Beyond the Page: Poetry and Performance in Spanish America

Notes

149 Introduction 1. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted. 2. A recent comprehensive book on this topic is Araceli Tinajero’s El lector de tabaquería: Historia de una tradición cubana (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2007). 3. Roland Barthes, in his essay “The Grain of the Voice,” discusses the quality of the voice in music and differentiates between the “pheno-song”—“everything in the performance which is in the service of communication, representation, expression”—and the “geno-song, or “the volume of the singing and speaking voice,” which forms “a signifying play” having nothing to do with the aforementioned listed qualities but is where melody really works at “the voluptuousness of its language,” exploring “how language works and identifies with that work” (182). 4. One of her most fascinating analyses deals with the popularity of Longfellow’s poem Evangeline. In the section titled, “Converting Evangeline to Evangelina,” she finds that the poem shifts meaning as it is “‘translated’ into the language of Catholicism” (94). 5. Spanish American modernism is different from “modernism” in European, North American, or Brazilian contexts. This early twentieth-century movement reacted against positivism (succinctly stated, a belief in a scientific ethos and the values of order and progress ) and the mercantilization of art as poets from the region responded to their new roles in society and the high cultural demands of a small, Europeanized audience. No longer state poets or visionaries, modernist writers reacted to their more marginal status by, as Cathy Jrade has explained, putting their “faith in the epistemological power of literature” (4). Chapter 1 Epigraph: No author is cited for the poem, which is quoted by Aura Rostand in Repertorio americano, 1932. Notes 150 · Notes to Pages 19–41 1. Some of these authors, such as Jijena Sánchez, have biographical data available , while others are not as well known. This Argentine, born in Rosario in 1920, was a professor of diction and declamación. In 1964 she founded the Instituto del lenguaje, published several collections of popular poetry during her lifetime, and wrote the lyrics to the “Himno a Buenos Aires” (http://www.patrimoniosf.gov.ar/ver/0–4785/). 2. My colleague Michael Doudoroff had the following comment about this observation : “In ceceo dialects there is only the interdental silbilant. In seseo dialects there is only the alveolar sibilant. In distinction dialects (orthographic) c before e, i and z contrast interdental with the alveolar (orthographic) s. This source appears to be using the term ‘ceceo’ colloquially (and incorrectly) for distinction” (conversation with the author, February 2011). I am grateful to him for his insightful feedback throughout this chapter. 3. “Bipolar” is my expression for what Gruesz describes as “top-down” and “bottom -up” models of cultural transmission. The former model comes from the culturally dominant institutions of taste and prestige—the letrado [lettered] tradition in Latin America—and the latter model comes from the reactions of readers, whose interests and values may be very different. 4. Both Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano and Francisco Monterde García Icazbalceta are well-recognized figures in Mexican letters. The former was a member of the literary group Nuevo Ateneo de la Juventud and cofounder of Contemporáneos. The latter founded the avant-garde magazine Antenae in 1925 and later was a professor of literature at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and a member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua. 5. In her book on the uses of poetry in America, Joan Shelley Rubin examines the variety in the printing industry and the presence of poetry in popular venues to document the importance of poetry for readers who represent “alternative cultural authority.” 6. Zouroff is the pseudonym of Esmeralda Zenteno de Leon, a Chilean author born in 1880, who became interested in oral presentations of poetry through theater, started a school for declamación, and later published her manual (http://books.google .com/books). 7. There is a long history of dialogue about the relationships between language and music in European thought, from Rousseau to Derrida and Barthes. While which came first remains undecided, what this discussion makes clear is that speech and music are intertwined, and especially so in the case of performed poetry, which draws additional attention to the multiple roles of voice in this genre. 8. Luis Alberto Sánchez claims that there is a comma after América in the original version of “Blasón” that does not appear in many editions (63); this shifts the meaning, making...