Poetry | BookSexy

My love affair with César Aira began at the Idlewild Bookshop. A friend handed me a copy of GHOSTS and said “This looks interesting. You read it and let me know if it’s any good”. (These assignments occur more often then you might think). And so I read it. Afterwards, I began to hunt for other Aira books with the single-minded focus I’d previously reserved for obscure short stories by Faulkner & Salinger (4 hours and $25.00 spent at the NYPL making copies of Hapworth 16 1924 from the 1965 New Yorker magazine microfiche). Fortunately New Directions publishes a nice selection of his translations, immensely simplifying my task.

Why my passion? Because no one writes like Aira. His small novellas – usually under a hundred pages – contain line-after-line of sublime prose. Each is a tiny, carefully articulated, universe. Like a miniature diorama you can lose yourself in for hours. The plots, on the other hand, appear relatively straight-forward. Deceptively so, in my opinion.

Varamo is “a third-class clerk” working for the Panamanian government. In the year 1923, during the ten- to twelve-hours described in this novel, he will be inspired and write The Song of the Virgin Child. It will be celebrated as a masterpiece. It will also be the first and last thing he ever writes. You never actually read the poem in its entirety… or even excerpts. Instead, Aira recounts this unusual day in Varamo’s life – seemingly disparate events which will culminate in a single poem.

Varamo has a place amongst literature’s eccentric characters. When we first meet him he is under stress, believing himself the recipient of counterfeit bills and convinced that he’ll be arrested if he tries to use or dispose of them. Things just get stranger from there as our protagonist is joined by a cast of equally outlandish characters. Their, and subsequently our, hold on reality seems more and more tenuous. The story is filled with absurdities – a botched taxidermy experiment, a regularity race (it’s real!), mysterious Voices – all accompanied by seemingly rational explanations. But as each strange event is explained away, another moves in to fill its place.

The races, said Cigarro, were fundamentally technical competitions, an opportunity for the fledgling automobile industry to test its innovations, and they appealed mainly to car fanatics rather than the general public, which made them rather esoteric. The race underway was a special case, because it had been promoted by the Central Administration as part of the festivities for the inauguration of the linked highways running right across the isthmus, connecting the cities of Colón and Panamá. In fact (and here he lowered his voice, as if revealing a state secret) the race had been planned, mainly, as a trap for anarchists. To them, a regularity race was a provocation; it’s strict regulation of time and space was bound to prove repugnant to the libertarian spirit.

Part of the frustration in reviewing a César Aira novel is that anything I write will be inadequate at conveying the pure delight to be found in his prose style, the way he transitions in and out of ideas and the overall narrative rhythm. How to fully appreciate “And the black sky crossed by streams of phosphorescent mercury was a vision worth the risk. The stars were an overwhelming surprise. But since each scene was linked to the one that had gone before, he continued to see the dominoes and dishes, twinkling among the constellations…” without reading it in context? Varamo poses an even greater challenge than usual – the narrative is perplexing, the plot (most of it filtered through our protagonist’s mind) difficult to untangle and a little slow getting off the ground. But – and I stress this - it’s so worth the effort. Every time I come to the end of an Aira novella I feel as if I’ve missed something important. Varamo was no different. Rather than finding it frustrating, I see it as an opportunity… a welcome excuse to go back to the first page and begin again.

Publisher: New Directions, New York (2012)
ISBN: 978 0 8112 1741 5

I purchased this little book of poetry sometime last year on a whim. It didn’t pop back up on my radar until after I read The True Deceiver, and discovered in the course of writing my review that both books were nominated for the 2011 Best Translated Book Award. I immediately pulled it out of the pile and devoured Flash Cards in just a few short hours. It’s a brilliant, beautiful collection of poems. I’ve returned to it several times since that first reading to re-visit my favorites.

Yu Jian is a Chinese poet. “The second bestselling contemporary Chinese poet, behind Bei Dao” we learn in his translator’s, Ron Padgett’s, thoughtful note (really more of an introduction) at the beginning of Flash Cards. The three pages of Padgett’s A Note on Translating Yu Jian provide a unique portrait of a poet living in today’s China. It’s followed by an equally interesting analysis of the poetry by Simon Patton, who discusses T.S. Eliot’s influence. And then we get to the meat of it: the seventy-five poems that make up this collection.

Throughout the book Yu Jian grapples with China’s vast cultural history in an attempt to contextualize its present. He repeatedly uses the traditional symbols and motifs – Autumn, leopards, flowering fruit trees, a porcelain bowl – and then contrasts them to a much less elegant modern world. And so peach blossoms become pink cosmetic boxes glimpsed from an escalator and a presumably priceless Shang Dynasty antique reveals itself to be a mass-produced bowl used to hold chicken soup. He shows us a China disconnected from its past. The poems are short and yet, in just a few lines, Yu Jian tells surprisingly complex stories.

Someone discovered Xi Shuang Ban Na
“Beautiful Place”
The locals don’t know what that means
They’ve never discovered beauty in their native land
The world has always been like this
The place has always been called Xi Shuang Ban Na

This collection is not political. But I still couldn’t help thinking of the Chinese artist Ai WeiWei and his 1995 piece: Dropping a Han dynasty urn. Both artists are smashing tradition – though, perhaps not so dramatically in Yu Jian’s case. Both challenge the public’s attachment to a China that no longer exists by co-opting its icons and placing them within what has become an almost alien environment. In Yu Jian’s case this includes the art of poetry. Nothing, it seems, is sacred.

(Poetry Recipe)

The lake takes off its blue mitten
exposing a red palm

The blue mitten is a metaphor for the lake
The red palm is the lakebed
Next you should compare yourself
to something small and lovely on the shore
a gazelle or deer drinking water
but don’t ever compare yourself to a fish
because they’re doomed the lake drying up

Yu Jien does not sacrifice beauty for meaning in his writing. Nor do the translators. The surprisingly lovely imagery, the distinctive meter and rhythm of these poems seems to have been strictly held to – an English and a Chinese translator collaborating to protect the integrity of the work. For those who have to ability to confirm this: the original Chinese text is printed on the page facing the English translation for each of the seventy-five poems. The paperback is well designed with clean-cut pages and french flaps. In short: Zephyr Press has done a wonderful job. Not surprising, as the non-profit, independent publisher specializes in international poetry translations.

Flash Cards is a joint project with The Chinese University Press and the Jintian Literary Foundation.

Publisher: Zephyr Press & Chinese University Press; Brookline, Mass./Hong Kong (2011)
ISBN: 978 0 9815521 3 2