A Poetic Order of Excess: Essays on Poets and Poetry by José Lezama Lima (review)

Translations of important literary texts need no justification. They extend literary works beyond their native and linguistic borders, and make them part of the greater world. The story has been told that on the day that the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima received a copy of the English translation of Confessions of a Mask (1958), is the day that Mishima, by his own account, declared himself to have achieved international notoriety. Whether the story is true or not, it is understandable. After all, the so-called "canonical" works of literature have been deemed so mainly through translations, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to The Divine Comedy and Don Quijote to Waiting for Godot, and beyond. Yet some writers, whose works have been masterfully translated, as in the case of José Lezama Lima, and his magnum opus, Paradiso, have nevertheless not managed to escape the field of gravity of their native soil. I believe that one of the contributing reasons for this is that such works like Paradiso demand a vast amount of knowledge in order to understand the poetics that architectonically informs them. This applies to the works of writers like Joyce, Beckett, Stein, Sarduy, and Pynchon, to name a handful that immediately come to mind. And here is where A Poetic Order of Excess, James Irby's and Jorge Brioso's annotated translation of Lezama's essays on poets, poetry, and poetics makes a significant contribution. These essays, beautifully translated for the first time into English, will help both the reader and the critic to understand the Cuban writer's Poetic "system," and thereby his hermetic poetry and novels, and essays.

One important characteristic of hermetic texts that often goes unnoticed, not so because of its subtlety, but rather because, on the contrary, it hides in plain sight is that the hermetic text is of a poetic statement itself—an ars poetics. In other words, the hermetic aesthetic object (poem or novel) is the author's poetics, for it is the form that speaks. "La obra está en la obra," Severo Sarduy used to say. Take for example, the case of César Vallejo's Trilce, a book whose very title—let alone its text—resists facile metonymic interpretations, and then, further consider the much discussed, interpreted, and debated first poem of the book, "Trilce I." However, what is "Trilce I" if not the poetics of the entire book? "But what does it "mean" beyond that?" someone will surely ask. To which one might answer: "what does it have to mean beyond that?" Does it necessarily have to refer to the poet's incarceration in Trujillo, or can it also mean something like what "jabberwocky" meant to Lewis Carroll or "quark" meant to James Joyce—a way of pushing language beyond its signifying limits? Which, in turn, will either "mean" a lot or no-thing (non-sense) to some reader x.

In any case, these are some of the questions and problems posed by Lezama's writings, and what gives unity to the essays collected and translated in this volume. Lezama was a writer in constant conversation with the hermetic tradition that preceded and influenced, but particularly with Góngora, the author of the Soledades (The Solitudes) and Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea and with Stéphane Mallarmé, author of the experimental Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard. These writers invented literary worlds by experimenting with images and syntax in ways that had never been done before. In the case of Góngora, for example, the "natural" objects of his forest (soledades), were unlike any described before: made of unusual combinations of words to create new objects (images and metaphors) reminiscent of Cézanne's famous painterly "apples."

The connection between Góngora's poetics and Cézanne's paintings is neither coincidental nor arbitrary. For when Lezama refers to Góngora's writing in "Serpent of...