Shaking the wings
Stephane Mallame (Paris, 1842–Valvins, 1898) wrote an unattainable work, an impossible book. Now Josu Landa has translated all that impossibility, or better, a sample of it, bringing the voice of the nearest poet closer to perfection. He has also brought it with rhyme, as Miguel Hernández translated for the World Poetry Notebook. We have been given a good result: “Nornahi bakarra stretch/ swan and kai/ look at the old/ my eye in nowhere.”
Reading Mallame looks like we're reading the decantation of time in words. Sometimes he's obsessed with eternity, like when he sings to Edgar Allan Poe's tombstone, and other times he wants to catch a moment, making him fit in the short flight of a butterfly. “Cisnes with thin neck, red Gladiolus, Laurel Sheet of Exiled Souls/ Apprehension of Apprehended Auroras/ Yellowish as the Finger of Seraphim”.
Mallame was a poet of the highest works, a language researcher, one of the great classics he believed in the laws of rhythm. That is why their poems are, as in the scenarios of the great operas, framed in empirical stone cardboard frames, in the holy orchards, at 12:00 pm, in the salons. Escapism leads to the exotic, to sleep: “As a protective and joyful doubt/torch that desolates the sown of Errubik.”
The echo produced by loose words in oneself is as important as the integrity of the poem. The vague things that happen in mystery landscapes are our imagination. The poet almost disappears and the hidden forces of the universe speak. Mallame's poetry is one of those that you have to savor more than understand, that little by little I catch you and that takes you beyond meaning. Another is Rimbaud. Baudelaire too. Poe. A current that has come to this day.
Symbolism and even surrealism emerged from this tradition. Even if you don't understand the signals, there's something that makes you tickle: you know it's not about the things that it describes, but it's a way to talk about the mysteries of the universe. The poet reinvents everything it is. Since then, the others, without realizing it, reinvented Mallame and his absolute.
Decisive seconds
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