Review: Birnam Wood by José Manuel Cardona, translated by Hélène Cardona

Reviewed by Sidney Wade

Birnam Wood
Poetry by José Manuel Cardona, translated by Hélène Cardona
Salmon Poetry; Bilingual edition (July 27, 2018)
$21.00, 96pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1912561186

Birnam Wood is a spell-binding, spell-bound book. It comes by this honestly, of course, originating in the spells of the three witches who correctly envision the death of Macbeth, but extending to a great many other binding moments in literature. It is no coincidence that one of the overarching concerns of the book is the certainty of human mortality. The poems in the book were collected over many years, beginning with the youthful series of  “Poems to Circe” written and published in 1959 and ending in time, appropriately, with “The Spell,” written in 1995. Throughout, the poet relies on the magic of language and metaphor to articulate his desires, his misgivings and his passions.

José Manuel Cardona was one of many Spanish intellectuals exiled by the Franco government, and the poems reflect the anguish and longings of the exile, embodied most powerfully in the figure of Odysseus. Cardona’s outpourings of longing for his “Circe” bespeak a displaced self and all its yearnings for the homeland. In “Poem to Circe III,” he says, “Circe, you are flesh, fertile land,/ Like the one I don’t have on this island.” What is mythology, after all, but a metaphor we tell ourselves to explain the inexplicable? To this poet, myth, metamorphosis, and magic are undeniably intertwined: “And metamorphosis and spell,/To what extent are they inseparable?” The fact that Circe herself is an enchantress and a spell-maker lends considerable depth to the metaphor.

Throughout the book the poet takes pains to emphasize his astonishment at the “this-ness” of the world in which he finds himself, and in the fluid and sensual and quite beautiful translations of his daughter, the language expressing this wonder rings through as truth and beauty:

It is beautiful to be born like birds

on a stone nest,

lift the wings like an antenna of light

over the bitter sea,

carry the name of the beloved

on the wings

His evocation, in the Circe poems, of the splendors of the flesh and the insistent passions of youth work well and powerfully to counterbalance the weight of the poet’s later considerations of loss and mortality.

The book is haunted by the tutelary spirits of literary friends and giants who have passed: Vallejo, Cernuda, Góngora, and contains elegies to a great many of the poet’s artist friends. It’s almost as if the spells the poet is weaving are attempts to ward off mortality and loss, as if they were talismans against forgetting and/or being forgotten. In his lovely “Inhabited Elegy,” the great heroes of myth are still with us and speak to each other in the present moment:

(In Knossos, dolphins

know how to exit the Labyrinth

and Theseus chats with Oedipus

in full knowledge that the sea, final destiny,

will be his shroud. Because the gods

love the mortals and we struggle

to return to the Labyrinth.)

There are many mythological and literary heroes here with us, clearly embodied or hinted at: Rilke, Orpheus, Hölderlin, Pygmalion, Odysseus, Shelley, Shakespeare, Machado, García Lorca. Through the fiercely elemental, deeply sensual and classically disciplined magical spells of José Manuel Cardona and the loving talents of his daughter, they live, struggle, bicker, forgive, and remember, still, as this magical book continues to keep their memory alive.

Ode to a Young Mariner

To my brother Manuel

The sea is a bride with open arms,
with stout rubber balls for breasts.
It is difficult to refuse her caress,
dry from the lips her brackish aftertaste,
forget her sweet bitterness.
Underneath her waters wails a rosary of dead
centaurs, watchmen of the shadows.
Handsome men, hard as anchors torn
from the chest of a barbarian god.

It is difficult to refuse the call
of the sea, cover one’s ears,
grasp the neck with both hands
and become suddenly mute, or pluck out one’s eyes
and feed them to the fish. To ignore the gulls
and red masts and so many pennants,
and the ships arriving from unknown countries
and the ships departing for others
barely known, or perhaps for ours.

Because we carry within
like a blue keel or masts and spars
the marine bitterness of kelp,
the stripes on the back of fishes,
the tarry death
and our initials written in the sea.

Brother moving away to the bridge
like one more piece of our island,
the sea of mariners, your bride.
You know the smell of death
because you tread beneath a cemetery
that can be yours and you go brightly.

You know how the sea smells of life,
how at times she spits a ferocious foam,
how she wails wild and rises
like an atavistic being, a primitive creature.

We all carry death within written in furrows
like a name traced by the keel
of your boat in the sea. We are all sailors
of a sleeping bride with round breasts.

I don’t want to depart for the land,
to sprout like a eucalyptus branch
my eyes blinded by grass.
Wait for me, brother, when you anchor
your vessel in the sea you’ve loved.
No need to depart so alone, mariner
brother of a seaman gripped
by the earth’s open jaws.

Oda a un joven marino

                        A mi hermano Manuel

El mar es una novia con los brazos abiertos,
con los pechos macizos como balas de goma.
Es difícil negarse a su caricia,
secarse de los labios su regusto salobre,
olvidar su amargor azucarado.
Bajo sus aguas gime un rosario de muertos
centauros veladores de las sombras.
Hombres hermosos, duros, como anclas arrancadas
del pecho de un dios bárbaro.

Es difícil negarse a la llamada
del mar, taparse los oídos,
agarrar con las dos manos el cuello
y enmudecer de súbito, o arrancarse los ojos
y darlos a los peces. Ignorar las gaviotas
y los mástiles rojos y tantas banderolas,
y los barcos que llegan de países ignotos
y los barcos que parten para otros países
que apenas se conocen, o quizá para el nuestro.

Porque nosotros llevamos adentro
como una quilla azul o arboladura
el amargor marino de las algas,
las barras sobre el dorso de los peces,
la muerte alquitranada
y nuestras iniciales escritas en el mar.

La mar de los marinos, vuestra novia
hermano que te alejas sobre el Puente
como un pedazo más de nuestra isla.
Tú sabes el olor que huele a la muerte
porque pisas debajo un cementerio
que puede ser el tuyo y vas alegre.

Tú sabes como huele el mar a vida,
como vomita a veces fiera espuma,
como salvaje gime y se rebela
igual que un ser atávico, criatura primitiva.

Llevamos todos dentro la muerte escrita a surcos
como un nombre trazado por la quilla
de tu barco en el mar. Somos todos marinos
de una novia dormida con los pechos redondos.

Yo no quiero partir para la tierra,
brotar como una rama de eucalipto
con los ojos cegados por la hierba.
Espérame tú, hermano, cuando ancles tu nave
en la mar que has amado.
No has de partir tan solo, marinero
hermano de un marino atenazado
por las fauces abiertas de la tierra.

Hélène Cardona is the author of seven books, most recently the award-winning Dreaming My Animal Selves and Life in Suspension and the translations Birnam Wood (José Manuel Cardona), Beyond Elsewhere (Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac), winner of a Hemingway Grant, Ce que nous portons (Dorianne Laux), and Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writings for WhitmanWeb.

José Manuel Cardona (July 16, 1928 – July 4, 2018) was a poet from Ibiza, Spain. He is the author of El Vendimiador (Atzavara, 1953), Poemas a Circe (Adonais, 1959) and El Bosque de Birnam: Antología poética (Consell Insular d’Eivissa, 2007).

Sidney Wade is a poet, translator, and professor residing in Gainesville, Florida. She earned her PhD in English from the University of Houston, an MEd in counseling from the University of Vermont, and a BA in philosophy from the University of Vermont. Her seventh collection of poems, Bird Book, was published by Atelier26 in the fall of 2017. She has served as President of AWP and Secretary/Treasurer of ALTA. She is Professor Emerita of Poetry and Translation at the University of Florida.