“Pyramidal” is a sufficiently outlandish and exquisite adjective to begin a flamboyant, rushing poem of a thousand verses, a savage battle of tongues that hurls darkness against sunlight and illumination, building pyramids again and again in the titanic battle of spirit against god. “Pyramidal” opens one of the most famous, longest and most overwhelming poems in Spanish, the title is simply “First Dream”. It was written by Sor Juana Inés, who died in Mexico City in 1695. She was poor, rebellious, great poet, intellectual and not interested in marriage. She became a nun, frequented the vicequeen’s court and is revered as “Mexico’s tenth muse”. Even today’s readers cannot escape the baroque furor that flares up more and more violently in long movements, even the German translations preserve Sor Juana’s urge for freedom.
Now a thousand verses are too big a chunk even for the overwhelming 2500-page anthology “Spanish and Hispano-American Poetry” that has just been published, which then offers just under a quarter of the text in Susanne Lange’s ecstatic translation: “Pyramidaler, ominous shadow, a Child of the earth, sent up to heaven the vain obelisks high spear, which wanted to climb up to the stars…” Those who want more, even everything, should reach for the translation by Fritz Vogelgsang, which is only available antiquarian. The fact that the reader comes up with such an idea at all can be thanks to this four-volume, bilingual monster edition. On every page, in the poems, which are always condensed life, as well as in the clairvoyant, clairvoyant commentaries, it makes you want to read on, explore more deeply, learn more. Because a reader always goes into such a mega-labyrinth in the hope of unknown experiences and encounters with the magical, provocative, divine. There is more than enough of that in Spanish poetry, and these gems, like Sor Juana, are often virtually unknown in Germany.
Spain’s most translated poet of the 20th century, Federico Garcia Lorca.
(Photo: DPA)
Even the beginnings are unique: at the beginning of the anthology there is an Arabic and a Hebrew poem, the final lines of which, which was not unusual, are in Spanish. Love laments, sighs: “My lover only wants a bare white neck, and he doesn’t like the jewelry.” This poetry thus begins in the context of those immigrants who were persecuted and expelled by the Catholic state between 1492 and 1611. The linguistically simple, everyday tone that condenses situations remained. It is found in romances and songs: “My mother sent me to the cool fountains: now I have love wounds.” He is still present with Federico García Lorca and also with the youngest of the anthology, Sergio Raimondi, who will soon be 60, who lets the plumber into the house who, “untouched by aesthetic postulates”, ensures that the water “does not fall from the ceiling onto the floor bed is dripping” and philosophizes: “His conception of the cosmos allows for an irregularity as a basic principle, a coincidence from which he literally lives.”
Good principle for translators: “My soul has forgotten the rules.”
However, ideological and philosophical elements are never the central passion of these poets; everything is image and perception, even in verses inspired by Christianity. This also applies to Luis de Góngora, this legendary and fiercely contested baroque poet monster who inspired the Sor Juana as well as the avant-garde Generación del 27. Lorca, the Nobel Prize winner Vicente Aleixandre, Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda or Jorge Guillen were inspired by the almost surreal Linguistic cascades of the “Soledad primera” inspire Góngoras: “It was the year of blooming splendor in which Europe’s treacherous kidnapper (a crescent moon is the coat of arms of his forehead, his whole fur glistens in full sun) shone…” This is how it works a thousand verses into the heart of Spanish poetry. The reader is increasingly enthusiastically whirled along. Here, too, the anthology only offers a selection; once you become addicted, you have to obtain the complete translation by Erich Arendt from an antiquarian bookshop in order to be completely happy.
Many of the translations inspire. Sometimes the overly symmetrical meter in German is annoying, in Spanish, which only knows vowels of equal length, the verses are usually much more irregular, jagged and therefore more lively. Sometimes the rhymes are annoying. Especially with the sonnets, it is beneficial when younger translators do without them. A famous sonnet sings about the poplar in the cloister of the monastery of Silos, Gerardo Diego, who was later devoted to Franco, begins with an exquisite adjective: “Enhiesto surtidor de sombra y sueño”, Susanne Lange writes “Gereckter Ray aus Schatten und aus Traum”, she then leaves all rhyming left out. Those translations that stick to Rafael Alberti are often particularly gripping: “My soul has forgotten the rules.”
Martin von Koppenfels et al.: Spanish and Hispanic-American Poetry, Volume 1: From the Beginnings to Fernando de Herrera: Bilingual. Verlag CHBeck, Munich 2022. 635 pages, 45 euros.
(Photo: CHBeck)
The wandering reader, especially the one who is systematically enchanted by these 2500 pages of poetry, will always remember individual verses, and not just celebrities like “Paradise, closed to the many, gardens, open to the few” or “Green, how I love green” . “O Hölderlin, rags and flowering crop at the same time, nest full of chirping, mistreated doll” will also get stuck. Or “I wish for a revolver, so that I can only hear the sound of blood and know that I will not die” or “thus / let’s travel out of the chest into the dry sun that gilds the miracle”. This anthology is a whale that swallows the reader to show him all the wonders he has collected inside over a thousand years.
The third famous Spanish long poem is translated here in full and wonderfully, those famous 480 verses that the soldier poet Jorge Manrique, who died shortly before 1500, wrote on the death of his father. A stormy understandable, intimate and lightly dancing memento mori. The Sung One is “what a friend to his friends, what an enemy to his enemies,” he is intelligent, defender of the poor, rebel fighter, and witty. Jokes are a common ingredient in Spanish poetry. So Lope de Vega, the literary monster of Spain, prolific writer, master dramatist, clergyman and devoted to polygamy, jokingly ridicules Góngora’s twisted mode of expression. So he lets the famous poets Boscán and Garcilaso travel from Parnassus to Castile and meet an innkeeper who speaks Gongorian: “Armed men are not pernocted here.” That disturbs the poets. Should they have ended up with the Basques?