Unthinkable Tenderness: Selected Poems

By Juan Gelman and Joan Lindgren

Juan Gelman is Argentina's leading poet, but his work has been almost unknown in the United States until now. In 2000, he received the Juan Rulfo Award, one most important literary awards in the Spanish-speaking world, and in 2007, he received the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's top literary prize. With this selection, chosen and superbly translated by Joan Lindgren, Gelman's lush and visceral poetry comes alive for an English-speaking readership.

Gelman is a stark witness to the brutality of power, and his poems reflect his suffering at the hands of the Argentine military government (his son, daughter-in-law, and grandchild were "disappeared"). While political idealism infuses his writing, he is not a servant of ideology. Themes of family, exile, the tango, Argentina, and Gelman's Jewish heritage resonate throughout his poems, works that celebrate life while confronting heartache and loss.

"remembering their little bones when it rains/ the compañerosstomp on darkness/set forth from death/wander the tender night/I hear their voices like living faces"—from Remembering Their Little Bones

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.
Juan Gelman is Argentina's leading poet, but his work has been almost unknown in the United States until now. In 2000, he received the Juan Rulfo Award, one most important literary awards in the Spanish-speaking world, and in 2007, he received the Cervant

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520918023

Juan Gelman

Born in Buenos Aires in 1930, Juan Gelman went into political exile in Europe in 1976, where he remained until 1989. Today he lives in Mexico City. Joan Lindgren spent seven years studying Gelman's work and made six visits to Argentina while doing her research.

Book preview

UNTHINKABLE TENDERNESS

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the contribution provided by the Literature in Translation Endowment of the Associates of the University of California Press, which is supported by a generous gift from Joan Palevsky.

UNTHINKABLE TENDERNESS

Selected Poems

JUAN GELMAN

Edited and translated by

JOAN LINDGREN

With a Foreword by

EDUARDO GALEANO

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1997 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gelman, Juan, 1930 .

Unthinkable tenderness: selected poems / Juan Gelman; edited and translated by Joan Lindgren; with a foreword by Eduardo Galeano.

p. em.

ISBN 0-520-20586-3 (cloth: alk. paper).—ISBN-0-520-20587-1

(pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Gelman, Juan, 1930 — —Translations into English.

I. Lindgren, Joan. II. Title.

PQ7797.G386A25 1997

861 —dc21 96-46859

CIP

Printed in the United States of America

987654321

Handkerchiefs first appeared in Latin American Literary Review 20, no. 39 (1992); Rain, On Poetry, and They Say in Seneca Review 23, nos. 1 and 2 (1993); and Somewhere Else in International Quarterly (Tallahassee, Fla.) 1, no. 4 (1994).

Grateful acknowledgment is made to these publications for permission to reprint the translations.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American Ntional Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

our size of sorrow, Proportion'd to our cause, must be as great As that which makes it.

Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra 4.15.4 — 6

To the families of Argentina’s Disappeared, especially the twice- orphaned Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo Linea Fundadora, and to all those forced to live in the shadow of absence and impunity, the lingering resonance of brutality.

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

EDITOR'S PREFACE

FROM INTERRUPTIONS I

FOREWORD, BY JULIO CORTÁZAR (1981)

RELATIONS

SOMATA

CONFIDENCES

NOISES

CLARITIES

FACTS

WHAT THEY DON'T KNOW

DEATHS

GRACES

SHEETS

ARTE POETICA

NOTES

NOTE I

NOTE XII

NOTE XVII

NOTE XVIII

NOTE XX

NOTE XXI

NOTE XXV

OPEN LETTER

XIII

XVII

SO GENTLY

ALONE

STILL HARBORING

US THE POOR

KILLING THE GENERAL DEFEAT

REMEMBERING THEIR LITTLE BONES

THEY ARE WAITING

THEY WAIT

COMMENTARIES

COMMENTARY I (SAINT TERESA)

COMMENTARY VI (SAINT TERESA)

COMMENTARY XX

FROM INTERRUPTIONS II

UNDER FOREIGN RAIN (FOOTNOTES TO DEFEAT)

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XX

XXI

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

SOUTHWARD

SOUTHWARD

THE TABLE

SOMEWHERE ELSE

YOU ARE

SOUTHWARD

FLIGHTS

THE POEMS OF JOSÉ GALVÁN

SOUTHERN LATITUDES

NIGHTINGALES AGAIN

I, TOO, WRITE STORIES

OTHER WRITING

KINGDOMS

THE END

CHERRIES

THE POEMS OF JULIO GRECO

TRUTHS

WOMEN

ON POETRY

THEY SAY …

LITERATURES

POETRY FOREVER

SAYINGS

POETRY ONCE MORE

AUNT FRAN'S BUÑUELOS

CERTAIN

DAMPNESSES

PHARMACIES

TIDES

AN EXHIBITION OF A FEW PAINTINGS

THE BEAUTY OF ALL CREATION

COM/POSITIONS

EXERGUE

THE CRADLE

PSALM

WHAT WILL COME TO PASS

THE EXPULSED

THE PRISONER

SONG

THE BATTLE

IN PRISON

THAT

RAIN

CHILDREN

HANDKERCHIEFS

THE DELUDED

LETTER TO MY MOTHER

EPILOGUE

APPENDIX A

APPENDIX B

FOREWORD

BY EDUARDO GALEANO

Here is the chanticleer of the city of Buenos Aires. Juan Gelman does not imitate the tango; he contains it. He sings like nobody else, better than anyone, to the city of his birth — a city "that resembles the word never"—and from that city he fires off his incessant shots of beauty and melancholy. His are pure words, and never innocent: certainties that dwell in doubt, liberties that live imprisoned, and a celebration of life from the exact center of death.

The schoolchildren of his country are not taught his name. Its newspapers rarely speak of him, and you won’t see him on television. No president of the nation has ever mentioned him in any speech, nor has any minister or senator or city father. He has received no official prize or medal, and the Argentine Academy of Letters has not submitted his name as a candidate for the Nobel or the Cervantes Prizes. He has never been seen at openings, receptions, dedications, inaugurations, or publication parties. His works have never made the bestseller list. In none of the world’s airports has he been ushered into VIP salons. No ambassador of his country has bothered about him — not even to denounce him.

Juan has committed the crime of marrying justice to beauty. From such a dangerous and fertile embrace, a general uneasiness must issue. To read Juan Gelman with impunity is impossible. Keeping his distance from success, an enemy, in fact, of notoriety, this outlaw poet can only be uncomfortable in these times of forced neutrality, when amnesia and contrition are applauded and the world confuses talent with public relations.

I believe that this voice, voice of voices, at once so delicate and so powerful, sounds louder than any other in the present-day poetry of the Spanish language.

Translated by Joan Lindgren

xii / FOREWORD

EDITOR'S PREFACE

JUAN GELMAN:

ARGENTINA'S LEADING CONTEMPORARY POET

Now that the Spanish publisher Seix-Barral has undertaken the republication of his complete works — some fifteen volumes — the Argentine poet Juan Gelman has moved to the foreground of modern poetry, where a place has been waiting for him. Perhaps this tacit endorsement will encourage English-language readers to confront some of the obstacles that have kept Gelman unavailable until now, except through the translations of his work published by Latin American Literary Review, Seneca Review, and International Quarterly.

These obstacles in themselves are seductive. As an Argentine, Gelman belongs to one of the most imaginative, introspective, and profound literary traditions of our times; he is in the company of Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Sàbato, Manuel Puig, and Alejandra Pizarnik—to name but a few of the Argentine writers of the Boom, a movement of stunning literature that emerged from Latin America in the latter half of this century. The political drama in which Gelman was caught up produced one of the most inhuman crimes of civilized man, the disappearance of thirty thousand of the country’s prime youth, a deviation we are still struggling to understand and fit into our human self-image. His political frame of reference is thus distanced from ours, unless we make the effort to understand it — as history demands we do.

A second obstacle is the structural incompatibility of English and Spanish, in that the former hardly permits the poet’s games and va garies to translate from the latter. Spanish is the language of a richly hierarchical and paternalistic society. Argentine Spanish furthermore retains vos, the old private pronoun, and its accompanying verb endings, which unite to create not only another inflection or music but a breathiness, and therefore another order of intimacy — something that English lost, perhaps, along with its thee’s and thou’s. The gender component of Spanish allows Gelman infinite opportunity to meddle, play, and turn language on its head. Equally useful to him are the patterns of verb endings, which permit him to make verbs out of nouns: ninar, for example, is to child; gelmanear is to Gelman. To destabilize the fossilized language of the Spanish conquistador and dredge up into Argentine Spanish the nomadic, gypsy component latent in the speech of its huge immigrant population is Gelman’s intent.

A third obstacle is our scant knowledge of the phenomenon of the tango — to the rest of the world a glamorous dance, but to Argentinians a ritual, a means to codify class and sexual longings, as well as political impotence. To literature it was a premonition of postmodernism. Curiously enough, as the tango was developing and infiltrating Argentine consciousness, so was the rage for Freudian psychoanalysis; today Buenos Aires has the world’s highest per capita incidence of analysis and trains most of Spain’s analysts. Yet the country cannot explain its idiosyncrasies and its failure to establish participatory democracy. A currently best-selling self-help book in the bookstores of Argentina is called How to Extricate Yourself from Corruption.

Gelman recognized the need to go beyond the paralyzing melancholia of the tango and to prescribe for and promise change. But early on, he saw as well the need for a collision between language and reality, not only a destabilization of the language but a defabuliza- tion of poetry itself, insofar as poetry had been an instrument of ideology. His attack was called Translations (Traducciones III). In Spanish the words translation (traducción) and betrayal (traición) sound perilously similar and play into the poet’s hands for an intervention into both language and meaning.

A polyglot, Gelman allows his imagination dazzling flight, often not easy for his Spanish-language readers to follow and certainly an exercise in stretching for English-language readers (not to mention the convolutions demanded of the translator). But throughout his work he is able to carry to greater heights and registers his poetics of intimacy. That is how we can follow him wherever he may take us, by virtue of his capacity to delve into the interior life where the poem originates, to dissolve the false barrier between the everyday self and the company self, between the individual and society, between private and public. It is gratifying to know that Gelman’s work is being used in linguistic research that may one day locate in the function of language itself the capacity—or incapacity