Notes on a Return to the Ever-Dying Lands
Singing Idea: Voice artist Montse Ruano ‘s quest to put one of Uruguay’s important poets to music
Part 2 of an essay on transmigrations of Latin American poetry into music
It might be surprising that a poet whose name was Idea wrote verses of such visceral passion, as evoked in the tireless, unnerving performances of Montse Ruano, who sings the fiery lines of Idea Vilariño’s poetry.
Uruguay’s Vilariño, who lived from 1920 until 2009, wrote that all she possesses in the world is a yellowed hankie withered by semen, tears, and blood. (The very line begs the question: did she write the poem on such a handkerchief, degenerated into parchment autumned by pain-force?) Poemas de Amor was dedicated to Juan Carlos Onetti, the legendary Uruguayan writer, with whom Vilariño had the long affair spoken of in the book. Love Poems was first published in 1957, but Vilariño continued to revise and add to the book— one of the causes for perpetual revision may have been the final, decisive change in their affair, when Onetti was imprisoned by the murderous 1970’s military regime, and was only able to escape into exile thanks to campaigns in Europe led by his successful contemporaries of the Boom-generation such as Mario Vargas Llosa.
Staccato return-pilgrimages to painful memory are perhaps a lasting condition of those affected by the 1970s dictatorships. Separation from the world during imprisonment, as well as the separation from a beloved, are often referred to in much older vanguard literature in Spanish, like in Saint John of the Cross’ (San Juan de la Cruz’) Long Dark Night of the Soul
“Idea is raw, she goes directly to the core of things, laying her nerves bare’’ says singer Montse, when speaking of her love for the poet born to the La Plata River delta (far away from the Eresma river of Montse’s Spanish territory of birth, in Segovia, Northern Spain.)
Scroll down, or follow this link for a translation of Vilariño’s “El Amor” by Jesse Lee Kercheval, the Montevideo-based North American translator and scholar who edited the Uruguay Poets’ folio in Drunken Boat magazine #23(and who has permissions from Vilariño’s estate)
Vilariño received little recognition in her young years. Upon news of death in 2009, Uruguay’s Socialist Party (then leading the country) issued a communiqué of bereavement at the loss, calling Idea ‘’a poet of militant and political compromise.’’ Argentinian poet Alberto Szpunberg, a poet whose work emphasizes Jewish identity, instantly beatified her as Santa Idea and keeps a small, dusted and polished ikon of Uruguay’s very first Saint upon his writing table.
Santa Idea’s first musical interpreter Montse admires the poet’s despairing existentialist intellectuality — though that intellectuality remains in the background, wholly different from being cerebral. “It is true that I often felt Idea was talking to me, or about me and my love-life. When transferring the words to music, at some point there is what I suspect to be a connection made, submitting me to the words of another, of this author — But perhaps that is an imagined intimacy with the author, who for all I know is rolling in the grave’’ Montse admits humbly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NBWmKZrUrc
Audiences at the concert halls such as that of the La Cooperación in Buenos Aires were electrified by Ruano’s performance during the 2016 international poetry festival. Her show lasts two hours during which the tall pale singer, dressed in red, seems to never waiver in her energy, the base of a tower of song impaling abdomen, wherefrom the poems, recited and sung, blast in accompaniment of piano, cello and other strings. The founder/conductor of the project is Miguel Wharen, who has also put texts of Federico García Lorca and Paul Auster to music.
A love poetry does not contradict Ruano’s visceral corporality, as she moves seductively while singing, then in intervals simply reciting what sound like the intimate diaries of poet fighting to possess and reignite a lost love affair to the brink of self-destruction. Antics of tango blend with rock and flamenco. Enchanted by the tale, the singer, who is much taller than ordinary Argentines, erupts into dances as she wails with a voice like tall water in the haunting performance, lacerating the soul and ear with serenades. Montse Ruano, (whose name sounds like Segovian volcano near the rubble of that windmill charged by Quijote) is a singer, actress and marionette-puppeteer. She ran away from her home in Segovia, Northern Spain, as a teenager, first going to London and New York. For the past 17 years she was based in Argentina. “For nine months I performed and lived each week in a different city between Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador” That number of months is no coincidence: no return possible, no re-adaptation to the cold land and European reality.
Despite being from a very different region of Spain than Lorca’s Granada, while performing an Uruguayan poet, it felt necessary after hearing her sing to ask of a relationship to Lorca and to what is known as Deep Song or Cante Jondo
“Ironically, maybe by coincidence, I had not truly discovered Lorca until I came here, to Argentina, the South of the world. Only then did I begin to understand and to encounter a world of the kind Lorca spoke of, the men and women and passions that fed him and his poetry. I found him walking here”
“I had put poets to music before, poems by Quevedo and Theresa of Avila — there was much to work with musically as rhythm is inherent in their texts. With Idea it was similar. I believe the work of a literary translator is much more difficult, one has to find words that translate the onomatopoeias and the innate sounds of the words, not only their meanings! Though it is by no means an easy task to take written words and musicalize them.”
It is clear how Uruguayan poets like Circe María or Ida Vitale or Idea Vilariño who wrote on nakedness and the difficulty of being free, could resonate and live in the interpreter Monste. ”After this long sojourn in my life, 17 years in Latin America, I see I am a very different woman compared to the structure, the house that was meant to be my foundation as a girl’’ she waxes. “They intended that my structure would be that of a Romanic house’’ (in her home-region Segovia, there are many Romanic churches, related in their history to Gothic) “And today my house is mishmash of everything, of adobe, of clay, of cardboard, and glass, and small garden with a view to sky. My house has no gates, no bars on the windows.” Only one possessing inner freedom and uncaged, channeled emotion could sing such blood-flower poets.
LOVE by Idea Vilariño | translation Jesse Lee Kercheval
Love love I will never catch you
now I will not know how you are.
I will not have lived one day
one night of love
one morning
no I never knew
I never had anyone
no one ever gave himself
nothing was mine
or he erased me from the world with his breath
What existed was pain
the only thing that was that was overflowing
witnessed as true
but where did it end up
what is certain now.
Today the only trace is a handkerchief
that someone keeps forgotten
a handkerchief with blood semen tears
that has turned yellow.
That is all. The love
where it was how it was
why among so many nights
there was never a night
a love a love
a night of love
a word.
EL AMOR
Amor amor jamás te apresaré
ya no sabré cómo eras.
No habré vivido un día
una noche de amor
una mañana no conocí jamás no tuve a nadie
nunca nadie se dio
nada fue mío
ni me borró del mundo con su soplo.
Lo que hubo fue dolor
lo solo que hubo
que fue colmado atestiguó fue
cierto pero dónde quedó qué consta ahora.
Hoy el único rastro es un pañuelo
que alguien guarda olvidado
un pañuelo con sangre semen lágrimas
que se ha vuelto amarillo.
Eso es todo.
El amor dónde estuvo
cómo era
por qué entre tantas noches
no hubo nunca una noche un amor
un amor
una noche de amor
una palabra.
A poem I wrote after the night I first experienced the performance by Montse Ruano singing Idea can be read via this link. -Arturo Desimone
More English translations of Idea Vilariño by Jesse Lee Kercheval
The Whole Spring
The whole spring
with pigeons and stalks and hurricanes
with buckets of warm water
with a voluminous butterfly
fluttering plush
with a garden a forest a grove
populated by humidity and rotting leaves
and fragrances and mists and whiffs of air
and fierce roots and why not
the whole spring was emptied out
breathing sinking
panting in my bed.
{photo of Vilariño in old age, linked via twitter https://twitter.com/ArturoSimone/status/777831357045170176 }
You Didn’t Know
My poor love
you believed
that it was so
you didn’t know.
It was richer than that
it was poorer than that
it was life and you
with your eyes closed
you saw your nightmares
and you called that
life.
Song
I would like to die
now
of love
so you could know
how and how much I loved you.
I would like to die
of love
so you can know.
Neither
Now you’re gone. I smell
your place in bed
your heat that still remains
and at the same time bitter
alienated I know
I am still alone and that
it will be only my body
the sweet the possessed
and never you
that will gather up my life.
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 andAdirondack Review.
