Jorge Guillén
55 Bayard Lane, Préncaton, Nede
\ Princeton, le 25 Juin 1948
Cher Monsieur :
posames - . ..J’ajd le remords de ne vas vous avoir écrit au
sujet de votre beau livre , dont vous aviez eu l’amabaliteé de m’envoyer
la traduction esvagnole. J’ai regu la Historia Universal del Hombre
quand j’étais extremement préoccupé par 1’état de santé de ma fenme. Nous
sommes partis en France et j’ai emporté le livre avec moi. Je me rappelle
tres bien les heures que j’ai passées a varcourir votre OUVrage, que
j’ai fini var lire entiérement, surtout dans we charmante petite ville
de l’Tle de France, Provins, plein pour moi de beaux souvenirs.Je me suis
beaucoun instruit et j’ai beaucoup admiré votre vaste savoir, ainsi que
la puissante intelligence qui donne 1m sens a tant ad’ éléments.Je@ ne suis
pas 4 meme de formuler wm jugement sur wm onvrage de cette taille, mais
*
je tenais 4 vous exprimer ma reconnaissance de lecteur.
Notre ami Herbert Steinerfa di vous varler de ma situation actuelle.
Je vais déja mieux et je crois que je vourrai rentrer a Wellesley dans
quelques jours. Aurai-je 1’ extreme plaisir de vous voir ? Merci beaucoup
encore une fois.
Tres amicalement,
\ Clean an'a def gue wry Mem
At pelle Jone posse hed. Jew mys Va
din Vir5 Ae rc jeolee sn ee
Ab iartin, Meuiz ble wt lhe!
“It moves toward
that encircling of
magnificence: midday.”
A roaa@ te Cadiz,
Spain: Photograph by
Michael Wolgensinger.
Interplay of Image, Idea
CANTICO. A Selection. By Jorge Guillén.
Edited by Norman Thomas di Giovanni.
291 pp. Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown.
Cloth, $6.50. Paper, $2.95.
By DUDLEY FITTS
ORGE GUILLEN, born in Vallado-
lid, Old Castile, in 1893, is one of
the small number of living poets
whom we can, without embarrass-
ment or reservations, call great. His
“Cantico,” an almost legendary life
work begun in 1919 and published
complete in Spanish in 1950, com-
once that in expressing these doubts
I intend no reflection upon the com-
petence of the present translators.
If this subtle, complex, singing, vi-
brant poetry could be caught and
carried across in verse translation,
such poets as Barbara Howes, Rich-
ard Wilbur and Ben Bellitt would be
the ones to do so. Unhappily for their
project, the Guillén texture is so fine,
the anima of this art so elusive and
so personal, that the admirably re-
sponsible assumptions upon which
"
sis rri¢’ i FiO) * cas ais avian sts
and Song
paraphrase that may very well re-
sult in a new poem in English, but
at the risk of violating or even falsi-
fying the original. This exercise is
irresponsible and may be exhibition-
istic; none of Mr. di Giovanni's trans-
lators accepts it. Their method is at
once less ambitious and more limit-
ing: a line-for-line adherence to.the
Spanish text—not in matters of
meter and rhyme and assonance, for
that would be crippling, but so far
as possible in what pertains to image
:
e S n anne
coct ‘nz Inne
Todo es cipula. Reposa,
Central sin querer, la rosa,
A un sol en cenit sujeta.
Y tanto se da el presente
Que el pie caminante siente
La integridad del planeta.
Curved, the firmament remains
Densely blue, above the day.
It moves toward that encir-
cling
Of magnificence: midday.
All is a dome. Quietly
There at the center rests the rose,
Subject of the noonday sun.
And so much does the moment lend
That the traveling foot can feel
The completeness of the planet.
Fair enough; but the poem is only
adumbrated in the English. Nothing
has been falsified, although the
translation of the third line from
the end is a needless dilution—that
word “lend,” without even rhyme for
a reason ?——of a verse that is in it-
self a statement and an example of
the oddly abstract immediacy of
Guillén, Nothing has been falsified,
but the reader will use the transla-
tion Only to begin his encounter with
the poem. A modest service, but a
true one,
Most often, then, the translator
must abandon the resonances of the
Spanish, the jubilant, complex verbal
play, and confine himself to little
more than the prose sense of the
lines. Such a restriction is not wholly
disastrous, for the prose sense is sig-
nificant; and for the reader with but
a little Spanish the presence of the
:
g LJ a - =
moaioc naccthion <awmwna
t <= ULC Vii! {8,5 y S—E€Ec
and every one of them, I should say,
defying translation. For the present
book he has made his own selection
of 50 of these poems; and Norman
Thomas di Giovanni, with 10 col-
laborating poets, offers more or less
literal verse translations on pages
facing the original Spanish text.
There is an introduction in English
-by Don Jorge himself, and the book
concludes with a useful chronology
of his life and work.
I have already suggested misgiv-
ings as to the possibility of translat-
ing Jorge Guillén. Let me say at
Mr. Fitts, scholar, critic and trans-
lator, edited “An Anthology of Con-
temporary Latin American Poetry.”
will not permit more than a mild
approximation to the original poems.
Granted that any good poet is to
be known as a totality only in his
own language, Jorge Guillén is an
instance—like Keats, I should imag-
ine, or like Wallace Stevens—of a
poet more resistant than most be-
cause of the intricately private inter-
play of image, idea and song. The
poetry may be regarded as all sur-
face, the impact immediate, instant,
Sensuous; or we may feel it as hav-
ing no surface at all, but as being
(again like the best of Stevens)
pure substance in naked and violent
contact with our minds. What is a
translator to do?
herence is right I am certain; but
it pretty much rules out anything
approaching poetry on the English
pages of this book.
There are exceptions. Richard Wil-
bur’s version of “Unos Cahballos’” is
a respectable sonnet in its own right;
in lyrics of a short span there are
interesting solutions by Ben Bellitt,
W. S. Merwin, James Wright and
Alastair Reid. The successes and
shortcomings of the method can be
illustrated perhaps by one of the bet-
ter approximations, written by Bar-
bara Howes.
Queda curvo el firmamento,
Compacto azul, sobre el dia.
understanding of the beauty that the
translator has been obliged to pass
by.
Mr. di Giovanni’s labors have cer-
tainly not been in vain. He has given
us, in a literate and responsible form,
some insight into the work of a
major poet, a poet of the stature of
Yeats or Valéry or Rilke. He has pro-
vided us with a Spanish text marred,
so far as I can discover, by only one
misprint. His translators have under-
taken their task with an engaging
pietas, rejecting self-conscious imita-
tions and other personal indulgences.
Best of all, Don Jorge Gillén, known
to us heretofore only in snippets of
translation, is made available in a
seems to be “imitation,” the free
An increasingly popular method
ORGE GUILLEN, though he has been called “beyond
dispute the greatest living Spanish poet” by no less
eminent a critic than Jorge Luis Borges of Argen-
tina, has spent a large part of his life outside of
Spain. In 1918, while still in his teens, he went to
Switzerland to study. Since then he has lived and taught
in Spain—but also in Paris, England (teaching at Ox-
ford), Germany, Mexico, Italy, Chile, Puerto Rico and
the United States. A literary scholar in demand, he has
held posts in this country on the campuses of Middle-
bury, Harvard, Berkeley, Ohio State, Yale and Wellesley,
remaining at the latter for 17 years before retiring in
1957. He now lives much of the time in Cambridge, Mass.
In his introduction to “Cantico: A Selection,” Guillén
describes himself as “a member not of any literary
school, but rather of a literary generation,” one that
in Spain included Federico Garcia Lorca, Luis Cernuda
and Rafael Alberti. Coming of age in the twenties, he
writes, “All of us turned out to be, quite unintention-
ally, as up-to-date as our contemporaries in Europe
and America. Our strongest feelings were in tune with
Es el redondeamiento
Del esplendor: mediodia.
substantial and representative selec-
tion of his poetry.
the general atmosphere of the twenties, though at the
Same time we echoed a purely Spanish tradition.” His
description of a literary impulse in favor of “reality,
not realism,” of “sentiment stripped of gesticulation”
sounds the note, as well, of Hemingway and T. S. Eliot.
“Not having been precocious, I was 25 when I began
writing. . . . Why had I never written before that?
Because I never dared. But from time to time I would
say to my friends, ‘I’d give anything to write a book of
verse!’ Even then I was thinking about a single work
with an organic unity.”
Guillén’s pursuit of the “single work” that would
serve as poetic testament might have been satisfied by
publication of the complete “Cantico,” in Buenos Aires
in 1950, with all of its 334 poems. But in fact two other
works have followed: “Clamor,” dealing, he says, with
“evil, disorder and death,’ (published also in Buenos
Aires); and a work in progress titled “Homenaje”
(“Homage”). Guillén’s hope is to combine all three “in
a single volume, so that, for better or worse, that dream
of my youth may be attained: to write a book, one book.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
