NAVIGATION AROUND THE WORLD
Entitled Navigating the world , Eduardo Moga published in the November 2010 issue of the journal Turia an extensive review of the book From a paper boat , Reginald Gibbons, reproduced below:
Reginald Gibbons (Houston, 1947) is an author widely known in Spain, despite already having a long work-which includes novels, stories, classic literature studies and nine books of poetry-and maintain a kind of relation to Castilian English and literature, as demonstrated by its bilingual editions of Luis Cernuda, Jorge Guillén, and convincing translations of Mexican poet New Writing from Mexico. The anthology From a paper boat. Poems (1981-2008), his first book published in our country, collects samples of seven of his poems, from The Ruined Motel to Creatures of a Day, celebrated its volume, a finalist for the National Books Award. The selection excluded only debut, Voices Roofs Roads , dating from 1979, and Slow Trains Overhead: Poems and Stories Chicago, appeared in 2010, after closing the issue. Gibbons
practices a concise and austere poetry. From his early verses, we see his taste for storytelling smooth syntactic or lexical ambushes. Even in the poems of It's time (2002), in which it enters, exceptionally, in the stormy waters of the visionary image, maintains accuracy elocutiva, tightening the flash irrational, but that is fraying the phrases or hypertrophy in tumultuous enumerations. In his illuminating foreword, the editor of this issue, Jordi Doce, calls Poundian Gibbons. You're right: Pound wanted, as the Imagist the last century, achieve compact and just sentence in which any word that has a specific function, any term superfluous or inaccurate, was eliminated. Pound that poetry was tangible and clear, free from inert and mucus expressive adjectives in Greek poetry, in some troubadours like Arnaut Daniel and Guido Cavalcanti, and classical Chinese poetry. Significantly, Gibbons has led Sophocles and Euripides, and has read in depth to the Chinese authors, as revealed in the vast central poem "From a paper boat, belonging to So Maybe It Was (1991), the title to the anthology and that is an explicit homage to the literature of China, written in the manner of the great stories of their authors, such as Tu Fu, which owns the four verses of his original heading. Gibbons brings to this piece many of the traditional motifs of Chinese poetry, and in a very prominent, the trip and the river as a metaphor for existence. Also appearing the boat, the geese, the moon, the fall and the blue hills, among other symbols the wandering people and their tranquil astonishment at the wonders of the moment, but they do with realities of the present time, such as cars, cigarettes and supermarkets: Gibbons mixing times to account for transit existential evocation in which the wife's lover and children convinve with the description of the turmoil calm collective.
narrative and figurative Gibbons-bearing-Twelve to rate their poetry poetry of experience "in the truest literal sense of the term" as "careful reflection, moral or sentimental about events of everyday life "- not without hidden meanings or transcendent projections, often be glimpsed after the deceptive transparency of its verses. His poems always dig what's next, even in the domestic, to remove false echoes, sudden melancholy, feeling sharp as a pin. The weight of intimacy is expressed, above all, in a rigorous meditation on love, a recurring theme in his work: "Lovers", a poem is titled, "Love" is another. In this we read: "We draw a story / for ourselves: after Exile on each other, after refugees into each other ...". But look outside, worried about setting up a chisel and reality that hampers us, balancing the subjective scrutiny. From "Madrid" a poem that recalls the city where the poet lived as a Fulbright scholar, and describes the gypsies and vagabonds who sold branches and trees in the Plaza Mayor, also included in Maybe It Was So, to "Ode: citizens' of Creatures of a Day, which offers a panorama of the city of Chicago, where he lives, following the model of Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg, another imagistic, Gibbons attends the world and its inhabitants incomprehensible, the boiling of the places and events, to the beat of the earth contradictory, full of tenderness and error, irony and hope. In this flow, which conjures the subjective and the coral, there are scattered moments of great lucidity analytical, lyrical short blasts that illuminate his bare word without Enjoy: "Many women admire the strong male is not used / Contra them. Or rather, when male strength / To restrain, dropping the arms and the force acting / With voluntary tender, many women admire, "he writes in" From a paper boat ", or grotesque and disturbing characters, like the tortured poet" Migrations of birds, belonging to It's Time . Details also populate the poetry of Gibbons and contribute to its tangibility, its accuracy, as Pound claimed. The long poem in prose "Historic Site" in Homage to Longshot O'Leary (1999), For example, specific to every mote, the way the wasps, "bent in the air", hunt or swarm. At other times we find parts, also long, with some Kerouac and Bukowski, depicting angry and vulnerable young people who travel streets with no purpose other than enjoying the disorder and love as "Playa Blanca" by Sparrow (1997) There we read: "Our city is a mock (...)/ reality, the buildings stand / / along motorways as if they were really solid / fast backward from the late emptiness / / of the summer night , arming, just in case / explanations and alibis ...". Translating
From paper boat is excellent, although its path has been tortuous, three translators, Manuel Ulacia, Jennifer Clement, and Victor Manuel Mendiola, was signed by the end of the nineties and their versions have been revised for this edition by Jordi Doce and Reginald own Gibbons. The end result is smooth and wise, though, on occasion, that reveals the original language template and uses a passive dispensable or abused the possessive pronoun: "He put his little hand on my shoulder", "holding my sleeve my coat "," kids stole my money. " This is not an issue clouding irreproachable key to access to an author as ignored as evocative. It
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