Calavera Bolsonaro

Mucho cobarde se esconde

vilmente tras el gatillo,

pues busca algo en el bolsillo…

que agarrar no tiene dónde.

Un tal cretino que incita

a su gente a la violencia -

sin importar consecuencia

al ruin racismo la invita -

se llama Jair Bolsonaro.

Este bruto brasileño

pone desigual empeño

en promover el descaro.

Su seña reconocida -

con los dedos apuntando

cual pistolas disparando –

lo delata fratricida,

aun cuando sus comentarios

homofóbicos, racistas,

misóginos y fascistas

estimulan partidarios.

Pues hay quien lo apoya, ciego,

como rechazo al partido

que percibe corrompido,

sin ver corrupto el propio ego:

el voto por el malvado

es un voto por la saña

que al público tonto engaña

al sentirse muy halagado,

pero aunque se haga jurar,

promesa hecha por culebra,

por mucho que se celebra,

es imposible confiar.

Así pintaba el ambiente

cuando llegó la Catrina,

vestida de gente fina,

de la situación consciente.

Se acerca al exmilitar,

saboreando el disgusto,

y al malhechor le da un susto

que no logra disfrazar.

“Sai de mim, Morte, depressa!

Aprecio seus favores,

mas não aturo seus pavores.

Seu voto em mim não interessa.”

Le responde la Difunta,

“Como apuñalado fuiste,

pero con vida seguiste,

mi dedo-rifle te apunta.”

Y ahí petateó el capitán

por la Muerte señalado,

el ademán coreado

por los que despertarán,

los que dejarán atrás

a una calavera tiesa

por un Brasil que progresa

como tú, lector, harás.

PORT: Uma “calavera” é um poema satírico da tradição mexicana, próprio da temporada do Día de los Muertos. A calavera retrata o falecimento imaginado de alguma figura pública, de maneira inspirada pelo caráter ou os excessos dessa figura.

ENGL: A “calavera” is a satirical poem, traditional in Mexico during the season of Día de los Muertos. The calavera portrays the imagined passing of some public figure, in a way that is inspired by the personality or excesses of that person.

As Arvores da Vida

Altas, amarelas, delgadas e puras, rodeadas por cogumelos: são as árvores como falos que as mulheres da tribo abraçam e mordem... Estas árvores selváticas não são seringueiras que dão látex. Melhor ainda: a casca destas árvores possibilita a fertilidade ilimitada das mulheres ao longo de todos os anos da vida. Além disso provém a única defesa natural contra a malária. Quase a fonte da juventude em forma botânica, eis o tesouro do romance State of Wonder escrito pela celebrada autora norte-americana Ann Patchett.

A protagonista--a Dra. Marina Singh--sai do frio de Minnesota pra selva amazônica na procura do companheiro de trabalho desaparecido, talvez morto já. Fica claro que Marina vai achar mais do que isso: encontrará a famosa cientista Dra. Annick Swenson, paga pela mesma empresa farmacológica onde trabalha Marina e cujo presidente é o amante de Marina. No tempo que leva nos altos do Rio Negro, a Dra. Swenson tem desenvolvido todo um sistema de aliados e evasivas--não porque não tenha resultados, mas sim porque tem que protegê-los: proteger o precário segredo das altas árvores amarelas. Swenson, comparável com Kurtz do Heart of Darkness, dá vida e dá morte e dá vida-morte nesta narrativa em que os poderes da mortalidade concentram-se nas suas mãos. (A narrativa nos leva com um suspense apoiado pela memória de uma operação cesariana malfeita por Marina.)

O texto descreve a selva com seus insetos e a inevitável cena com uma cobra anaconda. A cidade de Manaus, onde visitei, é também descrita com precisão imaginativa. Conhecendo a área, e parte do folclore regional, eu tivesse gostado de ver no romance uma maior conexão com a iara, por exemplo, ou outros tropos amazônicos de sempre, pois as árvores que são o objetivo das pesquisas farmacológicas no romance, sugerem a conexão com tantos outros exemplos de produtos e seres explorados. Também tivesse gostado de um melhor cuidado do "bom e velho português" (nem que a minha expressão no idioma fosse perfeita). Em State of Wonder o português aparece só em algumas palavras ou frases breves, erradas com freqüencia - "jaca" (faca), "Dr." (Dra. quando mulher), e "obrigado" por "obrigada" quando fala uma personagem feminina que já deve saber disso!

O romance anterior da autora, Bel Canto, também é situado na América do Sul, em um país não identificado. Fica evidente o apreço que tem Patchett pelas maravilhas do continente. A maior maravilha, porém, talvez seja a ousadia de escrever um romance com final feliz (relativamente feliz) - de afirmar que as nossas opções humanas nem sempre são tão trágicas.

Matapalo

The Romance Language Sisters

As a teacher of Spanish and Portuguese, and as someone who has acheived near-native proficiency in both, I am often asked just how different the two languages are. Here's an analogy I've developed as an answer.

Imagine I show you a family portrait of four sisters. They appear elegant, radiant, vibrant. There are no twins among them, but they are all similar in age and you can definitely see a family air about them. The extension of each smile, the bridge of each nose, the arch of each eyebrow and the curve of each breast show variations on the same Latin family theme. In fact two of them, you decide, seem to resemble each other very closely indeed.

After I show you the portrait, I introduce them to you in person, and you exchange a few words with each of the four sisters. You learn that their appearance was no indicator of how they speak, because the two that you had previously categorized together by physical resemblance, you have now split apart by speech, each with one of the remaining two sisters. Two of the four, although speaking different languages, seem to speak quite nasally and slide more often between their words, while the other two speak with non-nasal, sharp, clear vowels in their also distinct languages. Among the four of them, they seem to be able to understand each other to some extent, though this varies by context and speaker.

Finally you learn their names and the key to the analogy. The two who look the most similar of face and body are named Spanish and Portuguese. But Spanish, when speaking, shares with her sister Italian the use of sharp, clear vowels, while Portuguese, and her sister French, speak with a greater range of vowels, including nasal ones, as well as slipperier-sounding consonants.

The analogy is not perfect. What about the extended family, with sisters like Catalan, Galician, Haitian Creole, and Romanian? What about dialects and other variations within one language, such as Continental vs. Brazilian Portuguese? Obviously it is a more complex issue than my simple portrayal allows; however, I find that at least for the typical perceptions of most Anglophones, the humble little analogy proves insightful for characterizing (if not explaining) the visual similarities between written Portuguese and Spanish, as well as the spoken affinities between Italian and Spanish, and between French and Portuguese.

Vicente Huidobro and the Curse of the Aymara

Let us imagine the young Vicente Huidobro, intrepid explorer of the heights of poetry, as he stands among swirling clouds, braced against the whistling wind of an Andean mountaintop, in the epiphanic moment in which he receives the following pearl of wisdom from an elderly Aymara poet-guru:

"El poeta es un dios; no cantes a la lluvia, poeta: haz llover." 

The magic words echo among the peaks as the guru disappears into the mist. The young Huidobro, grateful and enlightened, reluctantly makes his way down the cordillera, feeling very reassured by what he has heard. The mystical aphorism affirms the apprentice seer's yearning for the godlike power of original imagery and semantic immanence.

Such a scenario is what Huidobro would like for us to believe in "La creación pura: Ensayo de estética," his manifesto attempting to arrange and defend his poetics, first published in French in L'Esprit Nouveau in April 1921. Regardless of the origin of the guru's cryptic phrase (Juan Larrea, for example, suggests that Huidobro merely switched one kind of "Indian" for another, in that the phrase is elsewhere attributed to a Hindu poet), and its various modifications in several of Huidobro's texts--such as

"Por qué cantáis la rosa, ¡oh poetas! / Hacedla florecer en el poema" ("Arte poética")

--the essence of its meaning challenges the temporal nature of poetry as an art of words through its mandate (the command "make") to execute something akin to organic immediacy. In fact, as our daring adventurer (cue stirring music) returns with the boon of knowledge from his heroic quest, beginning to sense within himself the intense desire to conceive of a--yes, that's it!--a metalinguistic parachute voyage, he does not suspect (ominous key change) the perils that await him. He does not yet understand that the mystical message, still resounding in his ears, bears the potential to be both blessing and curse. He walks, confidently, into a trap.

The paradox of the Aymara's blessing/curse is the synecdoche trap, my metaphor for describing the necessity to create an image, part by part, in an always and essentially incomplete way, especially as compared to image-creating in the visual arts. Given the temporal limitations of the written word as artistic medium, it is impossible to perceive the entire image or range of actions, at one glance, of, for example, a body--an image at once very ordinary and yet complex. Such a total perception at one glance is at least theoretically possible in the visual or spatial arts, but a writer must name, and describe, a body part by part, action by action.

The truest solution to the synecdoche trap is to employ some kind of radical onomatopeia, impossibly expanded beyond the range of mere sound such that the word IS the image IS the thing itself. One of Huidobro's examples in this vein would be his palindrome neologism "eterfinifrete" from his 1931 masterpiece Altazor. Such words can exist with effect in a certain context, but they're better for inventing than for describing, and the semantic problem with the end of Altazor is that the entire context--no longer just a word here and there--is composed of this kind of invented words.

Huidobro's more frequently deployed solution, more orthodox in a paradoxical vanguard way, is best explained in his earlier manifesto "La poesía": to find the novel juxtaposition of "palabras enemigas" whose semantic charges ignite the sparks of illumination. An example that he trots out is the title image of one of his collections, "horizonte cuadrado." Preferably such images occupy no more than two words: a smaller word count means greater proximity to the simultaneity or totality for which many vanguard writers envied the plastic arts and also music. But it is never as easy in practice as it sounds in theory, and this tension between plan and execution is essentially what articulates the theme of Altazor, in which the reader's gaze falls along the pages into the impasse of separating form from meaning, with any degree of success, in written expression.

[...]

my further explorations of these ideas:

Aesthetics of Equilibrium: The Vanguard Poetics of Vicente Huidobro and Mário de Andrade. 

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures. Purdue University Press, 2006.

"Altazor: A New Arrangement."
Hispanic Issues On Line Volume 6 (Spring 2010):  
Huidobro's Futurity: Twenty-First-Century Approaches (eds. Luis Correa-Díaz and Scott Weintraub)

Corporeality in Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature: Body Articulations.

Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming January 2013.

Of the Delectable Engagement with Ideas [...]

Of the Delectable Engagement with Ideas Experienced in Attentive Reading and Creative Writing, 

together with further Droll Observations Related to Language and Art

“Well,” said Don Quixote, “and does she not accompany and adorn this greatness with a thousand million charms! But one thing you will not deny, Sancho. When you came close to Dulcinea, did you not perceive a certain perfume, an aromatic fragrance, a delicious something for which I cannot find a name, I mean a redolence, an exhalation, as if you were in the shop of some skilled glovemaker?”

“All I can say is,” said Sancho, “that I did notice a little odor, somewhat mannish. She must have been sweaty from all the hard work, which has toughened her up, by the way.”

“It could not have been so,” Don Quixote protested. “Surely you were suffering from a head cold, or else you simply smelled yourself. For I know well how she smells—that rose among thorns, that lily of the field, that liquid amber.”

“Maybe so,” replied Sancho. “I often get from myself the same odor that seemed to come from her grace the lady Dulcinea. But that’s no surprise; one devil is just the same as another.”

(adapted from the Ormsby translation of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, 1:XXXI)

“Things are not always as they seem,” my sixth-grade teacher, arms akimbo, would intone frequently and dramatically, thus imparting one of life’s great lessons to the eleven-year-olds of the tiny town in West Virginia where I lived in the late 70s and early 80s. By that point in my schooling, I had already tapped a deep enthusiasm for books: for Kipling’s The Jungle Books, for Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree, for any books I could devour on mythology, history, or animal behavior. I had been winning creative writing contest ribbons consistently since third grade, and in sixth grade I sped through the voluminous color-coded comprehension cards of the SRA Reading Lab. 

In retrospect, I know that I was already cultivating my fascination with the secret rhythms of words, the craft of constructing sentences, the constantly revised agreement between writer and reader that invites us to scan across the text and emphasize or anticipate something—a syllable, a phoneme, a pause, an entire paragraph—in the same way that the hurdler negotiates steps and strides between obstacles to avoid tripping or slowing down. A pacing example from Bradbury's The Halloween Tree: 

For the Tree was hung with a variety of pumpkins of every shape and size and a number of tints and hues of smoky yellow or bright orange.

“A pumpkin tree,” someone said.

“No,” said Tom.

The wind blew among the branches and tossed their bright burdens, softly.

“A Halloween Tree,” said Tom.

And he was right.

Without the breath of the wind between Tom’s lines above, the assertion in the final sentence would fall flat; it would lose the sense of inevitability that the wind’s intrusion animates for us. A great writer, too, challenges readers’ pacing, pushing the hurdle perhaps just a few inches, enough to alert our awareness if not completely break our stride. 

The writer’s tools are words, not colors, clay, or chords. They are the same tools used by most of us every day to express our thoughts, which means that creative writing and also language-learning are both strongly and essentially linked to our capacity to articulate and manipulate our perceptions about art, life, and perception itself. I am fortunate to have engaged in the study of these tools we call words in four languages other than my native English during different periods of my life: French, Hindi, Spanish, and Portuguese. A familiarity—or better yet, intimacy—with other languages opens many new doors to metacognition: the awareness of how it can be that we think what we think, and the ability to conceive alternative modes of thinking and of expressing thought. 

Approaching my senior year at William & Mary, I decided to read Cervantes’s masterpiece in the original language (not without the acquisition of a hefty Spanish-English dictionary). The dialogue between Don Quixote and Sancho, sustained over two volumes published a decade apart in the early 17^th century, is, for many readers of the original and of dozens of accomplished translations, the greatest manual on friendship ever written. What these readers discover, alongside the addled knight-errant and his earthy squire, is a straightforward but profound apprenticeship in effective communication. Don Quixote relishes his search for a signifier that eludes him (not just Dulcinea in general, but also specifics like the aroma “for which I cannot find a name”) while Sancho, though quick to “call a spade a spade,” nonetheless provides a humbly diplomatic description of body odor. As they journey on together, Sancho becomes more imaginative while Don Quixote resigns himself to more realistic expectations, and the core of the work is exactly this process in which both learn to accommodate, in masterfully varied contexts, their own perspectives among the competing voices, strategies, and objectives of all the characters. 

The lady Dulcinea, or the peasant Aldonza? Windmills, or giants? Shaving basin, or golden helmet? Both, of course, and many other things besides. Things are not always as they seem, or smell. Like all good creative writing, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha exposes the artistic opportunities, and pitfalls, that lurk between the signified and its arbitrary signifier, between what we perceive, what we think, and what we can contrive to express.

“No hay de qué maravillarse; que un diablo parece a otro.”

Synesthesia for Polyglots

Blessing, curse, or as much of either as it is to simply be alive? If you're synesthetic, you assume everybody else is too. Then you learn that most people aren't, and even those people who are also synesthetes have colors that clash with yours.

Whether a consciously crafted poetic effect or an unconsciously formed sense filter, synesthesia is a crossing of the senses. It's been on the popular radar since the late nineteenth-century French Symbolist poets, among others, strove to replicate it in their works. Lately there have been a number of interesting psychological and neurological studies showing that (1) yes, it exists and people aren't making it up (although some people try to fake it) and (2) it is often inherited (the condition / ability, though not necessarily the particulars of it). For some synesthetes, sounds have shapes, tastes, or textures. But for a majority of synesthetes, what happens is that words have colors. 

I love colors. I love words. So did Rimbaud, so did Nabokov, so does the character Mia in A Mango-Shaped Space, a wonderful YA novel about synesthesia by Wendy Mass. For me, words tend to have the colors of their starting letters, unless a very strong visual component of another color associated with the word overrides it. For example, generally words starting with A are bright yellow, but apple is a reddish yellow--the color, in fact, of many apples--since the word is so often associated with the color red. D is a standard crayon green, such that danger flashes green for me, not red. Magic, miracle, marvelous, mystery, mischief, malevolence all share the smoky crimson of M. But then, so do the names Marcos and Marilyn. And Débora and Doug are green. Not the people, not their auras - just their names, when I think of them. But the name association "colors" perception of the people, like a faint watercolor.  

I've wondered if synesthesia as a neurological phenomenon begins to happen as one is learning to read, meaning that it is more rooted in a visual association, or if it starts to occur before learning how to read, meaning that it is more rooted in aural stimuli. The vowels, for me, tend to show the least defined hues, which I interpret as evidence for the latter assertion. The synesthetic condition may well begin before learning to read and then intensify after learning to read; however, another purely phonic example from my case is that B and P both are shades of blue, D and T are shades of green, and G and K share a brownish-orange spectrum. Somehow my synesthetic ability captured these phonically related pairs in color, long before I became aware of them structurally through the study of linguistics. Only many years later in graduate school did I learn that B and P are voiced and voiceless versions of the same sound, with D/T and G/K as further examples. Not only did the related sounds take on related colors in my synesthetic scheme, but in each of these pairs, the voiced consonant, which is a stronger sound, holds the deeper hue!

More evidence, from my personal case, for this kind of synesthesia being rooted in non-visual senses, is found in the days of the week. Monday, for instance, has nothing to do with smoked crimson M. It's a kelly green, and fingernail-pink Tuesday (nothing to do with spring green T) follows it on the left, as if seen from the inside of the calendar. Fire engine-red Saturday and somber black Sunday trail off and down to the left at the end of my week. Apparently this kind of spatial overlay is a not uncommon element of synesthetic renderings. The months for me also have colors, but these tend to follow their initial letters or else the colors of associated holidays, and they have no spatial arrangement in my conception of them. Numbers have colors, barely. The numerical association was never strong in my synesthesia, and even the alphabetic association is not as strong as it was when I was younger.

What happens when you're multilingual? Are you a multisynesthete? In my case, books, in the abstract at least, are a bright royal blue, but livros and libros are lemon yellow. Sometimes serendipity strikes: love and amor (Spanish) and amor (Portuguese; same spelling, different pronunciation) all share the same joyous range of yellow. Hunger, hambre and fome find themselves viscerally pink: the fresh wet shine of gums for F, the sullied pink of a pig's hide for H. (When I learned that often the H of a word in Spanish corresponds to an F in the Portuguese, it made perfect visual sense to me.) Majesty, majestad, and majestade glow with the smoky crimson of M, but the K of king has a rather sandy, wooden look to it, and the Q of queen is precisely periwinkle, while rey, reina, rei and rainha lie and vie in the rolling reach of R's red wine hue. Fork, garfo, tenedor: three tines of three colors. Imprecise translations can sear and trace across idioms: the S of saudades radiates an orange ember glow that tinges longing's L a dusky yellow and roasts the nut brown of the Ñ in añoranza. I studied Hindi during an intensive summer course as a teenager, but I don't remember enough, unfortunately, to know whether I had transferred shades to the Devanagari script, or how exactly synesthesia played a role. Yet Portuguese, Spanish, English, and even Hindi are all Indo-European languages; perhaps synesthetes who speak languages from different linguistic families experience wilder, splashier interactions.

Some non-synesthetes learning about synesthesia are jealous. Others are indifferent. Some few are concerned for my well-being, convinced that it must be a debilitating condition impeding everyday thought processes. On the contrary - because it's with you from a young age, you grow up with it, and you take it into account in the same way as you do other abilities. Like most anything else, it has advantages and disadvantages, but I know that if I somehow had the option to eliminate it from my life, I absolutely would not. It's an essential part of my being-in-the-world, an internalized rainbow that weaves languages together even as their colors blend to create, literally, new patterns of thought.

Independencia

in - dependencia
ou seja a não dependência
pero ¿qué tal si lo que se siente
é uma coisa tipo co-dependência?
¿De qué dependo?
Do que penduro?
Tenho uma divisão em mim,
una división en mi dependencia,
do verbo "dividir" que significa não só "separar"
sino también da el sentido de "compartir":
coitado daquele que tem uma pátria só,
porque yo tengo tres.

Quando estamos na hora de celebrarmos
el día de la independencia
dependo, pues, de mi afiliación mexicana
tanto quanto a minha afiliação brasileira
septembrinas, las dos,
entanto
I pledge allegiance
to the flag
of the United States of America

¿De qué dependemos?
Do que somos independentes?
Depende.

One Mic, Two Tongues

KARAOKE, Japanese word for "sing your heart out"? I don't know the etymology, but I do know that I've been to six gatherings at four homes within the past few months where karaoke was the main event. And these have all been gatherings with a mix of Spanish-speakers, English-speakers, and bilinguals.

There are several karaoke products on the market, most of them made in Asia, that can plug into your TV. They all seem to provide alternating-line lyrics over random shots of landscapes, and they give you a "score" at the end ostensibly based on how well you matched the rhythm. Many of the products include several languages beyond English and Spanish, but they vary greatly in the number and variety of songs per language they offer.

So at homes of Colombian, Mexican, and Mexican-American families and friends recently, I've been swimming in 80s rock one moment and 90s norteña the next. Billy Joel and Luis Miguel. Pandora and Queen. The Eagles and the Beatles and the Trío Los Panchos. Boleros, rancheras and rock anthems. Something like this:

Sing us a song, you're the piano mony mony el día que me quieras, vuelve que sin ti la vida ain't nothin' but a hound dog cryin' all the canta no llores who ya gonna call? Ghostbésame, bésame mucho I'm just a poor boy from a poor family probablemente ya de mí te has olvidado turn around every now and then I get a little caimán, se va el caimán, se va para Jack and Diane, two pencas nuevas que al maguey le brotan, vienen marcadas, con rock and roll, we built this city on una piedra en el camino, me enseñó que Billie Jean knockin' at my door, usted es la culpable, de todas mis angustias, que ya no como ni duermo, sigo pensando sólo en tu uptown girl, she's been livin' in her whitebread world, solamente una vez, amé en la vida, eres tú como el agua de mi dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair, hey Jude, don't let me down, you have found Penelope, con su bolso de piel marrón, sacó sus pistolas, tiró dos balazos, y me dijo: KARAOKE!

OUTREM

O OUTRO QUE VAI FALAR SOU EU
sim, ele e eu somos um
entanto somos três
na realidade, eu sou trezentos

La Otra Que Va A Hablar Soy Yo
soy mujer mientras soy hombre,
león, mono, búho, bestiario
soy pájaro de cuatrocientas voces

The other who's going to speak am I
who made this poor translation?
it unhinges
where it should most tightly seal
but this is just enough
to let a little light in
and a little air in
through the cracks

The Aviary

A hallucinated rhapsody

Primeiro foi a gritaria da papagaiada imperial:
Amo el canto del cenzontle,
pájaro de cuatrocientas voces
pero amo más a mis hermanos:
We’re three caballeros, three gay caballeros
They say we are birds of a feather
X-polynation:
Colibird, Humming-flor, Beijabrí
Minha terra tem palmeiras
onde canta o sabiá;
as aves, que aqui gorjeiam,
não gorjeiam como lá:
¡Cuac! ¡Cuac! ¡Acucuac!
Um papagaio verde de bico dourado
principiou falando numa fala mansa,
muito nova, muito:
Ya viene viene la golondrina
Viene viene la golonchina
va que vuela la golonmaya
pero el cielo prefiere el rodoñol
su niño querido el rorreñol
el roquetzal, que vive en tu escudo
el rorroner, the coyote’s after you,
Roadrunner, if he catches you,
transfórmate:
¿Altazor o Altazur?
A hawk or a handsaw?
Toucan or not tucán, that is the question.
A guacamacarara
foi pra Araraquara
deitou numa rede e compôs
Cuculzornaíma, o Un viaje en hamaca
Maculcantazur, O Herói sem Nenhum Pudor
Altacunaimacán, Pluma envuelta en serpientes.
Ya los pajarillos cantan:
Qui-qui-ri-doodle!
1 pássaro na mão > 2 voando
Pájaro cascabel, pájaro chupamiel,
chupa la bella cracker de miel
Polly wants a galleta maría
donde el águila paró
y su estampa dibujó
el cóndor pasa,
se la pasa criando cuervos
entre cuatro zopilotes
volverán las oscuras golondrinas
Little bird, little bird, ‘neath the cinnamon tree,
¡Cómo canta la zumaya!
¡Ay, cómo canta en el árbol!
¡La rama en que cantaba el tecolote!
Little bird, little bird, do you sing for me?
Pajarillo verde, quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermoré,’
Pajarillo verde, ‘Nevermore’ voy a llorar
The Trumpet of the Swan:
¡Cuac! ¡Acucuac!
Make Way for Ducklings!
¡GuaCuac! ¡MaCuac! ¡AraCuac!
Eram centenas e centenas de colheireiras cor-de-rosa…
Tive uma tal sensação de lindeza,
fiquei tão comovido,
de repente deitei no chão da lancha…




References: Above all, Vicente Huidobro in structure, style, and a few well-known verses, as much as Mário de Andrade, to whom I give first, last, and middle words here, and from whom I borrow “hallucinated rhapsody” from different titles. Strongly present: Miguel Angel Asturias, whose Guacamayo squawks throughout, and Oswald de Andrade, whose general idea of antropofagia informs the methodology here. Cameos: William Shakespeare (with and without anthropophagy by Oswald de Andrade), Nezahualcóyotl, Walt Disney, Gonçalves Dias, Nicanor Parra, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Pepe Guízar, Federico García Lorca, E. B. White, Robert McCloskey, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, Joe Darion, Edgar Allen Poe, Warner Bros., José Joaquín Palma and José María Bonilla Ruano, y varias frases y canciones de dominio público.

Gerineldo and the Hairy Nalgas

One of my favorite classes in the Introduction to Literature (in Spanish) course is when we read the medieval ballad "Romance de la Melisenda." I then have the students listen to a certain Britney Spears recording to compare and contrast content and theme of popular music over some six centuries. This always fruitful class activity led to the conception of the poem below, in which the "lyrics" part of my poem mixes "Melisenda" with "Crazy" and medieval Spanish with modern American English. (Another popular ballad from the same time period was the "Romance de Gerineldo.")

Gerineldo and the Hairy Nalgas
never made it out of Juan’s garage.
Quique played the bass and Steve the drum set,
somebody sang while Juan played lead guitar.
They used to shake the house and rock the calle,
as they covered all the hits “back when,”
from Mecano up to Ozomatli,
Fabulosos Cadillacs también.
But their version of “You Drive Me Crazy”
was Juan’s creation and their biggest dream.
It was a sampler from the Romancero
that built a backstory for Britney Spears:
“El romance de la Melisenda”
about a princess who stayed up all night.
Juan got Melissa to perform the lyrics -
she was Steve’s girlfriend but Juan loved her right.

Baby, I’m so into you
Yo soy princesa, eres príncipe azul.
De mi cama salté,
Wearin’ nothin’ as if it were my birth day.
Every time you look at me
Los mis pechos laten, it’s easy to see.
You drive me crazy
No puedo dormir
Me dize mi abuela que
There’s nothing to fear.
Sooyy…loca, carpe diem’s right,
Baby, thinkin’ of you keeps me up all night.
Conde, you’re so into me
Yo soy la moça que te encanta a ti.
Dime, will you marry me?
Ya maté un hombre para llegar aquí.
Cada vez I look at you,
No sé qué hacer - ¿qué harías tú?
Me vuelves crazy
I just can’t sleep.
Me dizen mis doncellas que
I’m in too deep
Sooyy…loca, carpe diem’s right,
Baby, thinkin’ of you keeps me up all night.

Gerineldo and the Hairy Nalgas
never made it past the neighbor’s yard.
But Melissa learned that Juan was her man,
and soon “Just Married” was soaped on their car.
They had a son and named him Gerineldo,
not for them a name like “Luis” or “James.”
From the juglares to American Idol,
the more things change the more they stay the same.