Trilogy

My Lorquian trilogy will consist of Apocryphal Lorca, What Lorca Knew, and Lorca: modelo para armar.

The first studies Lorca's "afterlife" in the US. The second will situate Lorquian poetics alongside the late modernism of Zambrano and Valente (among other things).

The third will be a compendium, in Spanish, of my latest thinking about Lorca. My only doubt, now, is whether there is enough Lorca in What Lorca Knew to justify the title. It is such a great title, I have to use it, but maybe I should take out one of the unwritten chapters and put in something about Lorca instead?

When I say "my only doubt" I realize that that sounds rather arrogant. Today, however, I am in a very self-confident mood, so all my usual doubts are not at the forefront of my mind.

I had wanted to do a kind of updating of Apocryphal Lorca, just a brief chapter called something like "Lorca and Kitsch Revisited." If I did that, then I would be able to increase the Lorca quotient of the second book enough to justify the title. I wouldn't want the reader to pick up the book and feel defrauded by the fact that only one out of ten chapters are about Lorca! Now 20% is enough, I think.

Crudely put, the argument would be that Lorca to Lorquian Kitsch is as modernism to postmodernism. I know even mentioning postmodernism nowadays is cringe-worthy, so I hope you understand I am speaking in shorthand.

Lorca / Teresa de la Parra

The guy at the framing shop asked about the story behind this Lorca drawing. Lorca drew this and dated it in Havana, 1930. On the right hand side he wrote: "Sirvió de modelo Teresa de la Parra." (Teresa de la Parra served as model). She was a Venezuelan novelist, and google revealed that she did travel to Cuba, so this is probably her. The title of the drawing is "Theorem of the Woman Eating up the Moon."

Duncan / Zambrano

Duncan is really opening the door for me on Lorca and Zambrano, in a way I didn't / couldn't see in Apocryphal Lorca, where I only looked at at his response to Lorca himself. Of course, the H.D. Book had not yet been published, so I'm going to cut myself a break here. Also, it is nice when another angle presents itself to me. My own distrust of gnosticism and mythopoesis creates a certain blindness and insight, in that it cuts me off from certain experiences while also giving me a somewhat original viewpoint on them. I am very excited about this new direction my work is taking. I STILL GOT IT. An intoxicating feeling. Pieces of the puzzle are falling into place with little effort on my part. When I invited Ron to give a talk in Kansas and he chose to talk about Duncan and the H.D. Book, I never suspected that this book would end up meaning so much to me. And it is not that I am a Duncan fanatic, either. Just being around Ken Irby for so many years I have grown in my respect for RD, by sheer contagion. By no coincidence, Irby for his first talk in the poetics seminar also talked about Duncan. I think people are trying to tell me something and I haven't been listening very well.

Duncan's scorn for the New Critics who dismissed H.D. helps me understand why Lorca's poetics was not recognized in the age of Dámaso Alonso and Jorge Guillén, the poet-professors. Duncan's scorn for Jarrell is like Valente's for Alonso.

Soria Olmedo

Here's another notice of my book, in the most prestigious Spanish literary journal, written by one of the main Lorca scholars from Spain.

De la incesante bibliografía lorquiana escogemos Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch (University of Chicago Press, 2009), de Jonathan Mayhew. Trata sobre la supervivencia de Lorca en la cultura poética de los USA a través de traducciones, imitaciones y pastiches por algunos grandes poetas de entre los 50 y los 70 (Creely, Spicer, O´Hara, Koch, Rothenberg), que lo conviertieron en un “poeta americano” fuerte justamente por ser apócrifo, un poeta de genio romántico y esencia cultural cuya imagen resulta de una simplificación.

--Andrés Soria Olmedo, Insula.

Lorca and 10,000 Hours

Lorca wrote a lot of juvenilia, and it has been published because Lorca is a super-canonical writer. I use the word super-canonical not as a superlative, but as my term for a writer who is so canonical that a drawing on a napkin is deemed worthy of publication. If you found a new manuscript by Dante, it would be a news item. Lorca is a writer in that category. Lorca's juvenilia, plays and poems, is often quite awful. Religious sentimental crap. His first book, Libro de poemas, is still quite immature. His first play after the juvenilia, about a butterfly and some cockroaches, is insufferable. A few short years after that, he was the genius poet of Poema del cante jondo.

So Lorca needed the proverbial 10,000 hours to be good what he became very, very good at. He needed to write a load of crappy work just to be practiced enough as a writer. Sure, some people write for 10,000 hours and are still crappy, so I am concluding that Lorca was working systematically, deliberately, in his practice, that he had some sense of what he was after and was working toward that goal. All of his reading, his work on Flamenco, his musical practice, was also directed toward this same goal.

So yes, Lorca is a genius inspired by the duende, and all that business, but what he was a genius in was figuring out how to get from being a crappy adolescent writer like all of us were, to be the poet and playwright he became.

***

Coltrane practiced so much that he didn't know who Willy Mays was.

The 1930s

I've been increasingly interested in the 1930s. Zambrano's first works, the beginnings of Lezama Lima. Lorca's duende lecture and Diván del Tamarit, Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno, mártir. The 30s represents the end of historical modernism and the beginning of late modernism. The Civil war is 36-39. The years right before are fraught with ideological conflict. The historical avant-garde has its last glorious moments before dying or becoming something else.

The late modernism of the 1975-present period is steeped in the 30s and 40s, that reorientation of modernism that occurs then.

What do you do, then, with social realism of the 1950s and 60s? Speaking of Spain, I guess we could see Sartrean engagement as an influential but short-lived movement. Any good poet from about '55 on was trying to find a way out of the realist nightmare. Even before social poetry reached its high-water mark the good poets were already trying to make an end-run about it. It took a while to develop in the later work of Valente, Crespo, Gamoneda, Atencia, but it was already in early Rodríguez.

Maybe I need chapter on Atencia? It couldn't hurt.

The Spanish Soul

Nobody writing on Zambrano (almost nobody) seems to question the idea that there is an essence to Spanish culture, a Spanish soul that can be found in the poetry of Saint John of the Cross.

None of the American poets I studied in Apocryphal Lorca question the duende and its expression of a Spanish essence. These are supposedly postmodern poets. (Only Sorrentino when making fun of Bly.)

I think I see a pattern developing.

What's the Difference?

In studying the cultural poetics of cultural exceptionalism, I find it interesting to look at how "the eccentric is at the base of design," to slightly alter a phrase from Wallace Stevens. What I mean is that the writer's individual perspective and identity comes into play in a more universalizable, nationalist project. This idea clicked into place for me when I saw an article by my colleague Roberta Johnson who pointed out that María Zambrano had been claimed by feminists in Spain who emphasized the difference rather than the equality of the sexes. I relate this to the eccentricity (and / or emphasis on difference) in Lorca and Lezama Lima.

Lorca as Dilettante

I've often had to combat the notion of Lorca as child-like dilettante or señorito andaluz. Christopher Maurer, in Lorca y su arquitectura del cante jondo (2000) provides a lot of ammunition for me. Lorca (as I interpret Maurer) is almost a professional folklorist with wide interests in every form of Spanish poetry from the popular anonymous tradition from the Galician-Portuguese medieval lyric to the romancero viejo to the cante jondo.. Of course, the field of Spanish folklore was only being invented / resurrected by Menéndez Pidal during Lorca's own time, since Machado y Álvarez's work had seemingly fallen into a black hole.

Of course later flamencologists are going to find errors in Lorca's lecture. If he had gotten everything right, anticipating their exact conclusions, it would have been a miracle. Félix Grande objects to a letter from Lorca in which he says that his guitar teacher sang and played "genialmente." He says that is nearly impossible for someone to sing and play guitar at the same time with "genius." But of course this is not a mistake on Lorca's part, as much as a difference in nuance. "Genial" can be just an exuberant term of praise in Spanish, especially in a letter. Even Grande has to backtrack in a footnote and say that some singers have accompanied themselves on the guitar. Obviously if Lorca heard one of his guitar teachers sing and play at the same time, we have no reason to disbelieve him. If this is the kind of judgment that made Lorca seem like dilettante...

Since Lorca was not an academic, but a poet and playwright, his approach to these subjects was opportunistic, In other words, he wanted to learn about these subjects for his own poetry, not for the sake of sheer erudition. His erudition was considerable, but oriented toward pragmatic ends.

What Lorca Knew

So the title of my book is What Lorca Knew. I came across and interesting example that illustrates what my title means.

I often teach Antonio Machado y Álvarez's anthology Cantes flamencos y cantares alongside of Lorca's great book of poems Poema del cante jondo.. This seems logical: the father of Spanish folklore (and also the father of the poets Antonio Machado and Manuel Machado!) right before Lorca's neopopularism. I do this in both undergraduate and graduate courses and it seems to work well. Well it turns out that (at least according to some scholars at least) Lorca did not know of the existence of the father of Antonio Machado when he was writing his lecture "Arquitectura del cante jondo" and his Poema del cante jondo. in the early 20s. These scholars can't exactly prove a negative, but I can't prove that Lorca did know of Machado y Álvarez and his work in flamencología. This is very strange. Lorca and his good friend the composer Manuel de Falla wrote of deep song without knowing of the labor of the previous generation of Spanish folklore.

Here, then, is a question of determining "what Lorca knew." My intuition is that Lorca had to have known of Machado y Álvarez, but I can't support this in the face of more knowledgeable scholars who claim the opposite. If he didn't, the his achievement is all the more remarkable, because he was working blind, without even the most minimal knowledge of the field. After all, I knew of Machado y Álvarez when I was a mere assistant professor, and quite ignorant of Flamenco.

Federico García Lorca is a particularly elusive figure whose poetic achievement poses challenges to both “ideological” and “theological” approaches to literature. Surely a hermeneutics of suspicion is needed to untangle his numerous ideological contradictions: his orientalism, his Spanish nationalism, his internalized homophobia, and his sacralization of violence come to mind. Surely nothing could be worse than a naive “love of Lorca” that merely reproduced the contradictions of the poet’s own ideology! In my recent book Apocryphal Lorca I myself adopted a skeptical attitude toward Lorca’s North-American reception, finding that poets in the US were not nearly suspicious enough of their own stereotypes of Spanish culture.

And yet Lorca’s work also offers a model of receptivity itself. ...

Condescending to Lorca (as many critics do), treating him as someone of negligible intellect, has the paradoxical result of not rising to the level of Lorca.

Or maybe that's not even a paradox. The smallness of mind that leads to that condescension is of a piece with the inability to grasp the real problems involved.

I just realized my colleague gave a course on violence in the Spanish novel recently. Maybe I don't want to organize my course thematically around violence after all. Maybe that will just be one theme.

Someone else also pointed out that with a monothematic course, discussions can get repetitive toward the end.

Here is my plan so far. I will organize the course around two to four topics like the following:

(1) Violence and the sacred. Sacralizations and aestheticizations of violence. Lorca and Hernández.

(2) Drugs and alcohol: drunkenness (Rodríguez), drug abuse, drug-induced madness (Leopoldo María Panero). Poetry as a mind altering substance. Venoms (Gamoneda). The pharmacological imagination. I just read a fantastic book on this subject, Las letras arrebatadas, by Germán Labrador Méndez. I could have my students read sections of that.

(3) Sex and sexuality.

(4) Poetry and music.

I hate the idea of "sex, drugs, and rock and roll in medieval times," those kind of courses that pander to the superficial glamour of certain topics. What I hate even more, though, is the idea that poetry is realm of purity where everything is sublimated out of existence. This would be course based on a Rimbaudian conception of poetry, more or less, with some Baudelairean artificial paradises thrown in. More Dionysius than Apollo.

The major figures of the course, then, would be

Lorca (sex, violence, music)

Hernández (violence, music)

Gamoneda (violence, venoms)

Rodríguez (drunkenness)

Panero (drugs)

Rossetti (sex)

etc...

Drugs and drunkenness is something else that everyone officially disapproves of, but that is pretty much central to the way cultures function--just like sex and violence. These four themes also intersect in interesting ways. Sex goes with violence and with music too.

I got my second non-internet review of Apocryphal Lorca, in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. The author of the review is a prof at San Diego State. It's positive--mostly an informative summary rather than a critique.

The best reviews have been on the internet, actually. The balance has now tipped to where there will be more buzz on the web than in print. Still, I appreciate the traditional print reviews too.

Another review of the Lorca book is up.

In my MLA talk I'm making the argument that Venuti's notion that "translation today bears little sign of these [modernist] developments" (The Translator's Invisibility [2nd ed.] 164) has to be questioned. Yes, there is a whole swath of mainstream translation that receives little influence from more radical Poundian principles. What Venuti unwittingly minimizes, however, is the entire phenomenon of the postmodernist poet-translator from Spicer to Rosmarie Waldrop. It is true that he mentions some of these significant names in passing, but he prefers to see translation as marginal and victimized rather than as central to modern poetics as a whole. Take away translation, and we have a mutilated modern/postmodern poetics. Maybe this modernist poetic practice of translation is marginal within the total universe of translations, but it is central to American poetry itself. Poet-translators employ a huge range of techniques, from Richard Wilbur on one end of the spectrum to Rothenberg on the other.

If we take "translation" as our area of concern, then modernist translation (as defined by Venuti) is a small part of the whole. Yet if we take "modernist / postmodernist poetics" as our area, then translation becomes absolutely central. You have to be able to see the duck as well as the rabbit.

Venuti's emphasis on the binary opposition between fluency and its discontents also has the practical effect of putting all "fluent" translations in the same category. Yet surely all "fluent" translation are not created equal, and there is a huge continuum of practices between the fluent and the obtrusive. Venuti's deep distrust of theories that make the translator invisible has the paradoxical effect of making certain kinds of translation less visible. Maybe interesting things are happening in Marianne Moore's LaFontaine, for example. Someone should look at that. Isn't that another variety of "modernist" translation?

A new post on Arcade where I talk a bit about my response to Venuti's review.

Review of my book by Heriberto Yépez. This one is in Spanish:

.... Se trata de Jonathan Mayhew y su extraordinario estudio Apocryphal Lorca. Translation, Parody, Kitsch (The University of Chicago Press, 2009). 

Esta obra se ocupa no de García Lorca sino de cómo los escritores estadounidenses han reinventado a Lorca, desde Spicer y Rothenberg hasta O’Hara y Koch. Asimismo, es una discusión de la Deep Image —¡cuánto hay que desmenuzar de ese capítulo!— y la manera en que la poética norteamericana se ha apropiado de lo lorqueano (o lorcaesco) y del concepto de lo “otro” que éste representa. Éste es un libro repleto de sutilezas, de tesis, apuntes, datos. 

Si alguien quiere comenzar a entender la poesía norteamericana de posguerra, este libro es una vía para aproximarse a esta tradición desde un ángulo inesperado, un Lorca que, en muchos sentidos, parecerá irreal a los lectores latinoamericanos típicos, el Lorca del duende, esa teoría lorquiana que es menor entre nosotros y fue protagónica en el imaginario de la poética en Estados Unidos.


In other words: "What I'm talking about is JM and his extraordinary study AP.... This work is not about García Lorca but rather about how US writers reinvented Lorca, from Spicer and Rothenberg to O'Hara and Koch. It is also a discussion of the Deep Image--how we have to read this chapter in detail!--and the way American poetics has appropriated the lorquian (or lorcaesque) and of the concept of the "other" that it represents. This book is full to the brim of subtleties, of these, of facts. If somehow wants to begin to understand postwar American poetry, this book is a way of approaching this tradition from an unexpected angle, a Lorca that, in many ways, will seem unreal to typical Latin American readers: the Lorca of the duende, this Lorquian theory that is more minor among us and that was the main thrust in the imaginary of US Poetics."

I got my copy of Vanitas with a very short essay by me on Lorca, translation, and prosody. Of course my first reaction on seeing was this was realizing that I spelled Zukofsky Zukovsky. I thought I had transcended that particular mistake. I really hate people who write Zukovsky, along with idiots who write The Wasteland or Finnegan's Wake or Alan Ginsburg. Those are mistakes I would never, ever make. Except with Lewis Z, for some reason. (I mean Louis, of course). I would never write Harry Matthews when everyone knows it is Harry Mathews. I would never write Thelonius instead of Thelonious either.

I would never refer to Leonardo Da Vinci as "Da Vinci." You have to say "Leonardo." It's just one of those things you have to know. You don't ever call San Juan de la Cruz, "De la Cruz" or Garcilaso de la Vega "De la Vega" or Fray Luis de León "De León." It just isn't done.

Bérubé reviewed some book about why the humanities matter, or some such crap, by an Ohio State professor who thinks that Leonardo was influenced by Newton's ideas on gravity. That's a little worse than calling Leonardo "Da Vinci," because, as others have pointed out, Leonardo was long dead before Newton was born. The guy lives in a bizarro universe where Edward Said is not sufficiently sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. But, of course, he is the champion of objective reality against postmodernism. Go figure.

Anyway, the Vanitas issue is worth checking out, apart from my deeply flawed contribution. At least I didn't talk about Lorca's influence on "Da Vinci."

Negotiations for my critical edition of a certain work of Lorca are going well. I don't want to jinx it by telling you what it is right now, but it will come out from University of Chicago Press if all goes well.