The Smelting Process

In 1955, Jorge Eduardo Eielson published Dark Night of the Body (Rome). [1] Chronologically, this comes after Mutatis Mutandis and before De Materia Verbalis. There are noticeable organic connections between these works, which help shed light on Eielson's poetic production as a whole. First, as one critic has noted, Dark Night of the Body picks [...]

Composed between 1957 & 1958, De Materia Verbalis comes after Mutatis Mutandis (1954) & dark night of the body (1955). If we think about it in a painter’s terms, it represnts the third leaf of a triptych. As in the previous two leaves, the imagery is ultra-mundane, hence the blond-haired doll narrator’s sister dresses, his brother on a bike & that grandmother asleep in a chair. Therefore, one immediate question the poetry forces us to ask is what we make of this simplicity? What does it say about Eielson’s stance toward poetic technique? & how does this form relate to what we see in the earlier works––Room in Rome (1952) & The Blood & Wine of Paul (1953)? The title De Materia Verbalis is in Latin & can be translated as 'On Verbal Matter' or 'On the Matter of Words.' Eielson brings his poetic discourse into the context of the written act itself. Reflection reaches new heights. The poet hovers. He writes & erases. He wonders what he can add to silence but silence, more silence, only silence. [3] The thirteen poems that make up this important collection mark the end of a poetic form which crosscuts the three mentioned works. After De Materia Verbalis, Eielson completed Dead Nature (1958), where the extreme abbreviation of the poem––there are many two liners––contains a certain pith & robustness that brings to mind Tree of Diana (1962) by Alejandra Pizarnik. In any case, today I'm presenting De Materia Verbalis in English translation. This work in progress marks the third collection by Eielson in this online anthology. I hope you enjoy it, & if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to post a comment.

Soon after expatriating to Italy, Peruvian poet Jorge Eduardo Eielson produced the short 10-poem collection Mutatis Mutandis (1954)1. There are evident links between the aesthetic of this work & that of dark night of the body. The title is in Latin & can be interpreted "this change, provided all other variables remain constant." What's so [...]

In this poem from dark night of the body, the Peruvian poet, Jorge Eielson takes his exploration of the physiological to a deeper level, a level of dissection without disgust, without moral sentiments of any kind. The poet counts extremities "as were they cherries or grapes". One problem that arises in the translation of this [...]

It seems intuitive that truth ought to be sought after by any person, no matter  the degree of seriousness, the frequency, the method. We believe in truth. We believe in everyday truths & hold people accountable for them. In fact, while the truth can set you free, it can also lock you up or even [...]

The Peruvian poet, Jorge Eduardo Eielson, explores the double-meaning of the "body" in his collection "dark night of the body". In this context, it must be understood anatomically & textually alike: it is the human body that is the body of work, or the body-as-text. Eielson's anatomical language– a list of body organs –is closely [...]

Jorge Eduardo Eielson is one of Peru's most unrecognized poets & artists, which is greatly do to the fact that he expatriated to Italy early in his life, only to return twice. The poem "prior body" comes from a short collection called "noches oscura del cuerpo" (dark night of the body), published in Rome, 1955. [...]

The poetry of Brazilian poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, saw several transformations throughout its development, with the publication of 31 books in the poets lifetime. This poem was originally published in 1928 in the magazine Antropofagia. The simplicity of the language adds to the focus of the observation of the "stone", which is not only [...]

Under the heteronym, Ricardo Reis, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa wrote poetry altogether different from that which he wrote at the hand of Álvaro de Campos, whose poems have been presented previously on this blog & podcast. Reis has come to be known as the "sad Epicurian". This means that, accordingly to the principals of [...]

Also from Against the Professional Secret, Vallejo here places us in one of his favorite scenes: before the tribunal. This allows the Peruvian poet to explore the ideas of justice, guilt, innocence & responsibility through numerous perspectives. Indeed, his three month incarceration in Peru was clearly a big part of his proclivity to take up [...]

Girondo published his first collection of poetry in 1922 (the same year that brought us other cutting edge works, such as Finnegans's Wake, The Waste Land, Trilce, The Enormous Room, Paulicéia Desvairada, The Marine Cemetery, etc). In this poem, "Exvoto"– the Latin derivation meaning "offering" –Girondo satyrizes the "chicas de Flores", Flores being an affluent [...]

In this poem from Persuasion of the Days, Girondo takes up the theme of perversity by demanding that he be flogged, precisely because he deserves it. It is curious that his "defense" is a series of acts which he never took part in, and for this, he deserves the punishment. The attitude of the poem [...]

The sense of deficiency comes through this poem in the poet's declaration of the ineluctable. Coming from Persuasion of the Days, Girondo here uses the dog as an emblem of man; a dog which cannot be described, which is one of a kind &, ultimately, which makes him want to "break a chair". There is [...]

This poem as well comes from Persuasion of the Days– one of Girondo's later works –& it is representative, in form & content, of that collection. There is an unmistakable feeling of nausea that emanates from these lines; not just a feeling of extreme disgust, but also that of groundlessness, which comes through the word [...]

Another poem from Girondo's collection, Persuasion of the Days, here we find a sort of ode to procrastination. The presence of a somewhat physiological vocabulary calls to our attention & directs us toward the concrete. The length syntactical phrasing is characteristic of Girondo in Persuasion..., where he manages to create lists of clauses that serve [...]

Only so much can be done in a day, in a week, in a month, in a year... only so much. What happens when pro-activeness deflates & the bleary eyes only see those activities beyond the attainable? In this poem, from Persuasion of the Days, the Argentine poet Oliverio Girondo explores the unattainable, with an [...]

Using his hometown as the main image of the poem, Pessoa here touches on the feeling of nostalgia which arises out of insomnia: "I want to imagine anything, & something else always comes up". In our modern vocabulary, we might say that he suffers from anxiety, but, what does this really mean? Might this not [...]

If we can make the stark (& perhaps unfair) distinction that one is either contained by the world or that one contains the world inside oneself, then Pessoa, in this poem signed by Campos, belongs to the second category. Campos here contains the world, observes it like a little crystal ball inside a secret room, [...]

In a curious way, rearranging the apartment, or even just one room in it, can provide a deep sensation of Order. We may tend to attribute the value we place on Order to our own productivity (i.e. having an orderly desk makes it easier to pay the bills on time), but there seems to be [...]

In this concise yet dramatic poem, Pessoa uses Álvaro de Campos, the naval engineer, to pose a series on questions whose answers are only available through the act of living: what's with my reality, that I only have a life? The figure of the Caesar at the end is bound to arouse humor, but what  does [...]

Trilce LXX, another poem by the Peruvian poet, César Vallejo, again presents the reader with the decision of how to interpret the abnormal line-breaks or enjambments. For those of you familiar with Lima, you'll notice that the capitalized "Barrancos" does not only refer us to "cliffs", but also to that seaside borough of the city. The [...]

Álvaro de Campos is one of the heteronyms used by the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa. The others he used were Ricardo Reis, Alberto Cairo & in his prose, Bernardo Soares. The use of these must be differentiated from simply using pen-names, since these were truly characters, each with their own personalities, appearances and attitudes, which Pessoa [...]

One of the more daring poems of the collection, Trilce LV has aroused considerable dispute as to whether its form is that of a "prose poem", which would mean that the lines get wrapped at the ends without consideration to the line-breaks, or whether it is not a prose poem, which would mean that those [...]

One of the central themes of Trilce is Time, with a capital T. Vallejo is never at a loss for ways in which this theme can be woven into that heteroclite poetic which emerges from his most daring work. The language of Trilce LIII is difficult, to say the least, & after recovering from the [...]

In a unique critical essay written in Paris, though published in Lima (El Comercio, 1924), Vallejo lays his cards on the table & openly discusses the shortcomings of North American in the 20's. In that piece, he suggests that Imagists, such as Pound & Doolittle, were simply riding the coat-tails of the "artificial" vanguards of [...]

One of the shortest poems of the collection, Trilce XXIX reaches a surprising level of complexity & depth in just 9 short lines. The "tedio enfrascado" is emblematic of the book as a whole; it is the same tedium or boredom that comes through the prison poems surrounded 'by the four walls of the cell'. The [...]