De la simple existencia: Antología poética by Wallace Stevens, and: La roca by Wallace Stevens, and: Poemas tardíos by Wallace Stevens, and: Ideas de orden by Wallace Stevens, and: Las auroras de otoño y otros poemas by Wallace Stevens (review) De la simple existencia: Antología poética by Wallace Stevens, and: La roca by Wallace Stevens, and: Poemas tardíos by Wallace Stevens, and: Ideas de orden by Wallace Stevens, and: Las auroras de otoño y otros poemas by Wallace Stevens (review) Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan Wallace Stevens Journal, Volume 37, Number 1, Spring 2013, pp. 119-122 (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: For additional information about this article [ Access provided at 6 Apr 2021 02:11 GMT from Carnegie Mellon University ] https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2013.0011 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/503155 https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2013.0011 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/503155 revIews 119 reading both versions they will be able to strike a balance, as in a single chord of different notes, enjoying both the intimacy of the particular and the grandi- ose effect of the whole. Gül Bilge han university of stockholm sweden De la simple existencia: Antología poética. By Wallace Stevens. Translated into Spanish by Andrés Sánchez Robayna. Bar- celona: Debolsillo, 2006. La roca. By wallace stevens. Translated into spanish by Daniel aguirre. Barcelona: lu- men, 2008. Poemas tardíos. By wallace stevens. Translated into spanish by Daniel aguirre. Barcelona: lu- men, 2009. Ideas de orden. By wallace stevens. Translated into spanish by Daniel aguirre. Barcelona: lu- men, 2010. Las auroras de otoño y otros poemas. By wallace stevens. Translated into spanish by Jenaro Talens. Madrid: visor, 2012. In the last few years, spanish readers have been treated to an unusually rich selection of wallace stevens’ writings, all made available in bilingual edi- tions. The relatively small number of books that stevens published during his lifetime turns the five collections of translations listed above into a substantial selection from his works. Not only can the Spanish reader now find transla- tions of a sizable number of canonized poems, from “The Idea of order at Key west” and “The Man with the Blue Guitar” to “The auroras of autumn” and “Final soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” he or she can also enjoy spanish versions of stevens’ major prose writings, whether they be the essays collect- ed in The Necessary Angel or epigraphs from “adagia.” That a poet’s personal collection of aphorisms has been translated may itself be regarded as a mean- ingful indication of the stature he has achieved in a foreign country. There are several explanations for the interest Stevens has aroused in Span- ish readers and, above all, poets. The most important one, it seems to me, is his defining concern with the relations between poetry and philosophy. Such a concern has been typical of an important strand in spanish poetry during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Characteristically, Andrés Sánchez Ro- bayna, one of the poet-translators under review here, entitled a talk he gave a 120 The wallace sTevens Journal few years ago about a selection of twentieth-century spanish poets, “Poesía y pensamiento” [Poetry and Thought]. In spain, the cross-fertilization of these two spheres has resulted in a poetic lineage that has been most fruitful. Quite a few Spanish poets have looked to British romantic poetry, for example, as a philosophical poetry (see eugenia Perojo arronte’s contribution to The Recep- tion of S. T. Coleridge in Europe [london: continuum, 2007]). wordsworth’s and coleridge’s poetry has been regarded among spanish admirers as a form of secular meditation, with its own reflective pace and tone. Stevens’ analogous interest in meditative poetry and substitutions for religion fits this mold par- ticularly well. One of the first explicit references to the American poet’s works appears in a collection of essays by José Ángel Valente (1929–2000) published in 1971 un- der the title Las palabras de la tribu [The words of the Tribe]. early in this book, valente quotes from the introduction to The Necessary Angel: “one function of the poet at any time is to discover by his own thought and feeling what seems to him to be poetry at that time” (CPP 639). valente, who spent four years as a Visiting Lecturer at Oxford University, kept up a sustained friendship with José Lezama Lima, the Cuban poet-editor who collaborated with Stevens’ epistolary friend José Rodríguez Feo on the magazine Orígenes. In addition, valente always acknowledged louis Martz’s The Poetry of Meditation (1954) as a fundamental source of inspiration. Martz, as we know, also published various essays on stevens, and it seems plausible that valente was familiar with at least some of this work as well. with stevens, valente may be said to have shared ideas about decreation, the role of the imagination in poetry, the ascendancy of romanticism, and the relations between painting and poetry. In recent decades, it is Sánchez Robayna who has written most extensively on stevens. his interest in the american modernist is consistent both with his own poetics and the ties that bind him to Valente. Not only was Sánchez robayna sought out by valente as his personal advisor whose task it was to keep the aging poet from repeating himself, the younger poet also coedited Valente’s collected works. In 1980, Sánchez Robayna published his first gath- ering of stevens in translation, Poemas (Barcelona: Plaza y Janés), and he wrote on several occasions to reflect on Stevens’ importance. He was by no means the only Spanish poet to show himself susceptible to Stevens’ influence: most poets who emerged in the 1970s would acknowledge the american poet as instrumental in forging their poetics. If spanish poets of the Fifties valued con- tent over form (with important exceptions, such as Valente), poets of the Sev- enties tended to choose foreign poets as their models, especially when these gave pride of place to form and language. as was the case in the u.s. before the historical turn in stevens criticism, stevens was viewed as a proponent of pure poetry for whom the poem functioned principally as an artistic artifact. Sánchez Robayna’s most recent gathering of translations was published in 2003 as De la simple existencia: Antología poética [of Mere Being: an anthology of Poems], reissued in 2006 as a paperback. The anthology, which has been revised in the course of a workshop on literary translation taught by Sánchez robayna himself at the university of la laguna, comprises work from all of stevens’ published volumes, in addition to some of the “adagia.” It thus revIews 121 intends to offer a wide-ranging perspective on the poet’s literary output, even if the balance is clearly uneven. with thirty-one poems, Harmonium is best rep- resented, while only six poems from Ideas of Order and two from The Auroras of Autumn are included. Nor do we find such staples of the Stevens canon as “The Idea of order at Key west,” “notes Toward a supreme Fiction,” or “The Auroras of Autumn” among the selection. By and large, Sánchez Robayna manages to translate the poems with close attention to the recreation both of stevens’ ideas and his typical literary devices. In his prologue, he offers an updated view of stevens’ writings in which he emphasizes the importance of the imagination in the poet’s creative process, arguing that reality is not es- sentially important in a poetry in which biographical facts are not on display. More recently, Daniel aguirre has set himself the daunting task of trans- lating stevens’ poetry and prose in its entirety. Between 2008 and 2010, he has published three installments that are the spanish equivalents of The Rock, “late Poems,” and Ideas of Order. To the section of “Late Poems” that we find in the library of america edition of the Collected Poetry and Prose, he has also exceptionally chosen to add “As You Leave the Room.” Both Poemas tardíos and Ideas de orden are accompanied by forewords in which the translator, who is a lecturer at harvard university and has also published spanish versions of W. B. Yeats and John Ashbery, explains the context in which the books were written. In addition, he gives us a brief explanation of the basic translation principles he has applied. The main purpose of the translations, he tells us, is to be as idiomatic as possible in spanish. Finally, Jenaro Talens, yet another poet (besides a professor of literary theo- ry at the university of valencia), has compiled a brief but representative num- ber of poems in an anthology entitled Las auroras de otoño y otros poemas [The auroras of autumn and other Poems]. This gathering, too, is accompanied by a preface in which Talens sketches his view of stevens’ poetry. like other poets of the seventies generation, he starts by emphasizing the independence of stevens’ poems from all referents. But by the end of his preface he modi- fies this claim somewhat: despite a lack of explicit confessionalism in Stevens (which is what Talens appears to have meant throughout) he concedes that the reader will not find poems made of abstract concepts but distillations of a man who has lived in a particular context. Talens compiles a choice selection of 16 poems culled from Harmonium, Ideas of Order, The Auroras of Autumn, and The Rock. after “The auroras of Autumn,” which surprisingly kicks off the book, the reader finds “Sunday Morning,” while the concluding poem is “Final soliloquy.” although Talens is radically interested in how a poem can be theoretical, he does not translate “Notes” nor, for example, “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself.” nevertheless, he does include a handful of poems about poetry, most notably “The ultimate Poem Is abstract” and “Metaphor as Degeneration.” overall, he seems to prefer shorter poems, with “The auroras” and “The owl in the Sarcophagus” as principal exceptions. each in their own ways, the three translators have turned out appealing books. Sánchez Robayna deserves credit for having been the first to translate Stevens in Spain. (For lack of expertise, I am ignoring the book-length transla- 122 The wallace sTevens Journal tions into spanish that have appeared in countries such as argentina, chile, and uruguay.) his anthology is still a major achievement that is reissued from time to time. Talens manages to give a more concentrated if still capacious view of stevens, while aguirre is engaged in the praiseworthy task of trans- lating all of stevens’ collected writings. These three translators seem to agree fundamentally about Stevens’ poetics, which explains why their conversions of the poet into Spanish have so many affinities and are often so similar in poetic effect. santiago rodríguez Guerrero-strachan university of valladolid spain