Ramón
López Velarde (Mexico)
1888-1921
Considered
to be the Mexican poet at the center of the modernist movement, López Velarde
is one of the most beloved of Mexican authors.
Born in Jerez, Zacatecas, he was the first
of nine children of a lawyer father and a mother who came from a landowning
family. After his law career failed, his father founded a Catholic school in
Jerez.
At the age of 12, López Velarde was sent
to a seminary in Zacatecas for two years, transferring with his family move to
a seminary in Aguscalientes. He left the seminary in 1905 in search of a law
career.
The following year the poet collaborated
on the literary review Bohemio, published by local friends, under the
pseudonym of Ricardo Wencer Olivares. The magazine associated itself with the
Catholic figure Manuel Caballero, opposed literary modernism as represented by
the polemical Revista Azul. Bohemio seemed to have little
influence on the Mexican scene at large.
In 1908 Velarde began his law studies at
the University of San Luis Potosí, but with the death of his father, the family
fell into difficult finances. However, his uncles helped him to continue his
studies. He also continued to collaborate on various publications in both
Aguascalientes and later in Guadalajara.
The young student became interested in modernist poetry, particularly in work by Amado Nervo and Andrés González Blanco, significantly changing his aesthetic sensibilities and transforming him into fervent modernist. In 1910 he began to write the book La sangre devota (Consecreated Blood) which would be published in 1916.
With the rise of the Mexican Revolution, López Velarde supported the political reforms of Francisco Madero, whom he personally met in 1910. After receiving his law degree in 1911, the poet became a judge in the small town of Venado. But he left the position the following year, traveling to Mexico City with the hopes that Madero might offer him a position in the government. When no such position was forthcoming, Velarde turned to his mentor, Eduardo J. Correa, who hired him to contribute to the Catholic journal of Mexico City, La Nación. Velarde wrote poems, reviews, and political commentary for the paper, attacking figures such as Emiliano Zapata.
After the revolt of February 9, 1913,
which brought Victoriano Huerta to power, Velarde left his job in the desire
the leave the turmoil of the capital city, returning to San Luis Potosí. There
is began an unsuccessful courtship of a long-time friend María de Nevares, with
whom he would remain in love for the rest of his life.
Returning to Mexico City in 1914, he
experienced a period of some tranquility, as he again became involved with
poetry, particularly the work of his friend, José Juan Tablada and the
Argentine modernist Leopoldo Lugones.
In 1916 Velarde published his first book,
which was well received by the literary community. He also began work on his
second collection, Zozobra (Disquiet), and worked with González Martínez on the
review Pegaso. Despite his intense Catholicism and provincialism, the young
poet's literary reputation grew. Although highly criticized by González
Martínez, Velarde's second book is still seen by many to be his best
publication.
Throughout 1920 the poet continued to work
in journalism, contributing to México Moderno and El Maestro, while working on El
Son del Corazón and other works of prose. But suddenly at the age of
thirty-two, Velarde contracted pneumonia (some rumored it was syphilis), dying
on June 19, 1921.
BOOKS
OF POETRY
La
sangre devota
(1916); Zozobra (1919); El son del corazón (México, D. F.
[Talleres tipográficos de A. del Bosque], 1932)
ENGLISH
LANGUAGE TRANSLATION
selections
in Octavio Paz (ed.) Mexican Poetry: An Anthology. trans. by Samuel
Beckett (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958; reprinted by New York:
Grove Press, 1985); Song of the Heart: Selected Poems (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1995)
Now,
as Never...
Now,
as never, you fill me with love and sorrow;
if
any tear is left me, I quicken it
to
wash our two obscurities.
Now,
as never, I need your presiding peace;
yet
already your throat is but a whiteness
of
suffering, suffocating, coughing, coughing,
and
our whole being but a screed of dying strokes
overflowing
with dramatic farewells.
Now,
as never, your essence is venerable
and
frail your body's vase, and you can give
me
only the exquisite affliction of
a
clock of agonies, ticking for us towards
the
key minute when the feet we love
must
tread the ice of the funereal boat.
From
the bank I watch you embark; the silent
river
sweeps you away, and you distil
within
my soul the climate of those evenings
of
wind and dust when only the church-bells chime.
My
spirit is a cloth of souls, a cloth
of
souls of an eternally needy church,
it
is a cloth of souls bedabbled with wac,
trample
and torn by the ignoble herd.
I
am by a penurious parish nave,
a
nave where endless obsequies are held,
because
persistent rain prevents the coffin
from
being bought out on the country roads.
The
rain without me and within the hollow
clamour
of a psalmist, louder and louder;
my
conscience, by the water sprinkler aspersed,
is
a cypress sorrowing in a convent garden.
Now
my rain is flood, and I shall not see
the
sunshine on my ark, because my hear
on
the fortieth night must break for good;
my
eyes preserve not even a faint gleam
of
the solar fire that burned my corn;
my
life is nothing but continuance
of
exequies under baleful cataracts.
—Translated
from the Spanish by Samuel Beckett
Wet
Earth
Wet
earth of liquid evenings when the rain
whispers
and girls soften
under
the redoubled pelting of the drops
of
the roof terrace.
Wet
earth of odoriferous evenings when
misanthropy
toils up to the lascivious
solitudes
of air and on them lights
with
the last dove of Noah;
while
the thunder crackles tirelessly
along
the miry clouds.
We
evenings of steaming earth when I
acknowledge
I am made
of
clay, for the summer tears, beneath
the
auspice of the light that is half gone,
the
soul turns to water on the nails
of
its cross.
Evenings
when the telephone invites
naiads
known for their knowingness,
who
leave their bath for live,
to
strew their fatuous tresses on the bed
and
to lisp, with perfidy and profit,
damp
and panting monosyllables
as
the fine rain harries the window-panes....
Evenings
like an alcove under the sea,
its
bed its bath;
evenings
when a maiden
grows
old in front of her extinguished hearth,
waiting
for a swain to bring her a live coal;
evenings
when on earth
angels
descend to plough unerring furrows
on
edifying fallows;
evenings
of supplication and Pascal candles;
evenings
when the squall
incites
me to inflame
each
frigid maiden with the opportune coal;
evenings
when, my soul
oxidized,
I feel
an
acolyte of camphor,
slightly
swordfish, slightly
Saint
Isidore Labrador....
—Translated
from the Spanish by Samuel Beckett
_________
Copyright
©1985 by Grove Press.
1 comment:
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