No Longer Lost: Nicaraguan Modernist Poet & Translator Joaquín Pasos

"I’m on my way to meet the son of a poet whose name is often mentioned by Latin American critics in the same breath as Vicente Huidobro and Eliot, but who remains almost entirely unknown beyond the confines of the Spanish-speaking world," writes David Shook about Joaquín Pasos for Los Angeles Review of Books. Pasos, the titular "lost Nicaraguan modernist" of this piece, "was born in Granada, Nicaragua, in 1914, and died in 1947, at the age of 32, without having seen a single book into print. Published posthumously, his verse is now an integral part of the Latin American literary tradition, its prophetic warnings of environmental, migratory, and war-fueled crises are timelier than ever." More on Pasos's background:

Pasos joined Nicaragua’s Vanguardia group when he was just 15, reading poems and discussing poetics with such contemporaries as José Coronel Urtecho and Pablo Antonio Cuadra in the bell tower of the cathedral in Granada, which had been destroyed at US military adventurer William Walker’s behest in 1856. The Vanguardia got its start with Coronel Urtecho’s composition of “Ode to Rubén Darío,” a clever skewering of the patron bard’s poeticized language, written in 1926 and first published in ’27. The group’s aesthetic was nativist, but their work drew on a vast range of new influences, from anthropology and psychoanalysis to cinema and contemporary European literature. In 1927, Coronel Urtecho returned from a three-year spell in San Francisco, where he had translated North American poets including Whitman, Pound, Moore, and Eliot, whose influence is evident in much of Vanguardia’s verse. In 1930, the movement formally established the Anti-Academy, which was opposed to any “spurious, bewitched, and sterile” manifestation of the past. It is impossible not to see a political stance in this aesthetic orientation. In the words of Ernesto Cardenal, “Nicaragua produced two important things during [the 1930s], the Vanguardia and Sandino. A single spirit animated both movements, and in some sense the two were one and the same.”

Shook moves from close-reads to thinking through translation:

Ernesto Cardenal said once that Pasos was born knowing English. An immensely gifted translator, though he never devoted himself seriously to the art, he did write a succinct suite of English-language poems, Poems by a Young Man who Does Not Know English (Poemas de un joven que no sabe inglés). Unfortunately, those poems are excluded from the most recent Spanish-language edition of his collected works. In his preface, editor Óscar Hahn explains their exclusion, dismissing them as the “exercises of a language learner” and reasoning that Pasos himself did not include them in the plan for Breve suma, his first — and posthumous — collection, which did include his other major suites. But the poems are much more than mere exercises, and I suspect Pasos excluded them simply because they didn’t fit in that particular volume. Pasos’s Spanish-language poems showcase his verbal ingenuity, and their most striking quality is the utter authority of their speaker, a powerful combination of confidence and wisdom. The English-language poems flip that formula on its head: by imposing the external limitations of his English idiolect, he emerges as utterly vulnerable, a truth-speaking fool. Poems by a Young Man who Does Not Know English are not failed Pasos — they are Pasos laid bare:

Let us hang violins from the highest branches, let us forget the moon, Love will come here riding on a bicycle as softly as this quiet afternoon.

The Uruguayan critic Mario Benedetti wrote in 1967 that these English-language poems, “written in a strange English, run through with Nicaraguan inflections,” are without doubt the sloppiest of Pasos’s poems, but I find that an unconvincing description of anything written by a poet for whom “Making a poem,” his friend and contemporary Carlos Martínez Rivas recounted, “was planning the perfect crime.” To me, they are the spoils of a great raid on the English language.

Much more of this "personal obsession" with Joaquín Pasos at LARB.