Notes on a Return to the Ever-Dying Lands
Introducing Transmigrations of Latin American Poetry Into Music
Poetry between the paper and ether, Southern and Central America.
Latin American poetic transmigrations into music are not unexpected. Traditions of songwriters, and of minstrels or traveling oral poets, have pre-Columbian roots reaching back unto well before colonization. (A jousting minstrel who continues such tradition is Mariana Carrizo, from the Calchaquí valleys of Salta, Argentina, seen here in this precocious performance on video where she sings “I am from Salta and full of longing’’ and that she is the tailor who came to take measurements of local men from their waists down to their feet and back.)
Penetrating far beyond the playfulness of the minstrels, there lies a tradition of nomadic folk-singers in Latin America: these have preserved and produced more singular, melancholy, philosophical and even epic forms of poetic expression.
Even in Santiago, modernized urban capital of Chile, certain bars are still visited by the payadores — groups of minstrels who sit with small guitars (guitarrón) before the audience, inviting members of the public to demand themes, or to give the minstrels a single sentence of five syllables that will become the ‘foot’ (pie) upon which the troupe of minstrels will improvise a fun, rambling story in meter.
The payadores (and payadoras) are by no means uniquely Chilean — related traditions of minstrels thrive in the North of Argentina, and wherever poetry is strongly embedded in the parlance and in daily exchanges of people. Much of European poetic tradition owes itself to the existence of such minstrels as the troubadours of France, or the Minnesingers of late medieval Germany. According to Joseph Campbell, historian of mythology, the troubadours and Minnesingers were persecuted and eliminated in Europe because of the consolidation of rising Nation State ideology, which had no tolerance for nomadic, free intellectual cultures (and their corresponding individualism and compassion.)
Penetrating far beyond the playfulness of the minstrels, there lies a tradition of nomadic folk-singers in Latin America: these have preserved and produced more singular, melancholy, philosophical and even epic forms of poetic expression. One of Argentina’s most remembered wandering bards was Atahualpa Yupanki. The outlaw, of indigenous and Spanish mixed origins going by a Quechua name, travelled the length of Argentina by horseback, making his name in major cities and villages.
Here is a video with English subtitles of Yupanqui telling a tale with guitar.
As a poet and legend, Yupanki was recognized by contemporaries such as Jorge Luis Borges, who went so far as to collaborate with him in projects — as did the Uruguayan poet and musician Osiris Rodriguez Castillo. Osiris was a poet of the generation of Circe María and Ida Vitale, and also an itinerant singer-guitarist.
Argentinian poet Roberto Jorge Santoro founded and edited the literary magazine El Barillete, platform he used to make the case for certain tango-songwriters, such as the anarchist Horacio Manzi, as Argentinian poetry that fed the music and dance-halls of the immigrant lower classes.
Santoro was a militant Peronist who fought against the junta regimes in the 1970s. He was detained and murdered in the clandestine prisons, one of the ‘’disappeared persons’’ who dictator Rafael Videla defined as ‘’neither living nor dead’’
Since El Barrilete, Manzi-as-poet has received comparatively little attention — except, perhaps, in Silvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, in which a warlock-like, stout chemistry-teacher is called Mr Manzi. (In later chapters, Plath testifies of the traumatic, devastating experience of being led by a Brazilian in an evening’s tango dance.)
South American poets today undergoing an increasingly restrictive and freedomless era of neoliberal constraints, can often fall back upon an example of defiance, and a source of nourishment and fascination in Violeta Parra, the Chilean singer songwriter.
South American poets today undergoing an increasingly restrictive and freedomless era of neoliberal constraints, can often fall back upon an example of defiance, and a source of nourishment and fascination in Violeta Parra, the Chilean singer songwriter.
Video with English subtitles for “Rin del Angelito, a song and poem by Violeta Parra.
Remarkably, Violeta seldom obtained translation into English, though an ode In Defense of Violeta Parra by her brother Nicanor Parra was translated and published (in the Paris Review’s 200th issue.) The youngest of the Parra siblings — all of whom became important national poets — La Violeta dropped out of school, into a friendship with the poets Enrique Lihn and Pablo de Rokha, who encouraged her to read and write more poetry. Parra embarked on a trek through the entire length of the Andes in search of proverbs, expressions and oral poems facing near-extinction. Her compilation of spoken poetry, written down while scouring and interrogating the Andes, was translated and published as “Poesie populaire des Andes’’ in Paris in 1965.
Music clip on Youtube of a Violeta Parra song with the option of English subtitles available here.
Parra’s music expresses her pursuit of freedom: an austere and nomadic, lonely existence, motivated by a love that regards itself above the law and above social ‘’propriety’’. Her expression and life exist in friction with an ultra-conservative Chile, its harrowing suffocation — a narrow, elongated land, like a fallen tower, between the high jagged Andes and the immense Pacific. She exudes a resonance of the mendicant mysticism of Saint Theresa of Avila (perhaps the foremost inspiration for North American nomadic-writer Jack Kerouac, a pious Catholic mystic).
Unlike the liberal and pagan Catholicism of many other Latin American countries, the Chilean church believes only in a male deity of European countenance, and cooperates with the business order. Parra sings of the loves and adulteries that flare up in the Church in the Sacristán (song of the sacristy)
The singer of Gracias a la Vida (Thanks to Life) committed suicide with a gunshot to her head on February 5th of 1967. The ominous end came shortly before the regime-change by the Chilean military. Like her contemporary Neruda, she did not live long enough to see the rise of Fascist society following the overthrow of Allende’s democratically elected government, replaced by a military and pro-neoliberal regime supported eagerly by Washington. Surviving friends such as Enrique Lihn and others witnessed the new Chile, from exile or from the darkness of prisons.
Parra was born in El Parral, an often mist-enshrouded small part of rural, central Chile, where the family owned lands, and which later became the site of infamous crimes during the time of Pinochetism.
It was the poet Eduardo Anguita who first validated Parra as an important revolutionary of literature in Spanish language. His Anthology of Hispanic-American Poetry includes Parra chronologically, in that same lineage of John of the Cross, Saint Theresa of Avila, Lorca and Neruda. “Nicanor insisted on taking the poets down from Mt Olympus, but we think it is of fundamental importance to hoist Violeta up there in Olympus” says publisher Christian Warnken. Poet Raul Zúrita, author of collections such as “Purgatory’’ among other books he wrote in prison after the coup, often describes his loathing for his country Chile, but exempts Violeta: I don’t like Chileans…Chileans, like to show they are the best, they are competitive, fond of social-climbing, conformism, envy. There are some Chileans I like. I like Violeta. (from a 2015 video-interview Zuríta gave to the young Argentine poets of the Audisea publishing house when to visit him in Chile)
The Cuban poet and percussion and voice musician Omar Pérez gave a brain-stirring lecture at the international poetry festival of Buenos Aires (June 2016, in the La Cooperación cultural center where I read with Pérez.)
Video of Omar Perez reading a translation of his poem “The Concept in English” on PBS news.
For Pérez, poets need to roll back the clock and undo the historical tragic divorce in which poetry and rhythm were wrongly conceived as separate. It seemed as if the cerebral division of poetry from music (which automatically means a division between art and philosophy, thinking head and body) was about as dramatic as the prelude to the first divisions of labour and class-society in ancient Sumer. The Cuban spoke with admiration for the extinct Neanderthal culture, who were said to have a singular language the hominids sung to one another, as words and meanings were distinguished by intonation. Perez laments the disappearance of this culture in the first ethnic cleansing of recorded human history. “There is no doubt that a poem can be interpreted, or read, by dancing it’’ insists Perez, who interprets a manifesto on poetry and musicality in Cesar Vallejo’s poem-collection “Trilce,” perhaps inhabiting the very title, Vallejo’s invented word which sounds like ‘triste’ (sad) and dulce (sweet) vibrating as one.
…wherever today’s modern experimentation in poetry can take place, it is with thanks to being earthed in a long historical memory of literary traditions, in which both European and native cultures (as well as West African and other traditions) interacted and forged together in the shadows of conquest in Latin-America.
Pérez’s verse shamelessly employs rhyme, on the border with rap and African talk-song traditions brought to the Caribbean via the slave trade. His poems engage with the poetic line established by the Cuban poet and revolutionary Nicolás Guillén, who was known to capture the rhythms and musicality of popular speech and vernacular, elevating these idioms into radical and futurist forms. But Pérez’s parallel artistic confreres are Cuban songwriters such as Pablo Milanés.
Late Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, a Party member and participant in the revolution, was also a music-scholar. Author of novels such as El Siglo de las Luces (Age of Enlightenment) and Concierto Barroco (Baroque Concert) he documented his research into Afro-Cuban music, for example the book La Musica en Cuba (video is Spanish text only).
In the region of Cuba, Puerto Rico and Central America, the song-texts of some of the salseros (salsa singers) such as Ruben Blades, Hector Lavoe and Willie Colón, inevitably have a mutual interaction with poets and poetry, though the influence has become more one-sided long since the golden age of son-son and salsa (coinciding with the years following the Cuban revolution) as performers commercialize. Among the most recognizable are Lavoe’s song text ‘’Your love is as yesterday’s front page newspaper‘’ (here, a sloppy English translation). The song is even mentioned by Grahame Greene in the novelistic memoir “Getting to Know the General’’, about the years of the populist government of Torrijos in Panama.
Young Salvadoran poet Miroslava Rosales, whose poems have been published in the major poetry journals of Mexico, has attested in her blogs to the power of the salsero’s popular chant. Panamanian laureate poet Javier Alvarado has often professed admiration for salsero Rubén Blades (whose songs like the classic Pedro Navaja were also much beloved by the Nuyorican poets movement of Puerto Rican diaspora poets writing in English in New York, from the criminalized underbelly of immigrant society.)
Possibly, wherever today’s modern experimentation in poetry can take place, it is with thanks to being earthed in a long historical memory of literary traditions, in which both European and native cultures (as well as West African and other traditions) interacted and forged together in the shadows of conquest in Latin-America. Possessing the warm and sunned earth, abreast and filled with predecessors under one’s feet, allows the dancer to enact poems freely, in new and radical forms that subvert against the powers’ sterile design. Radical is Latin refers to the radix, the roots of things — such as the Deep Song, Cante Jondo of Spain, a major well of inspiration both for the Republican revolutionaries as for Federico García Lorca. The poet sought the ancient roots of Andalucía and the folk poetry of the gitanos the traditional people who inhabit Sacromonte and other parts of Lorca’s native Granada. Lorca took up the cause of the gypsy in his Romancero Gitano, (“Gypsy Ballad-book”) about a gitano uprising against the repressive campaigns of the proto-Fascist Civil Guard in Spain, as authorities that sought to subdue the Cante Jondo’s people. (If only today such a revolutionary romantic would take up the cause of the tribes of traveling peoples, who are systematically persecuted under the neoliberal, militarized states of France and Italy.) Lorca consulted those who conserve a musical tradition that incorporated every culture ever to traverse the South of Spain, from the Arab and Sephardi Jewish traditions to the Romani who migrated through Asia Minor, the cajón beat-box from colonial Peru, among other influences. And yet he followed his conviction that his contemporary Spanish society still conserved a likeness to the ancient Greek society that gave birth to Tragedy and other epic forms.
A video of children performing Cante Jondo in Cadíz
If Deep Song has something to do with the origins of Greek tragedy, as Lorca claimed, then it should be no surprise of traditions of the Deep Song of Andalucía transmigrated into Argentina. Though traces are easily found in Buenos Aires’ region, the spirit of Deep Song comes especially visible in Argentina’s Northernmost provinces, where the Spanish and Andalusian musical traditions merged with the cultures of the indigenous peoples, as well as the later immigrations of Arab settlers during the 19th century.
The “blood couplets’’ (Coplas de Sangre) sung by Mariana Carrizo resonate and shudder the house of Northern Argentine musical tradition, as she unbuckles taboos and convention. In Catholic, near-feudalistic regions, Mariana sings candidly of marital infidelities, and of the needs and desires of women, with humor, and against all monogamous convention. It is a rebellion that seems not so much feminist as it is indigenous: reaching back to before the stern and disembodied morality of Christianity was imposed upon the native realm.
Video of Mariano Carrizo singing in the International poetry festival in Buenos Aires, June 2016.
Mariana likes stirring up the audiences of her concerts and radio shows, sometimes even eliciting moral outrage, threats and accusations from audiences who look past her beautiful singing, consternated by her message of “Soy Libre y Dueña’’ “Free and my own Lord” such as when she sang the couplet this a rhyming ballad (not a poem) in Spanish
Casada quisiera estar,
casada por un ratito.
Casada toda la vida,
eso sí no lo permito
“Married I would like to be,/married for just a little while./(but) Married for all my life/ well I cannot be bothered with that!”
In rebellion perhaps she is a daughter of the Chilean Violeta Parra, whose poetry Carrizo has sung indulgently, alongside repertoires of Argentine poets.
In the next sequence of post in the series Notes on a Return to the Ever-Dying Lands, three musical acts that use poetry, (written or oral, suffused into song) will be introduced in English for the first time.
First up, in no chronological order, will be the passionate underground diva Montse Ruano: in Argentina she sings the poems written by Uruguayan poet Idea Vilariño. Aforementioned singer and minstrel Mariana Carrizo, originally from the traditional Calchaquí people inhabiting the Calchaquí valley Salta in the North Argentina, will be the next feature….along with a poet who cannot sing: Argentinian bard Alberto Spzunberg, who is accompanied by the tango accordion player Cesar Stroccio.
There are, of course, many examples of literary and musical cross-pollinations in Latin America. The great Soledad Bravo put the words of poet Rafael Alberti, among many others, into song, in the dark year of 1977 and its many exiles.
The words of poet Marisa Wagner — an Argentine of German origin who spent much of her life locked in insane asylums, not unlike her Jewish Argentine counterpart, the poet Jacobo Fijman — are sung by the inspired amateur musician Mariel del Mar, who hails from the Patagonian South and who works in the labyrinthine mental health system of Argentina.
Argentine musician Daniela Horovitz has even put the Spanish translation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to heart-and-shadow-shuddering music. The transmigrations go on. The dual necessity between music and poetry is an endless and varied a permutation as pain itself.
Arturo Desimone, Arubian-Argentinian writer and visual artist, was born in 1984 on the island Aruba which he inhabited until the age of 22, when he emigrated to the Netherlands. He is currently based in Argentina (a country two of his ancestors left during the 1970s) while working on a long fiction project about childhoods, diasporas, islands and religion. Desimone’s articles, poetry and short fiction pieces have previously appeared in CounterPunch, Círculo de Poesía(Spanish) Acentos Review, New Orleans Review, DemocraciaAbierta, BIM Magazine, Knot-Lit. A play he wrote won a prize for young immigrant authors in Amsterdam in 2011, and published in the world-lit journal of University of Istanbul. His translations of poetry have appeared in the Blue Lyra Review and Adirondack Review.
