Tuesday, July 9,
Small memories are flooding the morning's writing,
Waldo Rojas and I waltzed to calliope music in the streets of Schoenhaven while
Jules Deelder, the
Night Mayor of Rotterdam,
Simon Vinkenoog and the venerable
Judith Hertzberg applaud, both they, and Miroslav Holub shower thin Dutch dimes down upon us like wedding rice, from the stone steps. We collect enough for a beer or two.
I curtsied, saying in my broadest Irish accent, Oh thank you kind sir. Simon, who is Holland's last hippie, asked me to remember him to Larry Ferlinghetti. Is City Lights still there? He asks. Of course, I laugh. I will give him your regards.
June 22
At dinner, I sat across from
Seamus Heaney, telling them about my grandfather and
Liam Mellows, whom he knew of. Seamus told me a story of going to a Catholic school in northern Ireland, making a Protestant reference. I queried, how did you wind up in a Catholic school? Because I'm Catholic, he replied, once more cracking the cap on the whiskey bottle.
I told Seamus of my grandfather's gun-running and of Eamonn De Valera and Liam Mellows visiting us. He said, You've got a rare bit of history there. And urged me to write it down.
Waldo, who was seated beside me, was silent. Of course, Seamus and I were speaking in English. Sometimes I translated, but I was often neglectful.
Georges Lory, Breyten Breytenbach's translator, a cultural attaché who lives in Ghent, sat across from Waldo but they spoke a little, only having French in common. And when they spoke, I was excluded. We had not one common tongue at the table. There's gotta a poem embedded in that thought.
Waldo left early to go upstairs, and I let him go ahead, busy talking with Seamus whom I hadn't seen in over three years and then only briefly.
At
Poetry International I started to follow Waldo who had asked me to join him, but he was so distant. Already I could feel him pulling away. I saw him at the credit phone, I could tell by his stance that he was calling his wife, shedding the adulterer's skin. I stopped, hesitated, and doubled back, and grabbed an after dinner coffee with Mairi, Seamus's wife. Letting him go.
I looked over the room of poets, saying my goodbyes too, and what an extraordinary two weeks it has been. This crazy tribe that I belong to.
Geert van Istendael (whose real name is at least five names long) and I had a mini Celtic caucus. He is a wild Belgian Celt. By the coffee pot we concluded that the Celtic nation was alive and well and partying in this room.
I let Waldo finish his call, and then followed him up to the Klein Hall, the hospitality room. Many poets were already saying their last goodbyes. And after the final reading of our work, translating Breyten Breytenbach, we gathered in the hallowed room, a cathedral of sorts, where we all had worked so hard, as if afraid to break the spell, though there was a band, and a party in the foyer waiting for us.
Waldo left me alone in the room, and went dancing, probably with Mariolijn, the translator. She seemed quite attached to him on several occasions, perhaps caring more for him, than he did for her. I don't think they were lovers in the past. But one never knows. Not my worry.
We roasted our host, and Poetry International founder
Martin Mooij on his retirement etc., toasting the end of an era.
South African poet Dynana Kukama, from Botswana, dragged me onto the table-top to do a Xhosan song that she taught me, I learned it during a drunken evening, a few nights previously. We sang it, replete with the accompanying clicks, and tribal dance movements.A floorshow.
Siya nibonga okuba nathi (2x)
ni phumile makhaya nazoba nathi (2x)
na hlala nathi (to sit)
na xoxa nathi (to talk)
na blega nathi (to love)
na dhlala nathi (to play)
Siya nibonga okuba nathi (2x with a different melody line)
Thank you for what we have
you have left home with us
stay with us
talk to us
love us
play with us
Thank you for what we have
I'm not very good at Bantu click languages (Setswana, or Xhosa -
Tswana), it's an interesting trick of the tongue to be able breathe out, sing, and click in the back of the throat, without drowning in saliva, but it was a gift to Martin and we had a good time.
Afterwards people came up to me saying, You have such a lovely voice. You could have another career singing. Or, I didn't know you could move your body like that, such wild dancing. Waldo missed it all, of course.
And I spent the rest of my time talking with Seamus. I gave him a copy of my
Poem for Sarah along with some artwork of mine. And he gave me three resounding kisses goodbye in the European fashion. And then one extra big smacker on the lips—for a fellow countryman. Calls me cousin (my grandmother was a Heaney), and says goodbye.
I talked with Mexican poet,
Homero Aradjis who brought me up to date on
El Grupo de los Cien, The Group of 100, an organization and ecological organization that he had founded. I told him I had seen his name in the SF Chronicle a few months back in connection to logging and the destruction of the monarch butterfly habitat.
Homero said that is very frustrated because he can't seem to get much news coverage. He said that NBC, or CBS and came over and taped him, four hours worth of coverage, and then didn't use any of the footage. His program was bumped US news, something in Iowa.
We brainstormed a bit and I said to catch the US media's attention, you've got to make it relevant to the US, like tying to the butterfly trees of Bolinas. I also mentioned a friend of mine, John Knox, and Earth Island Institute, whom he also knew.
Homero felt that the US media was afraid to report on Mexican ecological issues, and of course, he's completely blacklisted, media-wise in Mexico. We talked about the dangers involved. He said, Sometimes I fear for my life, but I have to believe in the purity of the animals I am trying to protect. The energy of the whales and the butterflies. I offer cosmic energy to protect him to reinstill energy for the cause.
I told Homero I used several of his poems (the Canadian translations), in the classroom to talk about extinction, and unanswerable questions. I also used Neruda's questions. Homero, who is half Greek, said his last name was from the Arabic, his mother is Mexican, his father fled from Tyre, so he is an oddysey of many worlds and epochs.
Eventually Waldo returned, saying, Let's go. But I wanted to dance, and he wanted to walk me home. I knew we weren't to spend the night together as I had hoped, we both had to pack, but I wish he was a bit more out of control. That he'd just let go.
Waldo grumbled that he wasn't into ecology, not like what Homero is doing. I don't think he likes Homero very much. I asked him if he didn't care about ecology, or the extinction of species, etc. He said, No it wasn't that, it was the politics. I said that I admired Homero, and the work he's doing, and if not him, then who? How? What is our real job as poets?
Nota bene: All my conversations with Waldo are in Spanish, so this is a paraphrased translation. It wasn't quite a tiff, but it was a disagreement that fell away when we got to my room. I gave him a souvenir T-shirt, Alcatraz Sleep Team, or something like that.
And he began kissing me on the bed. When he fell back among the pillows with glasses skewed, shirt awry, he looked so defenceless. I realized it was all a façade. I took them from him, and he was helpless before me. I touched him, asking if he wanted me.
Si, he said weakly, and we stripped off our clothes, turned off the light, and proceeded to squeak the springs on the narrow twin bed.
Waldo was wildly holding me, grabbing my hair, grunting my name, Mau-rin, Mau-rin, Mau-rin. I burst into tears, realizing that he was trying so hard to be civilized about it all. we had unleashed more than what we had bargained for. He wanted no long drawn out goodbye scenes, but he got it anyway. I wasn't about to be cheated of that.
Waldo is one of those rare man who can get it up a second time, replete with a second orgasm. We were on round two, when poor Herman Berlandt banged on the door, wanting to go to bed (we were roommates). It was more like a comedy of errors, we were caught
inflagrante delicto, madly scrambling for our clothes, grabbing all the wrong ones by mistake. Tossing them to each other, And I kept saying, Give us five minutes! Give us five minutes! As poor old Herman grumbled in the hallway.
I answered the door with as much dignity as I could, with my sweater inside out and backwards, wearing little more than it, and my jeans, I couldn't find my underwear. Herman shuffled off to bed grumbling. It was a long night for him. Being stuck out in the corridor while we dallied didn't help.
As I walked Waldo to the elevator, I couldn't believe how calm and dignified he seemed, as if nothing untoward had happened when I opened the door, while I looked fully the part of a wild ravaged woman, my hair was a frothy Medusine mantle of passionate embraces. Does he do this sort of thing often?
Waldo stepped into the elevator facing me, and repeated, No tears, no goodbyes. The mirrored walls of the elevator reflected my face, and my tragic response, so that I could see myself simultaneously as he saw me. For once, I was wildly beautiful, standing barefoot in that hotel hall, with a crushed tuberose dangling from my ear, in the gardenia-scented night.
And Waldo was carefully stepping back into his Parisian mode. I was the wild Celt who stirred his blood one midsummer's eve, but now it was time to leave.Rejoin the world. He did leave me his address. And I did write it down. But I never expected to hear from him again.
Apparently Waldo called at Charles McGeehan's flat a few days ago, now the shoe on the other foot. He leaves his wife in Paris to sneak off and call his lover who waits for him in Amsterdam. But I never received that message that he called me until afterwards. I wonder how he and Charles got on over the phone? Waldo's spoken English is almost nonexistent. And I'm not sure Charles even speaks French. Dutch, yes.
I send my second letter to Waldo yesterday with my new address and number. So far, though Charles gave him my new number, there was no call. Every time the phone downstairs rings, I think it's him. But the upstairs phone remains deathly silent. By tomorrow, or rather today, he should have received my letter. Then round two begins—meaning where do we go from here? Or is there nothing more? Did the calliope music stop?
I am stirring up his life a bit, I think. Perhaps he has gotten too comfortable in his bourgeois existence, teaching the history of history at the Sorbonne. A man dressed in varying shades of grey. In a sense, I'm from his world, the New World, even if he left it in 1973. Waldo is a French citizen having lived in Paris nearly 25 years. That's nearly half of his life, but he still calls himself Chilean.
I had to simultaneously translate a conversationfrom
Robert Dorsman (
Breyten Breytenbach's translator), to Waldo. Luckily, I knew enough about Waldo to fill in the missing gaps. It was funny, because while I was being Waldo's ad hoc translator, he waited expectantly, trusting me to unlock the veiled the prison of language, as did Robert. Their combined energy focused their attention on me like a laser, as if I possessed a rare thing—with my poor Spanish. I got so nervous, I became tongue-tied. But we were among friends. Not like with Dmitri Prigov.
Several times I had explained and translated something that was said in English to Waldo, but that was in private. This was different, a public forum. I literally was the only other Spanish-speaking person in the entire room.
Of course, they could've used French with another person as an intermediary, so communication wasn't impossible. But I thrived in that moment, I was a linguistic bridge between two people. How many times has it been done for me, the gift of translation? It's not easy to do. And when you get out of synch, you wind up speaking the wrong language to both parties.
More than once, I caught Breyten looking appraisingly over at us, perhaps listening in. At that point. I no longer felt like an imposter, I was truly one of the group and I belong here.
Earlier Waldo and I were at the magazine table, and I was trying to explain something to him, intent on my language skills, how our bodies, and faces move differently in other idioms. When we speak Spanish, we move closer into the circle. In English we are at arms-length. At this point, it was obvious to all, there was more than between us than a passing flirtation.
Breyten's publisher, Francis Galloway, from Durban, came over, and said, You two look like a French painting. And then I wondered how we looked to the others in the room, carrying out a clandestine relationship in a language that only we understood. Is Waldo's wife French? Did I awaken the younger man from South America, and not the Parisian sophistocate?
He says I am O'Brien, Rojas-Serrano, I am Basque, I am Spanish, I am Mapuche Lincoyán, Aracuña (a tribal leader?). He is Chilean, born in in Concepción,
Waldo's father, a university professor, was executed, while he was in Paris giving a reading. The military coup of September 11, 1973 forced him into exile. He never returned to his homeland, and now his mother is dead. What else was there to do but to flee the country of his birth? In this, the Irish blood in him, and the Spanish blood, returned home to Europe, but what of the Indio? In Paris?
Have I, with my wild irish blood, pierced his heart, that poor weakened heart? Every day he lives on the other side of his heart attack, rescued from death, he's not exactly on borrowed time, but has a revitalized awareness of time, who he is, and where he is going.
One of the few things he said to me in English was, I don't care about money. In contrast to what? Reviewing his life? Or a general statement. And applecart I disrupted? I wonder if he will write of me. Or remember me. He gives me a signed copy of his book,
Poesía continua. Yes, it does.
Another dream fragment comes resurfacing as I write these lines, I dreamed about my writing these very same lines, and analyzing his character etc. or having another chance to compare himself to my study of him. There is always more to come, contrary to what we might think. And I remember telling him of the dreams, and he asked, How can you tell the dreams and reality apart? Perhaps the dream is real and reality is just the dream.
In Neruda's
Book of Questions, the first page I opened to was:
42
Who was she who made love to you
in your dream, while you slept?
Where do the things in dreams go?
Do they pass to the dreams of others?
And does the father who lives in your dreams
die again when you awaken?
In dreams, do plants blossom
and their solemn fruit ripening?
Quien era aquella que te amo
en el sueño, cuando dormias?
Donde van las cosas del sueño?
Se van al sueno de los otros?
Y el padre que vive en los sueños
vuelve a morir cuando despiertas?
Florecen las plantas del sueño
y maduran sus graves frutos?
tr.
William O'Daly, 1991
Copper Canyon Press
And I still haven't written about
Breyten Breytenbach, and his praise for me, and my work. I didn't know Afrikaans, so I transliterated his work, and he said it was more spot on, that what the eminent translators, including
Miroslav Holub, and
Edoardo Sanguineti, came up with, how, when he hugged me goodbye, I blushed like a schoolgirl.
Seamus Heaney,
Rita Dove and I were definitely on the outskirts of that eminent circle, as none of us speak Afrikaans. So we coffee-klatched it a bit. However, I was determined to get something and treated it like a CPITS writing assignment, J
uan Felipe Herrera once gave me making fake translations of Rilke.
Francis Galloway, of Van Schaik Publishers, South Africa, wanted to use my translations in an upcoming collection of Breytenbach's.
Nor have I recorded
Zein al-Abidine Fouad's extraordinary story working among the outcast women of Egypt who worked in the garbage pits, and how he brought guerilla theater to them, and changed a society. I was so caught up in living in within the moment, I never got a chance to record the event itself. My plate was so full so to speak. Perhaps photos will help to jog my memory, later, and give me reason to write about the many poets I met.
I also have a cryptic note about Irish short story writer,
Seán Ó Faoláin, who died in 1991, and Homero Aradjis, I don't know what it means. Forever lost. Perhaps Seamus was urging me to read his work about the Easter Uprising. Or perhaps Homero was telling me to look up something. As it turns out Waldo was friends with Raúl Ruiz, Ken Bullock's friend. Small world. He and Ruiz were part of La Cofradía de los Caballeros Antiguo in Chile.
There's always that feeling of life slipping away, out from under you. No matter what you choose to record, or not record it at all. Fleeting memories, not important in and of themselves, a collection of disparate lives during a a brief moment in time. Poetry was our timeline.
This was a June 22 journal entry that was later transcribed, hence the jumbled format. I may untangle it later.
7/9/96
added and revised for clarity
