Not Communication, Communion

- By Michael Thurston

A Review of Save Twilight: Selected Poems. New and expanded edition, by Julio Cortázar, Translated by Stephen Kessler. (City Lights, 2016).

In “Axolotl,” an early short story by Julio Cortázar, the protagonist watches the titular amphibians very closely, day after day, imagining his way into their consciousness (or lack of consciousness), taking up the point of view from inside the aquarium, until, as a consequence of this attention, he finds himself suddenly looking out through the glass to see himself staring: “No transition and no surprise, I saw my face against the glass, I saw it on the outside of the tank, I saw it on the other side of the glass. Then my face drew back and I understood.” The strange thing here, for Cortázar’s narrator, is not the transformation itself but, instead, the fact that, once transformed, he is able to continue thinking as a person, to carry into the body and being of the amphibian the understanding of the man. “Like the horror of a man buried alive awaking to his fate,” soon this, too, along with the agony of a fishy shut-in syndrome and the mystery of the consciousness that remains in the man—going away with him when he leaves every day and returning with him when he comes back to watch the axolotl in their tank—fades to banality. No communication is possible; the mind that once was in the man is now in its object, the mind that now is in the man is unknowable, the only hope expressed is that perhaps the man will go off and someday write a story about axolotls.

This tale distills much that is characteristic of Cortázar’s work across genres. The Argentine writer, born in Brussels and settled in Paris for much of his adult life (after effectively going into self-imposed exile from Argentina, where he had been educated, had worked as a teacher, and had begun his literary career), wrote numerous such stories along with several novels (including Hopscotch, the book that is perhaps his best-known work among English-language readers. His late-life masterpiece, Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, narrates a slow journey down the autoroute from Paris to Marseilles, stopping at every rest area, going no farther than two per day, in what turns out to be a doomed effort to slow time as the author’s wife (and collaborator in this work), Carol Dunlop, is dying of cancer. And Cortázar was also a poet, writing, as he records in one of the prose passages collected in this volume, in innumerable hotel rooms as well as in his Paris home. In these poems, translated and introduced by Stephen Kessler, the strangenesses of attention, consciousness, communication, and being in the world are presented in a variety of tones, refracted through a variety of topoi.

Gathered and ordered by Cortázar only in the last year of his life, Salvo el crepúsculo was first published in Mexico in 1984. Kessler describes the volume—which included the author’s playful notes on the process of its making as well as found graphics—as “a book-kit, a literary game, a deck of poems to be shuffled and played at the reader’s pleasure,” an example (like Hopscotch, with its options for linear or non-linear reading) of “typical Cortázar.” In 1997, Kessler published a first English translation of selections from the book with City Lights. Now he has brought out a new edition, adding almost a hundred pages of poems and prose passages and producing what he calls “the most generous gathering to date in English” of Cortázar’s poetry.

One of the most important additions to this new edition is the author’s lyrical essay, “For Listening Through Headphones,” an ars poetica of sorts in which are blended Cortázar’s love of music, his musings on listening and technology, on solipsism and communication. “How not to think, then,” he writes at a key moment, “that somehow poetry is a word heard through invisible headphones as soon as the poem begins to work its spell” (21). Where a story or a novel, however “abstracted” from everyday life we might be able to be during the moment of reading, remains connected to “the system of communication,” it cannot help from providing “information” that remains information: the poem “communicates the poem, and it doesn’t try to nor can it communicate anything else.” In this, poetry is like music listened to through headphones. It is a technology for severing connections. It is an act not of communication but of communion, one requiring and rewarding something like the act of attention that translates the watcher’s mind into the axolotl. It is also, essentially, estranging. In this regard, it is also like the experience of watching someone else listening to music on headphones. “It fascinates me,” Cortázar writes, “that the woman at my side may be listening to records through headphones, that her face may reflect without her knowing it everything that is happening in that small interior night, in that total intimacy between music and her ears. . . . there’s something fascinating in those passages, those instantaneous transformations of expression, those light hand strokes which convert rhythms and sounds into gestural movements” (13).

We are invited, in these poems, to be at once the listener and the one who watches another to listen to music that we cannot hear. In three quatrains, “The Other” imagines in the human realm a situation like that narrated in “Axolotl.” The poem begins by wondering where the look comes from “which sometimes rises to meet my eyes / when from a long way off I let them / come to rest on a face,” and, in the final stanza, captures the complexity of the coalescence of consciousness in the acts of looking and being looked at:

Transformation, double-enchantment
exposing in me a different self
behind that person I pretend to be
whose look is focused on something else (129).

Especially important here, I think, is the recognition that the speaker has no access to the interiority of the other. All that exposure achieved in the looking is exposure of the self. Or selves, really, the plural capturing the evasiveness even of the speaker’s own and finally not really knowable self. The poem seeks not to express the thoughts or feelings of a speaking self, then, but to explore at once the inexpressibility of self (and so the impossibility of communication) and, as a cause and/or consequence of this, the non-existence of self as anything other than the totality of such acts of perception and cognition. “Distracted from distraction by distraction,” Eliot writes in “Burnt Norton,” the spiritually hollow reality lamented there transformed in Cortázar’s “double enchantment” to a spiritually deep mystery.

All that makes the poems sound way too serious and somber. And precisely such adjectives for poetry (or “the poetic”) Cortázar is explicitly at pains to reject here, both in the short prose passages and in the poems themselves. “Why is it,” he asks in one of the prose pieces, “that in literature—in servile imitation of the standards of contemporary life—one tends to believe that sincerity is offered only in lyric or dramatic expression, and that the ludic serves almost always only as artifice or make-believe” (141). Poems should be, poems are, games, fields of pleasurable opportunity to be entered and engaged in the spirit of fun, of joy that is at once playful and erotic: “A light sensuality in a kind of combinatorial art that mimics the play of love, at times within the text and always in the variations of the semantic blocks, the lines and stanzas” (145). And this is how the poems work—how they play!—even when the subject is, say, decapitation (as in “Appel Rejeté”):

It’s not the prevision of the blade that will sever me from myself,
nor the scientifically disproved suspicion of what comes after.
Whatever comes will come,
and nothing will come, and it’s plenty (47).

The playfulness and pleasurable permeate the lines and language, not only in contemplations of lasting love:

May you look beyond me,
may you love me with violent disregard
for tomorrow, let the cry
of your coming explode
in the boss’s face in some office
and let the pleasure we invent together
be one more sign of freedom (“A Love Letter,” 29)

or in evocations of brief love:

a slow flame kindling
the rhythmic dance of the bonfire
weaving us together in flashes, in spirals,
going and coming in a storm of smoke – (“The Brief Love,” 109)

but also in premonitions of a future characterized by loss and absence:

And I know full well you won’t be there.
You won’t be in the street, in the hum that buzzes
from the arc lamps at night, nor in the gesture
of selecting from the menu, nor in the smile
that lightens people packed into the subway,
nor in the borrowed books, nor in the see-you-tomorrow (“The Future,” 33).

And they are abetted into English by Kessler’s deft translations, which preserve the play of sonic repetition that is one of Cortázar’s chief means of loading his lines’ rifts with aural ore. Notice, for example, the interlinear assonance and consonance in this passage from “Ándele” (“Get a Move On”):

                        Carajo,
la carretilla de la vida
con carga para cinco decadas, con sed
de vinedos enteros, con amores
que inevitablemente superponen (64)

From the first two lines here Cortázar establishes a tendency to link lines through repeated sounds not at the ends in rhymes but, instead, in various places, the first syllable of “Carajo” picked up in the next line’s “carretilla,” the insistent “r” sounds in the next line echoed in the fourth, the short “e” of “inevitablemente” looking back to those of “vinedos enteros,” and on and on. In his English version, Kessler goes for similar effects, and he’s often able to pull them off in the same combinations of words (as in the opening “Fuck” and “dumptruck”):

                        Fuck
the dumptruck of life
with a load of five decades, with a thirst
for entire vineyards, with loves
that inevitably overlap (65).

Hear it, in the “v” sound that runs like a sonic river through the middles of these lines, from “vineyard” to “overlap”?

Keeping the fun in these poems and prose pieces is one of Kessler’s real achievements, and in that he keeps this volume true to an aim that Cortázar articulated in a little essay on the problem of poetic seriousness: “I never wanted butterflies pinned to a board; I’m looking for a poetic ecology, to observe myself and at times recognize myself in different worlds, in things that only the poems haven’t forgotten and have saved for me like faithful old photographs” (55).

These faithful old (and new) translations bring the poetic playfulness of this vitally important writer into engaging English life, and they promise to keep us looking into the vitrines of his poems so intently that we might well find ourselves looking back out from them, at blank faces, once familiarly our own and now estranged, looking quizzically back at us.

Michael Thurston is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English Language & Literature at Smith College and Book Review Editor of the Massachusetts Review