Memory in My Hands: The Love Poetry of Pedro Salinas. Translated with an Introduction by Ruth Katz Crispin

332 Pages·2009·1.68 MB·English

by  Salinas

M
EMORY IN MY HANDS
Currents in Comparative Romance
Languages and Literatures

Tamara Alvarez-Detrell and Michael G. Paulson
General Editors

Vol. 171

PETER LANG
New York (cid:121) Washington, D.C./Baltimore (cid:121) Bern
Frankfurt am Main (cid:121) Berlin (cid:121) Brussels (cid:121) Vienna (cid:121) Oxford
M
EMORY IN MY HANDS

The Love Poetry
of Pedro Salinas

TRANSLATED WITH
AN INTRODUCTION BY
Ruth Katz Crispin

PETER LANG
New York (cid:121) Washington, D.C./Baltimore (cid:121) Bern
Frankfurt am Main (cid:121) Berlin (cid:121) Brussels (cid:121) Vienna (cid:121) Oxford
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Salinas, Pedro, 1892–1951.
[Poems. English & Spanish. Selections]
Memory in my hands: the love poetry of Pedro Salinas / Pedro Salinas;
translated with an Introduction by Ruth Katz Crispin.
p. cm. — (Currents in comparative Romance languages and literatures; v. 171)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Salinas, Pedro, 1892–1951—Translations into English.
2. Love poetry, Spanish—Translations into English.
I. Crispin, Ruth Katz. II. Title.
PQ6635.A32A2 861’.62—dc22 2009011346
ISBN 978-1-4331-0624-8
ISSN 0893-5963

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek.
Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available
on the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de/.

Grateful acknowledgment for permission for this translation
is due Solita Salinas de Marichal and Jaime Salinas

Cover image: Velazquez, Diego Rodriguez (1599–1660)
The Toilet of Venus (‘The Rokeby Venus’), 1647–51.
Oil on canvas, 122.5 x 177 cm.
Presented by The Art Fund, 1906 (NG2057)
© National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability
of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
of the Council of Library Resources.

© 2009 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York
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All rights reserved.
Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
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Printed in Germany
IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER,
who taught me my first poems
CONTENTS

Introduction ix

The Voice I Owe to You 1

A Reason for Love 111

Long Lament 213

Index 311
Introduction

The poems of The Voice I Owe to You tell a true love story. They
document its advent and its fruition, and then the pain of separating. The
sequels, A Reason for Love and Long Lament, alternate between poems of
rapture and of loss. The protagonists are a professor (and published poet),
a handsome, witty, cultivated—and married—man in his young middle age
and a single woman of apparently exceptional beauty—at thirty five, six
years younger than he—who had come to Madrid and met him when she
attended a class he was teaching and, during the first lecture (he later told
her), “lightning had struck”. One of his early poems says just that:

I don’t need time
to know what you are like: we knew each other
like lightning.
The Voice I Owe to You, 12; vv 1-3
Despite the fact that we can document, in letters (his, which she kept),
and in her brief memoir, much of what occurred in their clandestine love
affair, and despite the fact that the poems seem to reflect faithfully the
feelings and experiences that inspired them, it is always perilous to read
poetry as if it were life. The life experiences of human beings, when they
are recounted, are never exactly “the way it was”. They are filtered
through a variety of sieves, as it were: the ego, for one; memory, for
another. This is probably even more true of literature (and possibly
especially of poetry), in part because the author shapes the remembered
material into a particular form (for example, a conventionally available one
such as a sonnet; or a story with a recognizable beginning, middle and end:
Much as we might wish it, life doesn’t always have that kind of order; this
is one reason—and this is relevant to Salinas’ poetry—that literature so
often does).
So reading the poetry of these three books requires a different kind of
hearing than one would use in a conversation: one listens not only for the
x INTRODUCTION

“story” it tells, and not only with an ear for detail (the way the language
works, its images, its rhythms), but also with an awareness that this is
literature, not life: and writers of literature are always (consciously or not)
either imitating or modifying or even rebelling against the kind of
literature earlier authors had invented, or imitated, or altered, or
challenged. And as I read this particular trilogy, I was, and am aware of
other, earlier books of poems which men have written about the women
they have loved.
Thus the way I read the love trilogy of The Voice I Owe to You, A Reason
for Love and Long Lament is to see them in the tradition of courtly love
poetry begun (in its modern form, as a sequence) with Petrarch’s Canzionere
and continued in such collections as Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella.
To read the Salinas poems in this way is to read them as fiction and not as
biography. And to see them as poetry of the courtly love tradition also
means seeing love transformed from a personal encounter in which a man
and a woman love reciprocally, into a mirror of the male lover: and
specifically of his desire, which remakes the woman in his image of her,
converting her from beloved to muse: from real woman, that is, to
divinity. Deities are generally inaccessible to human persons; and this is
precisely the point: For the poet in the courtly love tradition the
touchstone is desire rather than its consummation, desire maintained as his
supreme achievement. To put it succinctly: the lover wants a kiss; the poet
wants to want one. The woman as she really is is almost expendable.
Salinas’ poetry tells us this, in fact. Probably the best single example
occurs in The Voice I Owe to You, 36, which compares a real kiss to the
speaker’s memory of it. The poem begins:
Yesterday I kissed you on the lips.
I kissed you on the lips. Dense
and red. It was so short a kiss
that it lasted longer than lightning,
longer than a miracle, even
and then tells us in stanza 3:
Today I am kissing a kiss;
I’m alone with my lips…
And this kiss lasts longer
than silence, than light…
and explains why he values the memory over the experience:
Because now it isn’t skin
INTRODUCTION xi

that I’m kissing, or a mouth,
which could leave me, could elude me…
This explanation may seem reasonable at first, until you put yourself in
the place of the lover and try to convince yourself that you truly prefer to
remember kissing your beloved than actually to experience the kiss. But
since this is what the poem, however illogically, maintains, it makes sense
to look for a different motive than the one the poem gives: that he’s afraid
the real woman may abandon him. The Petrarchan/courtly love
explanation casts the poems’ speaker, rather than the woman, as its
principal focus: sincere as the feeling of love for a particular flesh-and-
blood woman undoubtedly is, once the poet gets hold of it, the woman
becomes close to irrelevant; at best she is the catalyst which generates the
desire to write a poem. Thus in the poem itself, the speaker, not the
woman, not even the muse, is the main star: because he reinvents her to fit
his measure, and because he compels her radiance to shine on him.
An interpretation like this in no way demeans the protagonists nor
diminishes the very real impact of the poetry; what it does is focus our
gaze on the poems’ inventive language and emotive content, rather than—
possibly distractingly—on the professor and his former student.1 This is
completely in keeping with Salinas’ own understanding of poetry. Salinas
opens his book on Rubén Darío (Latin America’s foremost “modernista”
poet), by saying this about poetry:
All poetry operates on one reality for the sake of creating another. . .
the job of the poet is not to reproduce that first experience, but to create
another, the work, new, different, free in its new being. . . The world of
artistic forms is life, of course. But it’s not this life. . . it’s another life.
The musical score, painting, poem, are created by man over their
material existences, precisely in order to rise above them, to transcend
them in a fabulous operation of the imagination which is incomparably

1 Some modern psychological theory (particularly that of the French psychiatrist and
teacher Jacques Lacan, himself influenced both by Freud and by the line of German and
French 19th and 20th century existentialist philosophers) maintains that this posture is the
central truth of all human beings: we do not constitute ourselves except as we believe we are
seen by others; our desire—the root of our existing as men or women—is at heart the
desire to be recognized and desired by the Other. In this sense, the male appropriation of
the Woman (as the Other with whose recognition and desire his identity is bound up) is a
fundamental fact of the human condition. For an excellent example of how this reality
(from a Lacanian perspective) can be self-effacing rather than self-centered or self-absorbed,
see Voice , 21.