Vicente Aleixandre: History of the Heart (Espasa-Calpe: Madrid, 1954).

Al-Motamid 28, Tetouan September 1958. Source Spanish National Library.

Presented by the great publishing house Espasa-Calpe, we have finally received Vicente Aleixandre’s highly-anticipated History of the Heart. The author has been promising that it would be published since last year and it is now offered to us as a means to satisfy our avid desire.

Its plot – complex, invigorating, distinctive – is, this time, a large, closed circle, completely logical in the way it has been masterfully structured, bringing together the entirety of the human life-cycle, from infancy to death. This History of the Heart, then, is a book of the greatest scope, bringing before us, already solved, the final mysteries of this poet; a book that is, in the meaning it contains and in the overview it provides, one of the works into which the poet has poured the most love.

Of everything in the book, the first thing that stands out in our search for surprise or novelty, for progress or for a “new period” of the author – a trace of which might fill the reader with joy – is the group of poems collected under the beautiful title of “The Extended Gaze.” When we ask ourselves where the love of which Aleixandre has so often sung, the love of which he has sung time and time again, the love that has acquired the sheen of a problem with no solution – when we ask ourselves where this love is to be directed, we see, here, the barriers that he has built around his individualistic approach to love begin to break, and we see how this love, free, now, from its obsessive focus and its necessary limitations, begins to overflow, becoming a love directed towards all people, to others, heralding the start – with such a strong desire for communication, with such a great feeling of happiness! – of the world of others. The new stage of life that the poet displays here has all the features of a life lived as if it is his first, of a world, with its capacity for wonder and its purity, that he has only recently come to appreciate fully; a purity and a wonder that seem to inform the marvellous reconstruction of them that Vicente Aleixandre undertakes in “The Child’s Gaze.” The poet makes his own voice spill over and speaks for everyone, adding, now, his own heart to the great collective of hearts. It is all as if Aleixandre has discovered, for the first time, that the world around him has been made his own world, too, in which he can love and be grateful.

This same cognisance of human solidarity also permeates the final part of the book, “The End.” In it, there is a human couple, both real and symbolic, who reach the end of their life with an awareness, at an emotional level, of the importance of one another’s company, and who, at the same time, look back lovingly and sorrowfully on the long road they have travelled. There flows forth in this book such a scientific consideration of the knowledge we have of life and the way we embrace living. The humility with which the voice speaks is striking, so deeply stoic, embracing life as a lightning bolt between two masses of dark, as something tempered only by love and by solidarity. The love that is now visible in Aleixandre is so distant from that other love, the love so grandly orchestrated in Shadow of Paradise; it is a love with the qualities of apotheosis, in which the richness of metaphor, abundant in the paradise it evokes, brings with it the full beauty of the written word in a constant stream of dazzlement, just as the matter demands.

The love that the poet offers to us in two of the parts of History of the Heart – “Like the Thistledown,” the poems that open the book, and those of the third grouping, “Reality” – is this very same love, full of life and so distinctly Aleixandrine, which continues to interpose itself with the commanding presence of being the only thing that really matters. But on this occasion – and this is one of the best decisions that Aleixandre makes – it is a well-balanced voice, each time more stripped back and serene, that sings. What profound wisdom there is in this stern, charged voice, the voice of a great, well-formed river. Now that a sharp, finely-tuned sadness strikes incessantly at the heart of the poet, his language refines the richness of its own metaphor, as well as its emotional horizon. Time and again, his hands clasp at a delicate calm [1], which flees, evading the touch of his fingers. With the poet, we reach the limits of what is coming to an end; with him, we drink down the last remaining essences. We arrive at the deepest parts of the eye; cutting through skin, we feel bone. The senses amplify the pleasing qualities that anxiety can only observe. This is the poetry of the unexplored, of the details that would otherwise escape us. The hand of his beloved is porous, exceptionally fine, fragrant, silent: and, oh, what a sprint to the finish! Yet, this time, it is not the blissful transience of supple bodies that enriches his love; rather, it is the almost final act of escape, an escape to which this great lover hardly dare confess, but which the presence of sadness and tenderness, now fundamental, allows us to recognise.

It is this same sadness and this same tenderness which appear, most purposefully, in the final grouping of poems, those which close the book, “The End.” How like anguish this particular compassion is, this pointed yet all-encompassing paternal understanding, born of what has been lived, with which the poet now stops and looks at us. The most serious of moments has arrived and, to receive it, the voice has, bit by bit, cast off its embellishments, in a process uninterrupted over the course of his published works, with such masterful alignment, to the point that it has achieved a complete absence of embellishment and a supreme transparency, in a perfect evolution of style [2].

The peak of existence, poems of the final serenity, the last act of deliberation – and, yet, what a strong affirmation there is, what a powerful exaltation, in the acceptance, in the resignation articulated by this mortal poet, ever hopeful, ever immersed in an exquisite and positive clarity, a contagious clarity that might still offer us salvation in our final hours on this earth. History of the Heart is not merely a book that is unique in its meaning, an important milestone in the oeuvre of Vicente Aleixandre; it is also a book of hope, masterfully written by someone who knows how to convey this hope in its fullest, most mature form.

***

Mohammad Sabbagh: The Tree of Fire (Itimad Collection, Vol. 1: Tetouan, 1954).

One of the bodies of poetry least known to the Spanish reader is Arabic poetry, particularly the most recent examples of Arabic poetry. Names that are fundamental in Arab countries – such as Gibran Khalil Gibran, Mikhail Naimy, Bulus Salamah, and so on – are completely unknown to the Spanish-speaking reader. In their countries of origin, these masters have produced a body of work that is so truthful and yet, at the same time, so resistant to what is ordinarily entailed by the appeal to “tradition” and the repetitive return to tired themes that their spirit has penetrated the minds of the new generations of poets. This is the case for Sabbagh, a young poet from Tetouan, who is exceedingly well-known in the Arab world and who is becoming so for the Spanish reader, not only through the poems of his that have been published in our most significant journals, but also – and above all – because of the book that has just been published in Spanish by the Itimad Collection [3]. A book that, unusually, has seen the light of day in a foreign language before its own.

For the Spanish reader, this book will be a great surprise. They will not find in it the forms and themes that have otherwise made them distance themselves from, or made them forget about, Arabic poetry: the theme of love, overlaid with the same old images and bound by the mould of a strict and immutable form, for example. Rather, Sabbagh – consciously drawing the ire of his compatriots by writing in free verse – offers us a collection of socially engaged poetry. It is his world, his village, his companions who appeal to his emotions; and it is in the sturdy verses that he writes, valiantly extracted from their formal constraints, that the stress the poet places becomes even more pronounced.

Man is a “tree of fire,” planted in a side-street of silence and solitude. Language that burns, that scolds: “The tear that runs down my cheek, wounding me, falls upon you and burns you.” Sabbagh does not attempt to lock himself away in ignorant isolation, turning his back on his people; his quest as a poet, within the wider work undertaken by his brothers, is devotedly carried out, and he sacrifices the best of his talent to it. This is the greatest surprise that the Spanish reader will note when reading the sixteen poems that comprise this book: how Arabic poetry bursts onto the field of Spanish with characteristics that are both juvenile and, simultaneously, twinned with those of our own poetry [4]. We see this clearly in the noble quest of Arabic poetry to shine the glowing language of truth into our contemporary life. And while those in Spain may have taken to calling this “Social Poetry” – a label that is used, in the circles of sycophants, to toast poetry of even the poorest quality – the fact that we should find such a noble quest accomplished by this young Arab poet demonstrates that he belongs to the highest echelon of literary figures. Not because he is overbearingly dogmatic in what he writes, but because of something that is much more difficult to do: because he is a poet.

Present, then, in the overview I provide of this Arab poet, is the idea of Spain. There is, now, no lack of what we might call “Spanishness” within what constitutes “Arabness,” just as there once was no lack of Arabness within Spanishness. Mohammad Sabbagh is intimately familiar with our best poetry, and he has been able to make excellent use of many of its aspects. We get a good idea of this from the Spanish translation, produced by Sabbagh and Trina Mercader, which is solidly put together, clear and close to the original. This is encouraging and faithful work, which anticipates the rewards that might be reaped from a more intensive Hispano-Arab collaboration, in which one body of poetry might be exchanged for the other [5].

With this Tree of Fire – a milestone on the path that stretches far ahead, a work from among whose pages we dare not extract a single poem because the book, as a whole, constitutes a single, painstakingly put-together unit – there is revealed to us a great poet, who offers up to his people the gleaming images that he has so carefully crafted in the moment of difficulty through which it is their time to live, and who, above all else, elevates their masculine virtue as a standard for the only possible form of political allegiance: that of loving one’s homeland.

“So many smiles I had to suppress

To become one with the pain of the paths you tread,

With my own pain.

But now, come to me, all of you, come – 

For all that matters

Is that we walk on together, forever,

Hand-in-hand.”

“I saw you as enemies, my friends,

Unaware that it was me

Who was my own adversary.”

“For how long

Will I feel this hunger for you, oh, my people?”

“As I chewed on a grain of your wheat,

How I wished that it would chew me over.

As I drank the water of your amphorae,

How I wished that it would drink me down.

As I wandered your paths,

How I wished that my own steps would wander over me.”

The book is accompanied by some words from Vicente Aleixandre, which, though few in number, are expansive in their incisiveness and their content. Here are some that corroborate what we have said above: “There is something that touches us intimately in the voice of this young poet of the Arabic language, who, stood amidst his own people, raises songs that are so distinctively his, in which there is as much of his own passion, many-hued and profoundly moving, as there is the emphasis that he has managed to place on this enlightened solidarity.

–Pío Gómez Nisa. [6]

***

Fadwa Tuqan: Alone With Time (Egypt, 1952). [7]

This poet from Nablus (Jordan) occupies one of the highest positions in contemporary Arabic poetry [8]. Her most recent published book, Alone with Time, which the author has sent to us and has dedicated to us, confirms what we had already learnt through the best Arabic literary magazines: that Fadwa Tuwan is close to achieving preeminence in contemporary female poetry.

A poet who is impulsive, intuitive, who does not have any higher-level educational qualifications, who was directed on her path almost exclusively by her brother Ibrahim, also a poet, and who has reached, guided by his hand, the world of lyrical feeling and beauty. It is to him, now that he is dead, that Fadwa dedicates her whole life, her tears and her poems, with anguished loyalty.

The subject of the book that we are discussing here could not, then, be anything but a profound elegy to her late brother. A blistering rush of air fills the despairing heart of the poet in her solitude. Her words burn. Her inherent pessimism, now deepened, dominates her, surrounds her, placing her, eventually, side-by-side with her beloved brother: “Oh, tomb, how often my restless soul has flitted about your confines, like a dying bird!” The sweet poetry of Fadwa Tuqan wins us over, unexpectedly, immersing us in the profound humanity with which the rhythm of her poems trembles; a rhythm that flows like her tears, warm and unrelenting, from which she cannot now free herself. Tenderness occupies a place deep within her and, therefore, reaches us, never a concept foreign to our Western lyrical world, but always close to our heart, cutting across the double distance, geographic and linguistic, that separates her from us: “I came with my heart to the road of life, ready to sow my flowers of love.” We make only one critique of this book: the print on the front cover shows a young girl wearing refined European clothes, which provokes a displeasing contrast with the strong Arab personality that is set free within its pages.

–Trina Mercader.

***

News

The journal Al-Anis – published in Tetouan and edited by Mohamed al-Juhra – has picked up on a piece of news, first reported in the Egyptian press, which discusses the recent publication of Vicente Aleixandre’s History of the Heart and names its author “the prince of contemporary poets writing in Spanish.” It also reports that the Boscán Prize has been awarded to Pío Gómez Nisa.