If Poetry Is to Be Written Right, and: Long Distance

124 ENRIQUE LIHN IF POETRY IS TO BE WRITTEN RIGHT Translated from the Spanish by Mary Crow If poetry is to be written right it isn’t enough for you to languish in the garden feeling the concerted weight of the soul or whatever and the illustrious twilight or whatever. The heart has a poor vocabulary. Its labyrinth: a game for the mentally backward which makes us laugh to see the heart lumber along like an ox a devoted reader of dime novels. From the moment the heart gets hold of a violin not even Sibelius’ Valse Triste lingers in the room filling up with tango. With some honorable exceptions Uruguayan poetesses still confuse poetry with dance in some morbid provincial dancing-hall or they confuse it with sex or confuse it with death. If poetry is to be written right in any case you should take it calmly. First of all: sit down and grow up. An early hatred of literature might be of some help in the army since you won’t be taken for a fag, though Rimbaud himself, who proved he hated literature, was a library rat and got that glorious nausea from gnawing at it. You play chess with words even when you howl. An unstable balance between ink and blood you must maintain it from one line to the next or else tear the soul’s pages. Death, madness and dream are so many chess pieces of marble or horn or whatever, 125 what matters is to play them in the checkered garden so the pawn dancing with the queen is not allowed a single false step. All those who insist on calling a spade a spade as if things were that clean and simple only add to the confusion. They don’t express things, but turn to the dictionary, render language ever more useless, calling a spade a spade while things answer to their names though they undress for us in dark corners. With some esteemed exceptions, there are no great poets any more who don’t look like traveling salesmen or preach or act or set up a business in god or at the box office of some provincial theatre. No Mystery: just tricks of language. Speeches, prayers, after dinner entertainment all the minor stuff with which we keep going. If poetry is to be written right you might lower your voice a little without adopting a monolithic silence or settling for a murmur. What we’re aiming to catch is something like a fish, something alive, swift, that vanishes into shadow yet is neither shadow itself nor the entire Leviathan. It’s something worth remembering for some reason that looks like nothingness itself but which is not nothing, not the entire Leviathan not exactly a shoe not exactly a set of false teeth. 126 ENRIQUE LIHN LONG DISTANCE Translated from the Spanish by Mary Crow Behind the voice of the unimportant operator, surprise lingers in the telephone nuptial echo of what used to be the secret marriage between Magic and Science dazzling in spite of midnight darkness A connection person to person changes any distance into almost nothing yet leaves it painfully as it was. Voice to voice those bodies that incredibly don’t communicate from living life— all magic has its shadow— plead from the most distant and different cities before the intimacy of a place that doesn’t exist in space yet fits from one side and the other of space into the hollow separated by two hands receivers a reality no one is surprised at as if person to person never meant body to body only voice to voice, something that is and isn’t the same. But you and I, ghosts of flesh and blood, make the rule unreal that proves us as if we were its exception voices and not bodies, but not only voices, we entwine person to person with the sensation of witnessing—in our very selves— the secret marriage of Magic and Science. ...