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Duende, The
American Poetry Review, The, Jul/Aug 1999 by Hirsch, Edward
the way children cry in the last row of seats
because I'm not a man, not a poet, not a leaf,
only a wounded pulse that circles the things of
the other side.
(translated by Greg Simon and Steen White)
The desire for transition and change is viewed as coterminous with the life force itself, but that, also, is thwarted by the final metamorphosis, which is death.
Lorca remembers that great art is made when the door is open to the other side, but he also calls us back to the world strangely inspired, as in his waltzing, sexy, high-spirited, deathward leaning proclamations of love:
Little waltz, little waltz, little waltz,
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of itself, of death, and of brandy
that dips its tail in the sea.
I love you, I love you, I love you,
with the armchair and the book of death,
down the melancholy highway
in the iris's darkened garret,
in our bed that was once the moon's bed,
and in that dance the turtle dreamed of.
Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Take this broken-waisted waltz.
(translated by Greg Simon and Steven White)
Lorca teaches us that one spins to the edge of an enormous night and then reels back from the precipice-wounded, yearning, sometimes terrified, sometimes rapturous, occasionally blessed. He gives us a passport to a vertiginous world of tragic imagination, weird joy. He declares our estranged residence, he returns us to being itself. For him, writing is a struggle both with geometry and death; it is a battle between restrictive measurement and exploding chaos; it is an attempt to bring something that lives out of the void. "Where is the duende?" Lorca asks. It is flinging itself into the vast night. It is hiding under your boot soles. The duende is a wind that breathes through the empty arches over the heads of the dead; it is the wing of a wounded hawk that floats through the crushed grass and flares out of the swollen sidewalks; it is a dream that mocks the bloody mockingbird and flees through the empty subway tunnels and soars out of the broken chest of bridges; it is a joy that burns and a suffering that scalds, like hot ice; it is a cry that rises out of the human body and annunciates "the constant baptism of newly created things."
EDWARD HIRSCH's prose book, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, was published this spring by Harcourt Brace. His new book, Responsive Reading, has just been published in the Poets on Poetry series of the University of Michigan Press.
Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Jul/Aug 1999
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