Santiago de Chile
March 29, 1953
Los Surcos Inundados (The
Flooded Furrows)
David Rosenmann-Taub
by Miguel
Arteche
|
|
|
"The
Flooded Furrows", the second
book by David Rosenmann-Taub,
is something more than a promise from a writer of our generation.
Rarely have I seen a voice that brings more richness pregnant
with true – and very contemporary – poetry than
that of Rosenmann-Taub. At last, and it was about time, here
is a poet who does not pursue novelty just for its own sake.
"The
Flooded Furrows" brings something that is rather unknown
in our young poetry: an awareness of the trade. To write
in
a state of hallucination was something very entertaining
at
a certain time; with that, much foolishness was justified.
Write some loose lines, let out some incoherent howls, and
the poem was done. Or the thought was: someone wrote free
verse; I can do that too, and it's easy. Or: someone invented
that delightful scale of sounds – the twelve-tone scale
– and here is my chance. The master has genius, and
the
disciples take it upon themselves to discredit him. Thus
it
has been and thus will it be. Behind enormous possibilities
for authentic artists – the ones for example who started
the Vienna School in music, and super-realism – hid
legions
of incompetents and frauds.
Rosenmann-Taub
is not going back to anything. He knows his personal technique,
he knows the technique of his trade, and, most important,
with those two areas mastered, he writes a strange, moving
poetry. An in-depth analysis of the book would reveal the
command of adjectival usage, the expertise in the technique
of verse: think of the metrical variation of his poems, the
creation of words, the richness of the vocabulary that he
possesses and uses with familiarity, not letting the bookishness
behind be seen.
However,
within the precise, hard architecture of his poetry floats
a primal world, of elemental beings, not in the manner of
shining, graceful creatures of a past or future paradise,
but endowed with all the strength and warmth, the bitterness
and disillusionment of some inhabitants of any modern city.
From them spring forth a furious debating, an interrupted
sleep, a world of semi-nightmare, that do not, at times,
exclude
the touch, the thread of tenderness and of eclogue-like tranquillity.
The latest poems of Rosenmann-Taub insist on the theme of
love, never monotonously; it is always treated with consummate
technical skill. But the boiling center of this poetry is
what has been mentioned above; because from there has issued
all of his strange art and because this poetry (which, in
general, has not particularly evolved since his first book – not
that this matters, although some people believe
that a poet must always be in a continual thematic ferment)
has its inception in that formless world of death, of desolation,
of tragic tenderness, of a joy mixed with irony, bitter irony.
A world composed of love, primitive sounds, frantic gasping.
The Segunda
sonata ("Second Sonata"), which
ends the book, contains one of the best and most extraordinary
moments of David Rosenmann-Taub. The process of division
into
tempos is unmistakable – the three parts titled Pórtico ("Portico"), Abismo ("Abyss"), Réquiem ("Requiem") do not, naturally, have the same pace, the same dramatic
tension,
with which Rosenmann-Taub has invested the poem. The way
of
treating that division shows a closeness to musical technique.
Let's be clear: it is not musical poetry, an absurd thing
that some believe to exist, but simply an external similarity
to sonata form. This can be seen from the title. But it is
in the depths of the poem, in the world that the reader of
poetry creates, in the emotion imparted to the reader, in
that landscape which passes from the poet to the one who
reads,
that the relation with music is found, and not in the use
of words with any musical value or in the accenting of the
line. The differences of "tempo" are vibrating
in
the depths of the poetry, moving in a sea that is constantly
helped by external form.
The
theme is eternal: death. The death of a child. At the end
of the third movement of the sonata, the atmosphere is a mixture
of a very profound, desperate tenderness and a soft, warm,
pleading playfulness. The first two tempos part company. The
first: a kind of mocking prelude, with a childish tone in
which there does not exist the slightest hint of death, not
even in the first lines, where a note of nostalgia seems to
appear. The second: the landscape changes completely. Once
the ironic, mocking tone has disappeared, one enters, directly,
and in the first line, a dark, mortal terrain, with a fateful
omen: |
| |
The
shadow of death at the threshold stops.
Oh dandún, oh dandún, don't look at its face. |
Dandún is the son. When love struggles to emerge transformed
into words, and the word does not come forth, there only remain
syllables which do not mean anything in terms of semantics,
but which, uncertain, fragile, arbitrary, are rendering the
whole tragic depth of despair that language cannot deliver.
Those syllables leap out – two, three, however many – and
a noun is delineated: "Dandún," "bomberún," "burburbur": words in which tenderness accrues, in which the syllable means
nothing if not the immense desire to express a love that knows
no bounds. Gradually the atmosphere of anguish increases.
A refrain that announces every so often – at least every
two stanzas – the presence of death, charges the poem
with concentrated tension. A hemistitch keeps constantly
recurring: |
| |
The shadow of death...
|
The
other half of the line changes, which helps to emphasize,
to magnify the proximity of death which, in the final refrain,
ends up lying in the bed of the sick child. First it stops
at the threshold. Then: |
| |
The shadow of death from the threshold advances.
Oh dandún, oh dandún, cover yourself with the
sheets.
And now it has arrived:
The
shadow of death is next to your bed.
Be good, my dandún, better look at the dawn.
Death looks at the child:
The
shadow of death has leaned toward you,
(the pillow has turned blue):... they look like two brothers."
Until the refrain ends:
The
shadow of death has lain down in your bed.
My son, dandún, you no longer belong to me.
|
And
as the refrain recedes, the tone alters immediately. With
death in the bed, with the heartrending sensation that the
child's life no longer belongs to him, Rosenmann-Taub changes
the heretofore relative calm. The rhythm becomes breathless,
like a maelstrom; repetition is used to accentuate the feeling
of despair, of powerlessness. The words strive to express
grief, and come out vertiginous. He repeats the negative,
the verb, the very name of the child, and up to the end of
this second tempo, everything gushes out of the poem in an
interminable stream of swift adjectives, of blazing visions
of powerlessness before death. Finally, the rhythm calms down
again, becomes quiet in a few assonant alexandrines: |
| |
From
the threshold the sun, lying like a dog,
gazes at the still bedspread, comes down as far as your still
chest, proceeds as far as your pallidly still face
and in your closed eyes places a blind glint,
in your closed eyes, terribly open. |
Everything
announces stillness, death. The stillness of the recumbent
sun and the immobility of the body in those terrible, simple
adjectives: your "still" chest, your pallidly "still" face,
the "still" bedspread. Until the final line,
with the two hemistitches
in apparent contradiction: "closed eyes" and
eyes "terribly open," which is to say:
eyes closed for us, lifeless for us, but terribly open for
death.
The
last movement – the "Requiem" – is
interspersed with another refrain that, in the same way
as the previous one, serves to emphasize the ambiance of
powerlessness
before death. But the rhythm is different. The octosyllables
give the line a more rapid pace. Here the light, elusive
tone
fits naturally. Certain themes of the previous two movements
now appear in a modified form, as if diluted. The tenderness
becomes much more intense because of the desperation of the
parting, and the refrain takes on a doubly funereal tone
which
destroys everything that might refer to the life of the child.
If during his life the child was |
| |
Teddy bear sleep, insomnia,
white on white, white mount,
a lot of taloned thistle,
a lot of breeze, barely winged,
a
smidgen of snow, candle,
without face with face,
without voice with voice, oh trataro,
lute, dandún, puff, nobody...
Rurrupata,
rurrupata,
rose syrup, pupa, runrún...
Upa,
triguito, ravé,
ota naanca, sweetness...
|
the
moment of his death is drawn in four lines in which can be
heard, with a truly horrifying note, that decisive "tris"
of separation, of farewell: |
| |
Already tris bracelet is closed,
already tris necklace is closed,
although we shall always look at you
we shall never see you. |
|
And from Spain one wonders what
hidden power, what invisible
hand, what underground currents, irrigate, continue touching
and fertilizing the earth of our poetry, making it always
new and always flowing.
|
|
|
