Pere Gimferrer - Every poem has a single theme: How the word says something else. The sparrow hawk lives blind and serene In the murk of the final words. I walked on these streets in the years When my youth was a dead she-wolf, But they were unreal, not drawn out Yet, or drawn out and entombed.

Pere Gimferrer, Alma Venus Trans. by Adrian West. Bilingual edition. Antilever Press, 2014.

The poetry of Spanish and Catalan writer Pere Gimferrer now appears in book form for the first time in English, translated by Adrian West. ALMA VENUS is a long unified poem blending the individual and the collective, the past and the present, and far-flung allusions to literature, film, and painting. Voices ranging from classical Latin poetry to those of contemporary critics like Antonio Negri and Noam Chomsky are enlisted in service of a vision of the subversive power of love in capitalist society. ALMA VENUS expands on themes explored in the author's previous work, Rapsodia, which was selected as the best book of poetry of 2011 by ABC and El Mundo. In its treatment of present-day social and political circumstances, the breadth of its cultural field of reference, and the intensity of its vision, this is a poetry as timeless as it is timely, one that for English-speaking readers will bear affinities with works of great lyricism and historical consciousness like Geoffrey Hill's The Triumph of Love. In the words of the translator, "Gimferrer vindicates the dialectic nature of poetry, the inalienability of its pedigree, and its freedom and duty to intervene in the historical moment of which it forms a part."


Alma Venus Translator's Note
Adrian West

Years ago, in a conversation about what he considered to be the dispiriting state of Spanish letters, a friend and former professor mentioned a short novel by a Catalan who wrote like Proust. Later, when I had begun to read Catalan, I asked after the book, Fortuny by Pere Gimferrer. The prose was reminiscent less of Proust than Góngora, though it is true that, with the exception of Proust, no other writer of the twentieth (and now twenty-first) century has brought such precision and attentiveness to the description of the play of light and shadow. I published a short selection from Fortuny in January of 2013 and began work on the present text six months later. Gimferrer’s writings are demanding, for the reader and particularly the translator; apart from employing a broad and refined vocabulary, they depend for effect on a system of multiple meanings and textual echoes that span not only the whole of Spanish language literature, but also references to contemporary history, art, music, film, and design. But at a time when a degree of colloquialism (representing less the quest for an authentic voice than a relinquishment of the ideal of Bildung) has reduced so much modern verse to an ineffectual monotony of unworked self-expression, Gimferrer vindicates the dialectic nature of poetry, the inalienability of its pedigree, and its freedom and duty to intervene in the historical moment of which it forms a part.


“the hand of a white washer”
With a rapid-fire succession of metaphors, similes and allusions, Alma Venus presents itself with descriptive force and sustained energy. Adrian West’s translation is razor sharp, passionate, courageous, and resourceful. This is not poetry for the timid, nor is it poetry for despisers of dictionaries. Gimferrer is historical, epic, didactic, ironic, visionary, and above all, never alone. Anthologizing words, ideas, memories and achievements of representative poets and artists from across the western tradition Gimferrer intermingles life and death. In the process, he finds his own voice. What is a poem if not the poet’s own biography? And what is a poet’s biography if not the poet’s own reading history?
The intermingling of life and death means that nothing is absolutely in one world or another. The poet himself resides between light and shade, sun and shadow, in the poem itself.
Reality, a major theme throughout Gimferrer’s work, is not only about perception, language and history, but more specifically about living amongst shadows and shades.
This reappearing trope assures us that Gimferrer’s pathway through poetry is inter-personal. When he writes “They are in the past and today I cross them”, “them” refers to the members of his library. “We” refers to us poets and readers in the realm of the living. Gimferrer is a fraternity of atemporal voices, an anthology of inner-space reunion with time past.
Moreover, Gimferrer paints with fire-eating hands. “The fire-eaters of the stolen word, / Surrounded by the image-crafting wind.” Gimferrer’s school, founded by Don Quixote himself, understands its capacity for illusion, that is, for delusional perception, and accepts this consciously. “I, who projected myself, am projection; / design for Living, poetizing.”
Venus is a song sung by many voices, containing multiple philosophies, principles, projections, memories, allusions.
The philosophical foundations of Gimferrer’s eccentric poetics are the combined force of the ages. Gimferrer indeed is a man of the ages.
Octavio Paz dedicated his poem “La Arboleda” (“The Grove”) to Gimferrer. In this poem the late Nobel Laureate describes the grove (which I assume to refer to Gimferrer’s poetry) as “a web of fronds and branches [with] flaming spaces / and, fallen into these meshes, -restless, / breathing- / is something violent and resplendent, / an animal swift and wrathful.” There is, in Gimferrer’s style, an innovative fury, a thought-provoking violence, and a very personal social conscience. Such a social conscience is the honest revelation of the prison-house of culture itself.
Significantly, throughout Alma Venus, Gimferrer presents himself as both reader and writer throughout Alma Venus, variously recounting his personal history alongside his reading history, reflecting himself vicariously through authors and artists and cultural productions. With Gimferrer, the writer is the reader. Gimferrer’s memories are our memories. Gimferrer’s readers are part of the pact, participating in a Quixotic visionary reading of western poetry along with the author. “All poems are one”, writes Gimferrer. Suddenly we too, having become part of the text, feel used. It was, after all, the author who made this pact on his own, when he set out to write such a poem. While Gimferrer periodically speaks from the perspective of we and our (i.e “Our Homer”), generally, he avoids pronouns altogether. For example, when Gimferrer talks about whitewashing the walls he writes.
This new voice that emerges is the voice of the hand of a whitewasher. It has become useless to talk about he or she or it. The meaning of identity has been made empty and useless. The artist’s hands themselves have become subject and object of their own discourse. Above all, there is a connection between the poet’s hands and the walls themselves.
For Gimferrer darkness and death allude to the realm of the shades, the underworld, visited by all the epic masters of poetry, including Homer, Virgil and Dante. It is in this realm, that all the words and languages that have ever been spoken remain forever stored. Interweaving the words of the fallen and departed, the poet interweaves death with life, restoring the dead to life, bridging the two worlds, while passing through the underworld of spirits. “Let us pass through yesterday’s mist”, writes Gimferrer, implying passing backwards in time.
One who takes the time to read Gimferrer’s book will find that while the poet lives and breathes shadows and shades, his reflections on the originality and freshness of language remain permeated by a dark scepticism.
Thus, according to Gimferrer, it would appear that we are none other than reflections of our cultural-personal histories, the poem itself being a “reflection of a reflection.” Gimferrer’s poem reveals his private and public tradition, his legacy in the western whirlwind. “The mask of my yesterday looks at me.” He is a mirror of his yesterday’s perceptions, and of all who contributed to the cultural creation of his illusory world. That said, there is much more to Gimferrer. Alma Venus cuts across the past with heroic detail, unassailable passion, presenting an ode to the memory of culture, society, Europe, the canon, the death of the poet. Gimferrer is a modernist magician, revealing a multiplicity of voices and the extraordinary gifts of scholarship, lyricism and wit. Ultimately, while Gimferrer presents life as a mirror of his complex vision of poetry itself, for all its contradictions, pessimism, and far-reaching allusions, such a vision harbours radiant light.
 - David Swartz



Every poem has a single theme:
How the word says something else.
The sparrow hawk lives blind and serene
In the murk of the final words.
I walked on these streets in the years
When my youth was a dead she-wolf,
But they were unreal, not drawn out
Yet, or drawn out and entombed.

They watched me with painted eyes
Or from photos incandescent
Those streets today blurry, clear,
At the same time narrow and precise:
They are in the past and today I cross them,
In a sheet draped, chasing myself.
Everything is a pact of irreality:
The serenade of the rosebush of time.
I will see myself unfolded, on turning this corner
As in the Rinascente department store
One afternoon in Turin made of plaster
In the dark grisaille of the porticoes.
(Then I remembered it was carnival,
Seeing lights in the February snow.)
Hunters of the hunter,
We crouch, loggia to loggia, corner
To corner, mercury zigzag
That slips through my hands, my years.
Like a gargoyle in the Piazza Solferino,
The mask of my yesterday looks at me.
To have reached the end of the road:
The moon could linger in the end.
The poem, a mosaic of voices:
All poems are a single voice
That murmurs words wearing makeup,
The smeared eyeshadow in the voiceless light,
The wave that arriving departs.
The predella of Urbino is the shuttering
Word of Paolo Uccello:
Shadows of quicksilver, incensing light
In the muzzle of air in flames.
But the predella is not a rampart;
The heirloom’s absolute word,
The waxen gloss of clarity.
Urganda the unknown? Not at all:
In a separate claim, Palma Arena,
Packages stuffed with brass and straw
And the larceny that shines in the night;
Rag-and-bone men the color of lead
And a pansy with pupils of blue.
The marauders of light
Wed not the figurines,
With the display window papered over.
The country of foam’s terracotta
Sees not the gold braids of sawdust,
The saturning nocturne of werewolves,
The rabble of scoundrels,
The scramble of the blue of the sky.
Joan Miró lived by this sea:
That is why we watch our words,
So as not to make peace with paper money,
With the veterinary of chemists and fodder.
Death in a Tyrolese hat
In the hills the color of hay,
Death with his vagabond eyes,
Will discover the asps of the day,
The Cleopatra in the suburb of tango
Touched with the picture hat with the plumage of toucan.
Our Homer will be Santos Discépolo
(Or perhaps he will be our Juvenal?).
The landscape has a date of expiry:
A suspension, between two wars,
A vacated instant of basil,
As well as discolored thyme,
Full sunlight with an odor of cyanide.
Flatland distant, instance annoying. 
More tiresome than fatal: landscapes
For a panoply of scrapyards.
The deadly cavalade of memories,
The pink trophy table of non-being.
Each word, bereft of meaning,
Is only the clamor of secondaries,
The hoarse caw of scrap-dealers,
An exchange of falsifications:
The rube and the ha, the gullible’s fair,
Of card-sharps and number-runners, nothing more.
Death of Blas de Otero in the summer sun:
The dignity of the word on foot.
Yes, the rest is excess. The bowspirit pushes on,
Death ahead, for poetry:
Manifestly leads to the prow the eyes of living.
Alma Venus: love, revolution.

Pere Gimferrer: The Man in the Turban


Pere Gimferrer (b. Barcelona, 1945) is the author of numerous books of poetry, criticism, and fiction, both in Spanish and in Catalan. His body of work has been awarded the National Prize of Spanish Letters (1998), the Reina Sofia Prize for Iberoamerican Poetry (2000), and the Octavio Paz International Poetry and Essay Prize (2006). His writing is notable for its visual power, the range of its references, and its extraordinary lexical refinement, as well as its profound concern with the role of the artist in his engagement with his forebears and the historical responsibility of the intellectual. - See more at: http://antilever.org/articles/alma-venus-translators-note#sthash.G0nNIKQq.dpuf