Poetry is what gets lost in translation? It ain’t necessarily so. Roberto Juarroz may hail
the song that does not enter the ear because it is in the ear, the only song that is never repeated.
Everyone needs one Untranslatable song.
—but that kind of song is not translated because it is already so intimately known. Born in Argentina in 1925, Juarroz published his first book of Poesía vertical in 1958, retaining the same title for each subsequent collection of untitled poems until his death in 1995. (The one I quoted is from Seventh Vertical Poetry, 1982.) This poetry, closer to proverb, parable, and aphorism, sometimes even to the syllogism, than to lyric, minimizes imagery, allusion, and evocation in favor of declarative statement—albeit his statements undo themselves, like the conclusion of one of the poems in Third Vertical Poetry (1965):
There are songs that sing, there are others that are silent, the deepest of all go backward from the first letter.
The straightforwardness of Juarroz’s syntax and diction mean that any little translatorly miscalculation is easy enough to put right. In the following piece from Third Vertical Poetry, I’d change every instance of “play that I [infinitive]” to “play at [gerund]”—for instance, in the first line, rather than “Sometimes I play that I catch up with myself,” I read, “Sometimes I play at catching up with myself”; but as W.S. Merwin has it,
Sometimes I play that I catch up with myself. I run with what I was and with what I will be, on the race of what I am.
And sometimes I play that I pass myself. Then maybe I run in the race of what I’m not.
But there’s still another race in which I’ll play that I’m overtaken and that will be the real one.
In Juarroz I sometimes hear a distant echo of Kafka, though seasoned with disillusioned equanimity rather than despair. But still, the paradox Hannah Arendt pointed out in Kafka also applies to Juarroz: “While we find it a matter of course to associate richness of concrete detail and dramatic action with the experience of a given reality and to ascribe to mental processes abstract pallor as the price exacted for their order and precision, Kafka, by sheer force of intelligence and spiritual imagination, created out of a bare, ‘abstract’ minimum of experience a kind of thought-landscape which, without losing in precision, harbors all the riches, varieties, and dramatic elements characteristic of ‘real’ life.” And for this reason the story, or in the case of Juarroz the poem, “in its utter simplicity and brevity records a mental phenomenon, something which one may call a thought-event.” The Kafka connection may reflect affinity more than direct influence, but the impact of Juarroz’s most renowned elder compatriot, Jorge Luis Borges, must have been direct. “The other who bears my name” in Third Vertical Poetry inevitably recalls “Borges and I” while in Fourth Vertical Poetry (1969), “I’m awake” conjures the author of “The Circular Ruins,” who was enchanted by the story of Chuang Tzu’s dream of the butterfly. But often enough, Juarroz lives his thought-events alone. Each is a sort of mechanism whose parts function only in coordination with all the others, so that each line is almost meaningless in itself; a word is a quantity like X or Y that only reveals itself through the whole equation. Here, from Fourth Vertical Poetry, is Juarroz working out the combinatorial possibilities of two triads (tree, nest, bird; life, death, a hand), and a single activity, drawing:
Life draws a tree and death draws another one. Life draws a nest and death copies it. Life draws a bird to live in the nest and right away death draws another bird.
A hand that draws nothing wanders among the drawings and at times moves one of them. For example: a bird of life occupies death’s nest on the tree that life drew.
Other times the hand that draws nothing blots out one drawing of the series. For example: the tree of death holds the nest of death but there’s no bird in it.
And other times the hand that draws nothing itself changes into an extra image in the shape of a bird, in the shape of a tree, in the shape of a nest. And then, only then, nothing’s missing and nothing’s left over. For example: two birds occupy life’s nest in death’s tree.
Or life’s tree holds two nests with only one bird in them.
Or a single bird lives in the one nest on the tree of life and the tree of death.
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Roberto Juarroz, Vertical Poetry, translated by W.S. Merwin, was published by North Point Press, San Francisco, 1988, and is out of print.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.