Jiménez, "El otoñado"

A work ("The autumnal") by this Spanish poet.  You can read the original here.

I am by nature thus complete,
In afternoon's full, ripest gold, 
As gusts rub leaves of erstwhile green.  
Remote and tasty fruit so sweet,
Earth, water, air, and fire I hold  
As I contain the infinite. 

‘Tis light I ooze, I gild the dark place cold;
Scent I transmit: and shadows reek of God;
Sound I effuse: deep music travels broad;
I filter taste: the clump consumes my soul,
As I enjoy the touch of solitude.  

Supreme of treasures, roundly dense
As a clean iris, I observe
From actions’ center.  All this I am.
The all which is oblivion’s brim;
The all sufficing yet still served  
By what remains ambition hence.  

De las alegorías a las novelas

An essay ("From allegories to novels") by this Argentine.  You can read the original in this collection.

For all of us, an allegory is an aesthetic error. (I  had initially planned to write, "is nothing if not an aesthetic error," until I realized that my thought comprised an allegory.) As far as I know, the genre of allegory has been analyzed by Schopenhauer (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I, 50), by De Quincey (Writings, XI, 198), by Francesco De Sanctís (Storia della letteratura italiana, VII), by Croce (Estetica, 39) and by Chesterton (G. F. Watts, 83); in this essay I will limit myself to the latter two. Croce denies allegory's art; Chesterton vindicates it. I suspect Croce is correct; yet I would like to know how a form which seems to us so unjustifiable could have found so much favor. 

Croce's words are transparent enough that it suffices merely to repeat them: "If a symbol is imagined to be inseparable from artistic intuition, it must be a synonym of that same intuition, which is always of an ideal character. If, however, a symbol is imagined to be separable – if it can represent both the symbol and what is symbolized – it devolves into an intellectual error. The supposed symbol is the exposition of an abstract concept: it is an allegory, it is knowledge, or it is art which replicates knowledge. Yet we must be fair with the allegorical and admit that in certain cases it is quite innocuous. Some morality may be derived from Jerusalem Delivered; from Adonis by Marino, a decadent poet, we may come to understand that immeasurable pleasure may end in pain; and before a statue a sculptor may place a plaque stating that this work embodies Clemency or Goodness. These are allegories appended to a finished work, and they do it no harm. They are expressions intrinsically added to other expressions. To Tasso's Jerusalem, an appended page of prose proffers some of the poet's other thoughts; a verse or a stanza added to Adonis contains what the poet wishes us to understand; and by the statue we find inscribed the word clemency or goodness." On page 222 of his book Poetry (Barí, 1946), Croce's tone is far more hostile: "An allegory is not a direct means of intellectual expression, but rather a coincidence of writing and cryptography."  

Croce does not admit of any difference between content and form. The former is the latter, and the latter the former. To him, an allegory seems monstrous because it aspires to two contents in a single form: the immediate or literal (Dante, guided by Vergil, finds Beatrice), and the figurative (guided by reason, a man finally finds faith). Croce deems this manner of writing rife with laborious enigmas.  

To champion the allegorical, Chesterton begins by refuting that language exhausts the expression of reality:

[Man] knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colours of an autumn forest; he knows that there are abroad in the world, and doing strange and terrible service in it, crimes that have never been condemned and virtues that have never been christened. Yet he seriously believes that these things can, every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.

With language now declared insufficient, there is room for other means of expression; allegory may be one of these means, like architecture or music. Formed out of words, it is not a language of language, a sign of other signs of brave virtue and secret illuminations which indicate this word. A sign more precise than a monosyllable, richer and more apt.    

I do not know for sure which of the eminent debaters is right; what I do know is that allegorical art once seemed charming (the labyrinthine Roman de la Rose, extant in two hundred manuscripts, comprising twenty-four thousand verses) and now seems intolerable. In addition to being intolerable, we find it stupid and frivolous. Neither Dante, who recreated the history of his passion in La Vita nuova, nor Boethius the Roman, composing in a tower in Pavia, in the shadow of his executioner's sword, his Consolation of Philosophy, would have understood this sentiment. How then is one to explain this discord without resorting to a begging of the question about fluctuating tastes? 

Coleridge observes that all men are born either Aristotelians or Platonists. The latter suspect that ideas are realities; the former, that they are generalizations; for the former, language is nothing if not a system of arbitrary signs; for the latter, it is a map to the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is in some way a cosmos, an order; this order, for the Aristotelian may be an error or a fiction of our imperfect knowledge. Through every latitude and era, these two immortal antagonists have changed dialects and number: the first may be Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, or Francis Bailey; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, or William James. In the arduous schools of the Middle Ages, everyone hailed Aristotle as the master of human reason (Convivio, IV, 2), yet the nominalists were Aristotle, and the realists, Plato. George Henry Lewes believed that the only medieval debate of any philosophical value was that between nominalism and realism. A bold judgment, if one that enhances the importance of this vivid controversy more than some maxim by Porphyry, put forth and commented on by Boethius, provoked at the beginning of the ninth century, which Anselm and Roscellinus reaffirmed at the end of the eleventh, and which William of Occam revived in the fourteenth. 

As one might suspect, all these years multiplied towards infinity the number of intermediary positions and distinctions. Nevertheless, one should assert that for realism the primordial element was the universal (Plato would say it was ideas and forms; we would say abstract concepts), and for nominalism, individuals. The history of philosophy is not a vain museum of distractions and verbal games; it is far more likely that these two theses correspond to the two ways in which to sense reality. Maurice de Wulf writes: "Ultrarealism took into account the initial adhesions. The eleventh-century chronicler Hériman of Tournai referred to those who taught dialectics in re as antiqui doctores; Abelard spoke of this as ancient doctrine (antigua doctrina), and until the end of the twelfth century, labeled his adversaries as moderni." A thesis now inconceivable appeared evident in the ninth century and persisted in some form until the fourteenth. Nominalism, before the novelty of very few, now included everyone; its victory was so vast and fundamental that its number was useless. No one declared himself to be a nominalist because there was no one who was anything else. We must try to understand, nonetheless, that for the men of the Middle Ages the most important thing was not men but humanity; not individuals, but the species; not the species, but the genus; not the genera, but God.  

In my understanding, it was from such concepts (the clearest manifestation of which is perhaps Eriguena's four divisions of nature) that allegorical literature emerged. It is the tale of abstractions, like the novel is the story of individuals; the abstractions are simply personified. For that reason, in every allegory there is something novelistic. The individuals whom novelists put forth aspire to generic roles (Dupin is reason; Don Segundo Sombra is the gaucho); in novels there is an allegorical element. 

The passage from allegory to novel, from species to individuals, from realism to nominalism, took several centuries, but I venture to suggest an ideal date. That day in 1382 on which Geoffrey Chaucer, who perhaps did not believe himself to be a nominalist, wanted to translate into English that verse of Boccacio's, "E con gli occulti ferri i Tradimenti" ("and treacheries with hidden irons"), and repeated it in this way: "The smyler with the knyf under the cloke." The original was in the seventh book of the Teseida; Chaucer's version in The Knightes Tale.

A la deriva

A short story ("Adrift") by this Uruguayan writer.  You can read the original here.

The man trod on something off-white, immediately felt a bite on his foot, and leapt forward.  Upon turning and swearing, he espied a lancehead – what the locals call a yaracacusú – coiled upon itself in anticipation of another attack.  Taking a quick glance at his foot, where two drops of blood were swelling troublesomely, the man removed the machete from his belt.  The viper saw the threat and sank its head deeper into the center of its coil; but the machete crashed down upon its spine, dislocating its vertebrae.  He bent over closer to the bite marks, wiped away the drops of blood, and thought about matters for a moment.  An acute pain had emerged from those two purple dots and begun to invade his entire foot.  In haste he bound his ankle with a handkerchief and followed the path back to his ranch.  The pain in his foot was increasing, along with a sensation of tense swelling, and suddenly the man spotted two or three shiny stitches irradiating like lightning from the wound to the middle of the calf.  He could move his leg only with difficulty; his throat was afflicted with metallic dryness then insatiable thirst, and he swore anew under his breath.

Having arrived finally at the ranch, he threw himself atop his mill-wheel.  Now the two purple points were vanishing into the monstrous lump the whole foot had become.  There his skin appeared thinner, tenser, and about to crack  He wanted to call out to his wife, and his voice broke into a hoarse scratch.  Thirst was devouring him.   

"Dorothea!" he managed to rattle.  "Bring me a beer!"

His wife came running with a full glass, which the man drank in three gulps.  But he did not taste a thing.

"I asked you for beer, not water!"  he roared again.  "Bring me a beer!"

"But it is beer, Paulino," protested the woman, quite scared.

"No, you brought me water!  I want beer, I tell you!"

The woman ran off one more time and returned with a demijohn.  The man had another glass, then two more, but he felt nothing in his throat.

"Alright, this here is getting very bad," he muttered, looking at his livid foot which already boasted the shine and luster of gangrene.  Atop the handkerchief's heaping ligature, flesh was oozing out like some monstrous pudding. 

Shooting pains were followed by further lightning stitches which now reached his inner thigh.  At the same time, the atrocious dryness in his throat, which breathing only seemed to heat up and exacerbate, was growing.  When he tried to stand up he vomited instantly, forcing him to remain for half a minute with his forehead pressed against the wheel's spoke.  But the man did not want to die, so he went down to the shore and got in his canoe.  He sat down at the stern and began to paddle towards the center of the Paraná river.  Here the river's current, which in the vicinity of the Iguazu river ran for six miles, would take him to Tacurú-Pucú in under five hours.  With somber energy the man was able to reach the middle of the river.  Yet here his benumbed hands dropped the paddle into the canoe, and he vomited yet again – this time, blood – then directed his gaze to the sun disappearing behind the mountain.

His whole leg, halfway to his thigh, was a hardened and deformed block bursting through his clothes.  The man cut off the ligature and opened up the pants with his knife: his lower abdomen was incredibly painful, bloated with large livid marks.  The man now believed he would never make it to Tacurú-Pucú by himself.  So he decided to ask his friend Alves for help, even if a falling out had kept them apart for a long while. 

The river's current now carried him to the Brazilian coast; the man was able to dock the canoe with ease.  He dragged himself up the slope, but after twenty meters he lay there stretched out on his stomach, exhausted.

"Alves!"  he cried with whatever force he could muster; but for a response he listened in vain.

"My dear Alves!  Do not deny me this favor!"  he screamed again, lifting his head from the ground.  In the silence of the forest not a single murmur could be heard.  The man still had the fortitude to return to his canoe, and the current, catching him once more, quickly carried him adrift.

Here the Paraná ran deep into an enormous river basin whose walls, higher than a hundred meters, gloomily canalized the river.  The black woods ascended from the shores lined with blocks of basalt, which were also black.  Behind there, on the sides, lay the eternal lugubrious wall at whose bottom the eddied river hastened into the incessant bubbling of murky waters.  So aggressive was this landscape, where reigned but the silence of death.  Nevertheless at dusk, its somber beauty and calm assumed a unique majesty.

The sun had already set when the man, half-prone at the bottom of the boat, experienced violent shivers.  Then all of a sudden, to his astonishment, he sluggishly lifted up his head and straightened it.  And he felt better.  His leg hardly hurt any more; his thirst had diminished; and his breast, now free, opened up in slow inhalation.

The venom was beginning to leave his body, he had no doubts.  He was almost alright, yet he still did not have the strength to move his hand, and reckoned that he would be fully recovered come the morning.  He also calculated that he would be in Tacurú-Pucú in three hours.

His well-being increased and with it a somnolence replete with memories.  He did not feel anything in either his leg or his stomach.  Might his friend Gaona still be living in Tacurú-Pucú?  Perhaps he could also see his former employer, Mr. Dougald, as well as the recipient of his work.  Would he arrive soon?  The sky, to the west, would now open up into a screen of gold, the river likewise having changed color.  From the already-darkened Paraguayan coast the mountain let the twilght's freshness cascade over the river with emanations of orange blossoms and wild honey.  Very high up, a pair of macaws silently crossed the sky in the direction of Paraguay.  

Down here upon the river of gold the canoe was drifting rapidly, at times spinning around before a bubbling whirlpool.  The man in that canoe kept feeling better and better, and in the meantime thought about the exact amount of time that had passed since he had last seen his former employer, Dougald.  Had it been three years?  Perhaps not, not that long.  Two years and nine months?  Perhaps.  Eight and a half months?  That's how long it had been, he was certain. 

Suddenly he felt frozen up to his chest.  What could this be?  And yet his breathing ... He had made the acquaintance of Lorenzo Cubilla, the recipient of those wood products of Mr. Dougald's, in Puerto Esperanza one year on Good Friday.  Was it a Friday?  Yes, or was it a Thursday?  

The man slowly stretched out his fingers.

"It was a Thursday ..."

And he stopped breathing.

Verano (part 3)

The conclusion to a short story ("Summer") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

Zulma ended up accepting, passively.  Without switching on the lights, they went to the stairs and Mariano gestured towards the sleeping girl, but Zulma hardly glanced at her and stumbled up the stairs.  Mariano had to restrain her as they entered the bedroom because she was about to walk into the door frame.  From the window looking out onto the wing of the house they espied the stone staircase and the most elevated terrace in the garden.  You see, it's gone, said Mariano, as he straightened Zulma's pillow while watching her undress mechanically, her gaze still fixed upon the window.  He got her to take her sedative, rubbed some cologne on her neck and hands, and softly drew the sheet to Zulma's shoulders.  She had already shut her eyes and was trembling.  He dried her cheeks, waited a moment, then went downstairs to look for the flashlight.  With the flashlight switched off in one hand and a large candle in the other, he gradually went around the living door and out the lower terrace.  From here he could survey the entire side of the house that faced east.  

The night was identical to so many other summer nights: crickets were cricking in the distance; a frog was releasing two alternating drops of sound.  Without using the flashlight Mariano could make out the trampled shrub of lilies, the potted plant overturned at the foot of the stairs, and the enormous tracks through the quarry of his thoughts.  So it had not all been a hallucination; and of course, it was better that it hadn't been.  In the morning he and Florencio would go investigate the smallholdings in the valley, and it would not be so easy for them to get down there.  Before coming inside he righted the potted plant, walked over to the initial knot of trees, and listened for a while to the crickets and the frog.  When he looked back towards the house, he caught sight of Zulma naked and very still in the bedroom window.  

The girl had not moved.  Mariano went upstairs without making a noise and began to smoke next to Zulma. You see now that it's gone, we can sleep peacefully; we'll see what tomorrow brings.  Little by little he led her back to bed, got undressed, and, still smoking, lay down on his back.  Sleep, everything's going to be fine, it was nothing more than a scare, an absurd scare.  He put his hands through her hair, his fingers slipping to her shoulders and grazing her breasts.  Without a word Zulma turned to the side, giving him her back; this, too, was like so many other summer nights.      

Although it must have been very hard to do, Mariano abruptly fell asleep – almost, in fact, as soon as he had put his cigarette.  The window was still open; mosquitoes would certainly float in; yet sleep, imageless sleep, won out, the total nothingness of what, at some waking moment, erupted into unspeakable panic, the pressing of Zulma's fingers on his shoulders, and panting.  Almost before realizing it he was already listening to the night, to the perfect silence punctuated by the crickets.  Sleep, Zulma, there's nothing, you were probably dreaming.  He insisted that she agree to this and lie down again with her back to him; but she had suddenly withdrawn her hand and was sitting up, quite stiff, and looking at the closed door.  Unable to prevent her from opening the door and going to the top of the stairs, he got up at the same time.  He came up next to her and asked himself vaguely whether it wouldn't be better if he smacked her, brought her back to bed by force, and had his way with her in her state of petrified alienation.

Zulma stopped halfway down the stairs and leaned on the banister.  Do you know why the girl is here?  It was a voice that seemed like it still belonged to a nightmare.  The girl?  Two more steps, almost at the bend in the staircase right above the kitchen.  Please, Zulma.  And the cracked, almost falsetto voice: she's here to let it in, I tell you she is going to let it come in.  Don't make me do something very stupid, Zulma.  And then the voice, now almost triumphant, still rising in tone: look, just look if you don't believe me, the bed is empty, the magazine is on the floor.  Mariano shoved his way past Zulma, and jumped down to the light switch.  The girl was looking at them, her pink pyjamas were against the door to the living room, her face was sleepy.  What are you doing up at this hour, said Mariano, throwing a dish cloth around his waist.  With something between sleepiness and embarrassment, the girl looked at Zulma all naked as if on the verge of tears and with the sole desire of going back to bed.  I got up to go to the bathroom, she said.  And you went out to the garden when we told you the bathroom was upstairs.  Her hands comically vanishing into her pyjama pockets, the girl began to convulse into a sob.  Ok, it's nothing, just go back to bed, said Mariano, stroking her hair.  He tucked her in and placed the magazine underneath her pillow.  The girl turned towards the wall, a finger in her mouth in consolement.  

Go upstairs, said Mariano, you see that nothing's happening, don't just stand there like a sleepwalker.  He saw Zulma take two steps towards the living room door and stepped right in her way.  Everything down here was fine, damn it all.  But don't you realize that she opened the door for it, said Zulma in that voice that wasn't her own.  Stop your silliness, Zulma.  Go see if you're not sure, or let me go see.  Mariano's hand seized her forearm which was trembling.  Go upstairs right now, he said pushing her until he had brought her to the foot of the stairs; in passing, he looked back at the girl who hadn't budged, who must have already fallen asleep.  

On the first step Zulma screamed and tried to escape.  But the staircase was narrow and Mariano, holding her by her shoulders, pushed her with his whole body, the dish cloth coming undone and slipping off at the foot of the staircase.  He dragged as far as the landing, threw her in the bedroom, and closed the door behind him.  She's going to let it in, Zulma repeated, the door is open and it's going to come in.  Go to bed, said Mariano.  I'm telling you that the door is open.  Who cares, said Mariano, it can come in if it likes, now I don't give a damn whether or not it comes in.  He caught Zulma's hands as they tried to push him away and shoved her onto her back on the bed.  They fell down together, Zulma sobbing and begging, incapable of moving beneath the weight of a body that stuck to her ever the more tightly, that furiously bent her into murmured consent, mouth to mouth, between tears and obscenities.  I don't want to, I don't want to, I never want to again.  But it was too late, her strength and pride were yielding to this oppressive weight that brought her back to an impossible past, to the summers without letters and without horses.  At some point everything cleared up; Mariano got dressed in silence and went downstairs to the kitchen; the girl was sleeping with her finger in her mouth; the door of the living room was open.  Zulma had been right, the girl had opened the door; but the horse had not come into the house.  Unless – he thought, lighting his first cigarette and gazing upon the blue edge of the hills – unless Zulma had also been right about this and the horse had indeed entered the house.  But how could they know if they hadn't heard it, if everything was still in order, if the clock continued measuring the morning, and if after Florencio came to pick up the girl, perhaps around twelve, the postman whistling from afar left on the garden table the letters which he or Zulma would collect without saying a thing, a small while before agreeing on what they wanted to have for lunch. 

Verano (part 2)

The second part to a short story ("Summer") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

Mariano was sifting through the piles of records for a Beethoven sonata to which he hadn't listened this summer when Zulma heard the first sound.  He stood there, his hand in the air, and looked at Zulma.  A sound that seemed to come from the stone staircase of the garden, but no one came to the cabin at this hour; no one ever came at night.  From the kitchen she switched on the lamp shining onto the most immediate part of the garden, saw nothing, and switched it off.  A dog looking for something to eat, said Zulma.  It sounded odd, almost like a snort, said Mariano.  A enormous white spot whipped against the window, Zulma cried out as if drowning, Mariano turned back too late, with the glass reflecting only the furniture and pictures of the living room.  He had no time to ask, the snort resonated near the wall facing north, a suffocated neigh like the cry of Zulma who had her hands on her mouth as she clung to the back wall looking fixedly at the window.  It's a horse, said Mariano without believing it, it sounds like a horse, I heard its hoofs, it's galloping through the garden.  Its mane, its blood-red lips, its enormous white head grazed against the window; the horse hardly looked at them, the white spot disappeared towards the right, and anew they heard the hoofs, a brusque silence beside the stone staircase, the neigh, the gallop.    

But there are no horses around here, said Mario, who had seized the liquor bottle by the neck before he realized what he had done and placed it on the banquette.  It wants to come inside, said Zulma glued to the back wall.  But no, don't be silly, it might have escaped from some smallholding in the valley and come towards the light.  It wants to come inside, I tell you, it's rabid and it wants to come in.  Horses don't get rabid as far I as I know, said Mariano, I think it's gone, I'll go take a look from the window upstairs.  No, no, stay here, I still hear it, it's on the terrace stairs, it's trampling the plants, it will come back, and this time it will break the window and come in.  Don't be silly, what's it going to break, said Mariano faintly, perhaps it'll scare it away if we switch on the lights.  I don't know, I don't know, said Zulma slipping down the wall until she was seated on the banquette, I heard something like a neigh, it's up here.  They heard the hoofs going down the stairs, the irritated panting against the door, Mariano thought there was some pressure against the door, a repeated scratching, and Zulma ran towards him screaming hysterically.  He pushed her away gently, and held his hand to the switch; in the darkness (light remained in the kitchen where the girl was sleeping) the whinnying and the hoofs became louder; but the horse was not right in front of the door: one could hear it coming and going in the garden. 

Without even looking at the corner they had laid out for the girl, Mariano ran to switch off the kitchen light.  He came back to hug Zulma who was sobbing; he stroked her hair and her face, begging her to be quiet so that he could hear better.  In the window the horse's head was rubbing up against the largest pane without tremendous force; the white spot looked transparent in the darkness; they felt that the horse was peering inside the house as if looking for something; it could no longer see them, yet it was still here, whinnying and panting, with sharp jerks from one side to the other.  Zulma's body was slipping from Mario's arms, and he was helping her sit back down on the banquette, leaning her against the wall.  Don't move, don't say anything, now it's going to leave, you'll see.  It wants to come in, said Zulma faintly, I know that it wants to come in and if it breaks the window, what's going to happen if it kicks the window until it breaks?  Hush, said Mario, please be quiet.  It's going to come in, mumbled Zulma.  I don't even have a shotgun, said Mariano, I'd put five bullets in its head, that son of a bitch.  It's no longer here, said Zulma, getting up all of a sudden.  I hear it up there; if it sees the terrace door, it could come in.  It's properly closed, don't be afraid, consider that in the dark it's not going to enter a house where it can't even move around, don't be such a fool.  Oh yes, said Zulma, it wants to come in, and it will smash us against the walls, I know that it wants to come in.  Hush, Mariano said again.  He was thinking the same thing, but could do nothing but wait, his back soaked in cold sweat.  Once more the hoofs resounded upon the slabs of the stairs, and suddenly there was silence, the distant crickets, and a bird in the walnut tree above. 

Without turning on the lights now that the window let in the night's vague clarity, Mariano poured a glass of liquor and held it to Zulma's lips, forcing her to drink even though her teeth rattled against the cup and the alcohol spilled onto her blouse.  After that he took a long drink straight from the bottle and went to the kitchen to look at the girl.  With her hands beneath the pillow as if holding her precious magazine, the girl was, incredibly enough, asleep: she hadn't heard a thing.  He had hardly been there a moment while, in the living room, Zulma's crying was turning slowly into a drowning hiccough, almost into a scream.  It's over, it's over, said Mariano now sitting down next to her and shaking her softly, it was nothing more than a scare.  It's going to come back, said Zulma, her eyes fixed on the window.  No, it's probably already far away, I'm sure it escaped from some herd down there.  No horse does that, said Zulma, no horse want to come into a house like that.  I have to admit it's odd, said Mariano, we'd better take a look outside.  I have the flashlight here.  But Zulma had pressed herself against the wall; the idea of opening the door, of going out towards the white shadow that could be close by, waiting below the trees, ready to charge.  Look now, if we don't make sure that it's gone, no one is going to get any sleep tonight, said Mariano.  Let's give it a little longer; in the meantime, go to bed and I'll give you your sedative; an extra dose, you poor thing, you've really earned it.