarida oscura” and what Paz in “La caída” (Libertad
bajo palabra) called “el abismo de mi ser nativo”. The other set of associa-
tions is existential. It sees life as an abyss, separating us one from another,
and over which we are forced to cross as on a tightrope, terrified of falling
into the depths. Both sets are implicit in Parra’s reference at the climax of
“Recuerdos de juventud” to “el abismo que nos separa de los otros abismos”
(Parra, 1969, 48). In the second of “Tres poesías” he calls on the abyss for
answers to ultimate why-questions;

Es absolutamente necesario
Que el abismo responda de una vez.  (ibid., 108)

But clearly there is no reply. This is what has caused critics like Ibañez-Lang-
lois and Schopf to emphasize the “nihilism” and “pure negativity” of much
of Parra’s poetry. Parra himself has reacted in two different ways. In one
mood he attempts to offset consciousness of the abyss with assumed frivolity,
describing himself light-heartedly as a “danzarín al borde del abismo” (“Yo
pecador”; La camisa de fuerza) and again as “bailarín al borde del abismo”
(“Test”; ibid.). Similarly he counsels his aspirant to the bourgeoisie to
cultivate the ability to “bailar un vals al borde del abismo” (“El pequeño
burgués”; Versos de salón). The repetition of the image must be significant.
In “Mujeres” (ibid.) he signals his impatience with women who associate sex
with existential despair (“La que sólo se deja poseer / En el desván al borde
del abismo”; Parra, 1969, 101) and in “La víbora” (Poemas y antipoemas)
describes his lover’s metaphysical questions as “necias preguntas”. But in
another mood, that in which God does not exist (“Composiciones” [Versos de
salón]), the world is presented as falling to pieces and death becomes mean-
ingless annihilation (“Soliloquio del individuo”; [Poemas y antipoemas];
“Total cero” [Tres poemas]).
This is the deepest level of Parra’s most familiar poetry: that in which the
poet, as Ibañez-Langlois says, “hurga sin cesar en la herida religiosa” (1993,
30). It is also the level which most brings to mind some of the poetry of
Vallejo. But whereas Vallejo’s references to God are always deeply serious,
 NERUDA AND PARRA 39

revealing the Peruvian poet’s painful awareness that what he wanted to

believe was not reconcilable with his experience of human suffering, Parra
reacts with bitter humour which testifies to his inability to contemplate with
detached serenity a world in which “la vida no tiene sentido” (“Soliloquio del
individuo”; Parra, 1969, 64). His technique is one of sarcastic anti-climax.
In “La cruz”, for example, he begins with seven lines of re-emphasized
emotional attraction to the idea of conversion. The acoustical effects of some
of the lines reinforce the effect:

TArde o temprAno llegaré sollozAndo

A los brAzos de la cruz …
¡vEN como ella me tiENde los brazos?

But what follows is a sneeringly degrading image:

Por ahora la cruz es …

Una mujer con las piernas abiertas.  (Parra, 1969, 191)

Similarly in “Agnus Dei” (La camisa de fuerza) the poet with mock solem-
nity repeatedly intones the familiar “Cordero de Dios que lavas los pecados
del mundo” only to follow it with a wisecrack (“Dame tu lana para hacerme
un sweater”), until at the climax, he once more contrasts sacred and profane
love:

Cordero de Dios que lavas los pecados del mundo

Déjanos fornicar tranquilamente  (Parra, 1969, 172)

The truly sacred moment is that of the orgasm. The climactic poem of this
group is, of course, the parody of the Lord’s Prayer, “Padre nuestro”. The
poet commiserates, in a slightly patronizing way, with a God who is plainly
not almighty. The poem is like a development of the second stanza of Valle-
jo’s “Los dados eternos” from Los heraldos negros, with its final line: “Y el
hombre sí te sufre: el Dios es él” (Vallejo, 1986, 105).
But instead of being an outcry, Parra’s poem adopts a tone of mocking
pity. As in the above mentioned cases, the humour derives from the unex-
pected. There it was the juxtaposition of conventionally taboo sexual refer-
ences in a religious context. Here it is the role-reversal: instead of being
the Comforter, God is comforted by man; instead of being omnipotent, he
is soothed by man’s recognition that he just has too much to contend with;
instead of forgiving mankind, he is forgiven.
In this context it is important to notice the difference between simple
inversion of the Christian conception, whereby God, instead of being good,
is wicked, or where the kingdom of this world is set above the next world,
40 DONALD L. SHAW

and the use of parody, irony and humour (Shaw, 1987). In the first case it
could be argued that simple inversion attests the central position which the
Christian frame of reference still occupies in Western culture. In the second,
however, we seem to detect an altogether less spiritually involved stance. In
Parra’s poetry, as we have seen, there is clear evidence of serious existential
malaise. His use of humour in dealing with religious topics perhaps should
be seen as a kind of safety valve or a psychological mechanism for avoiding
spiritual distress. As he writes in “Lo que el difunto dijo de sí mismo” (Versos
de salón):

… no fui payaso de verdad

Porque de pronto me ponía serio
¡Me sumergía en un abismo oscuro!  (Parra, 1969, 131)

The typical antipoema is essentially serio-comic, the function of the humour

being to prevent the content from becoming portentous or pompous, but
without compromising its real significance. We can glance at two examples.
The theme of “Preguntas a la hora del té” (Poemas y antipoemas) is the
futility of abstract questioning. We recall the climax of “Palabras a Tomás
Lago”:

Piensa, pues, un momento en estas cosas,

En lo poco y nada que va quedando de nosotros,
Si te parece, piensa en el más allá,
Porque es justo pensar
Y porque es útil creer que pensamos.  (ibid., 46)

One of man’s noblest faculties, thought, is presented as a merely useful illu-

sion. It keeps us happy, but in reality we are just fooling ourselves. Parra
figures forth this theme in “Preguntas a la hora del té” first by degrading
the thinking individual: he is “desvaído”, looks like a wax doll and peers
(symbolically) through broken blinds. The value-questions which he asks
himself are denuded of significance by the mockery of the questioner who,
instead of being idealized (as in Rodin’s Thinker, for example) is seen with
contempt. The questions, all of which are unanswerable, are debunked first
by the frame: the patronizingly contemptuous opening and the conclusion
which suggests that all thought is cut off by a piece of toast and a cup of tea,
a dreary parody of Epicureanism. They are further debunked by the poet’s
commentary on the questions. To the first two he responds via the symbolism
of the death knell: life, existence in time, is the real problem, not abstrac-
tions. To the third he replies directly “no se sabe”, but people build sand-
castles, symbols of ephemerality, mere “constructs” of reality. They pretend
that what has no stability will last, and act as if it can be relied on. The
 NERUDA AND PARRA 41

final question provokes the response that the only certainty is change and
flux. The climax word of the poem is the Unamunesque “niebla”: asking
ultimate questions only makes us realize that we have no clear vision of any
answers. In “El peregrino” (Poemas y antipoemas) Parra assumes the mantle
of a pilgrim: one who journeys towards a goal which he or she believes
will fulfil a spiritual need. The poem begins with ten lines of appeal to the
reader. One would have been enough. But the poet’s extended call for atten-
tion implies that others are so obsessed with their own affairs that they have
no time to pay heed to the poet’s longing for some sort of cosmic expla-
nation. For Paz, as we know, that explanation could possibly come from a
combination of the mental and the erotic, which combine to open a path to
“la vida más vida”. But Parra proclaims himself sexually and intellectually
frustrated, and compares himself to a sick patient fed inadequately by a drip.
The happy, Edenic, harmonious sense of life which he calls “el jardín” is
contaminated by disgusting insects associated with filth and decay. What is
it that produces the contamination? Clearly it is awareness. In the last stanza
others are protected by a “seventh sense” which allows them to move through
life freely, to enjoy its “jardines” without asking themselves questions. But
the poet, who cannot even formulate the questions beyond longing for “un
poco de luz” about “algunas materias”, and who sees a bicycle, a bridge,
a car, symbols of meaningful movement and connection with other people
and places, while he remains “embotellado”, does not belong with them.
He uses three climactic images reinforcing each other to express his frus-
tration: a child crying for its mother, longing for (existential) comfort and
security, a pilgrim stumbling over stones in his path and a tree calling out for
leaves. This time the poem ends with a real climax and not an anti-climax:
the desperate need for an answer to the irrational mystery of existence.
Much of what we have seen is summed up in “Advertencia al lector” in
Poemas y antipoemas, which is in a sense Parra’s “Arte poética”. From the
beginning what is emphasized is impact: the key word of the first line is
“molestias”. The antipoemas are intended to be enjoyed primarily not for
their aesthetic appeal nor for their expression of human emotion, but for
their challenge to complacency and their stimulus to thought. If the reader is
upset, too bad. The poet’s role-model is Sabellius the second-century theo-
logian who attacked the central dogma of Christianity: the Trinity. But, it is
suggested, he did so as a humourist – just for fun! And his attack was based
just as much on crazy self-contradiction as the dogma it pulverized (without
effect). Parra presents himself implicitly as attacking in the antipoemas a
central dogma of traditional poetry, but doing it in a ludic, “fun” way, without
setting up anything more sensible in its place and without expecting it to
disappear. We know what the dogma is: it is the notion of the centrality
of the poetic image dear to the (Vanguardist) “doctores de la ley”. Parra is
satirizing a certain kind of Avant-Garde which pursued an unattainable ideal
42 DONALD L. SHAW

of beauty (“arco iris”) by means of an ultra-specialized diction (“torcuato”).

In the third stanza Parra seems to be comparing them contemptuously to
obsolete thinkers and to moonstruck poets in the tradition of Lafforgue (such
as Lugones in Lunario sentimental). The second part of the poem famously
denies that the poet has any authorial intention or message. But it quickly
goes on to become quite assertive. Parra does not contradict the criticisms
he reports: that his poetry expresses unconvincing emotion, is full of silly
anger and is as unmusical as sneezing. Instead he nails his colours to the
mast insisting that, like Aristophanes (but in a more up-to-date way), he stabs
the reader symbolically in the head with his poems. The message is driven
home by “La montaña rusa” in Versos de salón. Before the antipoemas, Parra
asserts, Spanish American poetry was dominated by pretentious solemnity.
Now he has turned it into a roller-coaster. It is exciting, but one reads it at
one’s peril. The last point that needs emphasis in regard to “Advertencia al
lector” is the now familiar relative absence of figurative language. But it is
only relative; at key points, strategically positioned in the poem-as-process,
Parra makes functional use of it (“he decidido declarar la guerra a los cava-
lieri della luna”; “pretendo formarme mi propio alfabeto”) and the whole
poem reaches its climax in “entierro mis plumas en la cabeza de los señores
lectores”. In this poem about poetry, each of the images is about writing
poetry: what the poet does not want to do, what he wants to do and what
effect he wants to achieve.
Parra’s most original and influential poetry is contained in his Obra gruesa
(1969). It contained his Poemas y antipoemas (1954), La cueca larga (1958),
Versos de salón (1962), Canciones rusas (1967), as well as La camisa de
fuerza (1968) and Otros poemas (1968) which included uncollected poems
written between 1950 and 1968. Thereafter, he continued to bring out collec-
tions of poetry, including Artifactos (1972), Poemas de emergencia (1972),
Sermones y prédicas del Cristo de Elqui (1977), Nuevos sermones y prédicas
del Cristo de Elqui (1979), El anti-Lázaro (1981), Ecopoemas (1982), Chistes
para desorientar a la policía (1983), Poesía política (1983), Hojas de Parra
(1985) and Poemas para combatir la calvicie (1993). But as Carrasco affirms:
“El resto de su obra poética, también valioso, no resiste la comparación con
sus antipoemas” (Carrasco, 1990, 22). The reason is clear. Initially Parra’s
iconoclasm struck home, while his use of a deliberately referential form of
poetic diction, which reacted against (for example) Paz’s suspicions about the
adequacy of language (as when words are seen as “espejos rotos” in “Fábula”
in Libertad bajo palabra), was refreshing, and sent much subsequent Spanish
American poetry in a new, more relaxed, colloquial direction. But once the
novelty effect wore off, triviality began to show through. In addition, Parra’s
nihilism proved difficult to sustain creatively. Although, in “No creo en la vía
pacífica” (Poemas de emergencia), he was still writing:
 NERUDA AND PARRA 43

lo único que yo hago

es encogerme de hombros  (Parra 1972, 58)

this was far from being the case. An increasing number of poems express
indignation with social conditions, disgust with his fellow-Chileans, bitter-
ness in the face of political intolerance and despair at the ever-worsening
conditions of modern urban life, surrounded by smog, traffic and ecological
catastrophe. All of these attitudes are valid, but we find ourselves not so
much in the presence of poetry of ideas, as in that of accusation, denun-
ciation and at times petulant-sounding protest. The most rewarding of his
later collections is certainly Artefactos, which aims at the wit and brevity of
epigrams. Some are memorable, such as

USA
Donde la libertad
es una estatua.

But the majority are hardly more than sarcastic outbursts:

Estupendo negocio:
de país de poetas laureados
a guarida de perros policiales.
(Guatapiques in Poesía política, 1983, 184)
or
Me pregunto con sobrada razón
Qué hace la Sociedad Protectora de Animales
Que no se preocupa de nosotros.
(Chistes para desorientar a la policía in Poesía política, 1983)

In his interview with Morales, Parra suggested that these mini-poems were
intended to act like newspaper classified ads, grasping attention in the
smallest number of words. He hoped that, like the antipoemas, they would
“tocar puntos sensibles del lector con la punta de la aguja” (Gottlieb, 1993,
362). Parra also compared them to bits of flying shrapnel propelled by the
explosion of an antipoema like a hand grenade. We miss the self-deprecatory
anti-hero and the energúmeno of the antipoemas, for, as Parra explained, “el
personaje también explota”. He asserted that the antipoemas had done their
work and needed to be disintegrated into these shorter, more punchy, pieces.
But it is doubtful whether such minimalism is fully successful. The essential
Parra, from the point of view of literary change, is the Parra of the 1950s
and 1960s.
 3

Borges and Cardenal

I have attempted to show that the the mid-twentieth century constituted

a watershed in Spanish American poetry. This is confirmed by two more
important facts of literary history. The first is that Borges was now about to
begin writing a significant amount of poetry again, after having all but aban-
doned the genre since 1929. The second is that in 1954, the year which saw
the first volume of Neruda’s Odas and the publication of Parra’s Poemas y
antipoemas, Ernesto Cardenal began to write his first major poem, Hora O.

Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina, 1899–1986): Later poetry

Paul Cheselka (1987, 125) writes:
By the time Borges published El Aleph in 1949, he had already thoroughly
explored the short story as a vehicle for elaborating and seeking fresh
perspectives on his basic themes, and was ready to make poetry his first
priority again – poetry would dominate Borges new literary production
during the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s.

A curious feature of Borges criticism, which Cheselka notes, is that despite

dozens of books and more than two thousand relatively recent articles in
learned journals, this later poetry has hardly been studied in detail and in fact
only a handful of publications deal with it at all. Cheselka rightly criticizes
Zunilda Gertel’s Borges y su retorno a la poesía (1969) for its inaccura-
cies, but his own book, though useful, deals exclusively with the thematics
of Borges’s later collections and has nothing whatever to say about their
contents as poetry or about any influence which Borges may have exercised
on later poets. This pattern of neglect must be significant. It suggests two
things. First, that Borges’s later poetry is largely read for what it says, and
is often thought of as interesting primarily in relation to his prose. Second,
that his shift of outlook, especially with regard to poetic diction, set him
apart from the mainstream developments in Spanish American poetry after
the mid-century. As a result, although Carlos Cortínez could write in 1978 “A
estas alturas me parece incuestionable que el máximo poeta hispanoameri-
cano vivo es el argentino Jorge Luis Borges” (Cortínez, 1983, 43), after the
1950s Borges exists as a poet in a kind of splendid isolation.
 BORGES AND CARDENAL 45

Between 1930 and 1958, apart from beginning a radical revision of his
earlier poetry, the eventual result of which has been amply documented by
Tommaso Scarano (1987), Borges published only twenty-one new poems, or
an average of less than one a year. By far the most memorable of these was
“Poema conjetural” (1943), collected along with some of the others in El
otro, el mismo (1964). In it we can already recognize some of the features
which distinguish the mature poetry of Borges from that of his first three
collections. At one level, this is a matter of thematics. We are now far away
from the suburban street scenes in the late afternoon, the restrained emotions
and quiet reflexions of the bulk of the poems in Fervor de Buenos Aires
(1923), Luna de enfrente (1925) and Cuaderno San Martín (1929), and even
further away from the manifestos of Prisma I and II and the accompanying
poems. And yet, as Borges himself hints in the Prologue, Fervor prefig-
ured aspects of his later work. “Inscripción sepulcral”, with its evocation of
Colonel Isidoro Suárez, one of Borges’s military forebears, looks forward
to “Poema conjetural”, whose narrator, Francisco Narciso de Laprida, was
another warrior ancestor who died fighting gaucho insurrectionaries in 1829.
Barbarous death in the backlands of Argentina, though in a different moral
context, unites Laprida with Facundo Quiroga of “El General Quiroga va en
coche al muere” from Luna de enfrente, while the death of another soldier
relative and family icon, Isidoro Acevedo, is the theme of the poem of that
name in Cuaderno San Martín. “Poema conjetural”, through an incident
of family history, illustrates two important Borgesian themes: his sense of
Americanness (and specifically of argentinidad) and the notion of a man
reaching the centre of his personal labyrinth and coming face to face with
destiny and death. Emilio Carilla in his excellent commentary on it (Carilla,
1963) regards it as possibly Borges’s best poem.
More important than the theme is the poetic tone and the diction. The
pattern, if it is a pattern, that we are attempting to trace in this book is one
of a reaction against the theory and practice of high vanguardismo. As we
see in Parra’s antipoetry, Cardenal’s exteriorismo, and poesía coloquial, this
was in part a shift of themes and content, but more especially it involved a
change in attitude towards poetic diction. A parallel but different change of
attitude to the language of poetry is what we find also in the poetry of Borges
in the 1950s and later. It is already prefigured in “Poema conjetural”. At the
heart of the matter is Borges’s change of mind about the creation and role of
metaphor after his earliest ultraísta manifestos. This has been amply docu-
mented and studied by Allen Phillips (1965), Zunilda Gertel (1969), Pietro
Taravacci (1982), Martha-Lilia Tenorio (1992) and Mercedes Blanco (2000),
and is crucial to the understanding of his later poetry. In a nutshell, at the
beginning of his career, Borges broadly accepted three propositions about the
metaphor in poetry which were characteristic of high vanguardismo. These
were, first, that the metaphor was the “elemento primordial” of all poetry
46 DONALD L. SHAW

(“Proclama”, Prisma I, Loewenstein and Shaw, 2002). Second, that it was

necessary to change the attitude of his fellow poets towards metaphor so that
it ceased to be what it had been in Argentina up to and including the poetry of
Lugones. The old metaphors had been “descriptive”, that is, they compared
like with like, the familiar with the familiar; whereas Borges demanded what
he called “veraz” or “eficaz” metaphors. Third, that such new metaphors
would extend our vision of reality as well as possessing greater originality
and beauty. Underlying this conception of the metaphor, which has clear
similarities to Huidobro’s, and which is at the centre of high vanguardismo,
is the unspoken assumption (later openly voiced by Paz) that the new type of
metaphor expressed a level of poetic insight which was in some mysterious
way cognitive. It represented an alternative path to a form of truth, via the
poet’s subliminal mind.
Almost at once, however, probably as early as 1924 and certainly by 1928
in El idioma de los argentinos, Borges had changed his mind and had aban-
doned both the idea that metaphor was the essential element in poetry and
the idea that the best metaphors were “inéditas”. Nonetheless it was only with
his return to poetry in the 1950s that this change of mind became critically
important. Blanco and others have pointed out that Borges began to insist
on his shift of opinion in the short story “La busca de Averroes” (1947,
collected in El Aleph, 1949), in the essay “Nathaniel Hawthorne” (1949,
collected in Otras inquisiciones, 1952) and in “La metáfora” (in the second
edition of Historia de la eternidad in 1952). Now Borges had decided that all
really good metaphors were variations on a very limited range of compari-
sons (“ensueño-vida, sueño-muerte, ríos y vidas que transcurren” and the
like [“La metáfora”]). These universal, paradigmatic metaphors, Borges now
believed, had accumulated over time deeply encrusted poetic resonances. The
task of the true poet was to utilize what Blanco perceptively calls “ciertos
vocablos mágicos en los que la historia de la poesía ha depositado un sedi-
mento de poeticidad” (Blanco, 2000, 27) or what Borges himself was to call
in “Rubaiyat” (Elogio de la sombra) “unas pocas imágenes eternas”. Every-
thing else is mere “palabrería”. Why did Borges change his mind? We may
conjecture that it had to do with a decline of confidence in what the metaphor,
viewed as the primordial element of poetry, could achieve. When he came
back from Spain and published the manifestos of ultraísmo, he seems to have
believed, as a number of writers on metaphor such as Max Black (1962) and
Paul Ricoeur (1977) have affirmed or implied, that metaphors could open up
new dimensions of reality. But then he came to the conclusion that this was
perhaps an overstatement of the case. He decided that poetry was an aesthetic
act rather than a cognitive one: it cannot tell, it can only allude. It is never
more than a threshold experience, and can only communicate an immanence
of revelation, as he argued in 1950 at the end of “La muralla y los libros”, the
first essay in Otras inquisiciones (1952). In Leopoldo Lugones (Borges, 1965,
 BORGES AND CARDENAL 47

97) he wrote: “La realidad no es verbal y puede ser incomunicable.” Since

we cannot know the real, language of any kind, even poetic language, can
only suggest it. Although Blanco shows conclusively that Borges’s new view
of the creation and role of metaphor in poetry is not exempt from ambigui-
ties and minor contradictions, she asserts that in practice two major results
follow. The first is that “en los libros de poesía de Borges … (posteriores a
El hacedor) reina lo que podríamos caracterizar como una severa economía
o parquedad en el uso de la metáfora”(Blanco, 2000, 33). The second is
that, with regard to the short stories, “Lo que de algún modo reemplaza a la
destronada metáfora en estas ficciones es la alegoría” (ibid., 29). It is argu-
able that such a view is at times equally applicable to the later poetry, in the
sense, at least, that (since an allegory is an extended symbol) symbolism
comes to the fore.
“Poema conjetural”, as Julie Jones points out, is a Browningesque
dramatic monologue, a form which “has never caught on in Spanish verse”
(Jones, 1986, 208). To that extent it is already original. Its theme is dual, both
­American and universal. On the one hand, it illustrates the grand old theme
of the triumph of barbarism over civilization, as Laprida, a lawyer, intellec-
tual and signatory of the Argentine Declaration of Independence, is killed by
the gaucho cavalry of the local caudillo, Aldao, during the civil disturbances
which followed the Wars of Independence from Spain. But more importantly
it celebrates this death as the moment when Laprida reaches the centre of
his own labyrinth and, coming face to face with his ironic destiny, discovers
who he really is. The first twelve lines of this forty-four-line poem contain
no figurative language. This is a most important datum. Borges has several
times expressed his admiration for the anonymous Sevillian poet who wrote
the “Epístola moral”, for him the best poem in Spanish. He has emphasized
as one of its great qualities that the opening lines are completely unadorned.
But then in line 13 of “Poema conjetural” Borges begins a comparison of
­Laprida’s death with that of Jacopo del Cassero in Dante’s Purgatorio, a
simile designed to ennoble and universalize the episode. The other meta-
phorical expressions correspond to those mentioned by Blanco: personifi­
cation

La noche lateral de los pantanos

me acecha …
    oigo los cascos
de una caliente muerte que me busca  (Borges, 1974, 867)

in which “lateral” and “caliente” function as tiny metaphors within an

already metaphorical context, “encapsulados en una palabra” as Blanco
puts it (Blanco, 2000, 34), like “ruinosa tarde” in line 28. Finally we have
standard, but low-key, metaphors:
48 DONALD L. SHAW

el laberinto múltiple de pasos …

la recóndita clave de mis años …
el espejo de esta noche … (Borges, 1974, 867–8)

We notice that these are not variants of some archetypal “platonic” meta-
phors, but neither are they obtrusively new and original. But surely they are
what Borges called “eficaces”. Just as important, they are not exclusively
central to the poem’s technique. At least equally important are the acoustical
and rhythmical effects beginning with the unforgettable line 1: “ZUmban
las bAlas en la tArde Última” (ibid., 867), in which the tonic accents fall on
u–a//a–u to create a beautifully balanced line, followed by the alliteration and
the repetition of the syllable “en” (viento, cenizas, viento) in line 2, which
has a quite different and contrasting rhythm to line 1. Line after line exploits
such effects – “de sANgre y sudOr mANchAdo el rOstro” (ibid., 867) –until
the final line with its telling contrast of “i” and “a”: “el IntImo cuchIllo en
lA gArgAntaA” (ibid., 868).
To ram home his change of stance, Borges published in El hacedor (1960)
his famous “Arte poética”, like “Poema conjetural” in standard hendeca­
syllables, but now even more traditionally organized into seven quatrains
in each of which the rhyming words are identical, as if to emphasize the
lack of any need to seek original rhymes. The poem rehearses some of the
paradigmatic metaphors which Borges had listed in his prose declarations:
río–tiempo, sueño–muerte, día–tiempo, in order to illustrate his mature
conviction that proper poetic diction is at once “immortal”, because it uses
words which time has encrusted with poetic resonance, and “poor”, because
these words are in themselves commonplace. Nonetheless Borges affirms
what Paz reiterates in “La poesía” (Libertad bajo palabra, 1988a) that poetry
is cognitive and leads to at least one form of knowledge – self-knowledge:
“nos revela nuestra propia cara”. The climactic quatrian repeats the theme
of the poem as a whole: poetry is ever the same, because based on a limited
set of metaphors, and ever different, because the true poet can give them a
new intonation. But as Blanco cogently remarks, the key phrase of “Arte
poética’ is “el arte es una Ítaca”, which she rightly perceives is “un brillante
y erudito hallazgo metafórico” (Blanco, 2000, 31), contradicting Borges’s
afirmation that diction in poetry should be “poor”. This does not, of course,
mean “simple”. Borges is at pains to point out in the prologue to El otro, el
mismo that it means seeking “la modesta y secreta complejidad” (Borges,
1974, 858) which is what makes writing about his technique in the later
poetry difficult.
Whether or not “Poema conjetural” allegorizes, through the victory of the
barbarous gauchos, Borges’s hostility to the military junta which had just
seized power in Argentina (Williamson, 2004, 266), it is an important poem
for another reason. That same year, 1943, saw the publication of Borges’s
 BORGES AND CARDENAL 49

retrospective collection Poemas 1923–1943, consolidating his poetic past.

“Poema conjetural” (1943) and “La noche cíclica” (1940) (both published
in El otro, el mismo [1964]), in their technique and diction portend those
of “Arte poética” years later in El hacedor (1960) and announce the new
direction. What is slightly confusing about this period in Borges’s poetic
production is that poems from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s appear in El otro,
el mismo, whereas poems from the 1950s and 1960s had already appeared
in El hacedor almost four years earlier. Thus, with the exception of the first
handful of poems in the later collection which are transitional, the poems in
El hacedor and El otro, el mismo should be read together. In what follows
we shall concentrate on these two collections, since they illustrate the main
point at issue here: the shift in Borges’s poetics which produced them. The
later collections still await systematic exploration.
As we reread the two crucial collections from the early 1960s we see
again that they are not conventionally “lyrical”. Borges himself said, with
his usual – at times deceitful – candour: “If I could sing, I would sing, but I
lack a voice” (Cortínez, 1986, 38). They belong, for the most part, to poetry
of ideas; reflective, thoughtful poems about poetry and Borges’s poetic aspi-
rations, about aspects of the past in Argentina, Britain or Scandinavia which
were especially meaningful to him, about his own moods, experiences, fail-
ures, and most of all his failure to achieve happiness, about features of the
human condition, life’s enigmas, time, death and what it might mean, about
the mysterious attachment he feels to his country and finally about the two
most positive aspects of his outlook: his attachment to the ethical criterion
and moral courage (more implicit, since Borges is not a moralist) and his
admiration for physical courage (remarkably explicit). The problem is that
they are not coldly intellectual. Again Borges has asserted categorically:
“Without emotion there is no poetry possible” (Cortínez, 1986, 44). So, as
Yurkievich puts it, these poems tend to contain “las resonancias emotivas
de una idea” (Yurkievich, 1984, 71). It follows that among the critical ques-
tions concerning Borges’s later poems are: how does he succeed in investing
ideas with emotional overtones so that their appeal is not just to the mind,
and how does he do it without resorting, like Orozco, to a heavy overlay of
metaphorical diction?
It should be said at once that there are well-known poems which are almost
completely abstract and intellectual, such as “El golem” (El otro, el mismo).
This is a narrative poem inspired by the first book which Borges read in
German, Meyrink’s Der Golem, in which a rabbi from Prague magically
creates a (sub)human being only to repent of doing so. In the prologue to El
otro, el mismo, Borges explains that the poem is an allegory of “la relación
de la divinidad con el hombre y acaso la del poeta con la obra” (Borges,
1974, 857). The only hint of feeling is the reference in the sixteenth stanza
to the rueful tenderness with which the rabbi contemplates his “penoso hijo”.
50 DONALD L. SHAW

This is necessary in order to soften the impact of the climactic lines by the
suggestion that God may not totally reject fallen humanity or the poet his
always less-than-perfect poems. But we are not intended to identify emotion-
ally with the poem at all. If we were to do so it would have to be either with
the rabbi (but he is treated ironically), or with the Golem (but he is presented
as mentally retarded). The pleasure of the poem is in the odd orginality of the
story itself and in our mental response to the sly question at the end

¿Quién nos dirá las cosas que sentía

Dios, al mirar a su rabino en Praga?  (Borges, 1974, 887)

Formally speaking, the poem follows a strictly logical four-part pattern: an

introduction suggesting on the authority of Plato that the name can create the
thing; the story itself of the Golem’s creation and its pathetic inadequacies;
the rabbi’s realization of his error and folly; and the analogy with God and
mankind. The only significant images in this 72 line poem are those of “La
herrumbre del pecado” in stanza three and

          esta red sonora

de Antes, Después, Ayer, Mientras, Ahora …  (ibid., 886)

in stanza 9, unless we accept the description of the Golem as “el aprendiz

de hombre” in stanza 12 as an image. The versification, as so often in the
later poetry (which Borges, being blind, had to keep in his memory until it
was finished) takes the form of eleven-syllable quatrains, with rather obvious
rhymes, except where Borges in stanza 10, allows himself the not-quite-serious
“numen/volumen” and “Golem/Scholem”. And yet this does not strike us as
being a prosaic poem (though Borges did once say to Sobejano, who may have
been hinting at the vogue for “colloquial” or “exteriorist” poetry, “Prosaic-
ness is one of the poetic mediums, I think, if it’s used carefully”; Cortínez,
1986, 49). Why not? Borges’s inclination was usually to assert that what is
poetic is impossible to describe or define, but sometimes, especially when
challenged about his post-1920s view of metaphor, he also asserted that what
was poetic was, not metaphor, but what he called “cadences” (“what really
matters are the cadences”; ibid., 10). I take this to mean certain rhythmical
and acoustical patterns which distinguish poetry from most prose. We saw
some acoustical examples above in “Poema conjetural”. Here in “El golem” I
should like to emphasize rather Borges’s mastery of the hendecasyllable: his
ability to ring the changes on its rhythms, including a rather prominent use of
encabalgamiento to bond lines together or to shift the caesura about, as in:

Adán y las estrellas lo supieron

En el jardín. // La herrumbre del pecado …  (Borges, 1974, 885)
 BORGES AND CARDENAL 51

compared with:

Sobre un muñeco que con torpes manos

labró, // para enseñarle los arcanos …  (ibid.,)

We notice an obvious difference in rhythm between “En que el pueblo de Dios

buscaba el Nombre” (ibid.), in which there is only one tri-syllabic group,
“buscaba-el”, and the next line, “En las vigilias de la judería”, with its four
monosyllables and four-syllable “judería”. This flexible pattern of changing
rhythms is perhaps what allows Borges to create the “cadences” which make
his poetry immediately recognizable as his.
Borges’s reflctions in these two collections on the grandeur and futility
of poetic activity form a category apart, and a glance at them is a necesses-
sary preliminary to further commentary. “La luna” (El hacedor) reminds us
that we do not need the periphrases of Lugones or Güiraldes to allude to the
moon; the word ‘luna” itself is enough:

El secreto, a mi ver, está en usarla

Con humildad  (Borges, 1974, 820)

as Borges does in “A un viejo poeta” (El hacedor), when, mindful of his often
quoted line from Quevedo “Y su epitafio la sangrienta luna”, he refers to a
moon tinged with red as “acaso el espejo de la Ira” (ibid., 823). Quevedo’s
old metaphor, famous enough to have become standard, is subtly renewed,
according to Borges’s new views on figurative language. On the wider issue
of poetry itself this group of poems reveals Borges’s ambivalence of outlook.
“A Luis de Camoens”, “Ariosto y los árabes” (El hacedor), “A un poeta
menor de la Antología” (El otro, el mismo) and other poems celebrate the
triumph of poetry over time, even if, as in the last case, it is as a mere histor-
ical fragment. But Borges, always the sad sceptic, was profoundly committed
to recognizing the ultimate futility of all effort (“los afanes son engaños” [“A
la efigie de un capitán de los ejércitos de Cromwell”] El hacedor). In terms
of poetic creation this is in part because of the nature of poetry itself which,
as we have seen, can never transmit the real. “El otro tigre” (El hacedor) a
crucially important poem in this connection, reminds us that a lifetime of
obsession with tigers has only produced

  un tigre de símbolos y sombras,

Una serie de tropos literarios …
 Un sistema de palabras
Humanas y no el tigre vertebrado …  (Borges, 1974, 824–5)

And yet the effort of creation must continue. For, as “Una brújula” tells us,
52 DONALD L. SHAW

everything in the universe may represent a secret divine language of which

the poet may be able to see shadowy examples, which, if successfully turned
into poetry, might correspond to real reality: “El otro tigre, el que no está en
el verso” (ibid., 825). Insofar as any individual poet can convert the shadowy
sign into even one unforgettable line he earns immortality. This is Borges’s
supreme aspiration:
Dar con el verso que ya no se olvida
(“In memoriam A R” [El hacedor], Borges, 1974, 829)
Que mi nombre sea nadie como el de Ulises
Pero que algún verso perdure …
(“A un poeta sajón” [El otro, el mismo], ibid., 906

But in “Mateo, XXV, 30” and in “Baltasar Gracián” (El otro. el mismo)
(which Borges [Cortínez, 1986, 43] asserted was a self-satire) he reveals,
perhaps over-modestly, his awareness that the aspiration (like his aspiration
to happiness) has not been fulfilled.
Borges’s criticisms of Gracián as a poet – that he had no music in his
soul, no real sense of beauty and above all no love either of God or woman
– hint at his fears about his own poetry. They were, of course, largely ground-
less, except as regards love of God, which is not a necessary ingredient of
great poetry. Direct expressions of human or sexual love are rare in Borges’s
poetry. I have referred elsewhere to the unpublished thirty-two-line poem on
the death of his father which exists in the Borges Collection of the Alderman
library of the University of Virginia and its reduction to sonnet form in “A mi
padre” in La moneda de hierro (Loewenstein and Shaw, 2001, 141–58). The
two poems are intimately connected to “Baltasar Gracián” by their climaxes,
in which Borges’s father is granted at his death a vision of the Platonic arche-
types which, the poet suggests, was probably denied to the Jesuit poetaster.
What is symbolic of Borges, however, is the fact that he did not publish
the longer poem, and waited almost forty years to bring out the cut-down
version. Clearly he regarded the longer version as over-emotional, with its
climactic outcry: “¡Papá no me dejes, contigo quiero ir adonde vayas!” (154),
so unlike his own restrained ideal, which was to be, like his favourite poet,
Emerson, “full of emotion” but at the same time “cool” (Cortínez, 1986, 11),
exactly what we find in the sonnet version.
This makes the two sonnets entitled “1964” (El otro, el mismo) referring
to a failed love affair (when Borges was sixty-five), so moving in their open
emotionality. Suddenly, striking imagery reappears, contradicting Borges’s
stance in “La luna”. The moon is now:
      … espejo del pasado
Cristal de soledad, sol de agonías  (Borges, 1974, 920)
 BORGES AND CARDENAL 53

the warmly physical happy references to “mutuas manos” and “las sienes
/ que acercaba el amor” are replaced by the cold, tormenting abstractions of
“la fiel memoria” and “los desiertos días”. But the sonnet is spoiled by the
melodramatic verbs “te desgarra” and “te puede matar” of the climax. Not
so in the second sonnet where time (in which each instant is an Aleph) and
death:

   ese otro mar, esa otra flecha

Que nos libra del sol y de la luna
Y del amor …  (ibid.)

console the poet, but cannot beguile his nostalgia for places associated with
happy fulfilment. Are the “humble” metaphors in the second quotation more
“efficacious” than those in the first? Borges would presumably argue that they
are. Once more we notice the shifting rhythmical patterns of the hendecasyl-
lables; the contrast in the first sonnet, for instance between

       Ya no hay una

Luna que no sea espejo del pasado

with its encabalgamiento emphasized by the acoustical repetition in una/

Luna, and the superbly balanced line “Cristal de soledad, sol de agonies”,
with its remarkable sound effect al–ol–ol and the contrast between the tonic
accents falling on the same “a” sound in the first half of the line and on “o”
and “í” in the second half.
The reference to death as a consolation and as an event which may bring
a vision of the archetypes (i.e. of real reality), as in “Everness” and “El mar”
(El otro, el mismo), contradicts Angela Blanco’s notion that for Borges death
was always strange and incomprehensible (Blanco Amores de Pagella, 1984,
93). Those who heard him talk about it would probably agree that with his
conscious mind he normally endorsed what he wrote in “El despertar” and
“Los enigmas” (El otro, el mismo) that death would hopefully bring “olvido”,
total oblivion: “Quiero beber su cristalino Olvido” (“Los enigmas”, Borges,
1974, 916) (we note the capitalization of the word). In that sense, because
it brings release from awareness, death, as he suggests in “Blind Pew” (El
hacedor), is a treasure awaiting us. But even in “Los enigmas” he identifies
“el muerto” with “el misterioso”. In other poems, such as “El hambre” (El
otro, el mismo), he sees death and time as the two great curses of human
existence. Are there consolations? In “A quien está leyéndome” (ibid.,) he
reflects that, as we are in any case no more than dreams and shadows, we
lose little by death’s inevitability. But the real opponents of time and death
are epic courage, as expressed in “Alusión a la muerte del Coronel Fran-
cisco Borges (1833–74)” (El hacedor), in which his ancestor’s last hour is
54 DONALD L. SHAW

described as “amarga” but also as “vencedora”, and literary creativity, such

as that of the creator of the first sonnet (“Un poeta del siglo XIII” [El otro,
el mismo]) or that which dictated the “cantar de hierro” of the ancient North-
umbrian in “A un poeta sajón” (El otro, el mismo).
Time rather than death, however, is the great mystery. Borges succeeds
in investing this abstraction with emotion by linking it to the mystery of the
self, to memory and to destiny, both his own and ours. In “Una brújula” (El
otro, el mismo), historical time is seen as the manifestation of God’s designs,
his “words”, which are (because we are not programmed to understand them)
an “infinita algarabía” into which fits each of our lives, they being, in their
turn, enigmas, uncrackable codes or patterns of chance events and hence
agonizing. And yet, in this splendid sonnet, the compass symbolizes human
longing for meaningful direction, ironically subverted by the two final images
which present it as like a clock seen in a dream, something imprecise, and
as like a bird shifting a little as it sleeps, that is, as having the potential for
upward soaring flight, but merely dreaming instead. Two of Borges’s most
moving poems in this category are “Adrogué” (El hacedor) and “Límites”
(El otro, el mismo). “Adrogué” nostalgically evokes a house with a large
garden where the Borges family spent many happy holidays. The main part
of the poem moves from concrete features of the garden: flowers, the pond,
statues, so familiar that the poet could find his way among them even in pitch
darkness, to the evanescent perfume of the eucalyptus trees emerging from
the past and conveying the atmosphere far better than language could. Then
we move to details of the house itself and its one-time inhabitants, all, to the
poet, unforgettable. But the climactic stanzas relegate these beloved memo-
ries to the irrecoverable past and the poet is left contemplating the mystery of
time’s passage which suddenly changes the tone from nostalgia to anguish:

… no comprendo cómo el tiempo pasa

Yo que soy tiempo y sangre y agonía.  (Borges, 1974, 842)

We are flesh and blood creatures condemned to contemplate how time steals
from us the “humildes y queridas cosas” which once constituted our happi-
ness, while leaving us the dolorous memory of them.
The theme of “Límites” is the same, but the tone this time is more dramatic,
since the emphasis is not on the survival of memory to remind us of what we
have lost, but on the loss itself, in the sense that each day we may see, do or
even recall something for the last time in our lives. In this case the probability
that our lives are governed by shadows, dreams and empty forms is no longer
a consolation for the fact that

… para todo hay término y hay tasa

Y última vez y nunca más y olvido.  (Borges, 1974, 879)
 BORGES AND CARDENAL 55

Unlike Neruda, Borges can find no immanent meaning in life through social
action, nor can he share Cardenal’s belief that an immanent solution to life’s
injustices is at the same time in line with a trascendental plan, nor Parra’s
ability to respond to the sense of the abyss with black humour. If, on occa-
sion, as in “Otro poema de los dones” (El otro, el mismo), he can rejoice in
the positive aspects of the human condition, despite his awareness that reason
imposes only a dream of order on life’s chaos and that human wisdom is a mere
verbal construct, yet at the centre of his outlook is a feeling of irrecoverable
loss. The same word that had appeared in “Adrogué”, “vedado”, reappears
in “Límites”: we are progressively shut out from what once was. “Adrogué”
was focused subjectively, but one of the chief features of “Límites” is the
way it moves from “yo” to “nosotros” and then to “te” before returning to a
“yo” which has now assumed universal representativeness. All great poetry,
Borges insisted, comes from unhappiness (Cortínez, 1986, 10). “Límites”
leads us to suspect that for him supreme unhappiness was not emotional
frustration, which “1964” tells us “tal vez no importa”, but recognition of
the way in which the time and space of past experiences and even our former
selves gradually become forbidden territory to ourselves as we are now.
It seems odd that if the personality is perhaps illusory, reason likely to
be a dream and all effort probably ultimately futile, the ethical criterion
should survive unchallenged by Borges’s scepticism. Yet it is so. But this is
one abstraction of the several that obsess Borges which he does not attempt
to deal with in his poetry. His heroes are men of physical courage, not of
moral integrity, although such integrity is implicit in “un hombre oscuro
que se muere en la cárcel” (Borges, 1974, 873) at the climax of “Página
para recordar al Coronel Suárez, vencedor en Junín” (El otro, el mismo). The
key statement comes in “A Carlos XII” (ibid.): “no hay otra virtud que ser
valiente” (Borges, 1974, 908). Although the courage symbolized by a sword
(“A una espada en York Minster” [ibid.]) is described as “vano al fin”, since
death is unconquerable, several poems celebrate valour, including certainly
the valour of the “orilleros” (“la secta del cuchillo y del coraje” [“El tango”,
ibid.]).
In the end, however, what prevails is the vision of God’s “extraño mundo”
(“El” [El otro, el mismo]) and exploration of its often desolating strangeness
is what continues to inspire Borges in his remaining collections of poetry.
Of these the odd one out is Para las seis cuerdas (1965) which contains
a handful of poems mimicking milongas, the popular old-fashioned songs
which meant a good deal to the not very musical Borges and which some
of us whose classes he visited in the USA heard him sing to astonished
students. Like “El tango” and “Los compadritos muertos” (El otro, el mismo)
they reveal nostalgia for a past Buenos Aires (which perhaps never was),
when men were men. The broader background is provided by “¿Dónde se
habrán ido?” (Para las seis cuerdas) where Borges reveals that he saw these
56 DONALD L. SHAW

o­ rilleros as the last descendents of the gaucho irregular cavalry which helped
to liberate Argentina from the Spanish and by “A Manuel Mujica Lainez” (La
moneda de hierro) where he associates his

    nostalgia de ignorantes cuchillos

Y de viejo coraje  (Borges, 1976, 49)

with a heroic fatherland he and Mujica Lainez once had, but which has now
been lost. These milongas are linked too with Hilario Acasubi, whom Borges
thought of with admiration as combining heroism and poetic creativity.
Borges’s last poetic collections and collections containing poems, Elogio
de la sombra (1969), El oro de los tigres (1972), La rosa profunda (1975),
La moneda de hierro (1976), Historia de la noche (1977), La cifra (1981)
and Los conjurados (1985), though containing many memorable poems, still
await serious critical analysis. The essays by Julio Alazraki (1977), Guill-
ermo Sucre (1970), Thomas Lyon (1986), Alice Poust (1986) and Miguel
Enguídanos (1986 [on La cifra]) are not very helpful and have not been
followed up significantly.

Ernesto Cardenal (Nicaragua, 1925–  )

Cardenal’s early poetry, republished as La obra primigenia de Ernesto
Cardenal: Carmen y otros poemas (2000) reveals a gradual shift away from
more conventional Surrealist and Vanguardist influences towards a sparer
mode of expression. Stephen White has helpfully studied the origins of
Cardenal’s production in his Modern Nicaraguan Poetry (1993), with partic-
ular reference to the influence of Pound, and shown how Cardenal learned
to incorporate aspects of Spanish American history into his poetic work. In
a sense, Cardenal stands equidistant between Neruda and Parra. On the one
hand he is writing, for the most part, deeply committed Americanist poetry
on themes which are familiar to us from Canto general. We need only think
of “Sandino” in “Los Libertadores” or “La United Fruit Co.” from “La arena
traicionada” to see Cardenal join hands with Neruda. On the other hand, in
terms of using diction which is sparing of imagery, Cardenal is close to Parra.
In fact, in an interview with Raúl Bañuelos (in Flores and Medina, 1991, 22),
Parra declared: “El lenguaje de Cardenal está muy cerca del mío, o al revés.
El es también un poeta del habla, él se considera un exteriorista, pero eso es
otro nombre para la antipoesía.” This is a half-truth at best. But it makes an
important point. When, in the instructions given to students of poetry in the
“Taller de Poesía” at Solentiname in the 1980s, Cardenal insisted that “Hay
que escribir como se habla” (Mantero, 2003, 188), he was echoing Parra’s
words in “Manifesto” (Otros poemas):
 BORGES AND CARDENAL 57

Nosotros conversamos
En el lenguaje de todos los días
No creemos en signos cabalísticos.  (Parra, 1969, 211)

Also to Bañuelos (in Flores and Medina, 1991, 21) Parra said: “Mis deudos
son … con el habla de mi país. Eso es lo que más cuenta en la antipoesía,
y yo traté desde muy temprano de pasar de la lengua escrita al habla.” To
the extent, then, that Cardenal descends from Neruda and Parra (though of
course not exclusively), his work is representative of the next stage of Spanish
American poetry, in one area.
The problem of dealing with much of Cardenal’s poetry is already familiar
to readers of the later Neruda. It is that of how to balance the impact of this
kind of politically committed poetry of statement against the traditional desire
to see poems as aesthetically satisfying verbal artefacts. We find ourselves in
a somewhat similar position to that of readers and critics who try to bring the
criteria they have become accustomed to applying to Boom fiction to novels
like Skármeta’s La insurrección, Isabel Allende’s De amor y de sombra or
novels of resistance from Central America such as those of Manlio Argueta
or Sergio Ramírez. The fit is bad. As Daly de Troconis puts it (1982, 10),
Cardenal emphasizes “las funciones prácticas del lenguaje … las funciones
referencial, expresiva y conativa”, and this makes some of his poetry difficult
to analyse satisfactorily by conventional standards, especially outside Latin
America. There, as we have suggested, it is likely to be read differently by
people who have not experienced life under authoritarian regimes and with
whom its protest and denunciation do not resonate in the same way as they
may do inside Latin America. It is not enough to assert, as, for example,
committed critics like Hernán Vidal have done, that bourgeois, Western
readers simply read this kind of writing wrong (Vidal, 1984, 4–27). Nor is it
adequate to say that this kind of writing has to be judged only according to its
own priorities and objectives. Cardenal himself, in his well-known “Epístola
a José Coronel Urtecho” in La santidad de la revolución, while accepting:

La poesía como poster

o como film documental
o como reportaje (Cardenal, 1983a, 260)

nevertheless approves Chairman Mao’s dictum that

el arte revolucionario sin valor artístico

no tiene valor revolucionario (ibid., 257)

The difficulty is to identify valid and functional poetic techniques in poetry

which, like Parra’s, deliberately avoids specialized diction and which uses
58 DONALD L. SHAW

figurative language both sparingly and in a way which marks a return to

deliberately unchallenging imagery by using familiar referents instead of
strikingly new ones. In the first seventeen lines of Hora O, for example,
which create our first impression of the poem, the only figurative language
consists of two similes, both of which contemptuously describe presidential
palaces in terms of confectionery. We can readily imagine the stream of meta-
phors which Neruda would have used or the hermetic imagery which Vallejo
might have employed even in his late committed poetry. Cardenal’s strategy
is instructively different. Instead of challenging us to figure out the meaning
of the languaje, as Vallejo did when he described the Spanish Republican
hero, Pablo Emilio Coll, in “Himno a los voluntarios de la República” as

Coll, el paladín en cuyo asalto cartesiano

tuvo un sudor de nube el paso llano  (Vallejo, 1986, 282),

what Cardenal does at the start of Hora O is to challenge us to figure out

the treatment of time which zigzags about from 1937 to 1860 (the death of
William Walker) and then to 1954 and Somoza, backtracking in between
to 1899, 1926 and 1940, so that we are compelled to rethink the modern
history of Nicaragua. The function of this shifting among different dates is
to act as a prelude to understanding how the poem will then proceed to offer
us an interpretation of the historical process in question. This interpretation,
as in Neruda, is dominated by the macro-metaphor of the poem as a whole
which is made explicit in the lines: “La hierba tierna renace de las cenizas”
(Cardenal, 1983a, 70) and “La hierba verde renace de los carbones” (ibid.,
75). In other words, each failed rebellion is always followed by a rebirth
of revolutionary activity. Once we perceive this, we realize that the poem
begins by evoking a period around 1937. This is followed by a flashback to
the origins of the earlier Sandino rebellion. Later we find references to the
uprising under Báez Bone and this in turn is seen implicitly as prefiguring
a successful rising against Somoza. The poem is structured, that is, around
the myth of the Left, in which history is governed by a law of inevitable
progress, which can be traced in this case to economic forces set in motion by
the United Fruit Company after 1899. Against these Sandino was unable to
prevail, but his failure released a revolutionary spirit which in the end despite
all setbacks, will overcome dictatorship based on economic colonialism. This
is an unambiguous vision of linear historical development totally opposite to
that of Parra, for example. It postulates a pattern of cause and effect which is
perfectly intelligible, at the opposite pole from the “infinito juego de azares”
(Borges, 1974, 460) which was the basis for Borges’s historical vision, or
the futile circularity we see in García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad. It
provides the skeleton of the poem, which falls into two parts separated by
the death of Sandino and the last words of Walker. The second part is further
 BORGES AND CARDENAL 59

subdivided into “April”, the month of burning (= repression), followed by

an implicit “May” in the last twenty-eight lines with the promise of renewed
revolutionary activity. The other metaphorical principle of Hora 0 is that of the
superiority of nature to man-made conditions. Thus the United Fruit Company
is associated with the destruction of nature by manufactured weapons: “sus
bananos son bayoneteados” (Cardenal, 1983, 59), and Somoza and his allies
are always connected to cablegrams, telephones, cars, trucks, aeroplanes and
so on, their symbolic spaces being palaces, while Sandino and his men are
always associated with nature, animals, birds, the earth and peasant life and
their symbolic space is the mountains. Similarly Sandino is associated with
natural light while the oppressors are surrounded with darkness, or at best
artificial light. This in turn illustrates Cardenal’s consistent incorporation of
simple contrasts which produce the effect of implicit commentary, such as
that of the prisoners digging Sandino’s grave while the conspirators dine
with him at the palace. We notice too Cardenal’s direct intervention in the
poem to mention his own part in the 1954 uprising. What also repays study
is the functional use of striking acoustical and rhythmical effects, from heavy
alliteration to internal rhyme, insistent repetition of words and syllables and
sometimes splendid examples of combined rhythm and sound:

un hArapo levantAdo en un pAlo de la montAña  (ibid., 62)

los hOMbres sin moverse y moviéndose sus sOMbras  (ibid., 64)
la glorIA no es la que enseñan los textos de la historIA  (ibid., 71)

We need to recall that although Cardenal engaged in revolutionary activity

before he became a Trappist novice in 1957, he himself insisted that he came
to Marxism through his religious training: “yo me he politizado con la vida
contemplativa … Yo he llegado a la revolución por el Evangelio.” (Cardenal,
1976, 20). We can see the process developing in the “Poemas de la trapa”
(in Gethsemani Ky; 1960) especially “En la noche iluminada de palabras …”
(Cardenal, 1983a, 77). Once more the technique is based on a simple contrast
between the garish neon lights outside the monastery in the small hours of
the morning together with what they symbolize – bodily pleasure, immediate
gratification and outward cleanliness – and the lights in the monastery chapel
which are implicitly associated with spirituality and inward cleansing of the
spirit. The climax contrasts the worldly people outside who correspond to the
foolish virgins of the biblical parable, with the monks inside, who correspond
to the wise ones. To Eduardo Elías and Jorge Valdés (1987, 42) Cardenal
remarked that at the beginning of his career, he wanted to write religious
poetry but his early religious training with the Jesuits made it impossible.
Under the influence of Thomas Merton in Kentucky he discovered how to
fulfil his aspiration, but already we see in the “Poemas de la trapa” and the
60 DONALD L. SHAW

twenty-five Salmos (1964) the emergence of a collective, political dimension

interacting with the private spiritual one. The result is not quite stable. Tradi-
tionally in Christianity, sin and salvation tend to be seen in individual terms
and progress in the last resort as providentially directed. But in Cardenal,
as Barrow points out (1999, 563) “sin is institutionalized” and in fact often
collectivized. Thus a certain tension is set up between a providentialist vision
in which liberty and progress are gifts of God, and Cardenal’s later vision,
after his conversion to Marxism following his stay in Cuba in 1970, in which
they are the outcome of revolutionary activity, seen as a human expression
of God’s will and of brotherly love. In Salmo 4 God is invoked as “Dios
de mi inocencia” (Cardenal, 1983a, 112) and in “Salmo 16” the statement
appears: “No hallarás en mí ningún crimen” (ibid., 153). Sin is thus prima-
rily projected onto the oppressors. The notion of Original Sin has conven-
iently disappeared, at least in its traditional form. The emphasis has shifted
from a God who judges the individual and from “Mi pecado está siempre
delante de mí” of the “Poemas de la trapa” (ibid., 77), to a God who judges
social organization from the standpoint of the oppressed, a God who is “el
defensor de los pobres” (“Salmo 9”, ibid., 116), “El Dios que existe es el de
los proletarios” (“Salmo 57”, ibid., 123). The primary interest in the Salmos
is not individual redemption but collective liberation. The basic themes of
the collection are the reality of oppression, outcry for God’s intervention
and praise of God’s handiwork in the universe (implicitly as a sign of his
power to intervene). The Salmos, like so much of Cardenal’s poetry, resist
close textual analysis. They borrow familiarity and impressiveness from their
models in the Bible and impact from their enunciation of moral values and
libertarian aspirations which are shared by the readership. Their form and
structure are unchallenging and reflect in their immediately recognizable
pattern the stability of a world governed by divine providence. The basic
technique is one of simple contrast and repetition/intensification, reflecting
the moral difference between the behaviour of the oppressors and the poetic
voice, which is sometimes a “yo” and sometimes a “nosotros”, but always
the voice of the downtrodden:

Hablan de paz en sus discursos

mientras aumentan su producción de guerra.

Hablan de paz en las Conferencias de Paz

y en secreto se preparan para la guerra.
(“Salmo 5”, Cardenal, 1983a, 113)

“Salmo 5” is in fact paradigmatic. We notice the rare but striking use of

pointed imagery which needs no decoding. The oppressors:
 BORGES AND CARDENAL 61

hablan con la boca de las ametralladoras.

Sus lenguas relucientes
       Son las bayonetas …  (ibid., 113)

There is a sudden change of rhythmic pattern from the above to the thumping
accents of:

CastIgalos oh DiOs
    MalOgra su polItica
ConfUnde sus memorAndums
    ImpIde sus progrAmas.  (ibid., 113)

Finally, the psalm ends, unusually, with a climactic image: God protects
whoever is not fooled by propaganda:

Lo rodeas con tu amor

      como con tanques blindados.  (ibid., 114)

The climactic line turns the tables on the oppressors, asserting that God’s
weapons are quite as powerful as theirs. Those critics who have discussed
the Salmos (including José Promis Ojeda, 1975; Lilia Dapaz Strout, 1975;
Eduardo Urdanivia Bertarelli, 1984; and Geoffrey Barrow, 1999) do little
more than comment on their content: their rejection of biblical quietism, the
concretization and historicization of the biblical message and the reduction
of diction to the level very often of pure enunciation or what Barrow calls
“plain and declarative” language (Barrow, 1999, 70).
Cardenal’s most frequently anthologized poem of religious inspiration is
“Oración por Marilyn Monroe”. It is, in essence, a moral allegory, in which
Marilyn, the empleadita and orphan, becomes Everyman and Everywoman,
so that the poem transcends Latin American reality and calls on all Western
readers to repent. It goes from “ella” (Marilyn) to “Tú” (God) and then to
“nosotros”, who must assume collective guilt. The vital section is that in
which “ella”, “Tú” and “nosotros” all figure together; it contains the key
lines:

Ella no hizo sino actuar según el script que le dimos

– El de nuestras propias vidas – Y era un script absurdo.
(Cardenal, 1983a, 125)

We are responsible for making her act out our dreams; we all collaborated in
the collective charade; her life and death mirror ours. Two extended images
express the artificiality of modern life as symbolized in Marilyn. In one, her
love affairs with the rich and famous are revealed for what they were: mere
62 DONALD L. SHAW

screenplays. In the other, there are ritzy, high-life experiences, but she is
merely a lonely onlooker. The celluloid dream catches up with her and then
with us. At the climax of the poem, the telephone, the symbol of communica-
tion, becomes, as in Parra, the symbol of inability to establish any meaningful
communication unless God intervenes. This is Cardenal’s most universal
poem. It calls for Christian charity, love, not revolution. But for Cardenal the
two became inseparable. In that sense, another image in the poem, that of
Christ driving the money-changers (the representatives of capitalism) from
the Temple, cannot be overlooked.
By now Cardenal (who emphasized in an interview with Cuban students in
the early 1970s [Cardenal, 1979, 633] that his earlier poetry was not neces-
sarily published in the order in which it was written) had elaborated his
doctrine of exteriorismo. He asserted

La poesía exteriorista expresa las ideas o los sentimientos con imágenes

reales del mundo exterior: usa nombres de calles o de lugares, nombres
propios de personajes con su apellido, fechas, cifras, anécdotas, citas textu-
ales, palabras y giros de la conversación diaria etc.
(Cardenal, 1979, 636)

But he insisted that exteriorismo went beyond poesía conversacional in the

sense that it also included other elements of diction, such as technical and
scientific terms, reportage, quotations from historical and documental sources
and the like. As Rowe correctly emphasizes, “Like Parra, Cardenal opens up
the boundaries of the poem, to let in what was previously excluded” (Rowe,
2000, 120). In his 1987 interview with Elías and Valdés Cardenal added
his voice to those of Neruda and Parra in distancing himself from poesía
hermética or what he had earlier called “una plaga: el subjetivismo lírico-
onírico” (Benedetti, 1972, 120). Such poetry, he now declared, was perfectly
justified, but “no se puede dar un mensaje social o político al pueblo en un
discurso hermético” (Elías and Valdés, 1987, 47). Political poetry must above
all communicate. The critical question is: how? That technique was the key
is revealed by Cardenal’s statement in the early 1980s: “La única clase que
me hubiera gustado dar era la de composición de poesía: enseñar las técnicas
que yo había aprendido.” He went on to declare that the masses of popular
poetry thrown up by the Sandinista revolution were bad, because the writers
had not been trained to write tecnically effective poetry. (Cardenal, 1983b,
10 and 15–16). Several critics (including Paul Borgeson, 1981, amplified in
Borgeson, 1984, ch. 4; Robert Pring-Mill, 1980; and Jorge Valdés, 1986)
have attempted to characterize Cardenal’s poetic technique, but it still stands
in need of extensive and systematic treatment if we are to meet the challenge
of Parra’s statement to Benedetti in 1969 which in many ways sums up the
problem of critics when faced by Cardenal’s poetry:
 BORGES AND CARDENAL 63

pienso que la poesía política es desde luego necesaria, pero desde el punto
de vista estético, poético estricto, parecería que está condenada a operar
con elementos más fungibles que la otra. Tal vez sea ésta una de las razones
por las cuales la poesía política por lo común no logra concretarse en obras
realmente duraderas.  (Benedetti, 1972, 47)

In “Epistola a José Coronel Urtecho” (La santidad de la revolución)

and elsewhere, Cardenal has paid generous tribute to Ezra Pound’s poetics,
primarily in two respects: inclusivity, the capacity of poetry to incorporate all
aspects of reality and human experience, together with the need to sharpen
language, to give it conciseness and pin-point exactitude, in contrast to the
inflation and devaluation of language, its deliberate contamination and misuse
by the spokespeople of capitalism: “de ahí que nuestro papel sea clarificar
el language” (Cardenal, 1983, 254). This is basic. It goes together with the
limitation of figurative language, which is reserved by Cardenal, as we have
seen, chiefly for special effects as when in “Oración por Marilyn Monroe” in
one of hs most memorable lines, he speaks of her as “SOla como un astro-
nAuta frente a la nOche especial” (ibid., 124), combining a fine simile with
superb rhythmical and acoustical balance. It is this kind of effect that Pring-
Mill presumably had in mind when he described Cardenal as using “the full
range of more traditional or rhetorical effects” (Pring-Mill, 1980, xxi). Some
of those traditional effects we have already seen. Exteriorist or Documental
poetry necessarily privileges visuality: direct reflection of the real outside
the poet’s mind, with verifiable references to details, though of course such
details are carefully selected to figure forth the poem’s message. Along with
visuality go contrast and unexpected juxtaposition, as means of organizing
the visuality so as to create an implicit commentary, often ironic or sarcastic,
such as the contrast between Somoza on his white charger and the vomit of
his drunken supporters on which the horse’s hooves slip (“Marcha triunfal”
[Poemas sueltos], Cardenal, 1983a, 43). Another example is the contrast
between the serene beauty of Lake Nicaragua followed by:

el guardia borracho en la acera con el garand bala en boca

   apoyándose en el garand para no caer,
el obrero borracho acostado sobre el lodo de la calle
cubierto de moscas y con la portañuela abierta.
(“Epistola a José Coronel Urtecho”, Cardenal, 1983a, 260)

To Benedetti (1972, 102) he explained that he had learned from Pound that
violent juxtapositions produce by superimposition what the latter called an
“ideogram” or third (implicit) image.
Along with striking juxtapositions of this kind, goes a systematic use of
encabalgamiento in which the end of a line left “in the air” draws attention
64 DONALD L. SHAW

to the beginning of the next, creating a variety of effects, which may be

sarcastic, as in:

[El general] pasa debajo del arco triunfal

de papel …  (“Marcha triunfal”, Cardenal, 1983a, 43),
or
                Somoza
gordo lleno de condecoraciones como un árbol de navidad.
(“Oráculo sobre Managua”, ibid., 213)

or re-emphatic, as in:

    una flauta triste

          una
tenue flauta como un rayo de luna
(“Economía de Tahuantinsuyu”, ibid., 163)

or to create an effect of colour and movement:

y la gallinita-de-playa de color café y

alas amarillo limón, zancadita
camina sobre los nenúfares acuáticos.
(Canto nacional”, ibid., 195)

The language, as we know, is referential and colloquial, even to the extreme

(“Medallas color caca” [“Marcha triunfal”, ibid., 43], or “Mi tierra … es de
otros jodidos” [“Epistola a José Coronel Urtecho”, ibid., 255]). But this does
not preclude splendid rhythmical and acoustical effects:

Lago con luna

La luna sobre el lago y el agua color de luna
(“Canto nacional”, ibid., 194)

combines incremental re-emphasis, alliteration and repetition of vowels to

create a musical effect. Or we find the opposite – feísmo: “La luna riela
sobre la mierda” (“Oráculo sobre Managua”, ibid., 210). We equally find
cumulative enumeration, as in the Neruda of Canto general, often designed
to produce a knock-down effect by emphasis on the same theme:

El Banco del Espíritu Santo dentro del Vaticano

  – Banco di Santo Spiritu –
la Esposa de Dios hecha puta, emputecida la esposa
Generale Inmoviliare parte del patrimonio de la Santa Sede
 BORGES AND CARDENAL 65

mejor dicho Generale Inmoviliare filial del Vaticano

y Vittorio Veronesse, así se llama el hijo de su mama
presidente de la Acción Católica y el Banco de Roma
  la iglesia se acuesta con cualquiera.
Y más de la mitad de los obispos de Nicaragua eran apóstatas
y su Excelencia Pendejísima aquella noche
triste noche, ungió con óleo trémulo en el estadio
el pobre viejo, a la hija de Somoza reina del ejército. (“Oráculo
sobre Managua”, ibid., 222)

Every reader of Cardenal is struck in addition by his use of typographical

devices to underline certain effects, either simply visual, such as the final
lines of El estrecho dudoso:

… la mano de sangre en el muro todavía pintada

se iba hundiendo
   y hundiendo
     en el agua.  (Cardenal, 1985, 170)

or of contrast, or of crescendo or diminuendo, and perhaps most notably his

use of capitals for extra emphasis as in “Economía de Tahuantinsuyu” (in
Homenaje a los indios americanos) where the beginning references to money
are repeatedly capitalized to draw attention to the fact that the Incas did not
have a money economy. Similarly in the middle of the poem the description
of the joyful celebration of harvest in the Inca empire is followed by five
lines of capitals referring to a collapse of sugar futures in capitalist North
America.
One of the most fruitful approaches to Cardenal’s technique has been that
of Valdés (1986) (following Pring-Mill (1980)) who explores cinematographic
effects. Since Exteriorist poetry privileges reference to concrete objects in
the outside world, visuality, as in film, is fundamental. Hence it is profitable
to examine the visuality of Cardenal’s poetry in terms of visual montage (the
juxtaposition of different objects in meaningful relation to each other), flash-
backs and flash-forwards, close-ups, medium distance description and broad
panoramic shots, as well as changes of angle.
Initially Cardenal had not been particularly interested in the Indian
heritage of Central America, but after encouragement by Merton, he turned,
like Neruda, to this theme and published El estrecho dudoso (1966), a poem
of epic inspiration on the conquest of the region, Mayapán (1968) and
Homenaje a los indios americanos (1969). The last two were later incorpo-
rated into Los ovnis de oro (1988). All three represent the last phase of his
poetic work before his “second conversion” to Marxism in Cuba in 1970.
One of the functions of the epic is to provide a foundational myth which
66 DONALD L. SHAW

may transmit national values to its audience. This is the case with El estrecho
dudoso. Based on canonical historical sources, which are heavily quoted in
the poems, it contrasts the greedy, feuding conquistadors with selfless figures
like Las Casas and Antonio de Valdivieso, who voice the values of justice and
civilization. These, Cardenal prophesies, will ultimately prevail. A sub-theme
of the text is provided by transparent references to Nicaragua under the heel
of the Somozas and the contemporary struggle against ever-renewed tyranny.
Like a sector of the New Historical Novel in Spanish America, El estrecho
dudoso deliberately deconstructs “official” history, re-presenting it from a
new ideological viewpoint, no longer that of the victors, but rather that of the
vanquished, the victimized and the oppressed. Inevitably in the process, the
Indians, whose leaders’ voices we hear frequently, tend to be idealized. We
see the result in Los ovnis de oro. Russell Salmon, in his introduction to the
bilingual edition (Salmon, 1992, xxvii) remarks succinctly that the collection
uses “a post-conquest myth of origin [i.e. of Incarrí, a new Peruvian Messiah-
figure] now seen as hope for the return to order”. The poems in Los ovnis de
oro describe alternative native American communities from both the past and
the present, which reject materialism, competition and capitalism and which
base their outlook and life-style on contrasting spiritual, values. Sarabia
(1997, 131) rightly points out that Cardenal makes a conscious effort to avoid
overpraising the Indians’ adherence to these higher ideals and reminds us that
the poet also presents the “contracara, el militarismo y la desarmonía corpori-
zada en Huitzilopochtli, al que la voz le pone el mote de ‘nazi’ ”. Even so, the
aim is to awaken the reader to greater awareness of the degraded society in
which he or she is now living, and to the possibility of redeeming modern life
by collaborating with social change, if necessary by revolutionary activity. In
this way what Cardenal sees as God’s evolutionary design for human progress
will be furthered. Thus the collection begins with an idealized description
of the life of a community of Kuna Indians in Central America, seen, like
Santa Mónica in Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos, as an island of peace,
co-operation, equality and simple spirituality on the margin of modern life.
But, unlike Santa Mónica, which is recognizably evolving towards modernity
with its inevitable complications and compromises, Mulatupo is presented
idyllically as a place where “Vivimos como Dios quería que viviéramos”
(Cardenal, 1992, 8). The theme of the poem, that:

Lo tradicional era revolucionario

  El progreso capitalista, retroceso  (ibid., 28)

is developed in “Economía de Tahuantinsuyu”, which emphasizes the contrast

between life for the Indians under the Inca regime in Peru and life there
today. Paradoxically, then, there was no money economy and no individual
crime (theft, prostitution), no institutional crime (corruption) and no crimes
 BORGES AND CARDENAL 67

against humanity (slavery), whereas now, in a money economy, the Indian is

pauperized and degraded. Cardenal uses his familiar acoustical and rhyth-
mical effects to point up his message. While Inca society represented “La
sociedad sIN dINero que soñamos” (Cardenal, 1983, 158), the modern Peru-
vian Indians

      Son cenizas

son cenizas
que avIENTa el vIENTo de los Andes.  (ibid., 159)

The main ideological punch of the poem emerges when Cardenal takes issue
with the Neruda of “Alturas de Macchu Picchu”, who had presented the
Indians under Inca rule as slave-labourers:

Neruda: no hubo libertad

   Sino seguridad social.  (ibid., 161)

While admitting that this was a “Stalinist”, authoritarian society, Cardenal

emphasizes both the material benefits in which everyone shared and the spir-
itual underpinning of the Inca empire:

Pero sus mitos

   No de economistas!
La verdad religiosa
   y la verdad política
eran para el pueblo una misma verdad.  (ibid., 161–2)

Having dealt with the past and the present, the poem finally turns to the
future, to ask whether such a comunismo agrario could be re-established and,
as if in response, evokes in the final lines an Indian mummy preserved in a
museum with a bag of maize still clasped in its hand. In “Tahirassawichi en
Washington” (Los ovnis de oro) a Pawnee chief visits the US capital and there
voices the beliefs and religious principles of his tribe, its nature-worship and
connected symbolism, its collective and family values and its preference for
dream/visionary knowledge over scientific and technological knowledge. The
State Department ignores him.
What is important here is not so much the fact, which is obvious to all
critical readers, that Cardenal deliberately plays down the ambiguities and
conflicts, the human shortcomings common to Inca and Pawnee society (and
all other societies), but the notion of order, which Salmon rightly places at
the centre of Los ovnis de oro. The structure of the poems in the collec-
tion reflects the opposite of a world of cosmic disorder and unpredictability
of High Modernism, symbolized by Borges’s notion of “un infinito juego
68 DONALD L. SHAW

de azares” (Borges, 1974, 460). Cardenal enjoys a double concept of order.

One element is dialectical materialism with its explanation of things in
terms of the basic economic and class substructure conditioning the cultural
superstructure. The other is the Christian concept of a providential order in
which cosmic evolution reveals the finger of God on the controls. It should
perhaps be mentioned that this dual conception of a cosmic order has not
enjoyed the Vatican’s endorsement, nor does it meet with the approval of
such a Marxist-influenced critic as Dawes (1993). But the outcome is that in
Cardenal’s poems the medium reflects the message: the poems are architec-
turally conceived, orderly structures. They may lack elements of conventional
punctuation (“Tahirassawichi en Washington”, for instance, does not use
commas) and the pattern is one of free verse, but the logical nexuses linking
the sections of the poems together are normally all in place or easily supplied.
Under the influence of a positive ideology (in contrast to the frequent use of
chaotic enumeration in the earlier generation) formal order has returned to
poetry. This is a historically important shift: “a ‘change of attitude’ in which
the world appears as comprehensible, accessible and alterable”, as Claudia
Shaefer appropriately puts it (1982, 173).
Cardenal’s is a world of comprehensible causes and effects which are part,
as we have suggested, of a cosmic plan. While much of Los ovnis de oro is
focused on the past, usually in a contrastive relationship with the present,
Cardenal, as a revolutionary poet, is necessarily orientated towards the future.
In his vision of it, he is, as has often been noticed, influenced by the work
of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French paleoanthropologist and philoso-
pher of science. We can see the direction of his futurology in a poem like
“Condensaciones y visión de San José de Costa Rica” (La santidad de la
revolución, 1976, later incorporated into Cántica cósmico[1989]). It is based
on the notion of the mutual attraction of of all components of cosmic matter
from the electron to the largest heavenly bodies. This gravitational force is
seen as God’s love expressed in movement, and producing “condensations”,
when, for example, interstellar gas condenses into stars. This physical process
is in turn presented as the model for the gradual absorption of different soci-
eties into one world-society. A feature of the process is the ocurrence of
“disturbances” which accelerate the condensations. In human societies these
can take the form of revolutions. Even unsuccessful revolutionaries like Che
Guevara fit into the pattern, like the first fish to try to establish life on land.
Cardenal’s visit to San José offers him a vision of a society in which every-
thing manifests the love-principle. In line with his evolutionary-revolutionary
credo, he prophesies that this principle will overcome the contrary principle
of competition and exploitation as the revolution extends itself universally. As
Sarabia points out (1997, 137), it is this prophetic tone which distinguishes
much of Cardenal’s poetry from that of other socially orientated poets.
In terms of its structure “Condensaciones” is an extended simile relating
 BORGES AND CARDENAL 69

world evolution to cosmic evolution, prefigured in the two opening similes

which humanize the stars:

Como alegres bulevares iluminados

      o poblaciones vista de noche desde un avión.
(Cardenal, 1989, 81)

As always in Cardenal, the similes compare the familiar with the familiar.
The development of the extended simile includes the usual use of stark
contrast, once more with Wall Street as the chief obstacle to the harmonious
evolutionary process. Rhythmical and acoustical effects emphasize strategi-
cally important lines:

es una atracción entre los cuErpos, y la atracción

se acelEra cuando se acErcan los cuErpos  (ibid., 81)
y dANzaron delANte de los dOs bisOntes.  (ibid., 82)

The whole poem is structured as a carefully orchestrated sequence rising to

a climax in the final words “la Revolución”.
Two other elements of “Condensaciones” merit mention. One is the notion
of the emergence, as a result of the love-driven process, of “un hOMbre
nuevo con nuevos cromosÓMos” (Cardenal, 1989, 84). The other, which is
extremely relevant to Cardenal’s “Coplas a la muerte de Thomas Merton”
(?1970), is the assertion:
Mas: “la revolución no acaba en este mundo”
si no vencemos a la muerte.  (ibid., 85)

Merton died by accident in 1968 and shortly thereafter Cardenal produced

this elegy which he read during his visit to Cuba in 1970. Based on the famous
Coplas of Jorge Manrique, the Spanish medieval poet, lamenting the death of
his father and the passing of his age, Cardenal’s poem, as María Elena Claro
affirms (1972, 222) “presenta una antitesis a la poesía de Manrique”, visible
in the opening lines:

Nuestras vidas son los ríos

que van a dar a la muerte
    que es la vida.  (Cardenal, 1971, 196)

It is interesting to compare Cardenal’s approach to human mortality with

those of Vallejo and Neruda. All three poets perceive the life of the average
man as a death in life, characterized by lack of awareness (Vallejo, Trilce
LXXV; Neruda, “Alturas de Macchu Picchu”, Canto III). Cardenal writes:
70 DONALD L. SHAW

Soñamos en perezosas sobre cubierta

   contemplando el mar color diakirí …  (ibid., 197)

paladeamos un manhattan como dormidos …  (ibid., 197)

un traje sport para ser jóvenes, para alejar la muerte

mientras nos inventan el suero de la juventud
       el antídoto
para no morir …  (ibid., 201–2)

But whereas Vallejo and Neruda attempt to seek a non-transcendental

response to the problem of death (Vallejo in “Masa” [España, aparta de
mí este caliz]; Neruda, with his distinction at the beginning of “Alturas de
Macchu Picchu” between “una muerte pequeña” and “la poderosa muerte” of
whoever contributes to the onward march of the proletariat) Cardenal joyfully
accepts death as union with the great and everlasting All:

La muERte es una puERta abiERta

al univERso …
   … y no al vacío.  (ibid., 199–200)

Hence the tone of this elegy is the opposite of sad; it is a celebration, not a
lament, symbolized by the image of Merton’s last plane journey:

La ventanilla del gran jet lloraba

   al despegarse de California
de alegría!  (ibid., 210)

“Coplas” has inspired the most lucidly argued critique of a major Cardenal
poem so far (Daydí-Tolson, 1984). In it, Daydí-Tolson makes a number of
assertions which are relevant to a wider range of Cardenal’s mature poetic
works. The main one is that there is an objective discrepancy between the
poet’s aim of direct communication and the kind of readership which is
implicit in the poet’s language. It is argued that, unlike the Salmos, “Coplas”
requires an “informed” reader, familiar with Cardenal’s intellectual interests,
ideally capable of appreciating the intertextual references to Manrique’s poem
and capable of understanding the words and phrases in English. In addition
Daydí-Tolson affirms that the poem lacks a clear pattern of development,
while the language employed constitutes: “un discurso divagante, inconexo y
estéticamente inefectivo” (Daydí-Tolson, 1984, 26). With respect to the first
part of this critique, it might be mentioned that Claro, on publishing the poem
in the Revista Chilena de Literatura, felt constrained to add no fewer than
eighty-nine footnotes in a journal aimed at a cultured academic audience.
 BORGES AND CARDENAL 71

But one might argue that this is not a comprometido work like the poems of
Homenaje a los indios americanos, but a much more universal work and one
which takes the form of an epistle to a highly cultured recipient. The aim of
communication does not apply in quite the same way. However, the second
part of the criticism has to be taken more seriously. Unlike Hora O, “Coplas”
does not have an overarching key metaphor which imposes a measure of
structural unity on the poem as a whole. It consists of a series of short juxta-
posed meditations on Merton’s death, governed by three themes: death as the
achievement of final authenticity and as union with the cosmic force of love;
the inauthenticity of life in time; and Cardenal’s serene acceptance of his
friend’s passing, twice expressed by the use of the simple “o.k.”. Rather than
constituting a climactic sequence it is like a set of musical variations held
together by the strikingly unexpected tone of yea-saying. While adjectives
such as “divagante” and “inconexo” seem rather harsh, a careful scrutiny of
the diction of “Coplas” reveals some contradiction between the references
which seem to imply a cultured reader and the excessive emphasis and repeti-
tion which we notice, for example, in lines 358–92. Clearly Cardenal was
attempting to adapt his Exteriorist technique to the expression of a subjective
reaction to Merton’s death. The attempt does not quite succeed.
“Condensaciones” now figures as cantiga 8 of Cántico cósmico (1989), a
collection of forty-three cantigas, which had been written at intervals since
the late 1950s, and which develop Cántico’s basic contrast: between the
harmonious evolution of the cosmos according to physical principles and
the barbarism and cruelty of capitalism, as evidenced by the behaviour of
Wall Street and its Latin American satellite regimes. In cantiga 29 Cardenal
asserts plainly “no hay orden en estos cantos” (Cardenal, 1989, 336). This
same cantiga could serve as a model for the understanding of the thrust of
the collection as a whole. It re-expresses in poetic terms the present state of
research into quantum physics and the origins of the universe and of life on
earth, stressing the idea that its conclusions are as “mystical” in a sense as
religious insights, but asking the key question: “¿Acaso somos otra cosa que
un orden en el caos?” (ibid., 341). The answer for Cardenal is, of course, in
the affirmative. Developing the blue-print of “Condensaciones” he quotes
Teilhard de Chardin’s assertion: “El cosmos es materia espiritual” (ibid.,
348). Repetitiously and over-explicitly, Cántico cósmico insists that we are
living “En un universo con sentido” (ibid., 79), but one in which capitalism
reduces us to living in

la ciudad de las vidas sin significado

donde las almas son diskettes  (ibid., 372)

By the time Cardenal was writing Cántico cósmico his poetic style was set
and his influence established. Already Pring-Mill (1992, 70) notes that Los
72 DONALD L. SHAW

ovnis de oro had not “pioneered any fresh stylistic approaches”, and this is
equally true of Cántico cósmico which really has to be judged primarily
on its content. What makes it a centrally important work in relation to its
times is its astonishingly confident proclamation of a dynamic law of cosmic
evolution which contains immense possibilities and promises relief from the
emotional fears and intellectual difficulties which have beset the intellectual
minority in the West since Romanticism. For this reason, in the best chapter
(chapter four) of her otherwise rather too descriptive book, Mereles Olivera
(2003) points up the contrast between Cardenal and Parra as poets who stand
at the opposite poles of reaction to the human condition: “En Parra hay una
duda, un ansia existencial. En Cardenal hay una respuesta” (215). We live in
an age of anxiety and mental strain more intense even that that of the Victo-
rian intelligentsia, who felt the first onset of the modern mind-set. Like them
we see around us an intense will to believe, which for many people made
Marxist dogmatism an acceptable alternative to a world without absolutes,
and born-again Christianity popular in the United States and elsewhere. This
is the appeal of Cántico cósmico – poetry as revelation – and this consti-
tutes its historical importance. After the doubt and despair of Vallejo and
the Neruda of the first and second parts of Residencia en la tierra, after
the “nihilism” of Parra, it enunciates a comforting doctrine of inevitable
scientific and spiritual progress based on general laws and apparently real
principles of universal validity. It stands as a monument to an intense desire
to escape from the modern dilemma and to a frankly old-fashioned apostolic
conception of the poet. Time will tell whether Cardenal’s assurance was justi-
fied. The omens, however, are not good.
While he was writing Cántico cósmico, Cardenal published a number of
other poems and sets of poems, including the clandestine Canto nacional
(1972), Oráculo sobre Managua (1973), Tocar el cielo (1981), Nostalgia
del futuro (1982), Vuelos de victoria (1984) and Quetzalcóatl (1985). Subse-
quently he brought out La noche iluminada de palabras (1991), Telescopio
en la noche oscura (1993) and Las ínsulas extrañas (2002) as well as prose
works and volumes of memoirs. It seems likely, however, that his reputation
will rest primarily on the earlier poetry which launched exteriorismo and on
Cántico cósmico.
Before leaving Cardenal, it is appropriate to mention a factor which
affects all left-wing poetry in Spanish America from Neruda onward and
which it is always necessary to bear in mind when considering the question
of the author’s intentionality. Cornejo Polar has made the important point
that Cardenal was a poet’s poet, in the sense that his poetry made him the
link between the “objetivismo narrativo” of contemporary British and North
American poets, as well as Brecht, on the one hand and Spanish American
poets who moved in that direction following his example: “el autor de Salmos
se conviert[e] en el nexo entre la precoz experiencia mexicana y caribeña y
 BORGES AND CARDENAL 73

la que años después tendrá como escenario el sur del continente” (Cornejo
Polar, 1998, 15). Yet repeatedly, like the later Neruda, Cardenal has insisted
on his desire to write for “the people”. But even in the twenty-first century
“the people” in Spanish America are often barely literate and frequently far
too poor to buy books of poetry even if they were available outside the cities.
In other words, the readership, especially for poetry, except on special occa-
sions such as poetry readings in poor or rural areas or workshops for the
man in the street (or field), is likely not to be of “the people” at all, but of
the urban middle class, the bourgeoisie, who are among the objects of attack
(and who paradoxically enjoy being attacked while not taking the attack too
seriously). For that reason it is hardly necessary to adopt a poetic style which
appears to be reader-friendly and non-challenging. Interestingly, in “Talleres
de poesía” Cardenal went even further, declaring that in 1977 he had thought
that “no podía hacer que [los campesinos] entendieran mi poesía, aunque
siempre había tratado de hacerla popular, porque muchas de sus palabras
no eran del vocabulario de los campesinos” (Cardenal, 1983b, 11). Later
he discovered that they could be brought to understand any kind of poetry.
There is food for thought in all this about the real need for “poesía clara”
on the part of “the people” and about the real motivation for turning to it on
the part of poets.
 4

Orozco and Dalton

What the foregoing account of the work of some of the major figures in
Spanish American poetry around and immediately after the mid-twentieth
century seems to illustrate is that two different attitudes towards the produc-
tion of poetry faced each other. One emerges directly from Paz and has been
admirably studied by Thorpe Running in The Critical Poem (1996). The
other connects with Neruda’s Odas elementales, the view of poetic language
espoused by Parra, and the practice of Cardenal, explored by Alemany Bay
in Poesía coloquial hispanoamericana (1997). To see the difference in a
nutshell, all that is necessary is to contrast Parra’s 1958 essay “Poetas de la
claridad” with Paz’s “¿Qué nombra la poesía?” (1967) in Corriente alterna
(1986b). At the extreme it is the difference between poetry which deliber-
ately aims to adapt everyday referential language to its intentions (although
this aim involves a number of tricky issues) and poetry which questions its
own power over language. Cardenal, for example, representing the first of
these patterns, sums up his outlook in his interview with Alemany Bay, when
he says: “dejé la hojarasca de metáforas y de adjetivación innecesaria, y creé
una poesía más simple, más directa, más comunicativa, más clara y, por lo
tanto, de mayor acceso al lector” (Alemany Bay, 1997, 197). On the other
hand, Paz maintains, with the overstatement typical of manifestos that “la
poesía moderna es inseparable de la crítica del lenguaje” and that in modern
poetry external referents disappear and “la referencia de una palabra es otra
palabra” (Paz, 1986b, 5). Thus we are left with a current of poetry which is
ultimately affirmative of the meaningfulness of language, confronting one
which manifests the suspicion, to put it at the minimum, that language is
arbitrary, a system of “pure” signs in which the word merely interacts with
other words and “ya no designa y no es ni ser ni no-ser” (6).
Paz, therefore, as Running cogently suggests, finds his main historical
place as a major influence on Spanish American poetry after 1950 as “a
bridge between earlier tendencies and the most recent movement” (Running,
1996, 30). This last would presumably include “poesía crítica” and “poesía
coloquial” though, one suspects, in the latter case more by reaction against
the view, which had originally surfaced in 1956 in El arco y la lira, as the
assertion that “el pensamiento ve con desconfianza las palabras” (Paz, 1986a,
29). What Bécquer in the first of the Rimas had called “el rebelde, mezquino
 OROZCO AND DALTON 75

idioma” and Darío “la palabra que huye” (“Yo persigo una forma …”, Prosas
profanas), now threatens to go once more the way it had gone at the end of
Huidobro’s Altazor and lose all contact with the signified. Speaking of a
group of Chilean poets of the 1960s – Waldo Rojas, Gonzalo Millán, Manuel
Silva, Floridor Pérez, Jaime Quesada and the perhaps better known Oscar
Hahn – whose work parallels that of Roberto Juarroz (Argentina), Juan Luis
Martínez (Chile), Alejandra Pizarnik and Alberto Girri (both from Argen-
tina), Carmen Foxley writes:

Todos estos poetas trabajan en la convicción del carácter ilusorio de la

referencialidad” and goes on to assert that in all their work: “tiene un lugar
destacado la permanente problematización y cuestionamiento del propio
quehacer, es decir, una elucidación metapoética que atraviesa todas sus
trayectorias.  (Foxley and Cuneo, 1991, 13)

Thorpe Running (1996) tends to play down the the fact that a poem which
questions its own validity as a verbal artefact falls inevitably into paradox.
Words under poetic pressure may only be able to express a fleeting, uncer-
tain and/or ambiguous meaning, but if poetry is not to lapse into silence,
a residual communicative function must survive. The difficulty is that, in
attempting to cut itself off from any referent in exterior reality, while at the
same time not trying to create an alternative, symbolic reality, self-critical
poetry such as that of the poets mentioned above, tends to turn in on itself
and move towards a dead end.
At the other end of the spectrum, therefore, we find a conscious reac-
tion against the disengagement of language from the notion of referentiality
and the assertion of its power to get meaning across. Paz, in Los hijos del
limo (1974, 137) attributes to Lugones and López Velarde ‘El gran descu-
brimiento: los poderes secretos del lenguaje coloquial”. González and Treece
quote, of all people, Oliverio Girondo, one of the patron-poets of the Argen-
tine avant-garde, who nonetheless in “Lo que esperamos” (Persuasión de los
días 1942) could express the hope that in the near future:

usaremos palabras substanciosas,

auténticas …
    … palabras simples,
de arroyo,
de raíces
que en vez de separarnos
nos acerquen un poco …
(quoted in González and Treece, 1992, 117)

For Alemany Bay (1997), poesía conversacional/coloquial was the leading

76 DONALD L. SHAW

tendency during the 1960s and marks, as Parra had declared in relation to
his group of poets in the late 1930s, a conscious reaction against Vanguardist
hermeticism. Once more we notice poetry leading the way to literary change.
By contrast, in fiction the 1960s were the key decade of Boom experimen-
talism. The “new realism” of poesía coloquial, which no longer questioned
either reality or language in view of the need for “una comunicación de
emergencia” (Benedetti, 1972, 17) did not emerge as the dominant mode
in the novel until the rise of the post-Boom in the mid-1970s. We should
not overlook the fact that what in Spanish America is called “colloquial” or
“conversational” poetry is part of a wider movement of reaction against the
immediate past of the genre, which includes, for example, “The Movement”
in British poetry. We see this attested, for example, by Robert Conquest’s call
to his fellow poets “to be empirical in [their] attitude to all that comes” and
to “maintain a rational structure and comprehensible language” (quoted in
Bradford, 2005, 137). In 1956, the Times Educational Supplement referred to
“the triumph [in poetry] of clarity over the formless mystifications of the last
twenty years” (TES, 13 July 1956); exactly what Parra was to claim two years
later in “Poetas de la claridad”. In North America among the first poets to
abandon metre and use conversational speech were William Carlos Williams
and Marianne Moore. They have been followed by a large number of others,
most notably perhaps Frank O’Hara, Randall Jarell, Elizabeth Bishop and
John Ashbery. Like Conquest in Britain, we find William Stafford rejecting
difficult diction and, in his case, stating unequivocally: “When you make a
poem, you merely speak or write in the language of every day” (quoted in
Gray, 1989, 234). How different from Pound’s assertion that “There are few
fallacies more common than the opinion that poetry should mimic the daily
speech” (Pound, 1973, 41)! Not surprisingly we find Colin Falck entitling
the third chapter of his American and British Verse in the Twentieth Century
(2003), “The Triumph of Talk”. As in Spanish America, this tendency, though
for a time dominant, has not gone uncontested. Halpern, in his Everyday and
Prophetic (2003) postulates a “tension between the prophetic voice and the
everyday voice in postwar and contemporary American poetry” (3). Nor is
this the only tension. Within it we have the stand-off in the 1980s between
the “New Formalist” and “Language” poets on the one hand, and the older
“Free Verse”, colloquialist practitioners on the other. Lynn Emanuel (1998,
279) writes:

free verse, as it is characterized in the formalists’s discussions, is poetry

dominated … by what is seen as a set of unexamined assumptions about
the relation of form to “meaning”, to “content.” Free verse is debased
verse, common without being popular, a poetry that, simultaneously, is
middle-brow, academic and culturally illiterate. It is a verse that partakes
of notions of both a pop culture and a lingua franca.
 OROZCO AND DALTON 77

There are signs of similar tensions in contemporary Spanish American

poetry. It is unfortunate that Jill Kuhnheim’s otherwise enlightening Spanish
American Poetry at the End of the Twentieth Century, does not deal with them
directly. They deserve the same kind of critical attention that they have begun
to arouse in the United States.

Olga Orozco (Argentina, 1920–99)

Writing approvingly of his own Canto ceremonial in the preface to Propios
como ajenos Antonio Cisneros observes “Los poemas del libro estaban
llenos de vida vivida” (Cisneros, 1991, 10). It seems clear that one of his
aims was to make his poetry (at least seem like) a direct transcription of
lived experience and thus in a sense “realistic”. We recognize right away the
similarity of Cisneros’s outlook to that of Parra, who declared to Benedetti
in the early 1970s that “poesía es vida en palabras” (Benedetti, 1972, 51).
Olga Orozco’s poetry stands almost at the other extreme. Concerning Oroz-
co’s poem “Esbozos frente a un modelo” from the collection La noche a la
deriva (1984) whose theme is poetic creation, Jill Kuhnheim asserts that in
Orozco language is always in some sense “erróneo” “because it can never
refer directly to an object (the model, lived experience) but must be indirect,
figural, in this case metaphoric” (Kuhnheim, 1996, 58). This is not the same
as saying that Orozco endorses the “critical” attitude towards language which
Running (1986) and Foxley and Cuneo (1991) explore. But what it does mean
is that Orozco is not a colloquial poet. That is why setting her work beside
that of Dalton illustrates in some ways one of the dichotomies which we find
in modern Spanish American poetry.
As we know inter alia from Virginia Woolf ’s description of Lily Briscoe’s
painting in To the Lighthouse, Modernism (not modernismo) sought a more
elusive reality, turning away from mimetic realism and striving for a new
formal language, not completely abstract and non-representational, but using
realist elements in a different way, which sometimes expresses our fragility
and contingency in the face of nature and time. It may postulate realities
which are beyond the reach of rationalism or mere direct observation and look
behind appearances for something not fully perceptible or presentable, some-
thing which transcends normal cognition. An obvious example is Cortázar’s
notion of a “yonder”, a “kibbutz del deseo”, an invisible reality to be striven
for, which protects us from horror and despair in the face of life’s hostility or
meaninglessness. This mysterious realm, which for Cortázar is in the future to
be discovered, for Orozco was, at first, to be evoked from the past. Her poetry
is fully in tune with the cultural crisis of the West in the twentieth century, in
the sense that it postulates an escape from Borges’s “inasible” and random
(therefore “atroz”) reality though a mysterious empathy with another level
78 DONALD L. SHAW

of reality from which we can receive enigmatic messages. As Julieta Gómez

Paz puts it: “Olga Orozco ha vivido rememorando un paraíso, buscando en
el Caos un divino orden perdido” (Gómez Paz, 1977, 51). Much of Oroz-
co’s earliest poetry reads like an extended commentary on what Clarissa
thinks about in Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway: “the unseen part of us, which
spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to
this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death” (Woolf, 1925,
153). But, as Gómez Paz and Melanie Nicholson, among others, recognize,
in the later poetry of Orozco the attempt to recover a lost unity, to reach a
reconciliation with the human condition, fails. Nicholson writes:

the later books are characterized by a darkened tone or a more pessimistic

approach to the metaphysical problems presented … At the heart of all
Orozco’s work we discover the conviction that truth or reality always resides
elsewhere, and that the human endeavor to regain this lost paradise, or to
cross the threshold into absolute being, is doomed to failure.
(Nicholson, 2002, 20)

Essentially, then, at the centre of Orozco’s poetry there is a stubborn desire

to break out of or transcend what the poet feels are limitations imposed by
time, space and the various inadequacies of human knowledge and percep-
tion. It is this which constitutes the most universal aspect of her work. Evelyn
Underhill, in her famous and much reprinted Mysticism postulates “three
deep cravings of the self, three great expressions of man’s restlessness”. One
is the universal craving for love; another is the craving for inward purity
and perfection. The third is “the longing to go out from his normal world in
search of a lost home, a ‘better country’; an Eldorado, a Sarras, a heavenly
Sion” (Underhill, 1930, 126–7). This well describes Orozco’s principal aspi-
ration. In that sense the main thrust of her poetry is comparable to that of Paz.
Paz, we remember, used the symbol of the “muro” to express the limitations
which cut us off from “la vida más vida” and explored different strategies
for creating a “puerta” in the wall that would open the way to more authentic
living. Orozco uses much the same symbol. In “En tu inmensa pupila” she
apostrophizes night, clearly the dark night of the soul, as “horadando los
muros” (Orozco, 2000, 161). The earlier reference in the poem to “la casa”
reveals that these are the walls of her “home”, her refuge, as was the case in
“Maldoror” in Las muertes (1952). In the case of both Orozco and Paz, as
well as of Cortázar in prose, the striving to reach a harmonious interpreta-
tion of the modern human condition, and its failure, illustrate the impasse
which seems to lie behind much of the “high” literature of the West in our
time, and the concomitant longing to believe that the creative imagination
is a form of revealed cognition which can point a way forward through the
use of a special kind of language, a logos believed to possess redemptive
 OROZCO AND DALTON 79

potency. This is the most fruitful way to approach Orozco’s poetry. Nichol-
son’s discussion of the contribution of gnostic, magical and esoteric notions
to the poet’s attempt to explore new avenues of knowledge which are neither
religious in any orthodox sense nor rationalistic, and which do not depend on
normal conceptions of cause and effect, represents an important step forward
in Orozco criticism. Orozco herself asserts in her declaration “La poesía” that
the creative act

se convierte … en arco tendido hacia el conocimiento, en ejercicio de

transfiguración de lo inmediato, en intento de fusión insólita entre dos
realidades contrarias, en búsquedas de encadenamientos musicales o de
fórmulas casi matemáticas, en exploración de lo desconocido a través
del desarreglo de todos los sentidos, en juego verbal librado a las vari-
aciones del azar, en meditación sobre momentos o emociones altamente
significativos, en trama de correspondencias y analogías, en ordenamiento
de fuerzas misteriosas sometidas a la razón, en dominio de correlaciones
íntimas entre el lenguaje y el universo.  (Orozco, 2000, 235)

The origins of this view go all the way back to Hume and Kant, and were
dominant in English Romanticism, especially the poetry of Wordsworth and
Shelley, both of whom held that imaginary activity is not mere autonomous
creativity. Imagination, they believed, could be the source of knowledge of
objective reality. Thus the truths of fact, “scientific” truths were not neces-
sarily different from or in conflict with truths obtained via poetic insight. It
needs to be pointed out however that poetic imagination and intuition can
really only teach us about the human world. It is highly questionable whether
they can tell us anything about the physical world, still less about meta-
physical questions. Nevertheless, it is clear from Orozco’s interview with
Sauter that from childhood on she believed strongly in the paranormal and
accepted that she had a visionary gift. Its relationship to her poetry is clear.
“El poeta”, she declared, “escarba en lo desconocido, escarba en lo que no
tiene explicación lógica … Hay un pie que está en la tierra pero con el otro
está tanteando el vacío para ver dónde lo apoya” (Sauter, 2006, 112).
The first phase of Orozco’s poetic production comprises her first two
collections, Desde lejos (1946) and Las muertes (1952), since critical opinion,
represented especially by Cristina Piña (“Estudio preliminar”; Piña, 1984, pp.
13–63), María del Carmen Tacconi (1981) and Juan Liscano (“Prólogo” to
Orozco, 1975, pp. 73–101) tends to see in Los juegos peligrosos (1962) what
the first of these calls “un hito fundamental”.

Pues en él [Piña explains] tanto como el lenguaje alcanza la maduración

definitiva y su punto más alto de tensión semántico-simbólica, se plantean
80 DONALD L. SHAW

en toda su amplitud y complejidad las experiencias metafísicas que están

en el origen de su poetizar y se ensayan todos los recursos para superar la
contingencia. (Piña, 1984, 35)

We should bear in mind also that between Los juegos peligrosos and the
next poetic collection, Museo salvaje (1974) there is a twelve-year gap,
which suggests that Los juegos represented a high point of creativity from
which Orozco was not ready to move for more than a decade. In that decade,
however, she published in 1967 the prose pieces of La oscuridad es otro sol,
which is of such crucial importance that Elba Torres Peralta largely bases
her book La poética de Olga Orozco (1987) on it and in her article “Algunas
consideraciones sobre la poética de Olga Orozco”, insists that it “contiene
todas las claves de la poesía de Olga Orozco” (Torres de Peralta, 1988,
33). Subsequently, Piña posits “un cambio fundamental en la dirección del
impulso poético” (Piña, 1984, 41), though she is less willing than Nicholson
to see the change in terms of a darker vision.
There has been little serious study of Orozco’s earliest collections apart from
Colombo’s (1983) pioneering but brief commentary on figurative language
in the first three. Piña notes that Desde lejos prefigures aspects of the poet’s
later work but emphasizes a diference of tone: here it is merely melancholic
and elegiac; later it will become more dramatic and tragically intense (Piña,
1984, 28). This is certainly true, but there is much more to be remarked upon.
Tacconi writes: “El pilar fundamental del gnosticismo es un mito que explica
el origen de la condición humana como la pérdida de un estatuto ontológico
superior a causa de una falta en un tiempo primordial” (Tacconi, 1981, 116).
If it is the case, as it undoubtedly is, that gnostic notions play an important
role in Orozco’s later work, we must notice that this “Fall” from a lost para-
dise, from innocence, from an original unity with the godhead or an Edenic
existence into a world of mere contingency dominated by time and death, has
already taken place when Orozco’s poetry begins. From the title of her first
collection, and the first poem, the poet envisages a distant realm from which
she has become separated but with which she remains in contact through
“distantes mensajeros” who, however, cannot reunite her with it:

Yo los había amado, quizás, bajo otro cielo

pero la soledad, las ruinas y el silencio eran siempre los mismos
“Lejos, desde mi colina”.  (Orozco, 2000, 5)

The landscape evoked in several of the poems of Desde lejos is essentially

symbolic. Its function is to express the fallen world visited by the mysterious
messengers who represent the poet’s residual, sub-rational, sense of loss and
longing to recover her place in the happy land where can be heard
 OROZCO AND DALTON 81

        los pasos clamorosos de una alegre estación,

el murmullo del agua sobre alguna pradera que prologaba el cielo
el canto esperanzado con que el amanecer corría a nuestro encuentro.
(ibid., 5)

The ultimate symbol of that happy land is the garden, as we know from
one of Orozco’s best-known late poems “Pavana para una infanta difunta”
(Mutaciones de la realidad) in which she reassures her dead friend and fellow
poet Alejandra Pizarnik “en el fondo de todo hay un jardín” (ibid., 150),
a belief that Orozco clung to with her conscious mind, however much her
creative, subliminal mind doubted its existence. The surroundings in Desde
lejos contrast with the garden image of hope and joy. The poems are set in
“esa región de pena” characterized by “desolados médanos” around “la casa
abandonada” (“Quienes rondan la niebla”). The elements associated with the
countryside: “cardos”, “arena”, escarcha”, “niebla”, “viento”, “polvo”, “la
crueldad del médano”, “el triste sopor de lentísimos cielos” and the like
combine to create a paysage état d’âme which figures forth

       el triste decaer de las cosas terrestres

que solamente dejan en nosotros derrumbe y soledad.
(“Flores para una estatua”, ibid., 16)

But the poet is not as yet anguished by the existential situation which
underlies the evoked landscape. Her melancholy is alleviated by two factors
in particular. One is the sense that the fall from a lost happiness is not a
breaking of all bonds with it. Repeatedly Orozco alludes to shadowy connec-
tions: “mensajeros de un mundo perdido” (“Lejos, desde mi colina”; “Flores
para una estatua”), “seres que fui”, “hijos de nuestra imagen” (“Quienes
rondan la niebla”), “pálidos seres”, “sombras” (“Un pueblo en las cornisas”),
former selves, shades of the beloved dead, mysterious beings who beckon
towards better things:

nos están conduciendo hacia el amanecer de las colinas

(“Quienes rondan la niebla”, Orozco, 2000, 6)

custodian, impasibles, nuestra eterna esperanza

(“Un pueblo en las cornisas”, ibid., 9)

or simply teach us to endure (“Donde corre la arena dentro del corazón”).

“Cortejo hacia una sombra” is Orozco’s “Non omnis moriar”. This last,
climactic poem of Desde lejos suggests that the joys and sorrows of this life
survive in another realm with which we remain mysteriously in touch:
82 DONALD L. SHAW

Desde lo más callado de nosotros emigran esos lentos cortejos

para poblar, lejanos, la inviolable comarca donde habita nuestro propio
   destino  (ibid., 33)

and somehow call to us and condition our earthly lives with the promise that
we shall yet recover a lost unity of personality. However, Tina Escaja, in one
of the rare commentaries on Orozco’s earliest work (Escaja, 1998, 33–47),
points out the ambiguous treatment of death in Desde lejos: “Por un lado,
la muerte es indicadora de la reintegración con la Unidad perdida tras el
nacimiento … Sin embargo … existe más como posibilidad que como deseo,
imponiéndose siempre el elemento de búsqueda y de misterio” (40–1).
The other factor offering consolation is love: “¡Oh amor! Toda la fuerza
oscura de la tierra está en ti” (“Entonces, cuando el amor”, Orozco, 2000,
24). But time and death are unconquerable enemies. Interspersed with the
fleeting sensations of connections with our lost selves and lost happiness,
or of the potential for reliving times of joy, are indications that only death
will reunite us with the past or that hopes are fools. “Cabalgata del tiempo”
hammers home the message that “Todo ha de ser en vano” (ibid., 28) and
“Cuando alguien se nos muere” reintroduces from “Las puertas” the symbol
of the “pesadas puertas” (ibid., 30) which shut us out from fulfilment.
These are densely written poems which yield up their layers of meaning
slowly and require much rereading. But they provide a springboard to under-
standing Orozco’s developing poetic personality and bring us into contact
with some of her recurring symbols and rather hermetic diction. In particular
the theme of death in Desde lejos prepares us for Las muertes (1952) a series
of poems on figures chiefly drawn from literary sources whose lives the intro-
ductory poem “Las muertes” tells us were exemplary in the sense that they
rose above the mere pursuit of happiness and self-gratification; they lived by
a higher law:

no conocieron ni el sueño ni la paz en los infames

lechos vendidos por la dicha  (Orozco, 2000, 37)

So when Orozco writes that “sus muertes son los exasperados rostros de
nuestra vida” (ibid., 37) she is using the word “exasperados” in its etymolog-
ical sense of “rendered harsh”. Their acceptance of their harsh destinies has
hidden meanings for us. Some of them, like Lautréamont’s Maldoror or the
biblical Prodigal Son are rebellious spirits. Others, like Dickens’s Miss Havi-
sham, or Carina, from a play by the Belgian writer Fernand Cromme­lynck,
are victims. Melville’s Bartleby is a mysterious onlooker contemplating life
impassively. Conrad’s Waitt is at once grandiose and contemptible. Each
represents a different facet of human behaviour. We, the readers, are chal-
lenged to figure out and admire the different ways in which they transcend
 OROZCO AND DALTON 83

our petty preoccupation with life’s easy satisfactions. They illustrate what
the poet calls, in the final poem of the collection, “Olga Orozco”, where she
indirectly hints at sharing in the same human category to which they belong,
her love of “la heroica perduración de toda fe” (ibid., 51).
Perhaps the easiest case to understand is that of Maldoror, the post-Byronic
decadentist figure of cosmic revolt. The poem begins with a contemptuous
invocation of the petty bourgeois reader, as someone whose “sed cabe en el
cuenco exacto de la mano”, that is, as one who has no difficulty in coming to
terms with any existential uneasiness he or she may experience, and whose
complacency in the face of life will be endangered by coming under the spell
of Maldoror. The extended image Orozco coins to ridicule the average sensual
person’s trivial dicha is characteristic of the creativity of her diction:

    ese trozo de espejo en que te encierras envuelto en un

harapo deslumbrante del cielo  (Orozco, 2000, 42)

The average reader’s happiness is seen as no more than a reflection his or her
narcissistic self-image; this the petty bourgeois wraps round him or herself
like a celestial comfort blanket though it is in fact no more than a gaudy rag.
Maldoror, by contrast, symbolizes an utterly subversive power, beyond good
and evil, lonely, tormented, luciferine, endowed with the power to overturn all
conventional values: “desertó de Dios y de los hombres” (ibid., 43). Orozco
presents us with a figure of metaphysical insurrection like those explored
by Albert Camus in L’Homme révolté, a figure whom she finds admirable in
spite of his melodramatic satanism, because of his acceptance of solitude,
effort and suffering on behalf of a pattern of beliefs and behaviour which
radically challenges our complacency about the human condition. Because
of this he is able to rise above what Orozco calls, in “Quienes rondan la
niebla” in Desde lejos, “esa región de pena” (Orozco, 2000, 6) – our reality,
if we really understand it – associated with “llanto”, “congoja”, “muros”,
“ruinas”, “desamparo”, “soledad”, “sombra” and “tinieblas”, the key words
of her (especially early) poetry. But it is important not to overlook that at the
end of “Maldoror” this cosmicly rebellious figure is seen with fear. When
Orozco writes “Él sacude mi casa”, the tone is one of apprehension. We
know that in Orozco, as in Paz, light is always a positive symbol of hope and
yea-saying. But Maldoror “me desgarra la luz” and “roe con la lepra la tela
de mis sueños”. His footstep is “una llaga sobre el rostro del tiempo” (ibid.,
43). These images of destroying a safe refuge, tearing away a protection, of
“lepra” and of “llaga”, reveal that Orozco could not embrace cosmic rebellion
and a totally nihilistic vision of life. She needed “luz” and “sueños”.
Alongside Maldoror, the figure evoked in “El extranjero” “no pedía amor
ni otro exilio en el cielo” (Orozco, 2000, 40). Faithful to himself, he asks for
neither love nor for salvation. He is a stranger in the everyday world because,
84 DONALD L. SHAW

like Christoph in “Christoph Detlev Brigge” he has achieved final anguished

insight, symbolized as reaching the most distant room

aquel en que la vida, lo mismo que una amante desechada,

   escondió entre las manos los cristales de su rostro trizado.
(ibid., 41)

One of the most illuminating articles to have been published on Orozco is

Cristina Piña’s “‘Carina’ de Olga Orozco: un análisis estilístico”. In it, Piña
defines the theme of “Carina” as “una apasionada celebración del ser humano
en su dimensión absoluta y, consecuentemente, como una negación extrema de
la contingencia” (Piña, 1983–4, 59). What this means is that, just as Bartleby
symbolizes in Las muertes “la orgullosa prescindencia”, Maldoror “el mal
sin concesiones” and Carlos Fiala “el mero ‘estar’ sin preguntas”, Carina
symbolizes “el amor absoluto traicionado” and exemplifies “el heroismo
ontológico” (ibid., 60). In contrast to her are set “las gentes”, “ellos” and, in
line 24, an implicit “nosotros” who, as Piña puts it, comprise “todos los que
aceptan la contingencia del mundo humano, frente a los cuales se yerguen
los personajes sedientes de absoluto, cuyo sacrificio Olga Orozco celebra en
este libro”(ibid., 66). The whole poem is built around this contrast, just as
“Maldoror” is built around the contrast between the complacent conformity
of the petty bourgeois and the subversion of all conventional values symbol-
ized by Maldoror. “Carina”, with its exaltation of a love which refuses all
compromise with a fallen world, what the poet calls “la cenagosa piel del
día en que me quedo” (Orozco, 2000, 38) and which merits only “asco” and
“desprecio”, is Orozco’s most strikingly romantic composition.
Las muertes, then, is important for what it tells us about Orozco’s inner
priorities at this time. The elite minority, with whom Orozco identifies herself,
the collection suggests, must be ready to transcend conventional bourgeois
moral and religious values, to rise, like Miss Havisham, even above love
itself, to accept marginalization and differentness in order to remain true to
its own ideal. Clearly such a stance can be interpreted in social terms, both
general in relation to Western society as a whole and specific in relation to the
Argentine society by which Orozco was surrounded. But Kuhnheim’s asser-
tion, on which her entire approach to Orozco is based, that “The exploration
of the representation of subjectivity in Orozco’s poetry, then, is an integral
step towards our understanding of the social and political processes of this
time period in Argentina” (Kuhnheim, 1996, 18) seems to get the emphasis
wrong.
Ten years separate Las muertes from what seems in retrospect, to be, Oroz-
co’s first fully mature collection Los juegos peligrosos (1962). Nicholson
(2002, 18) points out that it is also the first collection which uses systematic
allusions to the occult. Such allusions are present from the opening poem “La
 OROZCO AND DALTON 85

cartomancia”, in which the poetic voice addresses a “tú” who is perhaps the
poet’s non-visionary self yearning for some sort of explanation or insight,
and warns that

lo que quieres ver no puede ser mirado cara a cara

porque su luz es de otro reino.  (Orozco, 2000, 55)

The speaker’s stance is that of one possessed of a deeper vision manifesting

itself through a reading of Tarot cards. The card belonging to “tú” bears the
sign of the world, that is, of Everyman, poised between good and evil, salva-
tion and destruction. The teller announces the arrival of a mysterious Being
or force, announced by hounds whose baying marks the rending of a veil,
who will displace the normal personality of the hearer. It seems that this
Being may bring answers though they are not to be revealed at once. We sense
that the evocation of someone calling throughout life “con una llave rota,
con un anillo que hace años fue enterrado” (ibid., 55) is a reference to the
hearer’s frustrated yearning for some way of unlocking the door to cosmic
understanding. The third stanza, however, contradicts the second, suggesting
that the newly arrived Being is no more than a familiar part of the hearer’s
own personality and only symbolizes her longing for an all-embracing

poema en que todo fuera ese todo y tú

– algo más que ese todo –  (ibid., 55)

But instead of illumination, the hearer only receives “estériles vocablos”.

The new arrival seems to represent the hearer’s adverse fate which “hila
deshilando tu sábana” (ibid., 56). Its heart is a “mariposa negra”. To defend
herself she must beware of water, love and fire, which perhaps symbolize
indifference, emotional vulnerability and uncontrolled passion. At all events
love is seen negatively in terms of its potential to bring hurt and suffering
– “un brillo de lágrimas y espadas” (ibid., 56); as creating

una prisión de seda donde el amor hace sonar sus llaves de

insobornable carcelero  (ibid., 56)

and as a river of fire, which leads the teller to prophesy that only hopeless
shipwreck awaits the hearer and her partner.
Death, however, “la Emperatriz de tus moradas rotas” (Orozco, 2000, 57),
is a darker threat than unhappy love. Her power, which is greater than that of
love “sepulta la torcaza en tinieblas” (ibid., 57). Yet, strangely, in this zigzag
poem, which is not structured wholly logically, although Destiny rolls the
dice in a world implicitly of pure randomness, and death has marked down
its victim, the teller asserts that “la partida es vana”. The penultimate stanza
86 DONALD L. SHAW

returns to emphasis on the inescapable suffering that life involves: there is

no justice and no talismanic protection against the “espadas, oros y bastos”
(ibid., 57) which, as life shuffles the cards, bring with them only cruelty,
deceit and violence. But at the climax, in a clear reference to the Bethlehem
story, the Three Kings arrive (mysterious messengers from elsewhere, once
more) who will escort the hearer for the rest of her days. The key note of
the collection is this alternation of life-rejection and sybilline references to
another realm which might make sense of the here below.
The notion that there is no talisman that can protect us against life’s
onslaught is developed ironically in “Para hacer un talismán”. The poem
centres, like Vallejo’s famous “Los heraldos negros”, on the blows which life
inflicts on us. Existence is seen as “la intemperie”

donde el viento y la lluvia dejan caer su látigo en un golpe

de azul escalofrío …
donde la oscuridad abra sus madrigueras a todas las jaurías
(Orozco, 2000, 67)

the poet affects to advocate acceptance of all the harm that experience
brings as a form of ascesis, or self-training in suffering, symbolized by the
process of subjecting the heart to every kind of pain (loss of love, disenchant-
ment with former aspirations) until all hope has been extinguished. At the
end of the process the poet is called upon not to conceal but to exhibit the
heart’s wounds like a beggar his sores. In a telling image these afflictions are
compared to the sound of a spoon scraping an empty plate. Clearly there is
a sense in which all the poems we are reading in this collection correspond
to the showing off of the heart’s wounds. At this point we assume that the
message of the poem (heralded by its title) will be that this training in stoi-
cism will convert the heart into a talisman which will protect its owner from
whatever tortures life can subsequently impose. But the conclusion is ironi-
cally anticlimactic and ambiguous. Accumulated experience may steel us and
cause the heart to become “más fuerte que las armas y el mal del enemigo”
(ibid., 68), and to be ever on guard against them. But vigilance is necessary
to prevent such acquired fortitude from contaminating and even destroying
other parts of the personality.
Two of the poems in Los juegos peligrosos allude to specific blows of fate
which the poet has had to suffer. “Habitación cerrada” reflects a failed love
affair, while “Si me puedes mirar” evokes the death of the poet’s mother
which looms so large in Orozco’s prose work La oscuridad es otro sol (1967).
A prominent role in Orozco’s symbolic system is played by doors, keys and
enclosed spaces where walls or partitions hem in and limit vision. Here in
“Habitación cerrada” (Orozco, 2000, 77–79) the threshold of love’s magic
chamber, now overgrown with grass, attests to the end of the relationship and
 OROZCO AND DALTON 87

the poet seems to be asking herself how, with her ability to “mirar más lejos”
and to read with apprehension “los signos del humo”, she could fail to take on
board the experience of loss. Even if her key, like a torch which has fallen into
the water, can no longer perform its function of opening “la última puerta del
amor”, what lies behind the door, the deepest level of self-discovery, is implic-
itly attainable. The central section of the poem contrasts the poet blooming like
a flower in a hothouse, with her partner “envuelto en hielo”. Now both have
lost both the ecstasy and the pain of love, the end of which the poet associ-
ates with crime and betrayal. But just as amid life’s brutal contingencies we
can receive mysterious whispers from another realm, so the poet suggests that,
even as lifelessness – life without love – spreads out around her like ripples in
a lake into which a stone has fallen, still “algo vibra / algo palpita”. The end
of the poem accumulates images of sound: “susurro”, “zumbido”, “rumor”,
“llamado”; or a sensation of touch, “roce”, which reverberate in the poet’s
emotional emptiness (“Tú, la deshabitada”) like a voice in an empty house,
but which will still reach the consciousness of her ex-lover.
“Si me puedes mirar” similarly ends on a note of hope that in some else-
where after death (“en algún otro lado”), the poet’s mother is still trying to
play her maternal role of holding the family together and soothing her daugh-
ter’s wounded spirit. Tacconi correctly emphasizes (1981, 118) that “la poeta
ha asumido la vida como una condena desde el momento en que se separó
de su madre”. The idea of a Fall, of an exile from paradise, of compulsion to
remain in the sinister “bosque alucinado”, the dark “galerías de este mundo”
where the poet can only ask despairingly:

¿qué gran planeta aciago deja caer su sombra sobre todos los
años de mi vida?  (Orozco, 2000, 69)

are all subsumed in the loss of the mother-figure. The poem begins with the
image of the poet tearing down the darkness of death like a curtain which
separates her from her mother, but in vain. She remains cut off, forced to
remain in the here below, where a series of images: “estatua de arena”,
“puñado de cenizas”, “los pies enredados … sin poder avanzar” convey her
sense that without her mother’s support, her personality is crumbling and that
she is held back from moving on with her life “acaso porque no supe aprender
a perderte” (ibid., 68). The centre of the poem begs for her mother’s help and
evokes the happy past, which now contrasts with the present “en que roen
su rostro los enormes agujeros” (ibid., 69). Returning to a favourite image
the poet asks: “¿Dónde buscar ahora la llave sepultada de mis días?” (ibid.,
69) and alludes afresh to the dark force (“alguien que se enmascara”) which
threatens her day by day. Extending the image, she speaks of guarding a door
which her birth could not close, a clear reference to the survival of mysterious
connections with a prior existence. But her mother’s voice is missing from
88 DONALD L. SHAW

the chorus of messages from that pre-birth past. Yet the poet believes that her
mother is still engaged with her life.
The final poem of Los juegos peligrosos, “Desdoblamiento en la máscara
de todos”, ends with one of Orozco’s most often quoted professions of faith.
Once more it begins with an evocation of a “tierra de nadie” and a “sendero
que no sé adónde da” (but clearly it leads to the mysterious realm). A succes-
sion of characteristically ambiguous images expresses the pilgrimage of the
human soul in search of “una tierra extranjera” from which one can hear
“un lenguage de ciegos” and leads to the suggestion that the human situa-
tion which the poem evokes is universal. We are each of us “el rehén de una
caída”, part of “una lluvia de piedras desprendida del cielo”; if not trailing
clouds of glory from an earlier life, as Wordsworth wished to believe, at least
participants in a the Passion Story of a gnostic lesser God:

Cualquier hombre es la versión en sombras de un Gran Rey

  herido en su costado.
Despierto en cada sueño con el sueño con que Alguien sueña el
  mundo.
Es víspera de Dios.
Está uniendo en nosotros sus pedazos.  (Orozco, 2000, 85)

When Orozco asserted to Demetrio Torres Fierro that “hay en mi poesía una
búsqueda de Dios” (Torres Fierro, 1986, 202) it is this “vision of spiritual
reintegration” (Nicholson, 2002, 35) that she was referring to. She herself
told Sauter:

Yo tengo fé, tengo fé en la perduración de mi alma en el más allá, en que

hay una unidad de alma, de que todos somos uno en definitiva … Para mí
lo contrario de la vida no es la muerte, creo que la muerte está entretejida
con la vida … queda lo que se llama muerte que no es lo contrario, que es
una continuidad impensable porque no se sabe cómo es, en definitiva.
(Sauter, 2006, 115)

The great question hanging over the rest of her poetry is whether this ever
represented more than an aspiration.
We stand in need of a systematic study of the often contradictory imagery
and symbolism connected with this aspect of her poetry. So far, the best
account of Orozco’s use of metaphor in her first three collections is Stella
Maris Colombo’s Metáfora y cosmovisión en la poesía de Olga Orozco (1983)
which attempts to link Orozco’s often long, complex, extended metaphors to
her cosmovisión, which Colombo sees as less ambiguous and less negative
than other critics. What Colombo shows is that Orozco stands at the oppo-
site extreme from Borges in regard to her use of metaphor, in the sense that,
 OROZCO AND DALTON 89

while Borges came to advocate “poor”, that is, familiar, metaphors, Orozco
uses complex, original metaphors which “forman cadenas o se imbrican unas
dentro de otras, en un desarrollo que no reconoce más límites que los de la
estrofa … e incluso, la totalidad de la composición” (Colombo, 1983, 15).
Colombo’s argument rest on the contention that Orozco’s metaphors are not,
as it were, simply “poetic”, that is, decorative or aesthetically pleasing, but
that they are essentially functional and meaningful: “vehiculizadoras de los
núcleos temáticos fundamentales” (ibid., 24). Especially in Los juegos peli-
grosos, which she regards as Orozco’s first fully mature collection, Colombo
asserts that

los temas vertebradores de los conjuntos metafóricos sean los enigmas

de la existencia – la dualidad cuerpo/alma, la multiplicidad del yo, los
peligros del mundo, el amor, el recuerdo, la soledad – los misterios de la
muerte y del más allá”  (ibid., 30)

In this way by studying the meaning of a number of selected metaphors,

symbols and key words (“polva”, “sombre”, “musgo”, “muro”, “puerta”,
“viaje”, “rueda”, among others), Colombo is able to explore Orozco’s existen-
tial outlook. But her insistence on the ideas that Orozco’s figurative languge
is essentially content-packed, “predicativa, portadora de significación” (ibid.,
49) and in general that “la metáfora abre una nueva dimensión de la realidad”
(ibid., 12) eludes the more difficult question of how far such language is
charged with “goce estético”. The whole question of the contrast between
Borges’s theory and practice of metaphor, and Orozco’s, cries out for further
study.
In his review of Museo salvaje (1974) Marcelo Pichón Rivière writes that
it is a “canto de amor al cuerpo humano” and links Orozco with Surrealism,
not because of any acceptance on her part of automatic writing, for example,
but because she reveals herself to be “continuamente atenta a los llamados del
inconsciente, a esas bestias de su naturaleza interior” (Pichón Rivière, 1974,
68). Piña, more cogently, modifies Riviere’s judgement, recognizing that,
rather than being a “canto de amor” Museo salvaje conveys the impression of
a love–hate relationship of Orozco with her body and describes the collection
as a “minuciosa y exasperada exploración de la propia ‘envoltura terrestre’,
que tanto como enfrenta a la poeta con su terrible y drámatica limitación, le
revela su naturaleza de microcosmos y, por tanto, su sacralidad” (Piña, 1984,
41). Museo salvaje contains eleven poems and six pieces of poetic prose,
chiefly dedicated to ascribing symbolic meaning to the functions of different
aspects of the body, as follows: “Mis bestias” (prose): the viscera; “Lugar
de residencia”: the heart; “El continente sumergido”: the head; “Esfinges
suelen ser”: the hands; “Parentesco animal con lo imaginario” (prose): the
hair; “En la rueda solar”: the eyes; “El jardín de las delicias” (prose): the
90 DONALD L. SHAW

sex; “Plumas para unas alas”: the skin; “En el bosque sonoro” (prose): the
hearing; “El sello personal”: the feet; “Animal que respira” (prose): the respi-
ratory system; “Tierras en erosión”: the tissues; “Mi fósil”: the skeleton;
“Duro brillo, mi boca” (prose): the mouth; and “Corre sobre los muelles”:
the blood. The overarching theme of the collection is the way in which the
body – “este saco de sombras cosido a mis dos alas” (“Lamento de Jonás”
Orozco, 2000, 91) – stands ambiguously between the desert, the shipwreck,
the exile, the broken stair, the looming abyss (“Mi fósil”), which refer to
this life, and the poet’s unchanging hope of a salida, an “acceso a las altas
transparencias” (“Duro brillo, mi boca”) which will mark the overcoming of
her fallen state. In this collection the body and its functions always remind
the poet that she is in a permanent state of being “in between”. Perhaps
the most bitterly ironic of these poems, given that it implies the word, the
poetic Ding an sich, is the prose poem “Duro brillo, mi boca”. Here there is
no triumphant exaltation of “palabras que son flores que son frutos que son
actos”, as in Paz’s famous “Himno entre ruinas” (Paz, 1988a, 306), in which
poetry may redeem a fallen world, but only a question whether from “las
canteras del verbo, las roncas fundiciones de la poesía” (Orozco, 2000, 107)
can be extracted a means of access to that which will transcend both question
and answer. The implicit conclusion is, as ever, ambiguous. The mouth, the
poetic voice, is “este oráculo mudo” (ibid., 107), always promising a poten-
tial answer (oráculo) but never able to articulate it (mudo).
For Borges in “El Sur” (Ficciones) the cat is a “magical” animal because
it lives in a perpetual present and unlike human beings has no sense of time.
For Orozco, her cat, Berenice, was magical in a different way, in line with the
ancient Egyptian belief in the cat as a sacred animal “misteriosa incarnación
de lo trascendente” as Piña puts it (1984, 46). In Cantos a Berenice (1977),
the cat becomes a living symbol of Orozco’s will to believe in another, higher
dimension which makes sense of this life. Most poems, as we know, are struc-
tured as climactic processes, so that it is often useful to read back from the
end. In “Canto 4” the climactic line is “Pero ¿qué fuiste entonces, antes de
ser ahora?” (Orozco, 2000, 114). We are being invited to accept the idea of
the transmigration of souls. Berenice is presented as having brought across
time a message from the other side:

Que eras, por otra parte, la emisaria de una zona remota

donde el conocimiento pacta con el silencio
y atraviesa los siglos arrastrando como boa de plumas la nostalgia,
lo atestiguaba ya tu ser secreto,
vuelto en contemplación hacia las nubes de la sabiduría,
suspendida en tus ojos como una lluvia de oro,
más acá del recuerdo, más allá del olvido.  (ibid., 114)
 OROZCO AND DALTON 91

As always, the diction is ambiguous. As Liscano asserts “En el caso de Olga

Orozco hay siempre una actitud sacerdotal antigua, mágica, de femineidad
esencial, oracular y sibilino” (1983, 89). “Conocimiento” and “sabiduría”
tempt us with the implication that there is a knowable answer to the enigma.
But the “knowledge” has made a pact with silence and the wisdom is (as
before) mute, merely imputed to the cat’s gaze, and even then situated
vaguely somewhere between what is recalled and what is forgotten. In “Si
me puedes mirar” (Los juegos peligrosos) it had been the poet herself who
stood sentinel at the door to the beyond. Now it is Berenice, “con tu aspecto
de estar siempre sentada vigilando el umbral” (ibid., 115), but neither of
them can unlock the door and cross the threshold.
As we read and reread Orozco’s poetry we see that each time she approaches
an affirmation she draws back. Everything is governed by “acaso”, “tal vez”
or “como si”. Unlike Borges, who could contemplate reality with serenity,
recognizing that if there are hints of a mysterious pattern or order underlying
its apparent randomness, a secret cosmos behind the chaos, a catalogue at the
centre of the Library of Babel, we are not programmed to perceive or under-
stand it, Orozco clings to the hope of a cosmic explanation. As a result, she
uses a “language that works back and forth upon itself and never quite rests
in closure” (Kuhnheim, 1996, 80). The same critic goes on:

her poetic subject is constituted in a dialectical process in which the self

is both subject, in control, articulating its desires, and object, at the mercy
of laws and forces beyond her control. She may be consistently frustrated,
her chance of success negated, but not with self-destruction of annihilation
as a result.  (ibid., 81).

This is a cogent statement of the case, but there is room to doubt whether at
the deepest level what is being described is in fact a dialectical process, for
the term implies progress, and that does not seem to occur. As in the case of
Unamuno, Orozco’s ambivalence is both the theme and the inspiration of her
poetry, and in the same way, to have resolved the spiritual dilemma in which
she found herself trapped would have blocked the fount of her creativity. At
one level, she longs for an answer. At another level, she knows the answer but
cannot accept it. At a third level she needs to cling to the question in order
to go on writing. Dilemmas of this kind, we have already suggested, are not
normally resolved; we grow out of them. They tend to remain at the back of
the mind, but cease to torment us. Writers, however, as we know, for example,
from the case of Azorín in Spain, run a great risk if they resolve their deepest
problems. Their work may never be the same.
This perhaps helps to explain why two already familiar sets of forces
confront one another in Cantos a Berenice. On the one hand, we have
Berenice herself and all that she symbolizes in terms or secret insight trans-
92 DONALD L. SHAW

mitted across the centuries, with which the poet wills herself to identify,
presenting Berenice as an alter ego. On the other hand, as both Kuhnheim
and Nicholson recognize, death and silence combine to contradict any posi-
tive message which the insight might bring. One of the most gnostic poems
of Cantos a Berenice is no. VI, which at first sight seems to be directed at
Berenice herself, but which on closer inspection reveals itself as directed
at the imperfect lessser God or demiurge responsible for the universe and
the human condition. The poem opens with the recognition that the deity in
question could simply have relapsed into forgetfulness of his creation and
allowed himself to be submerged in the sea of vague memories of other
possible divinities existing in man’s collective subconsciousness. But instead
this lesser Creator dug out of his stock of “sombras congeladas” (formerly
existent beings) the components of the black cat Berenice, “ese saco de carbón
constelado (Orozco, 2000, 116), who was then thrown into the on-going life
of this planet, envisaged as a moving train. The gnostic element in the poem
resides in the unexpected climax: Berenice, on being sent into our world:

en algún lugar dejó un agujero por el que te aspiran

y al que debes volver.  (ibid., 116)

How are we to understand this strange affirmation? It seems that the creation
of Berenice in the intermediate realm between this world and the world of
ultimate unity with the highest Godhead (the final gnostic aspiration), and her
being sent to earth, created what we should now call a “wormhole” linking
the intermediate realm and the abode of final unity. This being said, the final
words of the poem are baffling in the extreme: “un agujero por el que te
aspiran” seems to imply that, almost as a reward for having created Berenice
and sent her as a messenger to our planet, the demiurge will be drawn up
through the wormhole to the lost gnostic home of bliss, equivalent to the
Christan paradise. That the verb “aspiran” is in the indicative and not the
subjunctive puts this into the category of a statement of fact, but the use of
the present and not the future tense could imply a cyclic, repeated process. Is
this what we are to make of “y al que debes volver”? In its characteristically
sybilline way, the end of the poem appears to suggest that that the demiurge
(and hence his creation?) is subject to a cyclic pattern of absorption into the
Godhead and return to the intermediate realm, just as Berenice is subject to
an endless succession of transmigrations.
We cannot fail to notice that in Canto VIII, although Berenice is presented
as a sort of messenger, she herself is plainly not aware of the import of her
message. Thus she too questions certain objects “por si acaso sabían”. The
paradox of this situation is intensified in Mutaciones de la realidad (1979) and
can be seen in the contradictory reactions of both Kuhnheim and Nicholson
to the collection. On the one hand Kuhnheim refers to “an impasse, a ‘failure’
 OROZCO AND DALTON 93

full of possibilities” and insists that “Orozco’s negativity is an opening, an

opportunity to hear the unspoken, the marginalized, the voice ‘del otro lado’”
(Kuhnheim, 1996, 26). But at the same time she is compelled to write that
“Closing on a note of failure is a constant in Mutaciones de la realidad.
Every poem is an attempt at some kind of union or conjunction, each time
unachieved” (ibid., 32). Nicholson (2002, 68) echoes the same thought. But
the only way in which the impasse is full of possibilities is to the extent that
it goes on generating moving poems about the impasse itself. Nevertheless,
the opportunity to hear a voice from the other side is never realized. It is
always merely a hope. As Orozco admitted to Sauter “no encuentro nunguna
respuesta” (Sauter, 2006, 126)
One of the most original poems in Mutaciones de la realidad is “Objetos
al acecho”. Unintentionally it develops a theme already used by Pacheco in
poem 10 of El reposo del fuego II:
   los objetos
imponen su misterio, se remansan,
nos miran fijamente, nos permiten
luchar porque no avancen ni se adueñen
de nuestro mundo  (Pacheco, 1980b, 46)

Orozco, in her poem, senses in familiar domestic objects in her house, her
symbolic refuge. They threaten the “pequeña certeza cotidiana”, her hard-to-
hold-on-to feeling of existential security which her home symbolizes, as “Los
objetos adquieren una intención secreta” (Orozco, 2000, 148). The evil force
which is never far from her mind recruits her household things into a hostile
conspiracy to destroy her fragile spiritual peace. They threaten to drive her
from the “irreconocible paraíso / recuperado a medias cada día” to the abyss
of despair. They illustrate afresh the notion that behind the mansedumbre
of our surroundings lie in wait what in “Pavana para una infanta difunta”
Orozco calls “los invasores”. Apart from “Pavana” the most important poem
in Mutaciones is “Densos velos te cubren, poesía”. Its theme, like Paz’s “La
poesía” in Libertad bajo palabra, is poetry as a form of cognition:
Algo con que alumbrar las sílabas dispersas de un código perdido
para poder leer en estas piedras mi costado invisible …
… un indicio como de un talismán que me revierta la división y
  la caída.  (Orozco, 2000, 154)

And as in Paz this is simply a mystique, an act of faith not based on any
evidence outside the (possibly wishful) intuition of the poet. In the first two
lines of the poem, Orozco uses the images of “este volcán que hay debajo
de mi lengua” and “esta espuma azul que hierve y cristaliza en mi cabeza”
(ibid., 153) to express her understanding of the fact that poetry does not
94 DONALD L. SHAW

emerge from voluntary speech-acts or from the conscious intellect, but from
mysterious regions of the subliminal mind which cannot be pinned down and
come (as if!) from another world. She presents herelf as desperately seeking
from the poetic imagination “una señal” which will intimate an “eclipse” of
time (which we know is one of her two great enemies, the other being death)
or, using the same image as Paz, open a fissure in the “muralla” which bars
the way to true insight. But the third and fourth stanzas recognize that no
illumination comes. Next comes a reference to Delphi, the site of an oracle,
where the Pythia, the priestess, inspired by vapours issuing from the earth,
uttered prophecies from the other world of the gods. Orozco clearly wishes
to identify herself with a modern Pythia. But the Delphic oracle has been lost
and she cannot “asir el signo”; its “astillas de palabras” (ibid., 154) dissolve
into nothingness.
And yet, and yet: some cognitive poetic intuition may emerge like an island
from the waves or a boat from the sea-mist. The climax of the poem returns
to the idea that the poet’s hands have been cut off so that she cannot write,
her eyes dazzled so that she cannot see, and her hearing drowned out by
noise. Hence her words, far from uttering hidden truths, are no more than “un
puñado de polvo”. This is a deeply pathetic poem, like some of Unamuno’s
in which he cries out against the silence of God in the face of his entreaties.
Similarly “Esbozos frente a un modelo” in La noche a la deriva develops the
idea expressed in Orozco’s “La poesía” that the poet is always trying desper-
ately to “traducir un texto cuya clave cambia de código permanentemente”
(Orozco, 2000, 236). Here she is trying to reproduce a “model” from mate-
rials which are ever-changing. And yet a mysterious inner force compels her
to keep trying. We notice the ambiguity: the model exists, but she is denied
a clear, unchanging vision of it, and even then putting it into words would be
hard. Like Borges, she is in a double bind: on the one hand the model is, as
he would say, in a favourite word, “inasible”; on the other, language is inad-
equate to describe it. The poem accumulates symbols of frustration: “busco
a tientas”, “una engañosa huella en el tapiz”, “un cuenco … a la espera de
que se precipite la visión”, the model is “imposible y cruel, que cambia de
figura y de color cunado lo rozo” (ibid., 162–3). But (as usual, there is a but)
she has to go on with the poet’s duty to try to say the unsayable.
Another important and often quoted poem is from Mutaciones: “Pavana
para una infanta difunta”, which is addressed to Orozco’s friend and fellow
poet Alejandra Pizarnik, who committed suicide in 1972. Paradoxically it is
Orozco’s most positive poem from this period and contains the line which, as
she told Alicia Dujovne in 1978 (Piña, 1984, 273), became almost a mantra
for her, “frente a cada desastre”: “en el fondo de todo hay un jardín” (Orozco,
2000, 150): a consoling vision of an Edenic, prelapsarian locus amoenus like
Paz’s “otra orilla” or Cortázar’s “yonder”. We recall that Parra makes use
of the same image (“andar por los jardines”) in “Cartas a una desconocida”
 OROZCO AND DALTON 95

and “El peregrino” (Poemas y antipoemas) but in the latter, he writes with
typical bitter realism that “el jardín se cubre de moscas”. While in Orozco’s
evocation of a beautiful elsewhere there grows “la flor azul del sueño de
Novalis”, in Parra’s garden what grows is “una rosa llenas de piojos” (“Oda
a unas palomas”, Parra, 1969, 33). Near the root of the contrast between
these two contemporary Spanish American poets are their different concep-
tions of poetry and its power to scrutinize the arcane. For Orozco the possi-
bility always appears to remain that somehow poetry can pierce the cloud of
unknowing, while for Parra it may well simply be “un espejismo del espíritu”
(“Los vicios del mundo moderno”, ibid.). To look at Orozco and Parra side
by side as poets is to understand more clearly what each of them stands for
in the recent history of Spanish American poetry. But what links both of them
to the modern cultural crisis is their joint sense of the “abyss”: the spiritual
emptiness surrounding Western humanity.
As in almost all of Orozco’s major poems, what strikes us is the extraordi-
nary richness of the figurative language, in complete contrast to the relative
paucity of it in mainline “Colloquial” poetry. Practically every line of “Pavana”
contains an image, some of them extremely challenging (this is uncompro-
misingly “high” literature), connected to the diction of the Vanguard and to
Borges’s early insistence on the metaphor as the “elemento primordial” of
poetry. The poem begins with a metaphor, that of Alejandra as a “centinela”
which links her to Orozco, who had so described herself in “Si me puedes
mirar” (Los juegos peligrosos) and to Neruda, who considers himself a “vigía”
in “Sistema sombrío” in the first section of Residencia en la tierra. Alejandra
too stood guard, presumably at the threshold of the “other side”, but though
clear-eyed she was weaponless, defenceless against the fast multiplying horde
of “invasores insolubles”: negative intuitions which attacked her when she
faced the blank page and unravelled to the very end the fabric of her person-
ality (explored herself in depth). So she “fell through the crack” into the
darkness of death. The next lines assert the difference between “closing one’s
eyes” (relying on intuition) and “opening” them (viewing reality with the
conscious mind). The first opens the mind to the entire universe, presumably
including the “other side”; the second brings awareness of the uncrossable
border between the rational and the intuitive realms and leaves us on this side
in “la intemperie”. To try to explore that border takes you nowhere. Alejandra
is now presented as sleeplessly exploring the inconsistency of reality (partly
contingent, partly mysterious) like a projectile piercing through obscurity,
trying to understand herself (and her ontological situation) but tempted by
suicide, seen as an ugly but lovable angel of death. Are there spells to offset
the pain of having been born into the here-below? Can one bribe messengers
to reveal the future (that awaits us after death?)? Now comes the assertion of
the existence of the garden and Novalis’s flower, but it is a cruel and treach-
erous bloom and to pluck it involves death.
96 DONALD L. SHAW

The centre of the poem expresses figuratively Alejandra’s heroic struggle

to cut the flower and make it part of herself, despite the risk. A succession of
metaphors of effort and sacrifice culminates in images of the devastating effect
of poetic activity in which even the evocation of dawn, the symbol of hope
and renewal, is bought at the price of the poet’s blood and in which Alejandra
shares with Orozco a despairing sense of “la inanidad de la palabra” (Orozco,
2000, 150). As we approach the end of the poem, the light of hope and the
potentiality of finding meaning through writing are destroyed. Alejandra is
seen as a traveller begging to pass through the door to the other side but
prevented from doing so by symbolic forces: her great shadow which seeks
another shadow, perhaps a reference to her life overshadowed by insight and
longing for death (but is the implication that suicide may have closed the
door?); her sense of a world which is perhaps totally random and hence
existing under the outspread wings of a hideous insect, symbolic of the oppo-
site of divine providence; or the sea of annihilation in which all is shipwreck.
But the poem’s climax repeats oracularly that she will find her garden and
closes with the words of Christ to the daughter of Jairus “Get up, my child”,
just as previously in “El pródigo” (Las muertes) she had written of a voice
bidding the Prodigal Son: “Levántate. Es la hora en que serás eterno” (ibid.,
51). The words in each case testify to a profound will to believe, almost (but
not quite) indistinguishable from belief itself.
This groping after a response from the Other Side remains the central
theme of Orozco’s last two poetic collections, La noche a la deriva (1983)
and En el revés del cielo (1987). Piña, who remains perhaps Orozco’s most
insightful critic, suggests that in the first of these Orozco finds “una recon-
ciliación con el propio destino” (Piña, 1984, 50). But this seems more than
dubious. “Por mucho que nos duela”, on the death of a friend, is full of
familiar negative imagery:

Mis ojos sólo registran el ardor de una inmersión sin fin en el vacío
  inexorable.
Mis palabras son como vidrios transparentes trizados contra un muro
(Orozco, 2000, 183)

“El presagio” contains the sinister symbol “un gran pájaro negro” falling
onto the plate (presumably intended to hold the bread of life). The poem
reaches its climax with the assertion that there is no “escondite posible”
(from anguished insight). One of the most memorable poems in En el revés
del cielo is “Catecismo animal” which begins with a series of frightening
images descriptive of the human condition, typical of which is the one
which describes us as “Suspendidos en medio del derrumbe por obra del
error” (ibid., 204) – the error of a gnostic demiurge. Only obscure hints are
vouchsafed to us of a God completing himself in his creation. The adjec-
 OROZCO AND DALTON 97

tives which follow – “oculta”, “secreta”, “perdido”, “inalcanzable” – along

with the telling line “Pero no hay quien divise el centelleo de una sola fisura
para poder pasar” (ibid., 204), express afresh the poet’s sense of inability to
reach the “otra orilla”. The succession of verbs as the poem nears its climax:
“reclamo”, “pido”, “abogo”, “apelo” similarly convey her revulsion against
an existence in which there is neither rest, nor permanency, nor insight; but
only death releases us from mere contingency.
Orozco’s poetry, which mainly takes the form of psychic monologues,
illustrates mankind’s yearning for transcendence in a post-Christian age. It
reminds us afresh that, like fiction (we think of the symbolic interpretation
of Asturias’s El Señor Presidente and Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, of Roa Bastos’s
Hijo de hombre, of Lezama Lima’s Paradiso, Marechal’s Adán Buenosayres,
Arguedas’s Los ríos profundos and Donoso’s El lugar sin límites, to mention
only obvious examples of major novels with deep religious undertones), one
area of poetry in Spanish America in the second half of the twentieth century
continued to present the cultural crisis of the West as basically connected
with the loss of spiritual values. Sauter (2006, 254) associates Orozco with
Mallarmé and Paz in the sense that all three are to some degree “visonary”
poets, with part of their roots in Surrealism. In her interview with Sauter,
Orozco denies the link, but accepts that some of her dream-like imagery
might be similar to some Surrealist diction. The really common element, she
claims, is the will to believe in parallel realities (Sauter, 2006, 133). This
remains the key to her work.

Roque Dalton (El Salvador, 1935–75)

Orozco’s poetry is essentially concerned with vision and not with circum-
stance. Thus it is at the opposite end of the poetic spectrum in the 1960s
in Spanish America that we find Roque Dalton, an aggressively Marxist,
revolutionary poet, whose allegiances illustrate rather well the contradictory
imperative facing poets in the years corresponding to his creative period. In
the cases of Neruda and Vallejo, it can be argued that their commitment to
Marxism was at once philosophical and sentimental, arising, we suspect, as
much from the private psychological need expressed in the first two sections
of Residencia en la tierra of Neruda and Los heraldos negros of Vallejo as
from political involvement. They were not active revolutionaries engaged in
the armed struggle, despite the fact that Vallejo suffered brief imprisonment
to some extent because of his outlook, and Neruda participated in non-violent
political activity and spent time in hiding and in exile. Rather their allegiance
to Marxism illustrates their need for a self-transcendent myth. Dalton, on the
other hand, was the real thing. He believed in insurrection, went for training
in Vietnam, and in the end lost his life in the struggle. He was not alone;
98 DONALD L. SHAW

there are, of course, other examples of politically active poets, notably Javier
Heraud in Peru, as we see from references in Cisneros (cf. 137 and 154 below).
But Dalton is the supreme example of the genuinely revolutionary poet. As a
result the bulk of criticism has tended to concentrate on his compromiso. This
is clearly his most important contribution to Spanish American poetry in the
last half of the twentieth century. But it tends to obscure the fact that there
are really two Daltons, one of whom is a highly hermetic, post-Vanguardist
poet. This aspect of his work has been rather neglected. It poses challenging
problems to the reader and stands in need of further critical attention. The
other Dalton is the revolutionary, highly explicit poet, whose work stands at
the opposite pole from that of the practitioners of “critical” poetry. It is this
Dalton who finally won out. In the composite interview (1966 and 1969)
printed in Recopilación de textos sobre Roque Dalton (García Verzi, 1986),
Dalton contemptuously dismisses most of the non engagé Spanish American
poetry of his time as conformist, ideologically debilitated, full of petty bour-
geois prejudice and basically inoffensive. By this time he had gone through
a period of admiration for Neruda, but had largely sloughed off his influ-
ence, while remaining a devotee of Vallejo. “Me siento cerca”, he asserted,
“de poetas latinoamericanos como Juan Gelman, Enrique Lihn, Fernández
Retamar, Ernesto Cardenal” (ibid., 62). Like the last of these he had found
collage, anecdote, references to actual flesh and blood people and a certain
informality of diction essential to the kind of deeply committed poetry he
felt urgently called upon to write by his experience of politico-social condi-
tions in his country and elsewhere in a Latin America dominated by North
American economic, political and cultural imperialism. At the same time,
while accepting the efficacy of poesía coloquial, he recognized its inherent
danger of falling into banality. A comparison of some of his best work with
some of what we find, for example in Robert Márquez’s Latin American
Revolutionary Poetry (1974) underlines the point.
It is, as is often the case, instructive to glance at influences (or poetic
preferences). Apart from Vallejo and Neruda (and the impact of prose writers,
such as Joyce and Faulkner, plus the cinema), Dalton mentions three French
poets, Henri Michaux, Saint-John Perse and Jacques Prevert. We notice imme-
diately the contrast with Paz’s regular references to Rimbaud and Mallarmé,
for example, among so many others. But this is not the only illuminating
contrast. If in fact Paz’s work formed a bridge between his generation and
later ones, it is essentially because of his optimistic conviction that at its
best a poem is an “acto”, an active force which can alter people’s outlook,
change their mentality. This is something in which all committed poets must
believe. But this did not mean for Paz that poetry must commit to an ideology.
Although he believed in the cognitive power of poetry, expressed through its
imagery in the widest sense of the word, that is, in poetry as a special form of
truth-telling, it is clear from his chapter on imagery in El arco y la lira (Paz,
 OROZCO AND DALTON 99

1986a) that he saw poetry as exploratory of reality, not as declaratory. The

order in reality, which he often identified with the identity of opposites, was
something mysterious and hidden, and language was sometimes a barrier to
finding it. This cannot be the case in Marxist, revolutionary poetry, which is
why Paz, after a few poems connected with the impact on him of the Spanish
Civil War, abandoned engagé poetry. Much of the poetry we immediately
tend to associate with Dalton is not exploratory. One of his most important
and revealing statements is that in which he affirms “lo que espero seguir
siendo hasta morir: un poeta revolucionario que tiene sí verdadera conciencia
de los problemas de su tiempo y que sabe positivamente que ha encontrado
una verdad, esta vez sí, definitiva” (García Verzi, 1986, 39). In Marxism,
that is, like Vallejo and Neruda amongst others, he found an alternative, non-
supernatural pattern of belief to offset his earlier Catholic convictions.
What Borges rejected completely, in favour of a mere “preference”, a
distant hope that some positive ethical principle might just be present amid
the chaos of the universe; what Paz, influenced by Indian thought, tried to
find in his version of holism; what Cisneros found in a return to Christianity;
what Pacheco does not seem to have found; Dalton found in Marxism. At
bottom, it not only offered the hope of social transformation; it counter-
acted the notion of human existence as mere contingency, without ultimate
meaning. For many people the crunch comes with the need to contemplate
death, which to Borges usually meant simple oblivion. We only need to
consider the contortions of figures like Unamuno or Orozco to cling to belief,
or reread, for example, Pacheco’s “Épocas” (from Siglo pasado), to perceive
examples. Marxism seemed to offer a way out. From a bourgeois point of
view, a weakness of Dalton’s poetics, like that of Cardenal, is that, despite
his ironic cast of mind, he could not at first bring himself to contemplate
seriously the possibility that this “definitive truth” might be no more than a
mental construct which, as Pring-Mill points out approvingly of Neruda “le
ha permitido reducir el caos de la experiencia humana a una visión orde-
nada del ser y del existir” (Pring-Mill, 1979, 264). Dalton’s mind-set was
for a long time that of a man converted from the Catholic dogmatism of his
youth to Marxist dogmatism, albeit mitigated by humour, irony and cari-
cature, including self-caricature. Later, as we shall see, his views evolved
somewhat.
Dalton published an early, uncompromising declaration of principles in
1963, under the title of “Poesía y militancia en América Latina”. By this
time he had published La ventana en el rostro (1961), the first, incomplete,
edition of El turno del ofendido (1962) and El mar (1962). Los testimonios
(1964) and what was intended to become Textos y poemas muy especiales/
personales (a collection which has not survived as such) were in prepara-
tion. In his essay, Dalton makes a number of assertions which are essential
to the understanding of much of his past and future work. It is clear that he
100 DONALD L. SHAW

found himself caught between two not quite compatible standpoints. One
was the traditional view that the creative imagination was cognitive, that it
“otorga un conocimiento primario de lo real” (Dalton, 1963, 15). It puts man
in contact with “eternal” and “transcendental” reality. Alongside this was
the view that the ultimate justification for poetry was its formal beauty, its
power to transmit aesthetic pleasure. Without this, Dalton affirmed, it is not
poetry. The other standpoint is more interesting to us. It is that beauty is not
a fixed concept, but varies according to historical circumstances and is rooted
in social considerations.
This last notion allows Dalton to try to conciliate the standard view of
poetry with his inner imperatives: to endow his poetry with “contenido
nacional” and with revolutionary ideology (what he chooses to call “expresar
la vida” [Dalton, 1963, 12]), as well as creating beautiful verbal objects. Hence
Dalton defines the poet as a man deeply aware of his “profundo conocimiento
de la vida” and, at the same time, of his “propia libertad imaginativa” (15).
The poet must live intensely and observe minutely the life and society of his
country. He must nourish his work with “la realidad nacional” in order to
transform the latter from a revolutionary perspective; he must understand and
incorporate into his own work its cultural tradition; and finally he must take
an active part in revolutionary activity and the dissemination of a “scientific”
Marxist-Leninist outlook. However, this must not restrict his poetic activity
to the creation of a “mero instrumento ético” (15), that is, to mere militancy
and propaganda. His poetry must be artistically valid, though opening itself
to every aspect of life, from the struggle of the proletariat to the beauty
of colonial architecture, to sexuality, to childhood imagination and even to
prophecy. In practice, it may on occasion descend to mere agit-prop verse,
but without losing sight of its “civic duties” (18), it should always strive for
“expressive form”.
In all of this, the opening of the essay reveals, Dalton was uneasily aware
that what he was advocating could be interpreted as an attempt to concil-
iate a Marxist vision of poetry, as an essentially social activity marked by
accessible diction, with survivals of a bourgeois, traditional (in reality post-
Vanguardist) view of it, as a source of beauty and abiding truths sometimes
expressed challengingly. This dichotomy was to dominate the bulk of his
poetry in a way which much of the criticism of it, obsessed with his compro-
miso, fails to bring out adequately. Six years later, in a well-known interview
with Mario Benedetti in Los poetas comunicantes, Dalton implied that he had
resolved the dichotomy in his outlook in 1963, “debido a la insistencia en lo
nacional” and thanks to a more mature political outlook. “Esto”, he affirmed,
“me obligó a ir cargando mi poesía de anécdotas, de personajes cada vez
más individualizados.” This had led to an increase in narrative elements and
finally to “mi poesía más ideológica, más cargada de ideas” (Benedetti, 1972,
19–20).
 OROZCO AND DALTON 101

Let us glance briefly at a few poems which express Dalton’s view of poetry
and the poet’s task. We may begin with “Arte poética” from El turno del
ofendido (1962) published when the poet was twenty-seven. It is one of the
clearest examples of Vallejo’s influence on Dalton. “El hombre” in the first
section of the poem is the “Hombre humano” of so many of Vallejo’s poems
from Los heraldos negros onwards. He is viewed with deep compassion, and
seen as the innocent, suffering victim of both a human condition and a social
situation which is unintelligibly hostile:

El hombre usa sus antiguos desastres como un espejo …

ese hombre recoge los hirientes residuos de su día
acongojadamente los pone cerca del corazón
y se hunde …
en sus profundas habitaciones solitarias.

cree que la cama es un sepulcro diario …  (Dalton, 1983, 63)

This is the negative Vallejan vision which the Peruvian poet’s acceptance of
Marxism at the conscious level was not enough fully to overcome. Thus the
contrast between the Vallejo of Trilce and Poemas humanos and the benign,
confident, comradely Neruda of the Odas elementales is very pronounced.
The truer Marxist in this case is Neruda, since the doctrinaire believer in this
creed must regard existential pessimism and the cultural crisis of the West
as illustrations of the inner putrescence of capitalism. Marxists must believe
in the inevitable triumph of the proletariat, guided by the party, and in man’s
ultimate, utopian destiny. Dalton, like Neruda, but unlike Vallejo, took this
for granted, as we see from his poem “Karl Marx” in El turno del ofendido.
It is interesting to compare this poem with with that of Cisneros, also on
Marx, “Karl Marx, died 1883 aged 65”, from Canto ceremonial contra un
oso hormiguero (1968) published, that is, in the same decade. In Cisneros’s
poem, Marx is the “aguafiestas” who shattered the complacency of the Victo-
rian bourgeoisie. In Dalton’s poem, however, Marx stood for something quite
different: “le corregiste la renca labor a Dios” (Dalton, 1983, 89), that is, the
traditional Christian world-view dominated by awareness of Original Sin,
guilt, fear of death bringing God’s judgement, and recognition of life as a
vale of tears. The opening lines of Dalton’s “Karl Marx” evoke aspects of
Marx’s life, his symbolic “ojos de león”, study, marriage, poverty, journalism,
and hope amid the dark night of nineteenth-century capitalism. The climax
insists on the last: by overturning not just the capitalist, but also the tradi-
tional Christian world-view, Marx brought hope and, in the climactic line: “la
felicidad que sigue caminando” (ibid., 89).
It is this which explains the two contrasting parts of “Arte poética”. The
negative vision of the first section of the poem refers to “el hombre”, the
102 DONALD L. SHAW

isolated, lonely, alienated individual. But the positive vision of the second
section refers to “los hombres”, the collectivity. The next point worth noticing
is the way Dalton presents “angustia” at the beginning. This section of the
poem moves surprisingly from the abstract to the concrete, not the other way
about. The words desastres and desastrosas, due to the repetition, are the key
words initially. Disasters are a mirror which reflects the human condition to
the anguished individual. The alienated individual, in solitude, hugs his “hiri-
entes” misfortunes to himself, and, like the characters in Mann’s The Magic
Mountain, is compared to someone wasting away with tuberculosis, then a
killer disease, and trying vainly to fight back. The images in the third stanza
show him smoking without pleasure, counting the cobwebs on the ceiling
(a useless activity to kill time), hating both beauty and himself, and seeing
his bed as a tomb. Only then does Dalton add poverty and hunger. The clear
implication of this arrangement is that these last are the real problems.
The second part of the poem emphasizes man as part of the community.
Such men accept both good and evil (sol and asesinatos), they rejoice in food
rather than lamenting their hunger, they laugh, they have children, they accom-
plish difficult tasks (“parten las piedras”), they sing and joke and overcome
the salt sea (of infertility and symbolic shipwreck), they colonize páramos,
they reject crime, despair and hatred (we notice the image “la atroz guadaña”
which associates hatred and death) and exalt love (human solidarity). At the
climax, the poem repeats the trilogy of despair, crime and hatred. These exist;
but the poet must be on the side of optimism (implicitly with respect to the
common man, the proletariat), which is postulated primarily as a concomi-
tant of human solidarity. Poetry, then, should not just explore the anguish of
the human condition (as in Eliot’s The Waste Land, Neruda’s first two parts of
Residencia en la tierra or Vallejo’s Trilce, for example), but carry a utopian
message of hope, as in Neruda’s Odas and in Cardenal’s Canto cósmico.
Hence Dalton’s angry rejection of Borges (“De un revolucionario a J. L.
Borges” in Un libro levemente odioso), not just because he naively accepted
Videla and Pinochet, but because of his sceptical and on the whole negative
world-view. Similarly Dalton in “Arte poética 1974” (Poemas clandestinos)
rejects Mallarmé’s famous statement that poetry is made with words and not
with ideas. The clear implication is that Marxist writing must be ideological
and contribute to the onward march of the working class.
“De nuevo acerca de las contradicciones en el seno de la poesía” in Un
libro levemente odioso develops Dalton’s earlier expressed opposition to
non-committed poetry. The opening line links Salvadoran poetry at the time
with the false democracy of the country, and suggests that most poets have
sold out to the establishment. They are willing to “corromper la juventud”
“con sus párpados”, that is, by what they do not see. Their poetry is thus a
“trompeta de burdel” sounded towards the horizon (i.e. instead of a clarion
call to the workers). We can presume that the cow about to disintegrate refers
 OROZCO AND DALTON 103

to bourgeois society and that line 5, “pero ducha en el póker de los siglos”
(Dalton, 1983, 388), refers to poetry as highly adaptable to the outlook of
the holders of power throughout the ages. The key words in the poem are
plainly the repeated “simular” and “emboscada”. Dalton accuses the non-
politically involved poetry of his time and place of being insincere, that is,
of advocating values in which the poets themselves do not believe, and of
hiding from danger. So we can interpret “el poeta simulará una espléndida
mudez” (ibid., 388) as meaning that the poets of whom Dalton disapproves
pretend to have nothing committed to say, but use flashy rhetorical diction
instead. The rest of the second stanza seems to refer to the modern crisis. I
assume that Dalton is suggesting that the (false) poet feels that the crisis on
which he is crucified is a minority problem restricted to the city dwellers (the
cultured intelligentsia), whereas in Dalton’s view it is not a spiritual one, but
a socio-economic one involving every stratum of society. Dalton seems to
see his fellow poets as prophet-victims of a creed he rejects, prettied up and
Americanized (“con bello chaleco de jazzista”).
The difficulty of this whole poem, and of the third stanza in particular,
shows that Dalton was writing for a sophisticated target-audience, unlike the
Neruda of the Odas. He implores other poets to “storm” (to rage). This will
be the real source of pleasure in poetry and will bring salt, that which gives
savour, to the desert of modern sensibility. Stanza 4 suggests that when a
poet does not weep (at injustice) he is merely a pitiful entertainer, dodging
his duty and reducing poetry to a joke. In the image which follows, poetry
is seen as both ass’s milk, to bathe in which was thought to preserve beauty,
and as the guiding star we all long for. Finally the poet recognizes that he
himself has been guilty of frivolity in his work, which threatens his real posi-
tion as a sentinel, keeping watch on life while others sleep (i.e. are supinely
indifferent). It is worth noting in this connection that Neruda, in the first
section of his Residencia en la tierra, similarly describes himself as a “vigía”,
which is the same thing, and Orozco begins her famous “Pavana” on the
death of her fellow poet Alejandra Pizarnik by presenting her as a “pequeña
centinela”. All three characterize the role of the poet as that of being more
alert than the rest of us. The tongue of the frivolous poet is compared to the
swollen tongue of a hanged criminal. Dalton feels that to put himself back in
that category would be to join a pack of imprisoned “lobos frágiles”, sheep
in wolves’ clothing, who are in any case safely penned up and constitute no
threat to the establishment. The climax of the poem repeats that prostituted,
insincere poetry, which hides from danger, makes one’s hair stand on end.
“Ars poética 1970” (Un libro levemente odioso) has been helpfully analysed
by Chiquillo in her unpublished thesis on Dalton and other poets (2001). She
shows that Dalton had receded from his earlier conviction that poetry had
a privileged access to truth. Now it is no longer seen as: “el mapa perfecto
para explicar la teoría molecular” (Dalton, 1989, 59) (i.e. ultimate reality).
104 DONALD L. SHAW

It is now seen as connected rather with emotion, with absurdity and tragedy
as elements of the human condition, as well as with blindness and aspiration
(rather than certainty). At the climax of the poem, poets mock all cognitive
theories. Dalton had come a long way since 1963.
In “Historia de una poética” (Poemas clandestinos) the tone is quite
different. Whereas the poem we have just glanced at is clearly aimed at a
sophisticated readership, able and willing to puzzle out what Dalton is getting
at, this one deliberately uses comic colloquialism

Puesiesque esta era una vez un pueta …

… mero feyito y pechito y retebuena gente …
(Dalton, 1983, 496)

to satirize a spare-time, self-deceiving, role-playing, wannabe poet who in fact

earns his living from bourgeois commercialism (he is actually a book-keeper)
and the oppressive legal system (he has a second job in the law-courts). He
is however, not an emboscado as in the previous poem. He shares Dalton’s
aspirations to liberty and justice (at weekends), but without real ideological
engagement and without being able to resist ornamentation of crude reality
in the (old, bad) modernista tradition (he calls maize “bread” and rotgut
rum “wine”). Posing no threat to the establishment, he enjoys the esteem of
the standard critics. But suddenly reality steps in to raise his consciousness.
The substructure (the economy) governs the superstructure (the production
of poetry, in this case). Deprived of paper he gives up hermeticism and love
poetry (like Dalton) and turns to agit-prop in favour of the revolution. The
poem ends with a crude insult to those who turn up their noses at this sort of
poetic activity in which slogans, which act on the masses, are seen as more
important than (the wrong kind of) poetry. The poem seems to reflect indi-
rectly aspects of Dalton’s own evolution.
Dwight García, in one of the best essays on Dalton, sees a progressive rejec-
tion of the Nerudan influence so prominent, for example, in La ventana en el
rostro: “desde el nivel del léxico y el de la sintáxis, en que son frecuentes las
enumeraciones extensas de sintagmas nominales, usualmente metafóricos,
hasta el de la configuración de un hablante profético” (1995, 245). Clearly
Neruda, far more than Vallejo, initially provided Dalton with his springboard
into poetry. His depressive self-presentation in “Reparo”, for example,

Fugitivo del ruido y de las sombras

¿desde qué lágrima no vengo? (Dalton, 1980, 51)

seems borrowed directly from Neruda’s Veinte poemas de amor. The list of
his aversions in “Palabras ya dichas”:
 OROZCO AND DALTON 105

profesores de gélida corbata y bolsa llena

… canallas de cocktail, pulcrísimos
posgraduados del odio,
maniquíes ausentes, atildados
exaltadores de la indiferencia y los puñales …  (ibid., 62)

has an unmistakable Nerudan ring. Above all, as García indicates, there is

a clear imitation of Canto general in “Cantos a Anastasio Aquino”, a poem
admirably analysed by Chiquillo (2001–2, 223–38), especially in the section
“Pausa para el machete”. Inevitably, what we are drawn to in La ventana en el
rostro is not the introspective love poetry, so much of which seems derivative,
but the prison poems at the end, and especially the moving “Elegía vulgar
para Francisco Sorto” (a prisoner for nine years), which initiates the poems
of “personajes individualizados” prominent later.
What the more sophisticated critics of Dalton, like John Beverley and
Iliana Rodríguez, emphasize is not so much the simple revolutionary commit-
ment which Dalton tended to foreground in his essays and interviews, as the
elements of irreverence, humour and irony, which eventually relate both to
himself and sometimes to revolutionary endeavour and often lift his work
into a different category from that of more solemn advocates of revolutionary
heroism and sacrifice. Beverley in particular (1990, 130) reminds us that what
it meant was that his target audience was often the intelligentsia like himself,
“not the people”. Dalton’s poetry charts among other things the formation
of an active revolutionary, one who, as one of his most famous late poems
insists, is prepared to kill for the revolution as well as suffer for it (“Viejos
comunistas y guerrilleros” in Poemas clandestinos). But the process includes
some gentle debunking. As Iliana Rodríguez writes, à propos of Dalton’s
novel Pobrecito poeta que era yo, published posthumously in 1976:

[Dalton] wanted to strip political literature of all its elementary solemnity

in order to de-sacralize it and convert it into a commonplace matter …
every aspect of heroic life – courage, bravery, theoretical knowledge, sacri-
fice, schemes, the sacred and above all the Party organization – is subject
to ridicule”  (Rodríguez, 1996, 81–82).

Initially this humour satirizes his own grotesque situation as a law-student

condemned to dry-as-dust studies, while at the same time being madly in
love:

   Lisa
desde que te amo
odio a mi Profesor de Derecho Civil
… Pobre de mí, querida …
106 DONALD L. SHAW

estudiando Derecho con carne de presidio,

negando al cielo entre muchachos gordos
que creen firmemente en los rinocerontes  (“Poems in law to
Lisa”, La ventana e el rostro, Dalton, 1983, 24–25)

In the two “Poems in law” we find a number of elements which can serve
to introduce much of Dalton’s later work: humour, existential and politico-
social frustration, rejection of bourgeois acquisitiveness and moral-legalistic
values, longing for simplicity and sincerity, the love-ideal and politico-social
commitment. What we already notice at the level of diction is real crea-
tivity in terms of imagery. The two key statements in the poems are “estoy /
completamente herido” and “soy marxista”. The reference to Vallejo in the
epigraph suggests that the wound might be an existential, spiritual wound,
but the rotund “soy marxista” implies that already Dalton had resolved the
crisis which led him from Catholicism to his new ideological stance, which,
however, is tempered by humour and irony. There is in fact, despite the influ-
ence of Vallejo, not much evidence of spiritual malaise in Dalton. When he
writes, with Vallejan dry humour and anticlimax, “soy marxista y me como
las uñas” (Dalton, 1983, 26), we sense that his frustration is less with the
human condition than with social conditions. The first of the “Poems in law”
is based on a droll antithesis between love, which is emotional and fulfilling,
and the study of law, which is seen as crass, sterile and life-denying:

   te amo mientras todos hablan

de los contratos de adhesión.  (ibid., 25)

The language (“compraventos”, “hipotecas”, “propiedad raíz”, “contratos”)

relates to the buying and selling of property and its defence, that is, to a
major preoccupation of capitalist society (and that in a country where only a
tiny minority had property rights). Behind these concrete issues lies “la teoría
de causa”, which stands for the abstract corpus of legal doctrine from which
property rights are derived. We notice how, like Vallejo, Dalton brings such
abstractions to life by using unexpected imagery. “Compraventas” are person-
ified as having “rostros de ventanas de cárcel”, mortgages are described as
having tuberculosis (which in those days killed by slow degrees), real estate
is “asaltante” (highway robbery); legal theory is compared to a dark tunnel
in which the crickets (which make an incessant, useless noise) are the colour
of blood, not the green of nature, and where roots (which should nourish) dry
up deprived of sunlight. By contrast Lisa is presented through unchallenging,
traditional images designed to underline the difference with the earlier ones.
These produce an intellectual response in the reader; the imagery related to
Lisa produces an emotional one. Although some of the images are novel, they
are generally accessible, but
 OROZCO AND DALTON 107

mis manos descendiendo desde la flor del agua

para salvar tu sangre
de las aterias verdes de la grama  (ibid., 25)

is suddenly different, difficult, a throwback to Vanguardism, implying that

the target audience was still the intelligentsia. In the second poem to Lisa,
Dalton uses a delicious image to express his disgust with his conformist
fellow-students

    muchachos gordos

que creen firmemente en los rinocerontes.  (ibid., 25)

We expect something like “que creen firmemente en los valores comerciales”,

but what we get is rhinoceroses, big, ugly, lumbering creatures, the oppo-
site of what is graceful or endearing. The reader’s subconscious associations
damn Dalton’s fellow students as philistines. By contrast, Dalton presents
himself as in tune with nature: gentle, simple and harmonious, using an
image that Parra had employed in “Defensa del árbol” (Parra, 1969, 15–16),
“este muchacho que nunca hirió a los árboles”, in contrast to the destructive-
ness of urban, bourgeois life. At the climax of the second poem to Lisa the
poet is forced to go to bed with a treatise on customs duties (the opposite
of free trade) instead of a woman. The next words, “y así”, tell us that the
consequence is not just to accept but to swear to the idea that judicial murder
is morally superior to criminal murder. All the criticisms of bourgeois society
contained in the two poems culminate in this life-or-death, deeply human and
universal image.
Throughout the rest of his work gentle self-satire occasionally offsets a
profound sense of mission. We observe it, for example, in “Las promesas”
(La ventana en el rostro) with respect to his philandering, in “Hora cero”
(Los testimonios) in connection with his doubts about his readiness to face
death, or in “Saudade” (Un libro levemente odioso) with its characteristic
reference to: “mi viejo traje de payaso” (Dalton, 1983, 401). The next stage
involves the passage from self-satire to satire of the bourgeois-conformist
groups around him, notably in “Dios lamentable”, “Mecanógrafo” and “Los
burócratas” (El turno del ofendido) which satirize both ends of the middle
class. In “Dios lamentable” we recognize a upper-bourgeois rentier whose
wealth is based on primary products, cotton and coffee, i.e. on exploitation of
the peasantry, worried about crop prices, advancing age and his relations with
his manservant and mistress, combined with hastío and feelings of inferiority.
Behind all is religious indifference and a business-orientated attitude to the
Church. He is introduced via a symbolic setting, underlining his self-indul-
gence, with a hangover, drinking a hair of the dog, ordering his lunch. Signifi-
cantly, unlike, say, Fuentes’s Artemio Cruz, he is not shown as an oligarchic,
108 DONALD L. SHAW

reactionary tycoon. The emphasis is on his insecurity, emotional and spiritual

emptiness and sense of inadequacy by comparison with his mistress, since he
is an advenedizo, a duck among swans, while she is genuinely upper-class.
He is a pathetic rather than an evil figure. Above all, the climax of the poem
has to do with his lack of spiritual values, not his lack of social responsibility.
Again, as in “La segura mano de Dios” Dalton avoids the too explicit, the
too obvious. Like Vallejo in Trilce LXXV and Neruda at the beginning of
“Alturas de Macchu Picchu”, Dalton emphasizes inner hollowness (but in this
case of a well-defined class representative) rather than oppressiveness: we see
another level of insight behind the social one.
In “Mecanógrafo” and “Los burócratas” Dalton attacks the conservatism,
narrow-mindedness, servility and self-interest of a privileged petty-bourgois
class which was still small enough to be bought in by the oligarchy and
was thus a politically non-decision-making, “client” group, by choice wholly
subordinate to the upper echelon. The selection of imagery and the structure
of the poem, based on re-emphasis, are designed to express the refusal of the
typical white-collar worker to become involved with what Dalton regarded
as the unbearable state of society. The emphasis in “Mecanógrafo” (a man
doing what we think of as a girl’s job, already a signal to the alert reader of
underdevelopment) is on the typist’s triviality of mind. In the first section of
“Mecanógrafo”, the typist makes his daily trip to the office, and in the second
section arrives and sets to work. What links the two is the repeated “No te
importa”: the typist has no sense of solidarity with others, of sociabilidad.
Dalton uses contrasting symbols: the destruction of flowers by naughty chil-
dren and the jail where revolutionaries and misfits rot, then the invasion of
Cuba and the suspension of the next soccer match, to show that the typist
cares nothing for either deadly serious events or trivial ones. His values are
all wrong. What matters to him is keeping in with his superiors and having
a secure job. The symbol of it, his typewriter, produces the most striking
image of the poem: “rutilante como un ópalo en la barriga de un gran pez”
(Dalton, 1983, 68). The function of this isolated image is to emphasize the
symbolic importance to him of this machine, around which his life and privi-
leges revolve. The odd reference to a fish perhaps suggests that the typist
is trapped in society like Jonah in the whale, where the typewriter, like a
beautiful jewel consoles him for his role. Dalton contrasts his attachment to
it with Chopin’s dedication to love and creativity. This lack of love in the end
is the typist’s great shortcoming. The poem could have ended at this point
with “no te importa / nada”, but instead as the climactic image we have the
enigmatic: “hondo es el pozo” (ibid., 68). Presumably it referes to the depths
of human indifference and selfishness of the middle class.
In “Los burócratas” Dalton is not attacking the traditional oligarchy, but
the middle class which has sold itself to the oligarchy. What is interesting
is that here and in “Dios lamentable” he presents both the upper-bourgeois
 OROZCO AND DALTON 109

figure and the bureaucrats as advenedizos. In “Dios lamentable” the central

figure feels ashamed of his childhood and the fact that his mistress comes
from the real upper class. Here the bureaucrats are ashamed of their working-
class origins. What this implies is that in Central America the relatively new
bourgeoisie betrays its working-class roots. In the poem’s opening images,
Dalton rivals Parra in terms of sarcastic put-down of the pequeño burgués.
Later the splendid “sufren síncopes al comprobar que sus hijas se masturban”
(Dalton, 1983, 92) captures unforgettably their narrow-minded hypocrisy.
They are flagellated for vanity, cult of appearances, lack of real culture, ultra-
conservative sexual attitudes combined with indifference to moral principles.
As we see from “Los escandalizados” they are utterly lacking in a sense of
humour (humour being essentially subversive). But the climax of the poem
emphasizes that their worst shortcomings are snobbery and lack of inter-class
solidarity. Alongside the white-collar class, Dalton satirizes the clergy in “Lo
que me dijo un anarquista adolescente” (El turno del ofendido), suggesting
that they could be put to good use as horses to save gasoline.
As time went on, Dalton was often unable to preserve the detachment
which humour and satire require. In a range of poems, in which rage and
contempt replace humour he attacks those forces which align themselves
against the revolution: traditional Catholicism, military and dictatorial goven-
ments, the reactionary habit of mind and half-hearted commitment. At the
end of his career, in Poemas clandestinos satire is reserved for “revisionists”,
who reject armed struggle in favour of gradualness (“Parábola a partir de la
vulcanología revisionista”).
It should be noted at this point, however, that these and other committed
poems constitute only a small part of his output until very late in his career
and that, as Lara Martínez reminds us in his introduction to En la humedad
secreta (1994, xxiv–xxv), the anthologies of Dalton’s poetry, which are the
most available sources of it for the general reader, have been manipulated in
such a way as not to do full justice to his many-faceted production. Dalton is
far from being just the poet of indignation at the fate of his country and the
treatment of its inhabitants, the scourge of the political system, the selfish
petty-bourgeoisie, the clergy and the revisionists, and is himself the impris-
oned victim of an oppressive regime. He is also a man “herido gravemente
de vida” (“La noche V” in El turno del ofendido, Dalton, 1995, 143), the poet
of loneliness and exile, of self-scrutiny (even self-pity), of anguish (“Arte
poética”) and laughter (“Los escandalizados”, both in El turno del ofendido)
and always of the search for love.
It is plain, then, that two poetic voices are heard in El turno del ofendido
and for a long time later. One is clearly engagé, designed to arouse anger in
the reader, to induce rethinking of his or her allegiance to the current state
of society and to encourage commitment. This poetry does not challenge
the reader, except ideologically. The other voice is quite different. It is that
110 DONALD L. SHAW

of a hermetic poet in the Vanguardist tradition, whose goal is complex self-

­expression at whatever cost to immediate comprehensibility. “Casida”, for
example (in El turno) implies a totally different pact with the reader from that
of “Los burócratas”. The difference is in the diction. This is not to say that the
imagery in the more committed poems is banal. But when we turn to
Crujid de amor los dientes en el lecho
mortal su clima cálido en la desnudez
como los territorios del rocío …  (“Casida”, Dalton, 1983, 41)

it is only after a very close reading that we can figure out – provisionally
– that this is a slightly masochistic poem on the delicious suffering involved
in loving sexuality. The untitled “No soy sólo el que habla” in Los testimonios
further illustrates the confluence of two distinct poetic traditions: Vanguardist
and comprometida. The poem’s theme, that his diction is familiar “como el
espejo querido”, is contradicted by the lines which assert that the layers of
meaning:
se hacen carne del ojo
único faro baño del destino  (Dalton, 1995, 213)

in which it is not only the absence of punctuation which makes interpreta-

tion difficult.
This is not just a case of different poetic registers for different themes.
In Los testimonios there are moving love poems, such as “La memoria” and
“Asela” in which the imagery is traditional, comparing the familiar with the
familiar, while others, such as “Atado al mar” contain baffling metaphors.
One side of Dalton’s poetic personality inclined him to reject specialized
diction and even to include coarse everyday expressions in his poetry (“Las
feas palabras” in El turno del ofendido). Near the end of his life it caused him,
as we have mentioned, to reverse Mallarmé’s famous dictum and proclaim in
“Arte poética 1974” (Poemas clandestinos):
     Poesía
Por no haberte ayudado a comprender
Que no estás hecha sólo de palabras. (Dalton, 1983, 486)

But at the same time, the other side of his creative mind remained deeply
rooted in the kind of hermetic expression which implies a quite different
relationship with the reader.
This was a time when, both in poetry and in prose fiction, the past and the
mythology of the Latin American Indians, in the Andean region and Central
America especially, were being explored in search of the roots of nation-
ality. Dalton embarked on some anthropological study during his exile in
 OROZCO AND DALTON 111

Mexico in 1961. We already know that two years later he was advocating the
incorporation of national themes into poetry. This produced poems related
to the conquest of Central America such as “Un héroe (1524)” and the sub-
sections of Los testimonios entitled “Recreaciones libres sobre temas nahuatl
y mayances” and “La raíz en el humo”. Their tone contrasts sharply with
the bitterness and sarcasm of poems like “Cine” which evoke modern El
Salvador.
We lack detailed, sophisticated studies of the thematics and especially the
technique and diction of Dalton’s poetry. Such research would have to centre
on symbolism and imagery primarily, since the poems are oddly lacking in
easily recognized rhythmical and acoustical effects, or what we normally
think of as musicality. It would pay particular dividends in respect of Taberna
y otros lugares (1969) which won him the Casa de las Américas Prize and
is regarded as his most mature creation. In it he once more insists on the
saving grace of humour: “Prefiero sabedlo la locura a la solemnidad” (“La
verdadera cárcel”, Dalton, 1983, 306), but the collection enjoys its high status
among Dalton’s works partly because of its mordant vision of the reality of El
Salvador in the 1960s and partly to the poet’s actual (and symbolic) impris-
onment, which produced “Poemas de la última cárcel”. The poet rejects his
country’s passive acceptance of tyranny – “madre durmiente que haces heder
la noche de las cárceles” (“El alma nacional”, ibid., 265) – and in a well-
known sequence of poems uses the voices of an immigrant English noble
family to express his despair and frustration:

Este país es una espina de acero.

Supongo que no existe sino en mi borrachera
Pues en Inglaterra nadie sabe de él.  (“Sir Thomas”, ibid., 275)

One after another, the members of the family voice their contempt for the
society around them, the trash which passes for culture in San Salvador, and
their nostalgia for home:

El señorío es miserable aquí:

¿Quién oyó hablar
de estos príncipes grasosos
casi-negros de grandes pies indomables?
(“Lady Ann”, ibid., 277)

Their only acceptable guest, the bishop, shares their disgust with “la cultura
meridional”, while benignly contemplating the symbols of the Catholic tradi-
tion brought over from Spain. But as the characters speak, the poet undercuts
their reliability as observers and subtly creates a counterpoint between their
weaknesses, snobberies and prejudices and their critique of their surround-
112 DONALD L. SHAW

ings. Yet one of Dalton’s finest and most ironic love poems is spoken by
“Mathew” (subtitled “Salmos”, ibid., 283–4). It captures superbly the hurt
and ambiguity of a failed relationship. Instead of celebrating, as is usual
(and banal), the joys of requited love or the sorrows its opposite can bring,
this extremely original poem is about the masochistic pleasure that can be
extracted from being in love with someone who is like a mirror image of
oneself but who rejects one, probably for that very reason. This is a contorted
poem, full of paradoxical humanity and insight into the bitter-sweetness of
love’s failure. It accumulates binary oppositions: dolor/fiesta, silencio/canto,
distancia/puentes, golpe/fruto, herir/comunicar in which the speaker tries to
bend suffering back on itself and turn it into a source of fulfilment. Instead
of bewailing his rejection, the poetic voice celebrates it as a source of under-
standing of both the self and the other. His pain is seen as an enriching
experience for both of them. This is an example of the “other” Dalton at his
very best and deserves a high place among the relatively few memorable love
poems written around this time by major poets in Spanish America.
The second group of prison poems (after those of La ventana en el rostro)
reveals afresh Dalton’s ability to use complex and difficult imagery to evoke
the experience of incarceration. One of the most original of these poems
is “Huelo mal”. It accumulates olfactory metaphors to express the poet’s
discouragement:

Huelo a color de luto …

huelo a viejo desorden hecho fe …
… a hueso abandonado cerca del laberinto

culminating in “Huelo a cuando es ya tarde para todo” (Dalton, 1983, 301–

2). As in some of Vallejo’s best poems, the challenging language converts
something conventionally unpoetic (body odour) into a symbol of universal
feelings of misery.
Taberna y otros lugares also contains the best of Dalton’s “poemas de
personajes”. Like “Elegía vulgar para Francisco Sorto” (La ventana en el
rostro), “La segura mano de Dios” uses a murderer as a symbol of human
injustice. Both poems invoke “casos límites” designed to overturn conven-
tional moral values. Instead of rejecting the two criminals, we are invited to
respect them and even admire them, and thus withdraw our allegiance from
what Dalton regarded as legalistic safeguards whose purpose was to prop up
(in the case of El Salvador) an authoritarian regime. The critical question is
why the second of these poems is so much more mature and successful than
the first. If we look at the adjectives in “Elegía vulgar” we find, for example,
“calcinada música” and “innumerable llanto”, but most of the adjectives are
prescriptive (“hermoso”, “limpio”, “grande”, “maravilloso”) which tell us
what to think of Sorto. The dual theme of the poem is cruelty confronted by
 OROZCO AND DALTON 113

the invincibility of the human spirit, presented from the outside (in the third
person), pre-empting our judgement as readers. “La segura mano de Dios”,
with its curiously ironic title (from an ex-Catholic Marxist), implying that the
murder described was, in a sense, God’s handiwork, is quite different. In the
first place, it is in the form of a first-person monologue by the humble hand-
yman who stabbed the old ex-dictator of El Salvador, Hernández Martínez,
to death. Now, that is, the story is presented from the inside. The narra-
tive element, the colloquial language, the absence of obtrusive imagery and
the curious tone of mingled resentment and remorse combine to produce a
model example of testimonial poetry. Yet, unlike most of such poetry, it gains
immeasurably (from the point of view of a bourgeois critic, at least) from
two characteristics which are not common in committed literature: ambiguity
and irony.
The ambiguity can be perceived in the first adjective “pobrecito”, applied
by the murderer to his victim. It is followed by a series of comments which
suggest admiration for the dead general. The ironic originality of the poem
derives from the fact that Hernández Martínez was not assassinated by a
political adversary but by a servant whom he had offended by spitting on
him. Near the end of the poem the killer does mention explicitly the political
dimension of his action, but declares “yo no me doy cuenta de eso” (Dalton,
1983, 272). Why, unlike Borges’s Avelino Arredondo, who assassinated
Uruguay’s President Iriarte Borda in 1897, is he not shown as admirable?
We can only assume that, several years after the “Elegía vulgar”, Dalton had
realized (for the nonce) the danger inherent in committed literature: banality,
predictability and over-explicitness. Hernández Martínez is not assassinated
for his bestial crimes as President, but by a nobody for a banal reason. Instead
of making us reflect complacently on the punishment of a crime, the poem
compels us to take account of something far more profound and universal:
the absurdity and irony of events in general. The irony in the end relates to
the notion of a providential universe, which the killer both accepts – and
questions.
“Taberna” itself marks the peak of Dalton’s experimentalism: a long, accu-
mulative collage, composed of scraps of conversation overheard in a Prague
beer cellar in the late 1960s. Described by Dalton in the foreword as “una
especie de encuesta sociológica furtiva”, it contrasts the frivolity of a cosmo-
politan gathering in a Soviet-bloc setting with the poet’s inner sense that the
lack of revolutionary awareness of the speakers constitutes a threat to his own
convictions. His thoughts on his attraction to his girl-friend create a running
counterpoint and add a further element of ambiguity to the atmosphere, since
love is often held by convinced Marxists to gain greater authenticity in a
socialist society.
For the complicated chronology of Dalton’s later work it is necessary to
consult Lara Martínez’s introduction to En la humedad secreta. In the later
114 DONALD L. SHAW

collections: Poemas clandestinos (posthumous, 1980), Un libro rojo para

Lenin (posthumous 1986) and Un libro levemente odioso (posthumous, 1988)
Dalton continued to reflect, as we have seen, on the art of poetry as the
poetry itself became more consistently political in inspiration. Its final phase
coincides with his decision to return to the armed struggle in El Salvador,
after a period of additional training in Vietnam. To this phase belong his
most explicitly committed poems, those of Poemas clandestinos, and his last
comment on the poet’s task “Historia de una poética” which, with an element
of self-satire, suggests that the only true poetry is to be found in revolu-
tionary slogans and in guerrilla activity. We see an example, among many, in
“Vida, oficios”. Dalton announces the growth in himself of “la nueva vida”,
the sense of himself as a representative of the new socialist man. Like Neruda
in the Odas elementales, Dalton expresses the process in terms of simple,
unchallenging, basic symbolism. His sense of renewal is seen as a “sol con
raíces que habré de regar mucho”, an illumination, but one which requires
continuous cultivation; as

Pequeño y Pobre Pan de la solidaridad

bandera contra el frío, agua fresca  (Dalton, 1983, 486)

and as comfortingly maternal, something to be hugged to his heart. It shields

him from despair and a sense of failure and supports his will to carry out
the “oficios”, the tasks of the political activist, which in the end, as the poem
circles back to its beginning, renew collective life. “Dos religiones” contrasts
supernatural religion with the “religión positiva / que surge del alma de la
revolución” (Dalton, 1995, 614). All Dalton’s revolutionary writing culmi-
nates in these simple, direct, colloquial poems, designed not so much to
produce aesthetic pleasure as to raise the reader’s consciousness and affirm
the need for action now, rather than reliance on comfortable gradualness.
They challenge the reader ideologically, but not intellectually. Yurkievich
writes:

La percepción se despersonaliza, el registro desciende de tono, las metá-

foras escasean, el lenguaje se vuelve menos traslaticio, sólo se permite
algunas trasposiciones irónicas. Se produce un pasaje del psicologismo al
sociologismo que implica un cambio de poética, de visión y de versión.
(1977, 567)

They are the high-water mark of committed poetry in the 1970s. When
Dalton was murdered, for unclear reasons, by a faction of his own guerrilla
movement, Central America lost prematurely its greatest recent poet apart
from Cardenal.
Critics seem to be agreed that “Colloquial” poetry, which dominates the
 OROZCO AND DALTON 115

best-known sector of Dalton’s work was the characteristic poetic form in the
1960s. In fact, as late as 1977 José Emilio Pacheco could write: “El realismo
coloquial (ya nadie quiere llamarlo antipoesía) es la línea avasalladoramente
dominante” (1977, 34). Associated with it, according to Samuel Gordon
(1990), are (apart from Parra, Cardenal and Dalton) Enrique Lihn, Mario
Benedetti, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Antonio Cisneros, Juan Gustavo
Cobo Borda, Juan Gelman and José Emilio Pacheco. In connection with the
last of these, Daniel Torres has written:

Las tácticas que se emplean en este tipo de poesía en prosa son: la enumer-
ación o listado, el tono prosaico o coloquial, la insistencia o la repetición,
la renovación de un cliché o su recontextualización y el abandono de los
signos al lector (contrario a la poesía tradicional que siempre llamaba la
atención autorreferencialmente sobre sí misma)”  (Torres, 1990, 19–20).
 5

Pacheco and Cisneros

José Emilio Pacheco (Mexico, 1939–  )
Pacheco is regarded by some as the foremost Mexican poet after Paz, as
well as being an important prose writer. From the outset, however, we
may feel a certain surprise at finding him categorized alongside poets like
Cardenal, Fernández Retamar and Dalton. The kind of adjectives commonly
used to describe his poetry: “meditative”, “introspective”, “philosophical”,
“sceptical” and “ironic” seem to set him apart. Indeed, if we perceive, with
Alemany Bey, colloquial poetry to be closely associated with overt political
commitment and protest (1977, 85–6), Pacheco does stand apart. Though
such elements are present in some of his poems, his commitment is of a
different kind.
Like Dalton’s, Pacheco’s poetry has it roots in that of the previous genera-
tion Rocío Oviedo writes:

Si se puede señalar que efectivamente la poesía de Pacheco tiende al

prosaísmo e incluso al tono coloquial, también habrá que afirmar que su
poesía no carece de sistemas experimentales, incluso en la intertextualidad
y los espacios y la manera cubista.  (Oviedo 1963, 62)

She goes on to emphasize “la aceptación del hecho cotidiano en su anécdota

y el retorno a lo histórico frente a un presente amenazado por el devenir
que no conlleva un sentido de progreso” (ibid., 71). Hence derive prominent
elements of scepticism, pessimism and irony. For his part, Gordon (1990)
asserts that Pacheco distances himself from other conversational poets by
virtue of the fact that his poetry is “extremadamente culta y hasta cuasi polí-
glota, cargada de nostalgias por el canon elevado del Establishment anterior”
(265).
All his critics recognize that Pacheco’s first mature collection was No
me preguntes cómo pasa el tiempo (1969), which won Mexico’s prestigious
National Poetry Prize. This was his third award in the last half of the 1960s,
the others being the Enrique Lihn Prize in 1966 and the Magda Donato prize
in 1968. All the same his previous two collections Los elementos de la noche
(1963) and El reposo del fuego (1966) were apprenticeship works, despite the
favourable remarks on their maturity by Vargas Llosa (Verani, 1987, 15) and
 PACHECO AND CISNEROS 117

Oviedo (1976, 39). Some of the key words: “polvo”, “incendio”, “fuego”/
“ceniza”/ “calcinarse”, “ruina”, “devorar”, “desgastar”, “roer”, and references
to allied sensations: “olor de azufre”, “color de sangre”, “verdean espesa-
mente pútridas las aguas”, “ojos de cólera mirándonos” already prefigure and
symbolize what both Friis (2004, 438) and Monasterios (2001, 66) recognize
as one of the basic themes of Pacheco’s future poetry: time’s destructiveness.
One of the most forward-looking of his early poems in Los elementos de la
noche is “Árbol entre dos muros” in which the presentation of the tree, a
positive, natural symbol, between two walls (material, man-made, negative
symbols) creates a contrast which the rest of the poem develops in terms of
a second one between light and darkness:
Sitiado entre dos noches,
pozos de agua que espera,
el día nace …  (Pacheco, 1980b, 15)

in which sunset, the close of day, brings a sense of impermanence, intro-

ducing the theme of time’s destructiveness.
The first stanza establishes the positive pole, daylight at dawn: “Alza su
espAda de claridAd” (ibid.). The tonic accents on the same vowel empha-
size the crucial opening image of fighting back against negativism, decay
and dissolution, reinforced by the next images, again expressed in strongly
acoustical language,
mar de luz que se levANta, afilÁNdose
vaso en que vibra el resplANdor del mundo.  (Ibid.)

But in stanzas 2 and 3 the process is reversed:

Mientras avanza el día se devora …

El día impenetrable y hueco
empieza a calcinarse …
Nada persiste contra el fluir del día  (ibid., 15–16)

so that finally the world is surrounded by a “muro de tinieblas”. One of the

key words in the poem, recognizable through repetition, is “devorar”: both
daylight and its opposite, the sunset, “devour” themselves, or as the verb
“calcinarse” suggests, burn themselves up. All that is left are ashes. Here
we meet an early example of the theme of disintegration which runs right
through Pacheco’s poetry. The poem does not reveal logical sequence. Much
of stanzas 2, 3, 4 and 5, expand this process of replacing daylight and splen-
dour with darkness and on-going, threatening time. But within the process
are references to two positive elements. One is love, in stanza 3, which is
ambiguously associated with moonlight and with an island which is some-
118 DONALD L. SHAW

times there and sometimes not, and a hidden coin – a symbol of worth. The
other positive reference is to “el sol que no muere al apagarse” (ibid., 16)
even though it is devoured as it sets. Here the symbolism of the title is clari-
fied: the sun is compared to a tree floating on its own sap, that is, supported
by its own inner lymph (which rises and falls with the seasons, as the sun
rises and sets). At the poem’s climax, the beloved is associated with this
symbol (“tu eres la arboleda”) which appears to triumph over the angry voice
of thunder. This then is really a love poem, rare in Pacheco’s later work. But
what is more important is that it also introduces the notion of a cyclic pattern
in which all reality is subject to destruction and restoration.
This is what makes poem 15 of El reposo del fuego II essential to our
understanding of Pacheco’s outlook:

Rumor sobre rumor. Quebrantamiento

de épocas e imperios.
Desenlace.
Otra vez desenlace y recomienzo. (Pacheco, 1980b, 48)

Disintegration gives way to unity, only to be followed by disintegration

afresh. Once we grasp this principle we can interpret more confidently other
poems which illustrate the alternation of manic and (more often) depressive
phases of Pacheco’s mental processes.
Along with disintegration go ageing, death, forgetfulness, the evolution
of all things in a downward spiral, and additionally the inability of words
to express the poet’s vision. Examples of the depressive phase in Pacheco’s
early poetry are the title-poem of his first book of poems: “Los elementos
de la noche” and “Tarde enemiga”, from the same collection. In “Los
elementos de la noche” the night is clearly the dark night of the soul. The
poem’s semi-symbolic language parallels that of “Árbol entre dos muros”
(“roer”, “derrumbar”, “destrucción”, “noche”, “ceniza”, “calcinar”). In “Tarde
enemiga” time emerges once more as the key concept, this time expressed
via a splendid image of its ambiguity:

el tiempo abre las alas

con mansedumbre y odio de paloma y pantera  (ibid., 21)

and when it does, “nada permanece”. In the same collection, Pacheco’s atti-
tude towards historical time emerges and begins to include “la revisión crítica
del pasado mexicano” (O’Hara, 1982, 16), not unlike some of what we see in
Cisneros’s poems on the past of Peru. So Olivera Williams can correctly stress
that “Su poesía debe pues estudiarse como un cuerpo agónico en continuo
crecimiento” (1992, 245). The best account of these two early collections
is to be found in Ronald Friis’s José Emilio Pacheco and the Poets of the
 PACHECO AND CISNEROS 119

Shadows (2001), chapters one and two. What we perceive is that these are
early poems, dominated by youthful pessimism, the expression of which is
slightly too explicit. At the same time we recognize a certain insecurity in the
diction, which oscillates between difficult images and recherché adjectiviza-
tion on the one hand, and the beginning of colloquialism on the other.
It is appropriate at this point to mention briefly Pacheco’s views on poetry,
as expressed in a number of noteworthy poems. These include poem 13 from
El reposo del fuego, “Decaración de Varadero”, “Job 18.2”, “Desertación
sobre la consonancia”, “Conversación romana”, “Mejor que el vino”, all from
No me preguntes cómo pasa el tiempo, “Francisco de Terrazas”, “Un poeta
novohispano” and “H & C” from Islas a la deriva (1976), “Del último Juan
Ramón” from Desde entonces (1980), “Una defensa del anonimato” from Los
trabajos del mar and “Las vocales” from El silencio de la luna (1994). There
are others which, along with those just mentioned, are more than sufficient to
merit extensive treatment separately. So far, only a beginning has been made
by Carmen Alemany Bay (2001) in a useful article on Pacheco’s comments
on poetry in Islas a la deriva. It would be interesting to compare the results
of a fuller investigation with the views of Paz and those of some of the
other poets mentioned in this book. We must begin with the epigraph from
“Árbol entre dos muros”, which is a quotation from Tristan Tzara, affirming
categorically something of crucial importance for the present study: that
language is referential and not simply an arbitrary sign-system, as Paz now
and then seems to hint that it might be. Poem 13 from El reposo del fuego II
is directly related to this statement. At the beginning are a series of images
(of cold, of the ant, of the wind, of a rodent) which carry associations of
causing a crumbling of solid things, of their splitting and being carried away
in minute quantities. The next reference is to the “garden”, which we know
from Parra and Orozco is a positive symbol. But now in the garden (= ideal-
ized reality) summer is giving way to autumn, the dying season of the year,
associated with decay and the onset of winter. Sap, thought of as a source
of vitality, clots in the trees’ hardening arteries as they go into hibernation.
These images are intended to reinforce each other and unite to form a poetic
system replete with meaning. At this point the appearance of the poem, its
typographical lay-out, changes significantly. The last three lines,

        Y no es esto
lo que intento decir.
         Es otra cosa  (Pacheco, 1980b, 48)

rhythmically broken, tell us what Borges knew: that language, although refer-
ential, is inadequate to fully express reality.
In “Declaración de Varadero”, the theme is not so much the inadequacy
of language in general as the inevitability of change in poetic diction. The
120 DONALD L. SHAW

first section of the poem refers to the physical death of the great Nicaraguan
poet Rubén Darío, from whom, as Borges eventually admitted, all subsequent
Spanish American poetry stems, and then to his cultural death as poetry
moved on from modernismo. Each poetic movement is followed by a period
of “parricide” by younger poets and its diction becomes “hojarasca”. This is
colloquially expressed at the end of “Conversación romana”:

Acaso nuestros versos duren tanto

como un modelo Ford 69
– y muchísimo menos que el Volkswagen  (Pacheco, 1980b, 90)

But a century after Darío’s birth, Pacheco can record that modernismo
had been a fertilizing force, opening the way for vanguardismo and post-
vanguardismo:

Removida la tierra
pueden medrar en ella otros cultivos.  (ibid., 75)

Still, like that of modernismo, the diction of later poetry will gradually
become out of date:

Las palabras
      son imanes del polvo.
Los ritmos amarillos caen del árbol.
La música deserta
      del caracol.  (ibid., 75)

The end of the poem proclaims Pacheco’s awareness that poetry disinte-
grates and recreates itself like the rest of reality. But the final image of the
poem is positive: it suggests that out of destruction can come “fuego” and
renewed “energía”. The idea is that the tree which has been struck by light-
ning preserves a hidden potential for fire which can be relit by friction (as in
primitive fire-making). In other words, the friction of the poet’s mind working
on past poetry can produce renewed fire. “Desenlace y recomienzo” is the
law governing all things.
In any treatment of the development of poetry in Spanish America after
modernismo, “Disertación sobre la consonancia” merits mention. Luis Antonio
de Villena in fact describes it as “el más original entre los metapoemas de
Pacheco.” (Villena, 1986, 38). The first part of the poem, deliberately phrased
in colloquial and prosaic language, contains the straightforward affirmation
that poetry in the previous fifty years (i.e. since the end of modernismo) had
ceased to conform to the traditional definition of poetry. This, we notice, is a
 PACHECO AND CISNEROS 121

very radical assertion: that the very nature of poetry changed (by implicaton,
with Vanguardism). The second part goes on to suggest that a new, broader
“redefinición” of poetry “que amplíe los límites (si aún existen límites)”
(Pacheco, 1980b, 79) is needed to do justice to modern poetry. The key word
of the climax (which comments afresh on traditional poetry criticism), “razon-
ablemente”, confirms what we already know. Up to the end of modernismo
poetry itself reflected a rationally comprehensible world and could therefore
be read and commented upon rationally (recognizing its logical nexuses, its
coherence and harmonious structure). But now, the poem suggests, the world
to which modern poetry corresponds is not rationally comprehensible, and
therefore rational approaches can only lead to non-recognition of it as poetry.
It is important to notice what “Disertación sobre la consonancia” does not
say about modern (i.e. including Pacheco’s) poetry. It does not suggest that
modern poetry has any privileged access to an alternative form of cognition,
or that it offers thereby any possible solutions to our spiritual dilemmas. Nor
is there any indication that beauty or aesthetic pleasure plays any role in
recent poetry. The emphasis, which is noteworthy, is exclusively on poetry
versus intelligibility.
Yeats’s “Things fall apart, the centre will not hold” (“The Second Coming”)
is constantly echoed in No me preguntes cómo pasa el tiempo. In “1968 III”
Pacheco writes, borrowing a famous phrase from Karl Marx: “La fluidez
lucha contra la permanencia; lo más sólido se deshace en el aire” (Pacheco,
1980b, 72), and in “Conversación romana”, “Algo se está quebrando en todas
partes (ibid., 89), while in “Declaración de Varadero” we find “Lo que se
unió, se unió para escindirse” (ibid., 75), and in “Venecia: “Todo lo unido
tiende a separarse” (ibid., 88). We think again of Orozco’s assertion in her
essay “La poesía” that part of the poet’s task is to try to “vislumbrar la unidad
en un mundo fragmentado” (Orozco, 2000, 237). But unlike his Argentine
colleague, Pacheco seems to have little faith that this can be achieved. Hence
the disenchanted ending of “Conversación romana”. Rome, we recall, is a
symbolic place: the Eternal City. But the emphasis in the middle of the
poem is on its degradation and decay (“ruinas que serán ruinas”). There,
even pollen, the source of beauty, is contaminated. The city symbolizes our
age in which all lasting values have been reduced to “chatarra”. How does
this apply to poetry? It, too, is likely to be scrapped after a few years. Hence,
in “Mejor que el vino” Pacheco affirms that direct experience of love and sex
is better than evoking them in verse.
All of this tells us that for Pacheco this is not a poetic age, the devalu-
ation of eternal verities (what the picture of Rome, full of filth and litter,
symbolizes) has brought with it the devaluation of the poet’s role. Alemany
Bay stresses the recurrence in Islas a la deriva of the image, derived from
Rimbaud, of the poet “que al igual que un marinero con su barca a la deriva,
se encuentra desorientado, abandonado” (Alemany Bay, 2001, 32). Epecially
122 DONALD L. SHAW

in Latin America: “Francisco de Terrazas” and “Un poeta novohispano” from

Islas a la deriva (1976) deal with the struggle of the Third World, a cultur-
ally colonized figure, striving to find a true poetic identity. These too are
poems which are important for coming to understand the position of poets
in Spanish America. Behind the colonial poets in question stands the figure
of the modern poet who has two choices: either to write what his political
masters want (“panegíricos, versos cortesanos”) or to try to find, in a situ-
ation of cultural dependency, some authentic poetic stance (though in the
end even this will merely gather dust). “H & C”, also in Islas a la deriva,
reinforces Pacheco’s pessimism:

– Nada es lo que parece

– Entre objeto y palabra
cae la sombra
(ya entrevista por Eliot).  (Pacheco, 1980b, 182–3)

The outlook is the same as before: although language is referential, there

is a “sombra”, a discrepancy between the word and the thing, which makes
writing poetry tricky. But in the Third World there is a further difficulty:

el imperio nos exporta un mundo

que aún no sabemos manejar ni entender.  (ibid., 183)

But poetry somehow survives. In “Del último Juan Ramón [Jiménez]” the
binary oppositions on which the poem is based are resolved positively. Once
more “desenlace” is followed by “recomienzo”. The last poem is this repre-
sentative group “Una defensa del anonimato”, is ambiguous. Poetry is still
defined negatively as “esta mueca de náufrago”, using an image dear to
Huidobro (for example in “Monumento al mar” [Últimos poemas”, Huidobro,
1976, Vol. I, 589–92]) and to the young Neruda of the “Canción desesperada”
at the end of the Veinte poemas de amor. Nonetheless it is also

         ese lugar de encuentro

con la experiencia ajena …  (Pacheco, 1983, 97)

This is the key element in the poem emphasised by the acoustical effect of
“Una fORma de amOR que sólo existe en silencio” (ibid., 98). In a disin-
tegrating world, poetry creates secret links between people who otherwise
would know nothing of each other and offers us the comfort of recognizing
out common humanity. “Una defensa del anonimato” makes two more note-
worthy points. One is that poetry (in the tradition of colloquial poetry) has
now extended its range and covers
 PACHECO AND CISNEROS 123

todo aquello
(relato, carta, drama, historia, manual agrícola)
que hoy decimos en prosa. (ibid., 97)

This repeats and amplifies the way in which Pacheco defines his poetry in the
preface to Tarde o temprano: “poesía, un medio fluido y conciso para decir lo
mismo que se dice en prosa” (1980b, 11). The other is that the poetic experience
includs the active reader: “No leemos a otros: nos leemos en ellos” (1980b,
97). Appreciation of poetry depends in part on shared life-experience.
In the end, after a lengthy experience as a poet, Pacheco recovered cautious
confidence in poetic creation. In two poems “Postal de Berkeley para Jorge
Guillén” (Los trabajos del mar) and “Los vocales” (El silencio de la luna)
he uses images which suggest the triumphant survival of poetry. In “Postal”
the image is the familiar, natural one of the taproot of a tree piercing deeper
and deeper into the soil (i.e. away from the light). But this is interpreted as a
means to “anclar” the tree, to give it strength and fixity. In the second stanza
the “sombra” from which the root draws strength rises up above the ground
as sap and creates the lush, green foliage:

Por la raíz la sombra asciende al árbol

y se vuelve hoja de luz en la rama.
   Así la poesía  (Pacheco, 1983, 92)

In cognate fashion in “Las vocales” the vowels rebel against the poet and bury
themselves in the computer, leaving the poet, in a reminiscence of “Postal”,
feeling like a dead tree, unable to put forth leaf-poems. He recognizes that
the word, language, is an “anguila fugitiva entre las manos” (Pacheco, 2004,
124), but without it:

somos polvo y mudez crustácea, guijarros

que rezongan incomprensibles
al desplomarse en el abismo si tiempo.  (ibid.)

In the second part of the poem, as the sap rises in the tree, so the vowels rise
up from the bowels of the computer:

Vuelven de entre los muertos las vocales

Y renovadas por el descenso a ultratumba
se alzan entre su servidumbre de consonantes

Y por fin me devuelven la palabra.  (ibid., 125)

In each of these two poems of Pacheco’s maturity there is the implication

124 DONALD L. SHAW

that poetry in some sense is rooted or buried in the subliminal mind (as in
Bécquer’s famous third Rima), but wells up ever-renewed. On this positive
note we may leave Pacheco’s poetics.
One would like to think that Pacheco perceived the notions of disintegra-
tion and reconstitution which play such prominent roles in his outlook as a
dialectical process taking place in reality, leading to some ultimate synthesis,
but what we seem to be left with is an endless cycle. This is what so often
governs the choice of his subject matter, imagery, symbolism and vocabulary.
Clearly there is no room here for the senses-flattering imagery of modern-
ismo. In “Declaración de Varadero” (Pacheco, 1980b, 74–5), as we have seen,
Pacheco makes gentle fun of Darío’s rebellion against the poetic tradition of
his day, which was to be overtaken in turn by another rebellion and so on.
Nor is there room for the often semantically overloaded, “unique” imagery
of the Vanguardists in the wake of Huidobro. Pacheco has no confidence at
all in the notion that some spark of new cognition may be generated by a
truly innovative metaphor. Pacheco is less sure than Neruda, for instance, that
meaning inheres in the poet’s vision:

Miro sin comprender, busco el sentido

de estos hechos brutales.
(El reposo del fuego, I.4, Pacheco, 1980b, 38)

This does not mean that he is unable to join in the social protest and criticism
associated with colloquial poetry. The bitter poems alluding to the Tlatelolco
massacre of 1968 and the satire of North American cultural and economic
imperialism in “Ya todos saben para quien trabajan” (No me preguntes cómo
pasa el tiempo, ibid., 74) witness to the contrary. But it does mean two things.
One is that “los hechos nos exceden” (“Transparencia de los enigmas”, ibid.,
63): words cannot do full justice to reality. The other is that any attempt to
make them fit experience is condemned, like everything else, to be ephem-
eral. Time destroys poetry or turns it into a system of cryptograms for future
readers to decipher rather than to enjoy. Nonetheless the poet paradoxically
perseveres. If he cannot speak for the ages, he can be a witness to his own
times:

Tenemos una sola cosa que describir:

Este mundo.  (“Arte poética I”, Pacheco, 1969, 117)

It is clear that a very strong North American influence was operating in

the collections of the late 1960s and 1970s. Edward Halsey Foster (1992,
93) reminds us that William Carlos Williams had advocated for poetry the
language of “the daily press”, but while the style might appear prosaic, it
must contain “a hidden sweetness”. This is the problem Pacheco faced in
 PACHECO AND CISNEROS 125

his mature work: to write in direct, referential language both about the here
and now of Mexico (and Latin America) and about his disenchantment with
the human condition. This last was not absolute. The title-poem of Irás y
no volverás (1973) refers afresh to the Heraclitan notion that we can never
return to the past, since on the one hand it is unknowable (“Enigma” in Irás
y no volverás), and on the other, both the place and the returning subject will
have changed. But in “Contraelegía” (ibid.) he wrote, in another mood: “Y
sin embargo amo este cambio perpetuo” (Pacheco, 1980b, 125). Since the
alternative would be immobility and lifelessness. Fourteen years later in El
silencio de la luna (1994) we find the idea given an ironic twist in “Retorno
a Sísifo”. The symbol of Sisyphus eternally rolling his stone uphill was a
favourite of the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier. He used it to represent
human progress. The stone keeps rolling backwards, but never quite so far
back as before, so that continuous effort brings a slow gain. Carpentier, that
is, was concerned to warn against the illusion of fast, revolutionary change.
Pacheco, however, is less sanguine. First of all we notice that, as is implicit
in “Autoanálisis” and the much later “Camino de imperfección” from Siglo
pasado, the struggle forward is not just against external obstacles but rather
“contra la piedra y Sísifo y mí mismo” (Pacheco, 2004, 23), that is, against
external obstacles (la piedra), constant failure (Sisyphus) and the poet’s self.
With deeper insight than Carpentier, Pacheco recognizes that the real struggle
for (moral, political, economic, social) progress begins with ourselves. The
technique of the lines once more increases their impact: the rocking balance
of “ComiEnza la batAlla que he librAdo mil vEces” contrasts effectively
with the very different rhythmical pattern of “contra la piedra // y Sísifo // y
mí mismo”. Secondly we must attend to the repetition of “inútil” in the last,
climactic line. We expect “Sin este drama sería inútil la vida”, suggesting that
it is by carrying out what Carpentier called man’s “tarea”, his self-appointed
task on behalf of others, that life becomes purposive. But in Pacheco’s “Sin
este drama inútil sería inútil la vida” (Pacheco, 2004, 23) the first “inútil”
cancels out the second. The poem, that is, ends with a bitter paradox: to
pursue this useless task gives (an appearance of) meaning to life.
Irás y no volverás continues to illustrate Pacheco’s tendency to alternate
between taking the abstract human condition as his theme and commenting
directly or indirectly on today’s realities. “Urbana, Illinois” reminds us of
the way his poetry often tends towards the epigrammatic – short poems built
around one image:

El muñEco de niEve en el jardín

  se deshace
cuando la tiErra emErge del inviErno

En un jardín más vasto somos todos

126 DONALD L. SHAW

figuras contrahechas esperando

nuestra disolución.  (Pacheco, 1980b, 125)

We notice the skilful use of the short second line, emphasizing the key verb,
between lines 1 and 3 which enclose it in an acoustical pattern of “e” sounds
under tonic accents holding the two lines together. “Más vasto” (rather than
“más grande”) emphasizes, again acoustically, the contrast between the real
and the symbolic gardens, while the shift from the two hendecasyllables of
lines 4 and 5 to the shorter last line marks the disconsolate climax.
We see indirect commentary in the sarcastic use of the past to refer to the
ignominy of the present, as in “Moralidades legendarias” in which members
of the patrician class in ancient Rome gossip, grumble and strike humani-
tarian attitudes before kicking their coachman awake so that they can

Ofrecer mansamente el triste culo

   al magnánimo César.  (Pacheco, 1980b, 118)

The reference to grovelling before presidential power by the oligarchies in

Latin America is transparent. Another method is to use animals to satirize
aspects of human behaviour. Like Aesop, Pacheco does not hesitate (alas!)
on occasion to ram home his meaning. Of the owl, he writes

De cuál sabiduría puede ser símbolo

Sino de la rapiña, el crimen …
(“El buho”, Irás y no volverás, ibid., 129)

Pacheco’s critique of the human condition hovers between attributing respon-

sibility for evil to human behaviour, as we have seen, and a more metaphys-
ical awareness of a tragic pattern inherent in life itself. Thus in El reposo
del fuego II, numbers 11 and 12, alongside “ferocidad”, which may refer to
human action or to time’s ferociousness, we find that light, normally (as in
Paz) a positive symbol, is an ally of time in a process in which all things tend
towards death (no. 11). Poem 12 develops the deep pessimism of poem 9:

Nuestra moral, sus dogmas y certezas

se ahogaron …  (ibid., 46)

All comforting ethical (“moral”), spiritual (“dogmas”) and intellectual

(“certezas”) supports have crumbled and man’s life on earth is seen as a
parody which insults the notion of a paradise. We have no answers to ultimate
why-questions:

alguien pregunta
… y no hay respuesta:
 PACHECO AND CISNEROS 127

¿Para qué estoy aquí cuál culpa expío

es un crimen vivir …?  (ibid., 47)

Neither art nor love, among the great existential supports of Darío and
Paz, offer comfort. “The New English Bible” (Irás y no volverás) contains
a declarative, logically constructed, tripartite pattern: the lover, post coitum
tristis, in a squalid hotel, reads the desolate words of Ecclesiastes. But (“Y
sin embargo …”) the Song of Solomon’s exaltation of erotic love comforts
him. At the climax a balance is struck: love is as strong as death; but passion
is cruel and destructive. In “José Luis Cuevas hace un autorretrato”, in the
same collection, the painter is Everyman; what he paints in his self-portrait
is what time does to all of us

Mi desolado tema es ver qué hace la vida

con la materia humana

His theme in the picture is man’s struggle against the hostility of time and
life itself. But there is also a sub-theme: the ambiguity of the very self which
is thus victimized:

Los ojos que contemplo

         ¿son los ojos
de quién …?  (Pacheco, 1980b, 119)

Like Borges, Pacheco accepts that we can understand neither the reality of
the self, nor the workings of the reality outside the self. The former theme
had already appeared in another epigrammatical poem from No me preguntes
cómo pasa el tiempo. There we are reminded of the Vallejo of “Los heraldos
negros” in “Autoanálisis”:

He cometido un error fatal

– y lo peor de todo
es que no sé cuál.  (ibid., 79)

We are burdened with an irrational sense of guilt which poisons our happi-
ness and which we do not comprehend. Pacheco returns to the theme of the
impossibility of self-knowledge in “Camino de imperfección”:

En tantísimos años sólo llegué a conocer de mí mismo

La cruel parodia, la caricatura insultante
– y nunca pude hallar el original ni el modelo.
(Pacheco, 2000, 39)
128 DONALD L. SHAW

Over-explicitness is clearly a danger which hovers over Pacheco’s poetry.

We are as far away from the chaotic enumeration which Neruda used to
express the world of the first two parts of Residencia en la tierra in which
order had been lost, as from the mere juxtaposition of novel images in a
rhythmical pattern which the early ultraístas and creacionistas sometimes
advocated. Pacheco’s poems tend to be tightly but simply structured, with
clear logical nexuses, culminating in a sometimes heavy-handed climactic
idea or assertion. In “Insistencia” (Islas a la deriva [1976]), for example,
the first stanza introduces the softly, silently falling snow; the second stanza
affirms that the process is cyclic: the snow melts, rises as water vapour and
then falls again as snow. The third stanza warns us that we cannot expect
such a fate:
            serás tierra
Serás polvo en que baje a apagarse la nieve
(Pacheco, 1980b, 171)

Only the phrase “baje a apagarse” lifts the climax just above banality. In “La
secta del bien” (ibid.) the tripartite pattern is repeated. A priest has a vision
of the horror of existence; he confesses; he is denounced and burned as a
heretic. But the climax here is unexpected and ironic:
… fue a reunirse
con su Dios -que es el amor –en el infierno.  (ibid., 162)

Everything builds up to the final paradox.

Some of the poems of Islas a la deriva (1976) reveal a certain sameness
of technique: a logically articulated structure rising to a verbal pirouette at
the end. Again we see that the besetting temptation for Pacheco is in fact the
epigram, the striking, often ironic, phrase either in isolation:
Ya somos todo aquello
contra lo que luchamos a los veinte años
“Antiguos compañeros se reúnen”  (Pacheco, 1980a, 27)

or forming the sting in the tail of a short poem. We are conditioned by earlier
patterns of poetry to expect that the poem will lead up to a climactic meta-
phor. This sometimes happens in Pacheco, as in “Cocuyos” (Desde entonces)
in which the firefly captured in the morning is described as an “estrella herida
en la prisión de una mano” (Pacheco, 1980a, 32) or in “Jardín de niños VIII”
(ibid.) where the poet borrows Hobbes’s famous phrase to express the possi-
bility that each newborn babe could contain

el microbio o bacilo que puede fermentarnos en lobos

de nuestros semejantes.  (ibid., 81)
 PACHECO AND CISNEROS 129

But just as often the climax of the poem is an accusatory or affirmative

statement: “Las cartas tardan no sé cuántos meses” (“Todo tiene su precio”,
Irás y no volverás, 1980b, 133). There is sometimes bleak humour, as when
in “Miseria de la poesía” (1980b, 146–7) the poet confesses the futility of
protest poems which remain largely unread. There is indignation, pathos (as
in “Los juguetes” in Islas a la deriva (1980b, 177–8), in which toys symbolize
a childhood now lost for ever) and horror, for example, at the memory of
Hiroshima (“Los pájaros”, 1980b, 187–8). But there is little ambiguity: the
poet declares, rather than suggests, his reactions. Thus in “‘Cristo en la cruz’
por El Bosco” (Los trabajos del mar, 1983, 58–60), after an implacable
description of the corrupt humanity which El Bosco shows swarming around
Christ on his way to Golgotha, Pacheco makes his point: “Sólo tenemos que
reconocernos” (Pacheco, 1983, 60).
With advancing age, and very explicitly in Desde entonces (1980a)
Pacheco expresses an ever-deepening awarenes of “el horror de estar vivo”
(“Los conspiradores”, Pacheco, 1980a, 217). In the late 1970s and 1980s this
is the dominant in his work. It arises from the two different sources already
mentioned. One is human evil:

           La imagen
del Mal según aflora en el gesto humano
(“ ‘Cristo en la cruz’ por El Bosco”, Pacheco, 1983, 59)

the other is the abstract horror of the human condition itself, above all its
subjection to time, decay and death. We lack a systematic study of the images,
symbols and key words which Pacheco uses to communicate his bitter vision
of “lo que irrealmente llamamos la realidad” (“Prosa de la calavera” Los
trabajos del mar, ibid., 36), but with some of them we are already familiar:
sand, dust, the desert, rats, ants, a book never written or unread, the ever-
changing waters of a river, the sea, rain, shipwreck. These are words of
strongly negative connotation. We notice the emergence in Desde entonces of
one of Borges’s key adjectives: “atroz”. Poem after poem in the two crucial
collections, Desde entonces and Los trabajos del mar, record man’s dedica-
tion to producing ecological catastrophe, to violence, torture and injustice.
We find the symbolic figure of the ape in its cage in the zoo, the ragged Indian
begging at the entrance to the metro, the baby crying alone in the night, the
wounded wild boar left to die by the hunter. In the face of these examples
of desamparo, poetic activity seems to Pacheco often useless. Repeatedly
he questions not the possibility of poetry – as we saw some Chilean poets
were tempted to do (Foxley and Cuneo, 1991) – but the point of adding yet
another book to those already in existence (“Los demasiados libros”, Desde
entonces), or his ability to make sense of writing when
130 DONALD L. SHAW

Mientras escribo llega el crepúsculo.

Cerca de mí los gritos que no han cesado
       no me dejan cerrar los ojos
(“Fin de siglo”, Pacheco, 1980a, 213)

Once more in “Gustave Flaubert 1821–1880”, in Los trabajos del mar, he

confesses that we as readers can never know what the writer “intentó decir
(ni él lo sabía)”. And yet Pacheco never accepts Running’s idea of the “crit-
ical” poem in which language itself is subjected to critical appraisal. For
him, language remains referential and genuinely communicative, albeit not a
perfect medium. Hence:

      … todo escritor debe honrar

el idioma que le fue dado en préstamo, no permitir
su corrupción ni su parálisis, ya que con él
se pudriría también el pensamiento.
(“Gustave Flaubert 1821–1880”, Pacheco, 1984, 93)

Despite the ambiguity of the word, which, as Pacheco fully realizes,

        sirve lo mismo

a la revelación y el encubrimiento
(“Jardín de niños 13” Pacheco, 1980a, 241)

poetry survives:

      la poesía
se halla en la lengua,
en su naturaleza misma está inscrita.  (ibid., 14, 242)

Words can convey meaning; literature can have a cognitive and truth-telling
function. The writer, like the eternal child

        Intenta
inventar las historias que ajusten los fragmentos
del gran rompecabezas: la realidad
        y ordenen
sensación e impression.  (ibid 16, 243)

The earthquake in Mexico City in 1985 seemed to Pacheco to confirm tragi-

cally what he had been writing about since at least 1968 “todo lo que era
firme se derrumba” (“Las ruinas de Mexico”, II, 5, Pacheco, 1986, 18). The
familiar symbols of dust, ashes, rats flies and ants reappear in this bitter
 PACHECO AND CISNEROS 131

elegy for Mexico City, in whose destruction Pacheco, in whom the moralist
is never far below the surface, sees a warning of impending world-destruction
to which man’s blindness and folly contribute. In much of the rest of Miro
la tierra we meet again the themes of the evil that men do (“Caín”) and the
abstract evil of life itself:

la vida invulnerable que vuelve siempre.

Para encenderse y seguir ardiendo se nutre
    de muerte y fuego.  (“La salamandra”, ibid., 51)

Yet, paradoxically, we also find repeated references to “la verdadera vida”

(Paz’s “la vida más vida”; Cortázar’s “kibbutz del deseo”, Orozco’s “unity”),
the dream aspiration to find a harmonious, meaningful existence, which expe-
rience of life’s hostility cannot shake.
El silencio de la luna (1994), which won the Premio José Asunción Silva
in 1996 shows Pacheco in middle age commenting, often sardonically, on the
errors, illusions, follies and crimes of mankind now and in the past. Inevitably
we are conscious of a certain didacticism, at times relieved by ironic humour,
as in “Mercado libre” where Pacheco deftly deflates the conventional vision
of the cock lording it over the henroost, and replaces it with that of a bird
only too conscious of his role as a producer of breakfast eggs and Kentucky
Fried Chicken. A darker humour prevails in “Un reo bendice a Torquemada”,
“El gran inquisidor”, “El Padre de los pueblos” and other similar poems in
which instutionalized opression attempts to masquerade as beneficial. At the
beginning and end of the collection, Pacheco turns to symbolic life-styles
and outlooks, those of prehistoric man and circus performers and freaks, to
comment on modernity. One of the collection’s most significant poems is
“Adolesenescencia: Matthew Arnold se despide en la playa de Dover”. The
reference is to one of the great landmark Victorian poems of spiritual distress,
Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867), which compares the receding tide at Dover
to the receding tide of Christian faith and hope. Pacheco’s poem addresses
a mysterious “Niña” and gives thanks that, as an “emigrante del pasado” at
the end of the twentieth century (he was sixty-one), he had found her and
had been able to glimpse her for an instant before foundering like a ship and
sinking into adolesenescencia. The maritime metaphor appears at the begin-
ning of the poem with the assertion:

naufraga el siglo último y único

que me tocó.  (Pacheco, 2004, 98)

Since the girl comes from Rome, and the poem is specifically related to
“Dover Beach”, it is possible that she symbolizes traditional (Catholic) faith.
Perhaps we may tentatively suggest that the poet is voicing the realization
132 DONALD L. SHAW

that his generation may have been the last to have had sight of a world which
could still be thought of as fatherly and providential, before the new century
ushered in a world without (religious) confidence (“Comienza / otro mundo
implacable” (ibid.) – a post-Christian world. Much earlier, in poem 14 of El
reposo del fuego II, Pacheco had written

Tierra, tierra ¿por qué no te conmueves?

Ten compasión de todos los que viven  (Pacheco, 1980b, 48)

and in “La secta del bien” (Islas a la deriva) he had suggested that “[e]l
horror del mundo” (Pacheco, 1980b, 161) could not be reconciled with the
existence of a loving God. This is Pacheco’s “Diablo mundo” poem par
excellence in which he affirms that all is in the power of

el gran usurpador al que venera

   la ceguedad cristiana  (162)

The theme persists in Desde entonces with “Cerdo ante Dios”:

¿Dios creó a los cerdos para ser devorados? …

Si Dios existe ¿por qué sufre este cerdo?  (Pacheco, 1980a, 211)

A better poem is “Épocas” from Siglo pasado:

Morimos con las épocas que se extinguen,

inventamos edenes que no existieron,
tratamos de explicarnos el gran enigma
de estar aquí un solo largo instante entre el porvenir y el
  pasado.  (Pacheco, 2000, 31)

The echo of Darío’s famous “Lo fatal” is audible. It underlines again the
on-going importance of the spiritual crisis of the West as a theme in modern
Spanish American poetry, which will surface again when we comment on
Cisneros’s (re)conversion to Catholicism and the significance in this connec-
tion of his collection Las inmensas preguntas celestes (1992).
In Ciudad de la memoria (1989), El silencio de la luna (1994) and La
arena errante (1999) we have the sensation that Pacheco was revisiting
earlier themes or seeking new symbols to express a Weltanschauung which
had long since reached full maturity. A large number of poems in Ciudad
de la memoria are meditations on symbolic objects or events: a sea shell,
autumn leaves, frost, salt, a raindrop, old rags, copulating insects, ashes, a
changeless mountain, a hailstorm, a piece of pottery, a knife. Each of these
provides Pacheco with a prism through which to contemplate an aspect of
 PACHECO AND CISNEROS 133

human existence, usually bitterly and ironically. But in “Lluvia de sol” we

find a rare reference to feminine beauty as the justification for yea-saying.
The longest poem-sequence in this category is “Live Bait”, in which worms
dug from the sand to sell to anglers symbolize mankind:

      gusanos de sangre

que se afanan y reptan por la noche.  (Pacheco, 1989, 56)

We wriggle on life’s hook until death swallows us. And yet we cling to
“nuestra inmisericorde madre la vida … terrible, absurda, gloriosa vida”
(ibid., 58, 59).
Reflections on love are rare in Pacheco’s poetry. In La arena errante we
find them in “¿Qué fue de tanto amor?”, “Adán castigado” and the poetic
prose of “Melusina”, the witch lover. In each case love is seen as a “breve
paraíso” which momentarily fills our emptiness, only to crumble into dust
like all other human things. Siglo pasado (2000) confirms Pacheco’s pessi-
mism. Its usually short, pithy poems reject the gagetry of the present day:

Me gustan mi laptop y mi laserprinter.

Pero soy como soy y no son para mí
(“Página”, Pacheco, 2000, 16)

recognizing that we are sojourners in an existence which we do not under-

stand (“Epocas”), contributing to historical processes inevitably destined for
future ruin (“Esclavos”), bloodthirsty (“Lanza griega”) and morally degraded
(“Orden de los reptiles”). One of the most outspoken poems in the collection,
given its date of publication, is aptly entitled “Milenio”. In it Pacheco writes
a broad denunciation of the utter corruption of Western capitalistic society,
adopting the voice of one of those familiar street-prophets of the imminent
end of the world. After the presentation of the situation in the first three lines,
the body of the poem is a vast, twenty-line catalogue of the ills of present-day
society. It establishes a violent contrast between the exploiters of a system
based on profit and credit card debt, the worshippers of “la deidad de la usura
y el oro plástico” (ibid., 38) – that is, the stock-holders and beneficiaries, on
the one hand, and the victims, the socially marginalized, the old, the sweated
labourers, the drug addicted, the juvenile prostitutes and so on, on the other.
The climax suggests that the Last Judgement may be nearer than we think.
This is not part of Pacheco’s abstract critique of the human condition in
a non-providential world, but a wide-ranging, concrete attack on Western
society, which, as the first lines of the poem tell us, people refuse to face.
Clearly the implicit answer here, valid for much of Pacheco’s mature poetry
of social criticism and protest, is not the recovery of positive ideals and
beliefs but the need for concientización, heightened politico-social aware-
134 DONALD L. SHAW

ness, and action. At a second level, “Milenio” can be read as part of Pacheco’s
reaction to the situation in Latin America, where the problems of poverty and
moral degradation are apt to seem greater than in North America or Europe.
“Milenio”, in other words, combines the two sides of Pacheco’s critique of
Western society. The broader one is directed against the threats presented
by modern life in general, illustrated by poems like “Ser sin estar” (No me
preguntes cómo pasa el tiempo), with its warning against modern technology,
and “Fin de siglo” (Desde entonces) which clearly foreshadows “Milenio”.
For many of the evils denounced, the North American way of life is seen as
chiefly to blame. The other side is a more specific critique of Latin America,
and Mexico in particular, as in “Las ruinas junto al mar” (Islas a la deriva),
“Desmonte” (Desde entonces) and numerous other poems.
The insights of Siglo pasado are into a world threatened with ultimate
destruction by forces, from floods to termites, with which our follies merely
co-operate. In these latest collections we see what we have come to expect:
inward-looking poems on timeless features of human destiny, with ageing
and death more prominent as Pacheco grows older, alongside more outward-
looking ones criticizing humanity’s stupidity, cruelty and disastrous misuse
of the world’s resources.
Surveying Pacheco’s poetry retrospectively after the publication of Miro
la tierra (1986), Michael Doudoroff (1989) helpfully reviews the following
characteristics: absorption of everyday reality, dark vision, the theme of the
insubstantiality of experience in time, ironic judgements of human conditions
using playful meditations on the animal kingdom, humour, ethical concerns,
a bitter view of history, incursions into the testimonial mode, intertextuality,
the theme of ecological balance, concern with social justice and acceptance
of poetry as a vehicle for truth. Like all critics after J. M. Oviedo (1976),
Doudoroff mentions, in relation to technique, “the flattened voice” which,
though using conversational language “conceals a craft no less demanding
than that of the most purified symbolist” (Doudoroff, 1989, 267) “experimenta-
tion with typography” (269), visual orientation and participation in the move
away from musicality typical of the colloquialists. What we miss in Doudor-
off ’s article is any really significant commentary on Pacheco’s diction and
especially its characteristically sparing use of figurative language. For Hugo
Rodríguez Alcalá (1976), who was out of sympathy with this aspect of colo-
quialismo, it constitutes a serious flaw, limiting his poetry at times to “pura,
lacónica trivialidad” (58). Pacheco’s fellow poet Gabriel Zaid sharply disa-
greed (1977) but he fails to do much more than contradict his opponent. The
only critic to have made any headway in the direction of analysing Pacheco’s
poetic language is Debicki in his chapter on the poet in Poetas hispanoameri-
canos contemporaneous (1976), but his treatment is restricted to the earliest
collections. Sadly, this promising avenue of approach has not received much
further critical attention. In the new century Pacheco’s leading position in
 PACHECO AND CISNEROS 135

contemporary Mexican literature has been attested by a large number of

awards which make him, as has been said, “el escritor más homenajeado
del país” (Pineda Franco, 2004, 364). These include, in addition to those
mentioned above: the José Donoso Prize (2001), the Octavio Paz Poetry
Award (2003), and the Alfonso Reyes Prize, plus the Pablo Neruda Ibero­
American Poetry Prize, both in 2004. Like Cisneros he taught for many years
in a number of universities outside Mexico, most notably in the University of
Maryland, of which he holds the title of Distinguished Professor, alternating
with work at the National Institute of History and Anthropology in Mexico
City.

Antonio Cisneros (Peru, 1942–  )

Although he underwent a religious conversion in the late 1970s, Cisneros is
to some degree an exception within the group of poets we have been consid-
ering in that he does not seem to have been consistently affected by what
I have suggested in this book is an important component of the cultural
crisis of our times. Only occasionally in his poetry do we find references to
ultimate why-questions, to spiritual malaise, to the apparent randomness of
reality or to a yearning for a more authentic existence. When, for instance,
he dedicates a poem to Vallejo (“En defensa de César Vallejo y los poetas
jóvenes” in Agua que no has de beber [1971]) it is to praise the latter’s origi-
nality in the context of the Peruvian literary establishment of his time, his
defiance of official critical attitudes and his insistence on retaining his crea-
tive freedom, rather than to underline what Vallejo called the “vacío / en mi
aire metafísico” (“Espergesia” in Los heraldos negros). Julio Ortega (1996,
11) identifies a sense of “loss” emerging even in Cisneros’s earliest poetry,
Destierro (1961) but it is not, directly at least, a loss of existential confi-
dence. Nevertheless, Peter Elmore (1998, 25) correctly associates him with
the impact in Spanish America of Anglo-Saxon poetic Modernism (Pound,
Eliot, Lowell), the beatnik poets, and Parra, Cardenal and Pacheco. We also
recall that Cisneros’s undergraduate thesis was on his fellow Peruvian poet
José María Eguren, who clearly influenced his earliest work. His return to
religion and what we make of its impact on his later poetry, notably in Las
inmensas peguntas celestes, are highly significant. But more so, in some
ways, is his role as a poet concerned with revisionist views on Peruvian
history, as a critic of Peruvian society and his role in it, and as a consciously
Third-World poet as a result of his experiences in Europe.
Published while Cisneros was still an undergraduate, Destierro expresses
his reaction to an unhappy love affair chiefly, as was to be the hallmark of
his later poetry, through a series of symbolic references, in this case to the
sea, the port, the beach, sand and salt. The house which sheltered the lovers
represents a temporary refuge, in which the lovers experienced
136 DONALD L. SHAW

tiempo sumergido
en la sal.  (“Solo/una antigua linterna”, Cisneros, 1996, 26)

That is: love, which gives savour to life, overcomes the passing of time.
But the affair comes to an end. The house now only exhibits “arcos muertos”,
while birds, symbolizing the lovers’ feelings and desires, are replaced by
“ferrocarriles”, the agencies of separation. Some of the symbolism (e.g of
blood on the beach) seems forced and melodramatic. But, for example,

he llevado
mi corazón salino
hasta la niebla  (“Para que tu voz”, ibid., 35)

conveys the pathos of lost love with real originality. What is most striking
about this early collection is the absence of anecdote. There is no exploration
of the love affair itself. All attention is focused on the symbolism. In relation
to the later work we also notice the absence of both humour and irony.
In the introduction to his personal anthology Propios como ajenos (1989)
Cisneros describes David (1962) as “La historia del rey bíblico, contada desde
la perspectiva del común” (Cisneros, 1991, 8), mixing old and new diction
and aiming at ironic demythication. The result is not quite satisfying; the
reader is distracted from the themes of the collection: the contrast between
the distant king and the peasants, for whom his loves and battles are mean-
ingless, and the silence of God which seems to render vain David’s struggles
and triumphs, by an overload of inappropriately difficult symbolism. David
himself is treated ambiguously, as we see symbolically, according to Elmore
(1998, 28), in the alternation of first- and third-person verbs. However, the
underclass viewpoint prefigures later developments in Cisneros’s poetry.
Neither of these two initial collections seems to find quite the right balance
between diction and content.
Comentarios reales (1964), awarded Peru’s Premio Nacional de Poesía,
marks the beginning of his mature poetry. It reflects the most important
aspect of the New Historical novel in Spanish America: the rewriting of
“official” history along more honest and realistic lines. Comentarios reales,
the poet explains (Cisneros, 1991, 9), was designed to “revisar la historia
burguesa, tradicional, desde la poesía”. Aligning himself with Neruda and
Cardenal, Cisneros reveals the dark side of the Conquest, the colonial period
and the Wars of Independence. Rather than as heroes, the conquistadors are
presented as greedy, hypocritical and oppressive exploiters of the common
people. The colonial authorities treat the sons of the common people as
cannon fodder, while the people themselves are dominated by lecherous and
inquisitorial priests and a superstitious, arrogant ruling class. This is poetry
in the grand old civic tradition. The paradigmatic poem is “Descripción de
 PACHECO AND CISNEROS 137

la plaza, monumento y alegorías en bronce” where a snidely ironic descrip-

tion of a monument to a hero and to the nation’s supposed patriotic values is
seen as daubed with bird-droppings and contrasted with the heavily armed,
present-day riot police whose role is to defend the oligarchy against any
attempt by the people to assert the values the monument embodies. Other
significant poems celebrate the sacrifice of Tupac Amaru, torn to pieces by
the authorities after a failed rebellion, and the modern-day insurrectionary
figure of Javier Heraud, shot down by the army in 1963.
The reader outside Latin America may not receive this kind of poetry in
quite the way it is perceived by those who have endured oppressive regimes.
Imagery that seems over-explicit to many English, Spanish or North Ameri-
cans readers has an immediate impact on Irish Republicans, Basque sepa-
ratists or many Spanish Americans. But not all the figurative language is of
this kind. In line with the practice of other colloquial poets, Cisneros uses
imagery sparingly, in the context of a pattern of diction which is for the
most part directly referential. But often it gains increased effectiveness for
that very reason, as when, speaking of the conquistador Almagro’s armoured
troops in the tropical heat, he writes:

Y el sol con sus abrelatas

destapó a tus soldados
(“Cuestión de tiempo”, Cisneros, 1996, 53)

or, evoking the exploitation of the natives in the mercury mines,

Así moliendo y masticando

los metales,
cada noche recostaba
las costras de mi cuerpo
sobre arañas.
(“Canción de obrajes, bajo el virrey Toledo”, ibid., 54)

adding the acoustical effect of alliteration and repeated syllables to the

striking images themselves. The speaking voice in many of these poems is
that of a member of the underclass, reflecting what Cisneros, much later,
in his interview with Roland Forgues (Forgues, 1988, 259) called “la otra
cara de la historia, la voz de los vencidos”. In two poems Heraud stands as
a symbol of the brutal repression of dissent in the Peru of the 1960s. This
is a bitter and pessimistic collection, underlining the sad internal state of
Peru, the external threat to humanity from the USA with the H-bomb (“Los
científicos”, not included in Poesía reunida) and the cruel indifference of a
non-benevolent God. Only the epilogue, calling for more struggle, and for
more committed poetry, offers an unexpected note of hope. In his interview
138 DONALD L. SHAW

with Julio Ortega, Cisneros suggested that the collection did not quite come
off, partly because his attempt to rewrite Peruvian history was over-ambitious
and partly because he failed to integrate his personal and domestic life into
the wider historical approach (Ortega, 1984, 32).
In 1965 Cisneros took up his first university teaching post at Huamanga in
the Andes, a part of Peru he hardly knew. To Forgues (1988, 250) he said that
his experience there “contribuyó, en gran medida, a que yo cambiase mi idea
del mundo”. Already politicized (he had been expelled from the conserva-
tive Universidad Católica for undergraduate subversiveness), he now became
radicalized and contributed to guerrilla literature with “Crónica de Chapi,
1965”, a narrative poem in irregular metre describing an ambush by guer-
rillas of an army patrol commanded by an officer who was responsible for
the massacre of 200 local peasants. It corresponds to one of his definitions
of poetry as “testimonio de la realidad” (Forgues, 1988, 253) and to Ortega
in 1984 he declared that it arose from “mi experiencia directa del contacto
con la guerrilla” (Ortega, 1984, 36). Here there is little sign of the disil-
lusionment visible in Comentarios reales. Although Cisneros avoids drama-
tizing the actual fire-fight, the poem’s conclusion suggests that the deaths of
the soldiers and the ignominious flight of the captain offset the fate of the
“hermanos muertos”. Like Cardenal in “Hora O”, though on a much smaller
scale, Cisneros privileges direct narrative, based on black and white contrast
between the local landowning class:

Don gonzalo carillo – quien gustaba

Moler a sus peones en un trapiche viejo  (Cisneros, 1996, 103)

along with the “jauría” of soldiers who protect its interests, and the heroism
of the guerrillas

      Sin más bienes

que sus huesos y las armas, y a veces la duda como grieta
en un campo de arcilla. También el miedo.  (ibid., 104)

From Huamanga Cisneros moved to the University of Southampton on the

south coast of England (1967–9). By this time, he was already familiar with
much modern poetry in English, which he described to Forgues (1988, 253)
as “una poesía más vital, más directa, más coloquial, más conversacional y
además con humor”, qualities he clearly wished to emulate. Later he was to
publish a bilingual anthology, Poesía inglesa contemporánea (1975). While
in Southampton he saw published his most successful collection of poetry,
Canto ceremonial contra un oso hormiguero (1968), which won the pres-
tigious Cuban Casa de las Américas Prize and by 2000 had gone into five
editions. Among other things, it sealed his adherence (with reservations) to
 PACHECO AND CISNEROS 139

the Left, for example, in “Karl Marx died 1883, aged 65”, whose theme
is the contrast between the comfortable bourgeois-dominated world of his
great-aunt in 1902 and the world of (hoped-for) revolutionary change which
Das Kapital advocated. The first part of the poem contains images of stability
and technical progress supported by the values of right-thinking people. But
in the second section (ironically maintaining the industrial imagery) Marx
is seen “Moliendo y derritiendo en la marmita los diversos metales”, that
is, manufacturing his ideology from different raw materials, with the result
that

        los caballeros pudieron sospechar

que la locomotora a vapor ya no era más el rostro de la felicidad
  universal  (Cisneros, 1996, 77)

The old conventional ideas of morality and progress are undermined, and the
poet gives thanks to the “viejo aguafiestas”.
“In memoriam” reminds one irresistibly of Wordsworth’s “bliss was it in
that dawn to be alive”. Cisneros, speaking for many in his generation, recalls
the glory days of his youthful belief in the Cuban Revolution and his hopes
for Belaúnde Terry’s Acción Popular” party: “Yo estuve con mi alegre igno-
rancia, mi rabia, mis plumas de colores” (1991, 80).
Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution seemed to offer new hope. In the
poem he (and the revolution) are seen at first as “apenas un animal inferior,
invertebrado” then as “un mamífero joven”, i. e. as able to nourish its young
(successive Latin American revolutions), then as a splendid creature with
“brillante pelaje” and finally as “un animal noble y hermoso” but “cercado
entre ballestas” (i.e. threatened by the USA and its subservient Latin Amer-
ican states [Cisneros, 1996, 86]). Meanwhile in contrast, the bourgeois estab-
lishment in Peru is seen as consisting of hard-nosed businessmen: “Hombres
del país donde la única Torre es el comercio de harina de pescado” (ibid.,
86.) They are ironically presented as so many Odysseuses (Homer’s figure of
cunning, unscrupulous resourcefulness), setting sail on the sea of commerce
“hasta llegar a las tierras del Hombre de Provecho” (ibid., 87) even if this
involves (as in García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad) hushed-up massacres
of alleged subversives. But the end and climax of the poem prophesies that
the alternatives to revolution are war, famine and plague. “In memoriam” is
one of Cisneros’s most important poems and would have to be included in
any anthology of Spanish American poetry of the 1960s. It also reminds us
that in the last half of the twentieth century there were three categories of left-
wing poets. The first included Neruda and Cardenal, who were comfortable
expressing their commitment to the revolution in their work and raising the
level of revolutionary consciousness without joining in the armed struggle.
The second included men like Heraud and Dalton, who participated in the
140 DONALD L. SHAW

fighting. The third, which perhaps resonates most widely, includes poets
like Cisneros, who believed in the revolutionary ideal but who felt shame at
their inability to throw off bourgeois conformism and exchange the pen for
a weapon.
The title poem of Canto ceremonial, which Cisneros surprisingly dropped
from his personal anthology (but not from Poesía reunida), perhaps because
of its extreme tone, uses the symbol of an ant-eater to attack the degeneracy,
hypocrisy and love of malicious gossip which characterize, in the poet’s view,
the bourgeois society of Lima. The main anatomical feature of the ant-eater
is its enormously long, sticky tongue. There are six references to the tongue
in the poem, one of which describes it as

granero de ortigas
manada de alacranes
bosque de ratas veloces  (Cisneros, 1996, 78)

but above all three times it is presented as a Tower of Babel

que se desploma
sobre el primer incauto.  (ibid., 78)

The ant-eater is seen, not as an animal, but as a fat effeminate homosexual,

with soft plump hands, posturing at ladies’ lunches, in cahoots with other
homosexuals and lesbians and submerging the city in an ocean of slobber.
Nor was Cisneros impressed with Britain. In “Medir y pesar las diferencias
a este lado del canal (Universidad de Southampton)”, he attacks his host
country, complacent in its island, its intellectuals happily inhabiting “La Torre
de las Tazas de Té” (ibid., 94) from which they smugly contemplate their
fine cars and tend to accept that beyond the nearby hills lie “el caos, el mar
de los Sargazos”: the world of benighted foreigners incapable of imitating
Anglo-Saxon orderliness. The university is seen as a bastion of “seguridad
y belleza” and “olvido conveniente”, producing self-satisfied attitudes, just
as eggs in filth produce flies. In contrast with the other side of the channel,
with what Cisneros saw as the left-wing intellectual ferment of France (this
was 1968, we recall), British intellectual life is viewed as collaborating with
capitalist materialistic values, symbolized by “las grúas altas y amarillas”
building new office blocks. But the climax of the poems reminds us that the
gods of the developed West (progress and the profit motive) are also those
of contemporary Peru. This stay in Britain revealed to Cisneros that he was
a Third-World poet. To Ortega in 1984 he asserted “Canto ceremonial real-
mente es producto del choque de culturas” and that it included “la relación
del buen salvaje con el mundo desarrollado” (Ortega, 1984, 36). It was, and
was to remain, a highly critical relationship.
 PACHECO AND CISNEROS 141

Again this is civic poetry in the grand old Spanish American tradition,
aimed at withdrawing the reader’s allegiance from prevailing corrupt values.
Returning to criticism of his own country in “Crónica de Lima”, Cisneros
sees the city as still under the spell of its colonial past. Four symbols are
prominent: the sea, the mist, the air and the river. All are negative. The sea,
associated with destruction and decay (“mástiles rotos”, “ruedas inmóviles”;
Cisneros, 1996, 81) seems to symbolize, like the relatively unchanging climate,
uncertainty and the promise of change unfulfilled. The salty air is corrosive.
The river, dried up, promises revewal that never comes. Nothing is lush or
green. The deforested hillsides are covered with festering shanty towns. The
symbol of individual aspiration is a rusty needle (something that cannot sew
together a society torn apart). The poem ends with the poet futilely skipping
stones across Barranco harbour, unable to escape his ambiguous memories
of life in the capital, or to feel any sense of achievement.
Cisneros’s sense of frustration and misery (and even remorse and guilt)
was intensified by the birth of his son Diego. “Entre el embarcadero de San
Nicolás y este gran mar” asks pardon of the newborn child for bringing him
into an existential situation in which the gods never reply to our questions
with “un palmoteo amable” (Cisneros, 1996, 85). The poet observes ironi-
cally the ingenuous dalliance of a pair of young lovers which contrasts with
his insight. Nature (the sea, the wind, sunset and the fall of night) expresses
life’s hostility. The crane is another negative symbol, its hard, lifeless, metal
structure contrasting with the lovers’ warm tenderness. Like other poems in
the collection, reflecting the rejection of obtrusive musicality of much “collo-
quial” poetry, this poem contains no obvious rhythmical or acoustical effects.
Its rhetoric is understated. The questions to which the implacable gods return
no answer include the deliberately commonplace: “¿He apagado la luz de la
cocina?” (ibid., 85). The poem relies for its effect on the alteration of focus
from the poet to the young couple, whose behaviour acts as a counterpoint to
his mood. This is the main structural principle. Within it the contrast between
the Great Bear constellation, associated with the young lovers, and the other
symbols which help to figure forth the poet’s thoughts, reinforces the more
implicit contrast between the poet himself, hardened by his adult insight, and
his son’s lack of existential awareness (as yet). Cisneros writes in the first
person, but just once uses a pronoun in the second person plural, significantly
in the poem’s most striking image: “¿Qué polvo de hierro se arremolina en
nuestro corazón?” (ibid., 85). This is a deeply moving poem, full of function-
ally effective symbolism and original imagery. It illustrates Borges’s mature
view of poetic diction, which is valid for the bulk of post-Vanguardist poetry:
the poet’s task is not to strain after totally novel, “unique” imagery, since all
poets ring the changes on a limited stock of metaphors. But the true poet
recombines material (the sea, the wind, the stars, nightfall, birds) which has
already acquired a centuries-old poetic gloss, so as to make it new.
142 DONALD L. SHAW

The disconsolate, life-rejecting mood of “Entre el embarcadero …” is not

really typical of Cisneros. Rather, in a group of poems from Canto ceremo-
nial he reproaches himself (and implicitly us) for failure to break the bonds
of habit, self-indulgence and mental sloth. In two of his most memorable
poems, “Poema sobre Jonás y los desalienados” and “Apéndice sobre Jonás y
los desalienados”, the symbol of such failure is living, like Jonah, in the belly
of a whale. One is immediately reminded of a cognate image in Paz’s “Hacia
el poema” in section IV of Libertad bajo palabra, where he writes:

Damos vueltas y vueltas en el vientre animal, en el vientre mineral, en

el vientre temporal. Encontrar la salida: el poema.  (Paz, 1988, 295)

In a cogent commentary on these Jonah poems Raquel Chiquillo identifies

the “desalienados” with “un grupo de personas que han optado por cierto
conformismo” but goes on to point out that the poem “es a la vez colectivo y
personal” (Chiquillo, 2004, 229). In effect it moves from “los hombres” in the
abstract, to “nosotros” and finally to the poet himself as an individual. The
central image of the poem, which Chiquillo, commenting on its originality,
rightly calls a “hybrid image” (228) since it involves the mechanical and the
organic, the human and the animal, is that of constructing a periscope out of
whale parts, so as to be able to see beyond the imprisoning (but protective)
belly (= Peruvian middle-class society). This would be the equivalent of Paz’s
“salida”, since Paz regarded poetry as insight. “Apéndice”, however, suggests
that to rebel against life inside the whale is potentially very dangerous, since
life outside exposes the rebel to being hunted down like a rabbit. The poet
opts for safety. “Soy el favorito de mis cuatro abuelos” and “La araña cuelga
demasiado lejos de la tierra” reinforce the message of the Jonah poems. Once
more they contain symbols of acceptance of alienation and refusal to under-
take active engagement. The poet, like Carpentier in Los pasos perdidos,
recognizes the temptation to give in to “las vacaciones de Sísifo” instead of
being up and doing in an imperfect world.
The Jonah poems and “La araña” illustrate the risk involved with so
much “colloquial” poetry. In each case the poem is a development of a
single symbolic metaphor. If the metaphor is striking enough and really
extends itself in satisfying directions, the poems succeeds. The spider is less
successful than the whale as a symbol because the similarity of the insect
and the poet is worked out more mechanically. The language of direct, unam-
biguous comparisons presents no challenge to the reader precisely because
it is so direct and unambiguous that we realize that we are on the brink of
banality; whereas the success of the Jonah poems derives in no small part
from the highly original figurative language, much more in evidence here
than elsewhere in Cisneros’s poetic work.
In the prologue to Propios como ajenos Cisneros described Canto ceremo-
 PACHECO AND CISNEROS 143

nial as mixing solemnity with slang and as evincing “optimismo socarrón”

(1991, 10). This is hardly accurate. The language, typical of “Colloquial”
poetry, is often deliberately commonplace, rather than slangy. In “El arco
iris”, for example, we read:

Cuando estaba en el baño ví los siete colores – más o menos

  – desde un ojo de buey,
y a pesar del gran frío corrí hasta la barranda  (Cisneros, 1996, 89)

Hardly inspiring as poetry, but designed to keep the rainbow symbolism close
to the real-life situation. The symbol itself is not one of optimism. The poem
is based on Genesis 9: 1–17, in which God establishes an alliance with Noah
as the representative of mankind, and offers the rainbow as a sign of peace
and goodwill between Himself and man. The poet refers to the offer sarcasti-
cally – “Qué oferta tan amable” – and to the rainbow as “buena cosa” and
“un Arco de primera calidad” (ibid., 89), which promises “días fastos” and
“noches propicios”. However, as so often in Cisneros’s poems, structurally
speaking there is a shift, marked by the word “pero” or, as here, “mas”.
Prefigured by the almost always negative symbol of the sea (“revuelto mar”,
“estas aguas más negras y revueltas que el pellejo de un oso” and so on), the
saccharine promises of the rainbow are replaced by a vision of the descent
from it of “fieros arcángeles del juicio”, threatening presences whom the poet
tries to ignore, not (as we sense) wholly successfully. Urdanivia Bertarelli’s
assertion that the poem contains a “mensaje de paz y de establecimiento de
un pacto nuevo” (1992, 98) is a misreading.
Agua que no has de beber, published in 1971 in Propios como ajenos
carries the date 1966, perhaps referring to the date of writing. It contains
further criticism of Peruvian society of the kind visible in Canto ceremo-
nial. “Sexología nacional” evokes the episode of Odysseus and Nausicaa in
Homer’s Odyssey to satirize the prudery of middle-class Peruvian girls in
Cisneros’s time. “Las calaveras en el aeropuerto de Ayacucho” returns to the
image, first used in “Paracas” (Comentarios reales), of skulls buried in the
earth. Once more they represent the futile sacrifice of lives in the historic past
of Peru in order to produce the merely material and technological progress
symbolized by the modern airport, situated near the site of the last of the
great battles of the Wars of Independence in 1824. In the introduction to
Propios como ajenos, Cisneros is rather dismissive of this collection. Still, it
announces a certain shift in his poetry. Up to this time, the symbolism, which
as we have seen is the dominant technical feature, is in the main accessible
and the tone direct, even on occasion over-explicit. In Agua que no has de
beber, by contrast, we begin to find, though still combined with straightfor-
ward language, symbols which present serious difficulties of interpretation.
This is particularly the case in three of the movements of “Una muchacha
144 DONALD L. SHAW

católica toca la flauta” and in “Parábola (botánica)”. The first of these seems
to contain an explicit rejection of God’s oversight of human affairs:

Ojo de Dios que miras y quieres ser mirado

        … tú no has de salvarme …
            … no te miro …
Sal de mi templo, viejo, apártate, go home.  (Cisneros, 199?, 120)

The fourth movement of the poem appears to develop the idea of the temple
as the whole of creation. But it is now a broken temple, with closed doors,
outside which waits a thin, nervous horse, which may perhaps symbolize the
poet’s sense of alienation from a world dominated by self-gratification. Sex,
the second movement seems to suggest, resolves some of the differences of
outlook which separate the sexes. The third movement, one of Cisneros’s
most popular poems (“Para hacer el amor”) defines with sly humour the ideal
conditions for love-making, in tune with a collusive nature, but out of sight of
Christian morality. It also forms part of a wider movement in recent Spanish
American literature generally which was memorably expressed by Gustavo
Sainz in his 1969 novel Obsesivos diás circulares. “Si no podemos hacer
la revolución social”, Sainz writes, “hagamos la revolución moral” (Sainz,
1969, 203). If people could be persuaded to withdraw their allegiance to
bourgeois standards of propriety and morality, that would perhaps represent a
step towards getting them to give up their allegiance to bourgeois social and
political values and hence raise their potentially revolutionary consciousness.
This is a notion that should always be borne in mind when explicitly sexual
aspects of contemporary Spanish American literaure such as “Para hacer el
amor” are in question. In this connection also, we notice that, after Destierro,
there are practically no unambiguous love poems in Cisneros’s work. With
Agua que no has de beber we are in the 1960s, the central decade of the
Boom novel, one of whose major features is the absence of any confidence
in love as a support for existence. Sex, on the other hand, is promoted as
a major force helping to overcome the otherness of one’s partner. “Tercer
movimiento (affettuosso)” [sic] (“Para hacer el amor”) belongs to this pattern
of outlook. Its final line, “Es difícil hacer el amor pero se aprende” (Cisneros,
1996, 123), seems to suggest that the sexual relationship goes beyond the
merely physical. Interestingly, Hart selects this poem, which he describes
as “elegant”, and one which “teases the reader playfully”, as an example of
the Postmodern in Cisneros’s work, relating it to the mythological figure of
the satyr, which he argues has associations of sexuality, performativity and
quotidianization. “What is most significant about this poem”, he writes, “is
the way it manages to take the topos of love and quotidianize it, but without
letting love slip into pornography.” (Hart, 2005, 579). In his conclusion, he
emphasizes verbal playfulness as an outstanding aspect of Peruvian Postmod-
 PACHECO AND CISNEROS 145

ernism. This is certainly correct, but it is not the whole story so far as love
and sexuality in Cisneros are concerned.
In fact, the significance of El libro de loco amor (1972), which reflects the
collapse of Cisneros’s first marriage, lies primarily in the ambiguous treat-
ment of the love relationship. This is especially visible in “Para este aniver-
sario de bodas”, in which the allegedly 350 positions for making love are
reduced to three and associated, as in the ninth of Neruda’s Veinte poemas de
amor, with a voyage to the Enchanted Isles. But, as so often in Cisneros, the
second part of the poem debunks or contradicts the first: all is reduced to the
position of the corpse in the grave. Similarly in “Canción con estilo prestado”
human sexuality is contrasted with that of insects who unrestrictedly:

          se enredan
bajo un árbol del bosque bajo el aire  (Cisneros, 1996, 171)

whereas our sexuality, associated with enclosure and beds, is related to oceans
(depth, violence, passion) which may meet, but also may not. Marriage in
“Sobre mi matrimonio II” is reduced to unwanted wedding presents and the
spousal relationship is compromised by the wife’s irrational apprehensive-
ness. If, as Ortega not very convincingly suggests (1996, 11), Cisneros’s
poetry “se definía por su exploración de la incertidumbre en pos de unas
respuestas suficientes”, love, matrimonial or otherwise, does not seem to
offer one of the answers.
El libro de Dios y de los húngaros (1978), and the poet’s conversion,
clearly do indicate a new-found direction. In the meantime, in Como higuera
en un campo de golf (1972), Cisneros touched bottom. The collection, which
according to Peter Elmore (1998, 259) marks an impasse in the life and
work of Cisneros, reflects a deeply unhappy period in the poet’s life which
left him

más solo que una higuera

en un campo de golf.  (“Postal para Lima I”, Cisneros, 1996, 144)

Symbolic of the collapse of his world is the fate of his dream-house in Punta
Negra (“La casa de Punta Negra”). Formerly a source of joy and fulfilment,
now, under

este mal sol

más frío
que un cangrejo  (ibid., 142)

it is a fallen empire. The poet defines himself at this time in these terms:
146 DONALD L. SHAW

soy yo quien sembró el árbol tuvo el hijo escribió el libro y todo lo ví

arder cien años antes del tiempo convenido.
(“Homenaje a Armando Manzanero”, ibid., 184)

In hospital in Nice (March 1971) he recalls ironically Bécquer’s most famous

Rima, “Volverán las oscuras golondrinas”, the harbingers of spring, but they
become

    esas aves

seguras aleteando
sobre alguna ambulancia
que no llegará a tiempo.  (“Canción hospitalaria I”, ibid., 187)

Like Paz, Cisneros sees a “muralla”, a wall cutting him off from life’s happi-
ness: “nada conoces atrás de la muralla” (“Canción hospitalaria II”, ibid.,
188); even the green hills of pleasant memories from the past are fading.
Como higuera … combines subjective poems like these, expressive of the
poet’s depression, with others in which his inner malaise is manifested as
biting satire. Curiously, in Cisneros’s 1989 personal anthology many of the
poems in this second category have been dropped in favour of themes of the
poet’s loneliness and sense of futility. Like Parra’s “Autoretrato”, “Muchos
escritores tienen que dedicarse a la enseñanza” reveals Cisneros’s frustration
in his academic role. The underlying simile compares his teaching of litera-
ture to illustrating the anatomy of the cow to apprentice butchers till the end
of time. But other negative influences are operating. In “Londres vuelto a
visitar” the poet uses the analogy of sea-creatures moving onto land for the
first time to express the difficulty of moving forward towards a new pattern
of life. In London he recalls past happiness:

Allí está la casita donde íbamos a ser

    felices como chanchos
(“Londres vuelto a visitar”, Cisneros, 1996, 175)

only to realize that now

mi casa son las

viejas maletas arrastradas por trenes y aeropuertos.
(“Crónica de viaje”, ibid., 190)

London and Nice are linked to Lima by the image of steel bars closing round
the poet with a grinding noise. In “Tres églogas”, nature adds further symbols
of misery (rain, wind, a wintry sun). These are confessional poems. Unlike
Borges, Paz or Pacheco, Cisneros does not seem to find himself ill at ease
 PACHECO AND CISNEROS 147

with the human condition or existence in general, but rather with his own life.
Unfortunately self-pity is not a very profitable poetic theme.
We turn with relief to poems whose tone is aggessively satirical. In “En
el Rijk Museum los turistas alemanes celebran a Margarita de Parma” the
Third-World poet is heard reminding us that imperialism, oppression of
minorities and racism have long characterized the history of Europe. Enoch
Powell, the racist British politician, is set beside the seventeenth-century
Duke of Alba; the arrogant mentality of white superiority is set beside that
of Spanish dominance in the Netherlands. The complacent bourgeoisie of
London, Amsterdam and Berlin go to bed to dream of Nazi behaviour during
the wartime conquest of Eastern Europe. “La caza del liebre 1887” evokes
nineteenth-century British aristocrats devoted to blood sports and the exploi-
tation of the Third World. The title is significant. We should, of course, have
expected “La caza del zorro”. But presentation of Third-World countries as
defenceless victims is better served by the hare than by the (cunning) fox.
“Fin de temporada en el Mediterráneo” ridicules rich weekend sailors on the
Côte d’Azur, mothballing their pleasure boats for the winter and hurrying off
to check their blood pressure and blood sugar. Two of the best of these satires
are “Denuncia de los elefantes (demasiado bien considerados en los últimos
tiempos)” and “Soneto contra uno que llamó sátrapa a Mao, aventurero al
‘Che’ y a Carmichael racista”. In the first, Cisneros quotes passages from
Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan novels in which elephants save the lives of
(white) Tarzan and Captain Campbell from (black) savages, contributing to
notions of white superiority and to the white imperialism which has reduced
the African hinterland to a white man’s playground. More effective, because
more ironic, is the “Soneto” which mocks the pseudo-liberal, cuddling up
to famous personalities of the Left. The bulk of the poem lists examples of
fellow-travelling; the sting is in the tail

Cómo te pesa el óxido en los ojos el musgo en las orejas

– 50 y tantos años de antigüedad y miedo y un no saber qué pasa
(Cisneros, 1996, 183)

Unlike some other post-colonial or anti-imperialist Spanish American writings

these poems are self-standing. They are not produced specifically in protest
against the oppression or exploitation of Spanish Americans by First-World
countries. In any case, in “(Ilegible) al Tercer Auditor (ilegible) vecinos todos
de la ciudad de Lima” Cisneros recognizes the probable uselessness of such
writing. To Forgues he admitted that Como higuera “corresponde, efectiva-
mente a uno de los períodos más graves de mi vida, de soledad, de tristeza,
de falta de objetivos en la vida, de escepticismo personal, religioso, político
y social”. But, he added, “ahora me he recuperado” (Forgues, 1998, 258).
Cisneros’s next collection El libro de Dios y de los húngaros (1978)
148 DONALD L. SHAW

follows what in the prologue to Propios como ajenos he called his “reen-
cuentro fulminante con el Señor” (1991, 10). In his 1984 interview with
Ortega he was at pains to insist that it was more of a “reconversión” in
the sense that, since David, he had always alluded to religious themes in
different ways. He also makes it clear that his rediscovered faith was, like that
of Cardenal, completely reconcilable with his left-wing views, describing
himself as having “trabajado codo a codo con los hermanos revolucionarios
creyendo que estamos cumpliendo un verdadero precepto de Cristo” (Ortega,
1984, 42). Several of the poems in the collection chronicle the reconversion.
The only one written close to the event was “Domingo en Santa Cristina de
Budapest y frutería al lado” (predominantly in regular hendecasyllables, as
if to emphasize the traditional theme). It begins with a series of contrasts
(between the fruit and the machinery on the banks of the Danube – there is
another symbolic crane; between the priest’s traditional vestments and the
microphone he uses; between the vernacular language of the mass and the
poet’s ignorance of it). These contrasts surround the poet’s self-identification
with the Prodigal Son of the bible story leading to the triumphant “fui muerto
y soy resuscitado” (Cisneros, 1996, 199). The word “ignoro” appears four
times, as if to stress the unimportance of the poet’s lack of understanding
of the world around him, in comparison with his rediscovery of the world
of faith. But the poem ends on the same curiously ambiguous note that we
recognize in Cisneros’s remarks about his political allegiances:
   loado sea el nombre del Señor
sea el nombre que sea.  (ibid., 199)

It is possible that this phrase simply refers to the name of the Lord in
Hungarian rather than in Spanish, but one cannot be sure: doubt and certainty
are nearly always interlocked in Cisneros’s mind. Thus, while his experience
in Hungary brought a renewal of faith at some level, it also caused him to
have deep doubts about the political situation in the Eastern Bloc countries
in the 1970s, as we see from the dualities of “Celebrando otro aniversario del
partido”. In “Ave negra en el invierno de Moscú”, a sinister symbolic raven
takes the place of the Christian symbol of the dove; but by contrast in “Sofía”
(= wisdom) the attractive faces of young girls fortify the poet’s faith. For
once, all the images associated with them in the poem are positive. Equally
unambiguous is “Ocupado en guardar cabras” in which the poet confesses
his earlier mistakes and distorted vision. The second part of the poem rises
to a telling climactic image:
Ocupado y veloz,
no en tus negocios
ni en los míos, Señor,
navego hacia la mar
 PACHECO AND CISNEROS 149

que es el morir.
Ocupado y veloz como algún taxi
cuando cae la lluvia
y anochece.  (ibid., 210)

The juxtaposition of the echo of Manrique’s ancient coplas and the modern
image of a car speeding into the symbolic rainy darkness is highly effective.
But augmenting the effect with a note of irony is the fact that the vehicle is
a taxi, which the thoughtless passenger has hired to take him or her rapidly
and in comfort in what is implicitly the wrong direction.
Several of the poems express the poet’s negative reaction to his surround-
ings in Budapest and his nostalgia for home. The Danube in winter inspires
the pounding lines:

Piedra inmóvil, total, viento de piedra,

aguas de piedra plana, piedra igual.
Barcas de piedra atadas a la piedra
del viento plano y de las aguas planas.
(“Dificultades para nombrar un río en invierno”,
Cisneros, 1996, 207)

“Otras dificultades del invierno” uses the familiar symbol of migrating geese
to convey the poet’s longing for Peru.
It is clear that his refurbished faith did not fully solve Cisneros’s personal
problems. In “Los helicópteros del reino del Perú”, he confesses:

    ya no sé cuando se levanta el sol

ni para qué  (Cisneros, 1996, 223)

and in “Addio, Londra, addio” he complains: “me han arrojado entre los
arrecifes como un trapo” (ibid., 226). It is perhaps noteworthy that “Después
de corregir las pruebas de Amaru en la imprenta/1967” concludes with the
same sinister symbol as “Hampton Court” in Canto ceremonial: “y anochece”
(ibid., 225).
Cisneros is never far from the dark night of the soul. “Por Robert Lowell”,
written on the death of his fellow poet Robert Lowell in 1977, who died alone
in the back of a New York taxi, while his fellow men, man-made objects
and nature remain indifferent, is clearly intended to symbolize the margin-
alization of the creative artist in a philistine society. The poet’s fear of his
own death is manifest in “Sólo un verano me otorgáis poderosas”, the title
of which refers to the Fates. Like “Oh Señor, las cápsulas venados”, which
refers obliquely to the poet’s diabetes, “Sólo un verano” is a prayer in which
Cisneros invokes divine forgiveness for his unwillingness to forego the pleas-
150 DONALD L. SHAW

ures of life, symbolized by a plate of shrimps. He envisages death as an

endless flat meadow (in contrast to the green hills which recur in several
poems as a highly positive symbol) and confesses:

Me aterra esa pradera inacabable. Sigo a la vida

como el zorro silente tras los rastros de un topo a medianoche.
(“Solo un verano”, Cisneros, 1996, 218)

This final image, in which life is identified with one of Cisneros’s most nega-
tive symbolic creatures, and which yet arouses the poet to hunt for life’s
fulfilment, re-emphasizes the ambiguity of his existential outlook.
La crónica del niño Jesús de Chilca (1981) has been hailed as one of Cisn-
eros’s most original works. He told Ortega in 1984 that it was inspired by his
need to “reflejar otra vez la realidad sociopolítica nacional” (Ortega, 1984,
33). In fact it is a testimonial work. It deals with the destruction of the small
coastal village of Chilca. Cisneros laments the loss of the highly religious,
traditional community which partly depended on irrigation canals dating
from Inca times. Modernity is seen as an intrusive, exploitative presence.
Some of the poems evoke the mentality of the villagers, their experiences
and their sense of loss when the community is overwhelmed. The theme is
the pathos which accompanies social change which is not necessarily for the
better. Cisneros regards it as an innovative, experimental set of poems and,
as usual in his work, sympathetic to the underdog. Marta Bermúdez-Gallegos
(1990–1, 123) stresses the destruction of “una utopía social”. But Albada
Jelgersma (1999, 12 and 22), Urdanivia Bertarelli (1992, 114) and Bueno
(1992, 77) emphasize that the poems end hopefully. The sea provides food in
the form of a whale, and there is the implicit possibility that the community
can be rebuilt elsewhere.
One of Cisneros’s consistent aspirations has been to integrate poems about
his personal life and those which reflect his more public stances in the same
collection. This has not been very successful. Monólogo de la casta Susana
y otros poemas (1986) has no overarching theme, though the debunking
impulse is prominent. Susana’s monologue, like “Holofernes lament” in El
libro de Dios y de los húngaros reinterprets the biblical story in a deliber-
ately undramatic way. Both poems exemplify Cisneros’s tendency, visible
since Comentarios reales, to undercut rhetoric, in this case biblical rhetoric,
and downplay idealism (and even heroism). Judith’s murder of Holofernes is
presented as quite unnecessary; Susana’s defence of her chastity is made to
seem a commonplace event on the part of a woman who reports:

      Casta soy

pero no hasta el delirio.  (Cisneros, 1996, 262)
 PACHECO AND CISNEROS 151

Cisneros enjoys puncturing the complacency of others. “Heimat Film”, for

example, makes delicious fun of the worst kind of German schmaltz, as
revealed by films which exalt and sentimentalize German-ness:

Jarros espumantes de cerveza, danzas del Tirol, uniformes entrorchados

pantalones de cuero, gorgoritos, sombreros con rabo de conejo.
Más allá no existe nada que valga la pena. Tan sólo la ordinaria realidad.
(ibid., 268)

Everyday reality matters more to Cisneros than false national iconography.

“Son cubano” harks back to José Martí’s famous defence of authentically
American products in contrast to more refined, but less genuine, European
ones. In terms of his own everyday reality, which he symbolizes in a self-
indulgent cigarette, he contrasts it with that of health-besotted Germans, who
jog every day and use up more than their fair share of oxygen. All of this
shows us a poet who rejects polished-up, idealized reality and finds pleasure
and inspiration in a reality which, however ordinary, is satisfyingly free from
pretentiousness. This is just as true of the more personal poems of Monólogo.
Even in regard to his own children, he recognizes that to foreground them
in his poetry would be to risk falsehood (“Hay veces que los hijos”) and is
content to see them safe and sound in real life. His own everyday mood-
swings can be seen in “Dammerung” and “Hay unas mañanas tan sólidas y
frescas”. The first is down-beat, as dusk in Berlin and a snatch of a song by
Bob Dylan bring to his mind “los años que no quiero recorder” (ibid., 271),
whereas a fine morning reconciles him to life’s possibilities and brings the
impossible day-dream of meeting Marlene Dietrich in the park. Several poems
deal with aspects of love, though carefully avoiding romanticization. “Heavy
Metal (a)” uses the by-now familiar, though here rather curious, symbol of
a rat to express the gnawing sensation of deep emotion, but at the climax
the symbol changes to that of a sweet water-melon. Death is a reality which,
however ordinary, can never be commonplace. In “Nocturno de Berlín” the
simple pleasures of life are offset by the huge symbolic fly which settles
on the poet’s shoulder like a memento mori. The deaths of Lorca, Pasolini,
Heinrich Böll and Calvino, especially that of Böll who was

   el ejemplo (y la alegría)
de aquellos que se toman sus traguitos
y fuman cigarillos  (“Heinrich Böll, ibid., 273)

that is, who enjoy everyday satisfactions like Cisneros himself, remind the
poet that creativity is no safeguard against mortality.
In his interview with Manzari, Cisneros declared that he had always been
anxious about questions like “¿Quién soy?, ¿Adónde voy? ¿Y de dónde
152 DONALD L. SHAW

vengo?” (Manzari, 1998, 35) but now asserts that in Las inmensas preguntas
celestes (1992) “lo único que quiero saber es adónde voy” (36). He went on
to refer to the section of poems on Bram Stoker’s Dracula contained in this
collection and asked: “¿Por qué he escrito sobre Drácula?” His reply was:
“Porque la sensación de violencia y muerte está dentro, es una forma de
expresarla” (37), but he also associates it with the atmosphere of violence and
murder surrounding the period of the Sendero Luminoso guerrilla movement
in Peru. The link has been helpfully clarified by Albarda-Jegersma (1996).
Dracula, as Herman notes (1997, 124), is presented as a threat to civiliza-
tion itself. The story of Dracula, therefore, can be interpreted in terms of a
threat to society, such as is presented by violent insurgency. It is noteworthy
however that at least since “Monólogo de la casta Susana”, as Cisneros stated
to Zapata (Zapata, 1987–8, 37), he had been interested in “la maldad en sí
misma”. Albarda-Jergesma points out in this connection that Stoker’s Dracula
“embodies both the seductive Eros and the deadly subversive Thanatos”
(Albarda-Jelgersma, 1996, 20) and that he can be regarded as “the meta-
phorical sign for the dangerous and deadly syntagma of Eros-Thanatos, the
threatened eruption of sudden sociopolitical violence” (27).
Urdanivia Bertarelli has detected as early as Canto ceremonial contra un
oso hormiguero a tendency in Cisneros to baffle the reader; “los poemas”, he
writes, “se tornan herméticos, clausurados hacia la vertiente de quien los lee
y abiertos solamente para el poeta” (Urdanivia Bertarelli, 1992, 95). This is
the case in many of the poems of Las inmensas preguntas celestes, including
the Dracula poems. In an interview with Amanda Saldías, Cisneros stated
“Es un libro más bien de corte metafísico, pero metafísico a mi manera: en
el fondo, no puedo evitar ser burlón hasta cuando me pongo serio” (Saldías,
1994, 153). An example is “Requiem (4)”. The theme is the fear of death

          esa travesía

tan oscura y feroz como un mandril.  (Cisneros, 1996, 293)

What calms and consoles the poet in the face of death has nothing to do
directly with faith or spirituality; its is the thought of a dish of lamb with
roasted potatoes

Sea el cordero
Símbolo y consuelo. Agnus Dei.  (ibid., 293)

The totally unexected identification of the lamb on the plate with the Lamb
of God and thus with the words of the mass at the elevation of the Host
symbolize the comforting notion that the fleshly pleasures of this life, rather
than being sinful, are God-given gifts, the memory of which can support us
 PACHECO AND CISNEROS 153

on our last journey. It will be “algo en la mano”: something to hold on to, a

foretaste of God’s loving kindness. Thus Cisneros compares such a memory
to
         una bengala
en medio de los fondos submarinos  (ibid., 293)

something that will light up our last moments.

The same theme is present in “Requiem (2)” in which “la cama bien
tendida” and “la manta leve y fresca” along with “el rostro amado” and
“la mano amada” are associated with the liturgical “Kyrie eleison / Christie
eleison / Kyrie eleison” (Cisneros, 1996, 291). And once more in “Taberna”,
the warmth, light and comfort of a tavern in the evening turn it into a temple
and symbolize the possibility of fending off the fear of death. A prominent
characteristic of Las inmensas preguntas celestes is in fact the way that Cisn-
eros juxtaposes very hermetic poems like “Requiem (1)” and “Funerales en
la casa de té de Yutai en Pekín” with others in which simple things – “un
buen vinito de Burdeos / muy seco y saludable” (“Colinas de Berkeley 1979”,
ibid., 301), “leche fresca y fino requesón” (“Una vieja serie de televisión”,
ibid., 305), “esa falda de cuero / que te traje de Chile” (Aniversario de
bodas”, ibid., 313) – offer in the last analysis promises that what we enjoy
on earth suggests a wellbeing in store for us which offsets our haunting fear
of death.
Looking back over Cisneros’s poetry, what strikes the reader most is the
importance of symbolism in his work. As in so much “colloquial” poetry, with
emphasis on narrative, exploitation of the rhythmic, acoustical and musical
elements of poetic diction is at a discount. In that sense Cisneros’s poetry
often seems rather bare. At the same time the structure of the bulk of his
poems tends to be relatively simple, often based on a two-part development
with the sections separated by “pero”, “mas” or an equivalent, so that, once
the thematics have been taken on board, at the technical level we are left with
little more than considerations of imagery and symbolism. Cisnero’s imagery,
predominantly in the form of similes, is characteristically post-Vanguardist,
in the sense that there is, as we have seen, little straining after the new and
unexpected. Except to some extent in Destierro and again in the late poetry,
like tends to be compared with like in ways which the reader is not normally
challenged to figure out. The effort is to find figurative language which is
original without being obtrusively novel.
Thus in “De un soldado” (Comentarios reales) those who died in a battle
for Spanish American Independence and were left for the scavenging birds
to feast on are compared to “sobras”
           Iguales
al resto de otras cosas comestibles  (Cisneros, 1996, 68)
154 DONALD L. SHAW

to underline the betrayal of the ideals for which they died. By contrast in
“Héroe de nuestros días” in the same collection, the image

Tener un héroe entre la casa,

es como si una noche
por buscar nuestros zapatos bajo el lecho
tocásemos un cuerpo limpio y fuerte, con el cabello
recien cortado  (ibid., 73)

effectively emphasizes the surprise created by the presence of a man

like Javier Heraud amid our commonplace activities. At the same time the
reference to his haircut keeps him from being an over-rhetoricized figure.
Another deliberately banal reference (among many elsewhere) is seen in the
first movement of “Una muchacha católica toca la flauta” (Agua que no has
de beber): “Gran coca-cola helada en las calientes rocas” (ibid., 120) to refer
to the temptation to find relief in religiosity from the stress of modern life.
Another way to “make it new” is to use references to modern technological
development, in the tradition of Futurism. So we find in “Fatiga del haragán
en la playa” (Agua que no has de beber):

       este corazón

como un batisfera bajo el peso de todos los océanos conocidos
(ibid., 127)

to express the poet’s universal emotional involvement, and in “Crónica de

Lima” (Canto ceremonial): “el bosque de automóviles como un reptil sin
sexo” (ibid., 82) (in which “bosque” as elsewhere in Cisneros’s poetry mean
“a large number”). The opening of “Kensington, primera crónica” in the same
collection combines different similes:

      Yo caminé …
Como el más alto de los olmos …
      … alegre peatón
sobre los cráneos de los ingleses muertos en la guerra
      … y brillaba
como un árbol de moras en medio del verano, Cristo sobre
las aguas, glorioso …  (ibid., 88)

to figure forth the poet’s sense of superiority to the complacent English. Simi-
larly in the second stanza we see him in the company of ex-colonials and
Irishmen: “metiendo lagartos en el culo de la reina”. There is a well-orches-
trated effect here of contrast between the more conventional comparisons
with trees and with walking on water, and the less conventional images:
 PACHECO AND CISNEROS 155

walking on the skulls of the dead and the insult to the Queen, which makes
the latter (conveying Cisneros’s hostility to Britain’s participation in two
world wars and her imperialistic past) stand out memorably.
To Miguel Angel Zapata Cisneros said revealingly “para mí nunca ha sido
fundamental el lenguaje en sí” (Zapata, 1987–8, 33). His figurative language
is in fact often deliberately conventional (seguir “como un granadero a su
bandera”, “más dura que un colmillo” (“A una dama muerta” Canto ceremo-
nial, Cisneros, 1996, 90) “solo como un hongo” (“Hampton Court”, ibid.,
92); “sus palabras brillaron más que el lomo de algún escarabajo” (“Paris
5e”, ibid., 93); “Te pareces … más alegre que los pastos en la estación/ de
lluvias” (“Te pareces a la hija de algún cow-boy famoso”, El libro del loco
amor, ibid., 168). The danger is banality:

veloz y pasajero como un italiano joven en un Alfa-Romeo

(“A dedo hasta Florencia” Como higuera en
un campo de golf, ibid., 178)

los helicópteros
parecen mil legiones de langostas
(“Los helicópteros del reino del Perú”, El libro de Dios
y de los húngaros, ibid., 223)

hundiéndose en las aguas como el sol del Pacífico

(“Por Robert Lowell”, ibid., 227)

es como cuando usted se echa un chicle a la boca.

(“En defensa de César Vallejo y los poetas jóvenes”
Agua que no has de beber, ibid., 113)

However, as we saw in “Héroe de nuestros días” this may be part of a prepared

poetic effect. It is always necessary to analyse the function of an image or
simile in Cisneros in the context of the poem as a whole from which it comes.
A few images stand out as unexpected (but not difficult):

sus ojos, os diré

que estaban llenos
de ciudades  (“Javier Heraud”, Comentarios reales, ibid., 72)

el miedo que nunca te dejó como la ropa interior o los modales

(“Sobre mi matrimonio 2”, El libro del loco amor, ibid., 165)

la duda como grieta/ en un campo de arcilla”

(Crónica de Chapi, ibid., 104)
156 DONALD L. SHAW

or the simile which gives the title to a collection

más solo que una higuera

en un campo de golf
(“Postal para Lima” Como higuera en un campo
de golf, ibid., 144)

A separate category is that of metaphors or similes which contain recurrent

symbols, as, for example, in:
   alacranes
cantan bajo tu lengua
(“Consejo para un viajero”, Comentarios reales, ibid., 52)

   estas aguas – más negras y revueltas

que el pellejo de un oso
(“El arco iris” Canto ceremonial, ibid., 89)

los libros son adobes de una torre que nunca edifiqué

(“Homenaje a Armando Manzanero”, Como higuera
en un campo de golf, ibid., 184)

This last category serves to introduce the recurrent symbols themselves,

without recognition of which some of Cisneros’s poems become more difficult
to understand. An excellent article could be written about them. Here we can
only list some of the more obvious positive and negative examples, bearing
in mind that many poems incorporate symbols, such as the watermelon in
“Heavy Metal (a)”, the plate of shrimps in “Solo un verano” or the hospital
and sports centre in “Hospital de Broussailles en Cannes” (Como higuera en
un campo de golf) which are specific to the individual poem. Among those
that recur some of the most positive are drawn from nature: “colinas verdes”,
“gordos pastos” and “fruto(s)” represent happiness; “laurel(es)” symbolize
life’s rewards; “faro” light in the darkness of existence; “muchacha(s)”
vivacity, life and hope brought by a new generation; “canto” also suggests
happiness, along with references to wine, tobacco and food. Perhaps the most
positive of Cisneros’s recurrent symbols is “torre”. It normally stands for
what is solid, lasting and important, sometimes sarcastically, as when in “In
memoriam” (Canto ceremonial”) Cisneros describes Peru as
el país donde la única torre es el comercio de
    harina de pescado  (Cisneros, 1996, 86)

or in “Medir y pesar las diferencias a este lado del canal” in the same collec-
tion “la Torre de Tazas de Té” stands for what Cisneros dislikes about Great
 PACHECO AND CISNEROS 157

Britain. Once in “Canción de negro” (Comentarios reales) it is a threatening

element of a slave ship: “alta torre del velero” (ibid., 62). Whereas the refer-
ence above in “Homenaje a Armando Manzanero” shows the tower being
used to signify the poet’s life-work, which he had failed to complete to his
satisfaction. In “Sofía” (El libro de Dios y de los húngaros), the fact that the
girls, representing vitality, are identified with “torres”, and the association of
a tower with a glass of wine and a book to make up three symbols of life’s
happier possibilities, clears up any doubt about its meaning.
Negative symbols are easy to recognize. “Rata” and “alacrán” along with
“mosca(s)” stand out. Ruins, the rain and rough seas contrast with the green
hills and lush grass that express Cisneros’s deepest longings. As we have
seen, the fall of night provides a climax to a couple of poems. Corrosion and
rust are equally obvious symbols. Less obvious is the “grúa”, the symbol of
harsh, inhuman technology. Some symbols present almost insuperable diffi-
culties to the reader, as in the fourth movement of “Una muchacha católica
toca la flauta” (Agua que no has de beber) which makes none of the conces-
sions to the reader that we expect from “colloquial” poetry. As a rule the
problem arises from, private, autobiographical references, not from exis-
tential interrogation. This underlines what was said at the beginning of this
section about Cisneros’s world-view. Only rather late in his work do we come
upon poems like “Requiem 3” in Las inmensas preguntas celestes which
does allude to abstract questions. Characteristically, the poet’s only answer is
the symbolism of the “muchachas” in his household (his daughters) and the
nearby lighthouse. The poet confesses that deep existential questions

me tienen dando vueltas

como un zancudo al final de la tarde
(“Requiem 3”, Cisneros, 1996, 292)

another typical simile. Only death, in itself an unimportant event, will implic-
itly solve the riddles.
Structually Cisneros’s poems in general offer few surprises. For the most
part their build-up is logical, with intelligible connections either present or
easy to infer. Two favourite devices are antithetical arrangement and repeti-
tion of of significant phrases either for emphasis or to hold sections of the
poem together. In the first category, that is, we notice words and expressions
like “pero”, “mas” or “sin embargo” setting one part of the poem in contrast
to the other. In the second category a prominent example is “Domingo en
Santa Cristina de Budapest y frutería al lado”, the poem on his conversion
in Libro de Dios y de los húngaros, in which the repeated “fui muerto y soy
resuscitado” both emphasizes the theme and bonds the two stanzas each to
each. The relevance is this: in the arts technique ideally contains its own
metaphor. Chaotic enumeration, for example, suggests a random reality. The
158 DONALD L. SHAW

straightforward organization of most of Cisneros’s poems and the unchal-

lenging nature of the bulk of his poetic diction suggest that, however full
of “desencanto” (“Requiem 3”) his life has been, his existential outlook has
remained relatively stable, particularly since his conversion.
 6

Conclusion

As we survey the scene presented by Spanish American poetry after the mid-
twentieth century, what strikes us most is the virtual absence of any critical
framework within which we can situate all but the most famous of the indi-
vidual poets. The critic’s situation is rather like that of someone hacking a way
through a jungle which contains a few clearings here and there but remains
basically unmapped. Occasionally he or she will meet someone who is simi-
larly engaged and exchange a few cautious signals, before both proceed on
divergent paths. The trees are many; the landmarks few; the danger of getting
lost ever present. Thus, to take only a few prominent examples: González
and Treece, in The Gathering of Voices (1992), deal with Neruda, Cardenal,
Dalton, Parra, Lihn and a few others. William Rowe, in Poets of Contempo-
rary Latin America (2000), includes Parra, Cardenal, Gonzalo Rojas, Jorge
Eduardo Eilson, Juan L. Ortiz, Ana E. Terán, Raúl Zurita and Carmen Ollé.
Carmen Alemany Bay, in Poética coloquial hispanoamericana (1997), looks
primarily at Jaime Sabines, Roberto Fernández Retamar and Gioconda Belli,
with passing remarks on Mario Benedetti and Enrique Lihn. Rosa Sarabia, in
Poetas de la palabra hablada (1997), chooses Raúl González Tuñón, Parra,
Rosario Castellanos, Luisa Futoranski and Cardenal. Gustav Siebenmann in
Poesía y poéticas del siglo xx en la América Hispana y el Brasil (1977),
listed thirty-seven poets from and including Darío, the latest being Sara de
Ibañez, José Lezama Lima, Paz, Parra, Juan Liscano, Cintio Vitier, Roberto
Juarroz, Cardenal, Carlos Germán Belli and Enrique Lihn. Mario Benedetti,
in Poetas de cercanías (1972), selects Claribel Alegría, Alvaro Mutis, Paco
Urondo, Roque Dalton, Juan Gelman, José E. Pacheco, Nancy Morejón,
Rubén Barreiro, Circe Maia, Pedro Shimose and Antonio Cisneros. Jill Kuhn-
heim, in Spanish American Poetry at the End of the Twentieth Century (1996),
cites Neruda, Cardenal, Borges and Parra but then extends the list to a dozen
more recent figures of whom only Zurita has been mentioned so far. Thorpe
Running, in The Critical Poem (1996), cites Octavio Paz, Roberto Juarroz,
Alejandra Pizarnik, Alberto Girri, Jorge Luis Borges, Gonzalo Millán and
David Huerta. Perhaps the most useful brief panorama is that contained in the
fourth chapter of Sonia Mereles Olivera’s Cumbres poéticas latinoamericanas
(2003). One could extend the many references to individual poets which it
contains, especially by reference to anthologies, but the point does not need
160 DONALD L. SHAW

to be laboured. There is really no consensus either about who the leading

contemporary poets are or which categories of poetry they may belong to.
The danger of trying to include too many poets is that the survey can become
the equivalent of a section of a dictionary of literature with a certain amount
of connective tissue. In such circumstances all one can do is to follow the
existing trail as far as it leads and then try to extend it a little further in the
hope that eventually a pattern will emerge.
As we examine the existing criticism a second conclusion becomes
apparent. It is that, with very rare exceptions, the treatment of the poets tends
necessarily to be descriptive and thematic. To move, however gingerly, in the
direction of technique, to discuss diction, imagery, symbolism, key words,
adjectivization, rhythmic and acoustical effects and so on requires space. It is
not too much to say that, apart from the early Borges, Paz and Parra (and even
there the matter is debatable) there is hardly a poet among those mentioned
above for whom we have anything like an in-depth approach, especially one
based on the analysis of individual poems. If we wish to explore, for example,
what Borges meant when he accused the modernista poets of using merely
“ornamental” imagery and asserted that the ultraístas’ imagery was “veraz”,
we have virtually nowhere to look. We lack a systematic comparative account
of how aspects of poetic diction evolved from early to late modernismo, of
the contribution of transitional poets like Lugones or Tablada, of the revo-
lutionary shift in the “ismos” and eventually in Vanguardism. Ideally any
study of this evolution would have then to include discussion of the turn
against figurative language by poets like Parra and Cardenal and its effect
in their work and later, the modernization of diction in “colloquial” poetry
and the impact of “critical” poetry which consciously examines the limits of
what poetry can actually say. For the most part we have only fragmentary
and impressionistic accounts, narrow in focus and tentative in their conclu-
sions, generally as chapters in books on individual poets, a good but isolated
example being Paul Borgeson’s fourth chapter of his Hacia el hombre nuevo
(1984) on Cardenal.
In general, poetry tends to arise from the discontents of poets. Thus Bene-
detti: “No hay un solo poeta que esté conforme con el mundo” (Benedetti,
1994, 24). This includes their discontent with the poetic practice of their
elders which suggests two extremely broad areas of classification. In one
category fall poets whose main discontent is with the human condition in
general, which they explore critically both to focus attention on the cultural
crisis of our time and to seek possible ways to come to terms with the modern
malaise. Borges, Paz and Orozco are obvious examples and many other
poets participate in this trend, the title of Cisneros’s collection Las inmensas
preguntas celestes being a clear illustration. Into the other category fall poets
whose chief discontent is with the state of society and the political estab-
lishment, particularly in their own countries, so that a large sector of their
 CONCLUSION 161

work is to some degree comprometido, ranging from guerrilla poetry and the
later poetry of Dalton to significant parts of the work of Parra, Cardenal and
Pacheco, all of whom have harsh things to say about conditions in their coun-
tries. However, as previous chapters have illustrated, many, perhaps most,
poets can fit into either category depending on where we look in their work.
Even Borges wrote poems which are directly critical of the Malvinas conflict.
Still, the two-way tug of universalism versus especificidad is an important
element in understanding recent Spanish American poetry.
The other general consideration concerns the concept which individual
poets have of poetry itself. Here Paz’s writings both as a poet and a critic
are of central importance. For, on the one hand, as we saw, he has been the
leading advocate of poetry which is consciously aware of itself as language, as
a system of signs in ambiguous relationship with any possible reality outside
itself. Yet, on the other hand, in contradistinction to Borges, Paz in much of
the central period of his development seems genuinely to have believed not
only that the creative imagination could express through language a special
form of cognition, but even that words could be in some sense the equivalent
of acts. This is a mystique which many, maybe most, poets intuitively share. If
we glance, for example, at the papers read by a number of poets at the Primer
congreso de poesía escrita en lengua española desde la perspectiva del siglo
xxi (Sandoval, 2000, vol. I) we see ample evidence that this is the case. Saúl
Yurkievich (Argentina) proclaims, in “De la apropiación poética” (35–9):
“Atribuyo a la poesía una función gnómica. Ella aporta un vislumbre de la
totalidad en acto” (36). Leonardo García Pabón (Bolivia) in “De la poesía
como pensamiento” (45–8) refers to poetry as “un instrumento privilegiado de
conocimiento” (46). Piedad Bonnet (Colombia) insists in “El quehacer poético
y la ética de la autenticidad” (51–6) that the poet enjoys “una conciencia o
tal vez … una intuición, que sus contemporáneos no poseen” (52). Samuel
Jaramillo (Colombia) repeats the assertion “Un papel para la poesía después
del siglo xx” (61–4): “lo poético es … una forma de pensamiento. Distinto
al pensamiento racional … Pero pensamiento con todos los alcances del
término” (63). The virtual unanimity with which the poets assembled at the
Congress, from eleven different Spanish-speaking countries, accepted this
assumption, while largely ignoring the issue of poetry as a social force, as
the expression of emotion or as productive of artefacts of beauty, underlines
afresh that much Spanish American poetry at the end of the twentieth century
was inseparably connected with the collapse of traditional overarching expla-
nations of the human condition, and the resulting ache of modernity. Again,
as we seek to establish criteria which help to differentiate among poets and
groups of poets, the degree to which they profess confidence or otherwise
in poetry as an alternative path to knowledge, or as influential as a public
activity, rather than or in addition to, producing aesthetic pleasure, becomes
highly relevant. At the same time, it is just as relevant to recall the distinction
162 DONALD L. SHAW

between different kinds of knowledge made above in relation to Orozco (see

Chapter 4). The qualities of empathy, imagination and intuition to be found
in poetry can teach us about ourselves and others, but wider claims than this
seem to rest on an insecure foundation.
And yet, as Antón Arrufat asserts in “Viejos fantasmas” (Sandoval, 2000,
103–11), with perhaps questionable historical accuracy but making a very
pertinent point, only now have poets begun to give serious consideration
to the poem as a verbal object: “Sólo a partir de nuestro siglo la poesía se
refleja sobre sí misma, se hace cuestión de su propio ser” (108). Precisely
when poetry, under pressure from the modern dilemma, clings to belief in its
unique possibility of transmitting redeeming insight, it turns a critical spot-
light on itself. Once more, as Merlin Foster has shown in “Self-referentiality
in the Poetry of Octavio Paz” (2002, 141–55), Paz’s poetry and poetry criti-
cism were highly influential in focusing both poet and reader on the process
of creation, as well as the role and the limitations of language.
What this means in the end is that, when we examine trends in Spanish
American poetry in the second half of the twentieth century, we have to take
into consideration the question of degrees of referentiality. It follows from
the heavy emphasis often placed, as we have seen, on poetry as cognitive,
that in most areas of recent Spanish American poetry referentiality is not in
doubt. Politically committed poetry, poetry of testimony, social protest and
social criticism, gendered poetry and much of colloquial poetry take referen-
tiality for granted. But this is not the whole story. For we know from Thorpe
Running’s The Critical Poem (1996) and Foxley and Cuneo’s book Seis
poetas de los sesenta (1991) on Chilean poetry in the 1960s, that a number
of poets set out deliberately to problematize the whole notion of referential
language. On the other hand, as Kuhnheim points out (2004, 116–17), a
current of neo-baroque poetry, represented by work of Néstor Perlongher,
Eduardo Espina and Coral Bracho,

disarticulates language as a vehicle for communication, emphasising

instead its other features … neo-baroque writing displays its own artifice
and highlights the materiality of the signifier, its ‘literariness’, for the word
is not mimetic or a transparent vehicle for meaning.

As long ago as the 1970s this current predictably came in for fierce criticism
from Angel Rama in his Transculturación narrativa en América Latina (1987,
19) where he blasted the sector of criticism which “decidió ignorar la terca
búsqueda de representatividad que signa a nuestro desarrollo histórico”.
In this context, it looks as though, rather than attempting to pick out a list
of younger figures who in the early years of the twenty-first century seem
likely to make a place for themselves in any future history of Spanish Amer-
ican poetry, a wiser course might be to consider some criteria on the basis of
 CONCLUSION 163

which it might be possible to situate both poets who reached their maturity
after 1950 and their emerging successors. In the preceding chapters we have
made reference to five such criteria. They are as follows:

1 The stance adopted by each individual poet on the question of

universality as against specificity to Spanish America, with regard to
thematics.
2 The stance adopted by each in the face of the Western cultural crisis.
3 The stance adopted by each on the question of the poetic imagination
as an alternative form of cognition to rational knowledge.
4 The stance adopted by each on the issue of specialized poetic diction
as against direct referentiality.
5 The stance adopted by each with regard to his or her target audience.

It will be seen at once that these criteria are interconnected. Thus even a
figure like Dalton, whom we are apt to think of primarily as a committed poet
deeply concerned with specifically Spanish American politico-social themes,
derives a certitude, amid the crisis of Western confidence, from his Marxist
beliefs. Similarly we cannot separate the degree of confidence which a given
poet may feel in poetic insight as an alternative form of cognition to that of
pure rationality, from his or her outlook about what poetry can or cannot
say, whether about the human dilemma in our time or anything else. In turn,
the use or avoidance by any poet of challenging imagery and symbolism
is bound to reveal something about his or her view of an ideal reader. The
other point which needs to be underlined, obvious though it may be, is that
these criteria need to be used flexibly. We have seen, for example, how a poet
like Cisneros can use, sometimes in the same poem, diction which rests on
familiar associations and diction which resists easy interpretation. Nonethe-
less, it remains the case that throughout the last half of the twentieth century
in Spanish America, the view of poetic language associated with the mature
Borges and, in uneasy parallelism with it, the view of the “colloquial” poets
that diction should be accessible, stand in contrast to the prolongation of
Vanguardist hermeticism, such as we often find in the non-committed poetry
of Dalton. Part of what makes his poetry as a whole so fascinating to the
critic (especially) is the coexistence of both trends in it.
The most obvious link between two of the above criteria is the one which
relates the desire for universality with consciousness of the modern cultural
crisis. We have seen how this consciousness generates a nostalgia for a lost
“unity” in Orozco and Pacheco. We can confidently assert that both in Spanish
American fiction during and after the Boom, and in Spanish American poetry
after 1950, a central preoccupation is the search for an “order” which will
makes sense of the human condition. It is, as we have suggested, aware-
ness of the absence of such an order, such a “unity”, which made the actual
164 DONALD L. SHAW

poetry of the major Vanguardist poets so different from what we might have
expected given the youthful vitality and optimism present in many of the
Vanguardist manifestos. We have noticed that even a poet like Parra, whose
early work represents a clear turning-point in Spanish American poetry in
the mid-twentieth century, remains deeply affected by the crisis of ideals
and beliefs by which he was surrounded. All of Cardenal’s politico-religious
ideology is a conscious response to the same crisis. Over and over again in
Cántico cósmico, he dismisses the notion of a chaotic universe and insists on
its divinely-created orderliness:

Sólo la vida crea orden y mantiene orden  (Cardenal, 1989, 36)

Acaso somos otra cosa que un orden en el caos.  (ibid., 341)

The shrillness of his insistence testifies to his intense awareness that the
opposite view predominated in the culture by which he was surrounded.
He was not alone. Claire Pailler (1988), for example, has shown how wide-
spread such awareness was among recent Central American poets, despite
their more immediate social and political preoccupations. It bears repeating
that, as we have seen, these preoccupations seem to have militated, to at
least some extent, against the creation of poetry whose aim is the creation of
patterns of words, rhythms and images which are intrinsically beautiful and
designed to elicit aesthetic pleasure. As in modern North American poetry,
we tend to conclude that not many poets are really committed to exploring
the mechanics of verse. Borges, as his lectures on the craft of poetry indicate,
remains an exception. Similarly, it seems significant that these preoccupa-
tions have made love poetry, traditionally one of the great currents of lyric
poetry, less prominent than in the past.
Few convincing attempts have been made to see recent Spanish American
poetry in terms of Postmodernism, Hart’s 2005 article being a rare excep-
tion. But it is clear that, were any such attempt to be made systematically, it
would have to be rooted in the recognition that, however one situates a given
poet in some sort of poetic spectrum or line of development leading to or
belonging to Postmodernism, the role of his or her thoughts on the modern
crisis would have to be seen as a crucial factor. In concluding, however, it is
perhaps as well to mention that there are signs of a reaction against cultural
pessimism, which may in the end come to be seen historically as part of the
sensibility of a former period. We can detect in a book like Arthur Herman’s
The Idea of Decline in Western History (1997) a serious critique, from a
Humanist point of view, of some of the attitudes mentioned in the present
work, which may be destined to prevail. Still, for the moment, they are part
of the mainstream.
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 INDEX

Acasubi, Hilario  56 Bishop, Elizabeth  76

Acevedo, Isidoro  45
Adoum, Jorge Enrique  11, 32
Alazraki, Julio  56
Albarda-Jelgesma, Jill  152
Aldao, José Felix  47
Alegría, Claribel  159
Alemany Bay, Carmen  11, 74, 119, 121,
159
Allende, Isabel  57
De amor y de sombra  57
Amaru, Tupac  137
Amauta  4
Anguita, Eduardo  8
Arguedas, José María  97
Los ríos profundos  97
Argueta, Manlio  57
Aristophanes  31
Arnold, Mathew  7, 131
Arredondo, Avelino  113
Arrufat, Antón  162
Ashbery, John  76
Asturias, Miguel Angel  97
El Señor Presidente  97
Azorín (José Martínez Ruiz)  91
Báez Bone, Adolfo  58
Bañuelos, Raúl  56, 57
Barreiro, Rubén  159
Barrow, Geoffrey  60, 61
Batista, Tomás  3
Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo  75, 124, 146
Belaunde Terry, Fernando  139
Belli, Carlos Germán  159
Belli, Gioconda  159
Bellini, Giuseppe  2
Benedetti, Mario  11, 30, 35, 62, 63, 76,
77, 100, 115, 159, 160
Bermúdez-Gallegos, Marta  150
Bernard, Judith  16
Beverley, John  105
Black, Max  46
Blanco, Mercedes  45, 46, 47, 48
Bõll, Heinrich  151
Bonnet, Piedad  161
Borges, Jorge Luis  3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12,
13, 14, 15, 16, 44–56, 58, 68, 77, 88,
90, 91, 94, 95, 99, 102, 113, 119, 120,
127, 129, 146, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164
Cuaderno San Martín  8, 45
El Aleph  44, 45
El hacedor  8, 47, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54
El idioma de los argentinos  46
Elogio de la sombra  46, 56
El oro de los tigres  56
El otro, el mismo  45, 48, 49, 51, 52,
53, 54, 55
Fervor de Buenos Aires  45
Historia de la eternidad  46
Historia de la noche  56
La cifra  56
La moneda de hierro  56
La rosa profunda  56
Leopoldo Lugones  46
Los conjurados  56
Luna de enfrente  45
Otras inquisiciones  46
Para las seis cuerdas  55
Prisma I & II  45
Borgeson, Paul  62, 160
Bowers, Katherine,  9
Bracho, Coral  162
Bradford, Richard,  76
Brecht, Bertold  72
Bueno, Raúl  150
Bourroughs, Edgar Rice  147
Caballo verde para la poesía  22
Calvino, Italo  151
Camus, Albert  83
178 INDEX
Cardenal, Ernesto  2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13,
30, 32, 45, 55, 56–73, 74, 98, 99, 102,
115, 116, 135, 136, 138, 148, 159,
160, 164
Cántico cósmico  68, 72, 102, 164.
Canto nacional  72
Coplas a la muerte de Thomas Merton
69, 70, 71
El estrecho dudoso  65, 66
Momenaje a los indios americanos
65, 71
Hora O  26, 58, 71, 138
La santidad de la revolución  57, 63,
68
La noche iluminada de palabras  72
Las islas extrañas  72
Los ovnis de oro  65, 66, 67, 72
Nostalgia del futuro  72
Oráculo sobre Managua  72
Salmos  6
Quetzalcóatl  72
Telescopio en la noche oscura  72
Tocar el cielo 72
Vuelos de victoria  72
Carilla, Emilio  45
Carpentier, Alejo  66, 125, 142
Los pasos perdidos  66, 142
Carrasco, Iván  42
Carrera Andrade, Jorge  6, 7
Casanovas, Martí  4
Casas, Bartolomé de las  66
Cassero, Jacopo del  47
Castellanos, Rosario  159
Castro, Fidel  139
Caupolicán  26
Cavafis, Constantino  7
Chiles, Francis  12
Cheselka, Paul  44
Chiquillo, Raquel  103, 142
Chocano, José Santos  8
Chopin, Frederick  108
Cisneros, Antonio  5, 6, 7, 11, 32, 77, 98,
99, 115, 132, 135–158, 159, 160, 163
Agua que no has de beber  135, 143,
144, 154, 157
Canto ceremonial contra un oso
hormiguero  101, 138, 140, 142,
143, 154, 155
Comentarios reales  136, 138, 143,
150, 153, 157
Como higuera en un campo de golf
145, 156
David  136, 148
Destierro  135, 144, 153
El libro de Dios y de los húngaros
145, 147, 150, 157
El libro del loco amor  145, 155
La crónica del niño Jesús de Chilca
150
Las inmensas preguntas celestes  132,
135, 153, 157, 160
Monólogo de la casta Susana y otros
poemas  150
Poesía inglesa contemporánea  138
Poesía reunida  137, 140
Claro, María Elena  69, 70
Cobo Borda, Juan Gustavo  2, 7, 15, 30,
115
Coll, Pablo Emilio  58
Collazos, Oscar  3
Colombo, Stella Maris  80, 88, 89
Conquest, Robert  76
Conrad, Joseph  82
Contemporáneos  3, 9
Cornejo Polar, Antonio  72, 73
Coronel Urtecho, José  2, 7
Cortázar, Julio  14, 19, 77, 78, 94, 131
Cortés, Hernando  7
Cortínez, Carlos  44, 49, 50, 52, 55
creacionismo  5, 9, 128
Crommelynck, Fernand  82
Cuneo, Ana María  77, 129, 162
Dalton, Roque  5, 6, 11, 30, 32, 97–115,
116, 139, 159, 161, 163
El mar  99
El turno del ofendido  99, 101, 107,
109, 110
La ventana en el rostro  99, 104, 105,
106, 107
Los testimonios  99, 107, 110, 111
Pobrecito poeta que era yo  105
Poemas clandestinos  102, 104, 105,
109, 113, 114
Taberna y otros lugares  111, 112
Textos y poemas muy especiales/
personales  99
Un libro levemente odioso  102, 103,
107, 114
Un libro rojo para Lenin  114
 INDEX 179

Daly de Troconis, Yrais  57 García Huidobro, Cecilia  13

Dapaz Strout, Lilia  61 García Lorca, Federico  151
Darío, Rubén  2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 14, 15, 35, García Márquez, Gabriel  58, 139
75, 120, 124, 127, 132, 159 Cien años de soledad  58, 139
Prosas profanas  14, 75 García Pabón, Leonardo  161
Dawes, Greg  68 García Verzi, Horacio  98, 99
Daydí-Tolson, Santiago  70 Gelman, Juan  98, 115. 159
Debicki, Andrew  134 Gertel, Zunilda  44, 45
De Costa, René  3, 29 Giordano, Jaime  5
Del Corro, Gaspar Pío  4 Girondo, Oliverio  3, 4, 75
Dickens, Charles  82 Persuasión de los días  75
Dietrich, Marlene  151 Girri, Alberto  7, 75, 159
Donoso, José  97 Gómez Paz , Julieta  78
El lugar sin límites  97 González, Mike  11, 75, 159
Doudoroff, Michael  134 González Prada, Manuel  8
Dujovne, Alicia  94 González Tuñón, Raúl  159
Dylan, Bob  151 González Videla, Gabriel  22, 24
Gordon, Samuel  115, 116
Edwards, Jorge  24 Gottlieb, Marlene  30, 37, 43
Eguren, José María  135 Gray, Richard  76
Eilson, Jorge Eduardo  159 Guevara, “Ché”  68
Elías, Eduardo  59, 62 Guillén, Jorge  7
Eliot, Thomas Stearns  7, 102, 122, 135 Guillén, Nicolás  9
The Waste Land  102 Gutiérrez, Carlos María  32
Elmore, Peter  135, 145
Emanuel, Lynn  76 Hahn, Oscar  75
Enguídanos, Miguel  56 Halpern, Nick  76
Escaja, Tina  82 Hart, Stephen M.  144, 164
Espina, Eduardo  162 Heraud, Javier  98, 137, 139, 154
Exteriorismo  62, 63, 72 Herman, Arthur  152, 164
Hernández Martínez, Maximiliano  113
Falck, Colin  76 Huerta, David  159
Faulkner, William  98 Huerta, Efraín  30
Fein, John  13, 20 Hugo, Victor  35
Fernández Moreno, Baldomero  11 Huidobro, Vicente  1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10,
Fernández Retamar, Roberto  11, 98, 12, 46, 75, 122, 124
115, 116, 159 Altazor  3, 5, 10, 75
Flores, Angel  37, 38, 56 Ultimos poemas  8
Forgues, Roland  137, 138, 147 Hume, David  79
Foster, Edward Halsey  124
Foster, Merlin  162 Ibañez, Carlos  22
Foxley, Carmen  75, 77, 129, 162 Ibañez, Sara de  159
Friis, Ronald  117 Ibañez-Langlois, José Miguel  30, 38
Fromm. Erich  13 Iriarte Borda, Juan  113
Frost, Robert  7
Fuentes, Carlos  107 Jamis, Fayad  32
La muerte de Artemio Cruz  107 Jaramillo, Samuel  161
Futoranski, Luisa  159 Jarell, Randall  76
Futurists  4 Jiménez, José Olivio  2
Jiménez, Juan Ramón  7
García, Dwight  104 Jones, Julie  47
180 INDEX
Joyce, James  98
Juarroz, Roberto  75, 159
Kant, Emmanuel  79
Kayser, Wolfgang  37
Kuhnheim, Jill  6, 77, 84, 91, 92, 93,
159, 162
Lafforgue, Jules  42
Lago, Tomás  33
Laprida, Francisco Narciso de  45, 47
Lara Martínez, Rafael  109, 113
Lautréamont, Isidore-Lucien Ducasse,
Count of  82
Leland, Christopher  4
Lerzundi, Patricio  31
Lezama Lima, José  97, 159
Paradiso  97
Lihn, Enrique  11, 32, 98, 115, 159
Liscano, Juan  79, 91, 159
Loewenstein, Jared  46, 52
López Velarde, Ramón  75
Lowell, Robert  7, 135, 149
Loyola, Hernán  24
Lugones, Leopoldo  42, 75, 160
Lunario sentimental  42
Lyon, Thomas  56
Madrid, Lelia  15
Magis, Carlos  13
Maia, Circe  159
Mallarmé, Stéphane  13, 19, 98, 102
Mañach, Jorge  3
Mann, Thomas  102
The Magic Mountain  102
Manzari, H.J.  151
Maples Arce, Manuel  3
Marechal, Leopoldo  97
Adán Buenosayres  97
Mariátegui, José Carlos  4, 5
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso  4
Márquez, Robert  98
Martí, José  151
Martínez, Juan Luis  75
Marx, Karl  101, 121, 139
Masiello, Francine  4
Medina, Dante  37, 38, 56
Melville, Herman  82
Méndez-Ramírez, Hugo  22, 23
Mereles Olivera, Sonia  7, 34, 72, 159
Merton, Thomas  59, 69, 70, 71
Meyrink, Gustav  49
Der Golem  49
Michaux, Henri  98
Millán, Gonzalo  75, 159
Miranda, Francisco de  25
Mistral, Gabriela  8
Lagar  8
Modernism  67, 77
Modernismo/modernista(s)  1, 2, 3, 8,
104, 120, 121, 124, 160
Molina, César Antonio  31
Monasterios, Elizabeth  117
Moore, Marianne  76
Morales, Leonidas  1, 33, 37
Moran, Dominic  14
Morejón, Nancy  159
Mutis, Alvaro  30, 159
Neruda, Pablo  1, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12,
13, 15, 17, 21, 22–30, 31, 32, 35, 36,
38, 55, 56, 64, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 95,
97, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 108,
114, 122, 124, 128, 136, 145, 159
Alturas de Macchu Picchu  10, 15,
23, 27, 69, 108
Canción de gesta  24
Canto general  9, 10, 11, 13, 21, 22,
23, 24, 25, 27, 64, 104
Cantos ceremoniales  24
Cien sonetos de amor  24, 30, 35
Estravagario  23
La baracarola  24
Las uvas y el viento  24, 30
Las piedras de Chile  24
Los versos del capitán  24
Memorial de isla negra  24
Navegaciones y regresos  27
Nuevas Odas elementales  24, 28, 29
Odas elementales  10, 21, 24, 27, 28,
29, 30, 74, 101, 102, 103, 114
Plenos poderes  24
Residencia en la tierra  5, 12,17, 22,
72, 95, 97, 128,
Tentativa del hombre infinito  9
Tercer libro de las odas  24, 29
Veinte poemas de amor y una canción
desesperada  38, 104, 122, 145
Nicholson, Melanie  78, 79, 88, 92, 93
Novalis (Georg Freidrich Phillipp von
Hardenburg)  95
O’Hara, Edgar  118
 INDEX 181
O’Hara, Frank  76
Olivera Williams, María Rosa  118
Ollé, Carmen  159
Orozco, Olga  5, 6, 7, 49, 77–97, 99,
103, 119, 121, 131, 160, 162, 163
Cantos a Berenice  90, 91, 92
Desde lejos  79, 80, 81, 82, 83
En el revés del cielo  96
La oscuridad es otro sol  80, 86
Las muertes  78, 79, 82, 84, 96
La noche a la deriva  77, 94, 96
Los juegos peligrosos  79, 84, 86,
88, 89
Museo salvaje  80, 89
Mutaciones de la realidad  81, 92, 93
Ortega, Julio  135, 138, 141, 145, 148,
150
Ortiz, Juan L.  159
Osorio, Nelson  3
Oviedo, José Miguel  134
Oviedo, Rocío  116
Pacheco, José Emilio  2, 5, 6, 7, 93, 99,
115, 116–135, 146, 159, 163
Ciudad de la memoria  132
Descripción de Piedra de sol  7
Desde entonces  119, 128, 129, 132,
134
El reposo del fuego  93, 116, 118,
119, 126, 132
El silencio de la luna  119
Irás y no volverás  125, 127, 129
Islas a la deriva  119, 121, 122, 128,
129, 132
La arena errante  132, 133
Los elementos de la noche  116
Los trabajos del mar  119, 123, 129,
132
Miro la tierra  131, 134
Tarde o temprano  123
No me preguntes cómo pasa el tiempo
116, 119, 121, 124, 127, 134
Siglo pasado  99, 125, 133, 134
Pailler, Claire  164
Palés Matos, Luis  9
Parilla, Eduardo  35, 38
Parra, Nicanor  1. 5. 6, 7, 10, 11, 21, 23,
29, 30–43, 45, 56, 62, 72, 74, 75, 77,
94, 107, 109, 115, 119, 135, 146, 159,
160, 164
Artefactos  42
Cancionero sin nombre  33
Canciones rusos  42
Chistes parRa desorientar a la
policía  36, 42, 43
Ecopoemas  42
Hojas de Parra  42
El anti-Lázaro  42
La camisa de fuerza  38, 39, 42
La cueca larga  33, 42
Nuevos sermones y prédicas del Cristo
de Elqui  42
Otros poemas, 36, 42, 56
Poemas de emergencia  42
Poemas para combatir la calvicie  42
Poemas y antipoemas  1, 6, 21, 32,
33, 34, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 95, 107
Poesía política  42
Tres poemas  38
Sermones y prédicas del Cristo de
Elqui  42
Versos de salón  36, 37, 38, 40, 42
Pasolini, Pier Paolo  151
Pasos, Joaquín  7
Paz, Octavio  2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12–21,
32, 33, 35, 38, 42, 46, 48, 74, 75, 78,
83, 93, 94, 98, 99, 116, 119, 142, 146,
159, 160, 161, 162
Blanco  16, 18, 19, 20
Corriente alterna  74
Días hábiles  17
Carta de creencia  19
El arco y la lira  15, 19, 74, 98
Hacia el comienzo  19
Homenaje y profanaciones  18
Ladera este  16, 18
Libertad bajo palabra  9, 15, 16, 18,
20, 38, 42, 48, 93, 142
Los hijos del limo  75
Luna silvestre  9, 12
Pasado en claro  14, 19
Piedra de sol  16, 17, 18, 19
Salamandra  18
Pérez, Floridor  75
Pérez-Luna, Elizabeth  37
Perlongher, Nestor  162
Perse, Saint-John (Alexis Saint Léger) 98
Phillips, Allen, 45
Phillips, Rachel  18
Pichón Rivière, Marcelo  89
Picón Garfield, Evelyn  2
Piña, Cristina  79, 80, 84, 96
182 INDEX
Pineda Franco, Adela,  135
Pinochet, Augusto  102
Pizarnik, Alejandra  75, 103, 159
poesía coloquial/conversacional  45, 62,
75, 95, 98, 114, 115, 116, 119, 122,
143, 153, 157, 160, 162
Postmodernism  164
Pound, Ezra  7, 63, 76, 135
Poust, Alice  56
Pring-Mill, Robert  62, 63, 65, 71, 99
Promis Ojeda, José  61
Quesada, Jaime  75
Quiroga, Facundo  45
Rama, Angel  162
Ramírez, Sergio  57
Revista de Avance  4
Ricoeur, Paul  46
Riess, Frank  26, 27
Rimbaud, Arthur  98, 121
Rivera-Rodas, Oscar  2
Roa Bastos, Augusto  97
Hijo de hombre  97
Rodero Jesús  7
Rodríguez, Iliana  105
Rodríguez Alcalá, Hugo  134
Rodin, Auguste  40
Rojas, Gonzalo  30, 159
Rojas, Waldo  75
Rovira Soler, José Carlos  24
Rowe, William  1, 32, 34, 62, 159
Rulfo, Juan  97
Pedro Páramo  97
Running, Thorpe  2, 74, 75, 130, 159,
162
Sabines, Jaime  159
Sainz, Gustavo  144
Obsesivos días circulares  144
Sainz de Medrano, Luis  24
Saldías, Amanda  152
Salmon, Russell  66, 67
Salvador, Alvaro  1.
Sandino, Augusto César  58, 59
Sandoval, Pedro Sarmiento  161, 162
Sanhuesa, Jorge  23
Santí, Enrico Mario  9, 19
Sarabia, Rosa  32, 66, 68, 159
Sauter, Silvia  79, 88, 93, 97
Scarano, Tommaso  45
Schopf, Federico  2, 30, 31, 38
Schulman, Ivan  2
Schwartz, Jorge, 3
Segall, Brenda  12
Shaefer, Claudia  68
Shaw, Donald L.  23, 40, 46, 52
Shelley, Percy Bysshe  79
Shimose, Pedro  159
Siebenmann, Gustav  3, 159
Silva, Manuel  75
Skármeta, Antonio  57
La insurrección  57
Sobejano, Gonzalo  50
Somoza, Anastasio  58, 59, 63
Stafford, William  76
Stoker, Bram  152
Dracula  152
Suárez, Isidoro  45
Sucre, Guillermo  2, 10, 16, 20, 33, 56
Surrealism/Surrealist(s)  33
Tablada, José Juan  160
Tacconi, María del Carmen  79, 80, 87
Taravacci, Pietro  45
Teitelboim, Volodia  8
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre  68, 71
Tenorio, Martha-Lilia  45
Terán, Ana E.  159
Torres, Daniel  115
Torres Bodet, Jaime  3
Torres de Peralta, Elba  80
Torres Fierro Demestrio  88
Treece, David  11, 75, 159
Tzara, Tristan  119
Ulacia, Manuel  18
ultraismo  8, 46, 128, 160
Unamuno, Miguel de  20, 41, 91, 94, 99
Underhill, Evelyn  78
Urdanivia-Bertarelli, Eduardo  61, 143,
150, 152
Uriarte, Iván  32
Urondo, Francisco  11, 159
Urrutia, Matilde  28
Valdés, Jorge  59, 62, 65
Valdivieso, Antonio de  66
Vallejo, César  1, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15,
36, 38, 69, 70, 72, 86, 97, 98, 101,
102, 106, 108, 127, 135
España aparta de mí este cáliz  7, 70
 INDEX 183

Los heraldos negros  39, 97, 101, Williams, William carlos  76, 124
127, 135 Williamson, Edwin  48
Poemas humanos  7. 101 Wilson, Jason  13, 14
Trilce  5, 36, 69, 101, 102, 108 Woolf, Virginia  77
Vanguard/Vanguardism/Vanguardists  1, To the Lighthouse  77
3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 20, 22, 23, Mrs Dalloway  78
31, 33, 41, 45, 46, 76, 95, 97, 100, Wordsworth, William  79, 88, 139
107, 109, 120, 121, 124, 153, 160, 163
Vargas Llosa, Mario  116 Xirau, Ramón  7
Verani, Hugo  3, 4, 5
Vidal, Hernán  57 Yeats, William Butler  121
Videla, Jorge Rafael  102 Yurkievich, Saúl  1, 7, 10, 12, 13, 15, 49,
Villegas, Juan  34 114, 161
Villena, Luis Antonio de  120
Vitier, Cintio  159 Zaid, Gabriel  134
Zapata, Miguel Angel  155
Walker, William  58 Zurita, Raúl  159
White, Stephen  56