haiku Archives | Numéro Cinq

Poems from Jorge Carrera Andrade’s Micrograms

Translated by Joshua Beckman and Alejandro de Acosta

Newly released from Wave Books, Micrograms, by the Ecuadorian poet Jorge Carrera Andrade, pays meta-homage to the brief yet visceral impact of the microgram. Featuring a meditative body of short works translated by Joshua Beckman and Alejandro de Acosta, the collection also includes Andrade’s hermeneutical “Genealogy” of the microgram that serves as a primer to the form while simultaneously providing a substantive look at Andrade’s innately philosophical consciousness. In Andrade’s words, “The microgram is but the Spanish epigram deprived of its subjective hue. Better: an essentially graphical, pictorial epigram. Through its discovery of the deep reality of the object (its secret attitude) it arrives at a refined emotional style.”

As we learn in the translators’ introduction, Andrade was a world traveler who believed in a universal human solidarity that transcended borders and united him to all men. Evidenced in his introduction and his poetry, Andrade was also a tireless observer of the natural world who remained committed to illuminating the metaphysical through an examination of the miniscule. Micrograms, with Zen-like clarity, offers earthly, object-centric writing that informs our perceptions and emotions with refreshing brevity.

Jorge Carrera Andrade (1902-1978) was born in Quito, Ecuador, and was a diplomat as well as a poet, essayist and journalist. His distinguished literary career comprises a wide range of work, including editing, translation, criticism, and poetry. William Carlos Williams described Carrera Andrade’s images as “so extraordinarily clear, so connected to the primitive I imagine I am … participating in a vision already lost to the world.”

I have included a sampling of Andrade’s poems below along with one of the translators’ reinterpretation of Andrade’s Japanese to Spanish translation of Basho.

—Martin Balgach

WHAT THE SNAIL IS

Snail:
tiny measuring tape
with which God measures the field.

Here’s a fascinating review of an even more fascinating book. All of you are familiar with Barthe’s essay “The Death of the Author.” I like here the potential contrast between the haiku and the novel, which contrast never actually eventuates apparently.

Part II returns both author and work centre-stage. Barthes investigates the emergence of writing as an intransitive activity, determined not by its object but by a “maniacal” urge in the author’s body. It focuses on the “operations” by which he (the writers considered are all male: Flaubert, Kafka, Mallarmé, Chateaubriand, Proust, etc) passes from the desire to write to creating the work. We learn about the minutiae of authors’ habits: where they write, when, at what rhythm or speed (“at a gallop”, in Proust’s case). For the writers Barthes discusses, the space of writing offers a retreat from worldly preoccupations: Flaubert asks for no more than a quiet room with “a good fire in winter and a pair of candles to light me at night”, whereas Proust favours the bed: “you can work, eat, and sleep in it”. Similarly, the time at which they choose to write often suggests a withdrawal from the world. While Barthes cites Paul Valéry as an example of an early morning writer, he devotes most space to those who wrote at night: Flaubert (sometimes), Rimbaud (once), Kafka (joyous at having written “The Judgment” in one night-time sitting) and, of course, Proust (always). The latter’s “complete inversion of day and night” leads on to a broader discussion of inversion in general as the source of a “perverse pleasure”: perhaps the reason why night work enjoys such privilege in Barthes’s imagination.

via The Preparation of the Novel by Roland Barthes reviewed by Mairéad Hanrahan – TLS.