Review: His Tongue a Swath of Sky by Francisco Aragón

Review by Alexandra Lytton Regalado

His Tongue a Swath of Sky
Poetry by Francisco Aragón
momotombito press, 2019

The Companion Thread

Francisco Aragón excels at bringing people together; having founded and worked for fifteen years as director of Letras Latinas, it is no surprise that he would choose to share the spotlight in his new chapbook, His Tongue a Swath of Sky, published by m o m o t o m b i t o (an imprint of the discontinued Momotombo Press) in 2019. In the author’s note Aragón states, “I’ve come to embrace, in recent years, that my sensibilities as a poet have as much to do with curating other poets as it has to do with writing and sharing poems of my own.” Aragón has made it his life’s work to bridge communities and that priority is clearly evident in his writing aesthetic.

The chapbook is the result of a collaboration between the author and American and Brazilian artists and is printed on a rich textured paper of sustainably sourced banana leaf fiber and a hand-bound spine with blue Irish linen thread. Each copy is signed by the author and limited to a production of 200 with 100% profits donated to Letras Latinas.

In this chapbook, Aragón, the son of a Nicaraguan father, continues his conversation with Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío in a project that reimagines translation as activism. Section one of the book offers eight English-language poems, seven of them written “after” Darío’s poems. The eighth is an imagined epistle in the voice of Darío—from the grave. Section two consists of the seven Spanish-language Darío poems that inspired the “after” poems in section one. Darío’s work has been in the public domain for more than fifty years. What I find compelling about Aragón’s method is the way his interpretations “after” Darío do not perfectly mirror the originals. In Aragón’s translations the effect is more fun-house mirror in how they stretch and shrink perspectives, cast light and shadow into reinvented versions of the poems. Aragón’s “re-writing” of the poems seems perfectly in line with Darío’s aesthetic. In his lifetime, Darío was inspired by the classics and the work of contemporary writers outside Spanish culture; seeking new shapes and forms, Darío created a new style of Spanish-language poetry that was imagistic and musical, lucid and straightforward: Modernismo.

His Tongue a Swath of Sky focuses on exchanges: the dialogue between a wolf and a saint, a letter from a Latinx poet to a US president, the work of a contemporary poet responding to the work of an iconic poet born 152 years ago. The book’s opening poem “Far Away” (what Aragón calls an “almost-translation” of “Allá Lejos”, 1905) is stripped down to the imagistic elements that represent the innocence and peace of Darío’s infancy. Aragón’s version is not concerned with the constraints of rhyme, meter, or the sonnet form of the original; instead he chooses haiku-length lines in quatrains. The ladder-like shape of the poem provides a frame of white space around the words on the page. The form also seems to reflect the intonation of Aragón’s unmistakable reading voice—carefully enunciated with deliberate pauses, every word is weighed on the tongue before it is uttered.

The book’s cover depicts Saint Francis of Assisi and the wolf of Gubbio from the San Sepolcro altarpiece and the book’s title is a translation of lengua celestial, an image from Darío’s poem “Los motivos del lobo,” first published in 1913.  In Aragón’s poem “The Man and the Wolf” he prefers free-verse tercets to Darío’s original rhymed couplets and because the language is pared down to its essentials with nothing to spare, Aragón’s version ratchets up the tension. In addition to recounting the traditional Christian narrative that warns us against evil (childhood threats at bedtime: ¡Niña, si no te dormis te va a comer el lobo!) and original sin, “hunger / is not what drives them to hunt,” the poem also invites us to consider why this poem was important to Darío, and in turn, why it is important to Aragón? Perhaps they were interested in the symbolic figure of St. Francis as usher, interpreter, and intermediary? Perhaps they contemplated the ways a poet can influence community, how they can mark it, possibly even liberate it? It was thought that Darío set free Spanish language poetry when he adopted influences from French and European poetry to create his modernista style. In my personal reading of this poem, there is an interesting mirroring in Francisco the saint and Francisco the poet (I’ve always told Francisco I consider him the guardian angel of Latinx poets). Because the rest of the poems cast a kaleidoscopic light and invite multiple interpretations I like to think that Aragón included this poem as a lament to black and white thinking and as a commentary on the struggle of coexistence.

Aragón’s invitation to consider Darío’s work is especially relevant today as Nicaragua is currently ensnared in a period of political and economic unrest accompanied by violent protests against the dictatorship of President Daniel Ortega. Throughout his career Darío expressed concern about socio-political conditions in Latin America as reflected in poems such as “A Roosevelt” (1905) that warns the president against predatory advances on Central America. Aragón puts a spin on Darío’s poem by dedicating his 2006 version to George W. Bush. Clearly marked as the preying wolf, “…you raise / your voice and it’s // bellowing we hear (The sky / is mine)…”, in Aragón’s poem Bush is “one part wily astute / animal, three parts owner // of a ranch: conglomeration.” Aragón shoots straight; the questioning of truths is central to this book:

And though,

O man of bluest eye

.

you believe your truth,

it is not—you are not

.

the world.

Considering the current state of US border politics, Aragón leaves the door open for a poet’s future interpretation dedicated to Trump.

Although Aragón began his translations of Darío in 2001 during his MFA at Notre Dame, Aragón explains that 2012 was a key year in the formation of his chapbook because it was then that ASU unveiled their Darío archive, which unearthed nine letters to the Mexican poet Amado Nervo. Aragón considered this biographical information that hinted at a secret romantic relationship between the two poets when he wrote the poem “January 21, 2013” (a title that references the day that Richard Blanco became the first Latinx and openly gay

Inaugural Poet at the initiation of Barack Obama’s second term.) “January 21, 2013,” an epistolary poem in the voice of Darío, addresses Sergio Ramirez, Nicaraguan novelist and winner of the 2018 Cervantes prize who refuted the veracity of the letters.

Aragón continues his reimagining of Darío and Nervo’s relationship in the poem “Winter Hours” and here the figure of the predatory/tamed wolf also reappears in the figure of a man

curled

in a large, plush

chair, wrapped

.

in sable fur

and then in a second man who enters and takes off his gray coat. The original sonnet form is abandoned for free-verse tercets with tightly coiled words; like screens parting, each stanza of the poem slowly reveals the scene of a quiet and private love; instead of the “Carolina” in the Spanish original, there is another man, but still present is the brown sable, the gray overcoat, and the whiteout of snow in Paris that blots out everything surrounding the lovers.

“I Pursue a Shape” explores the bud of a thought, unfurling to columns adorned with palm fronds, all kinds of phallic shapes and fluid curves: a fountain’s spout, a swan’s neck, a final question mark. Here Aragón has re-envisioned a poem structured with a particular form and liberated it in its translation to underline a sense of searching marked by unease and doubt. Likewise, in the poem “1916” there is a singing and a signing back, an echo in slant of poets’ voices that flow back and forth.

In his preface Aragón states that he will “continue to interrogate and re-examine what constitutes a ‘book of poetry’ in in his forthcoming full-length collection After Rubén, dedicated to his recently deceased father. Aragón claims that these “idiosyncratic gestures [of] placing particular texts and genres in proximity to one another…foment conversation between the living and the dead” and that layered, multi-faceted approach results in the most captivating element of the chapbook: Aragón’s poems urge us to linger, to consider multiple perspectives, to admit more than one truth.

Seashell

(Rubén Darío)

Half-hidden in the sand
is where I find it—embroidered
with golden pearls like the one
she held, riding over the water

on a bull. To my lips
I raise it, provoke echoes…
then press it to my ear
to hear the bluest fathoms

whisper of their riches.
This is how the salt
of a storm slowly fills me,
how those sails billowed

when stars fell for Jason.
And I listen to the voice
of a wave—deep
indecipherable wind…(the shell

is in the shape of a heart)

for Antonio Machado

Caracol 

A Antonio Machado 

En la playa he encontrado un caracol de oro
macizo y recamado de las perlas más finas;
Europa le ha tocado con sus manos divinas
cuando cruzó las ondas sobre el celeste toro.

He llevado a mis labios el caracol sonoro
y he suscitado el eco de las dianas marinas,
le acerqué a mis oídos y las azules minas
me han contado en voz baja su secreto tesoro.

Así la sal me llega de los vientos amargos
que en sus hinchadas velas sintió la nave Argos
cuando amaron los astros el sueño de Jasón;

y oigo un rumor de olas y un incognito acento
y un profundo oleaje y un misterioso viento…
(El caracol la forma tiene de un corazón.)

I Pursue a Shape

I pursue
…………..a shape

which
to my style remains
elusive

………bud
….of a thought
that wants to unfurl

that arrives
with a kiss
alighting       

on my lips
like being hugged
by David

columns
are adorned
with palms

stars say
I will glimpse
a god

and light
descends
settling

inside me
like the bird
of the moon

settling
on a still lake
and yet all

I obtain are
words wanting
to scurry away

melodious
prelude
streaming

from a flute
boat
of dreams

rowing
through space
and outside

his window
the fountain’s
spout continues

to weep
the swan’s neck
posing the question

after Rubén Darío’s “Yo persigo una forma…”

Yo persigo una forma…

Yo persigo una forma que no encuentra mi estilo,
botón de pensamiento que busca ser la rosa;
se anuncia con un beso que en mis labios se posa
al abrazo imposible de la Venus de Milo.

Adornan verdes palmas el blanco perstilo;
los astros me han predicho la vision de la Diosa;
y en mi alma reposa la luz como reposa
el ave de la luna sobre un lago tranquilo.

Y no hallo sino la palabra que huye,
la iniciación melódica que de la flauta fluye
y la barca del sueño que en el espacio boga;

y bajo la ventana de mi Bella-Durmiente,
el sollozo continuo del chorro de la fuente
y el cuello del gran cisne blanco que me interroga.

1916

León, Nicaragua

One evening water—
watching

it fall, the night sweet
silver

the breathing sigh
a sob

the sky’s amethyst
soft—

diluting his tears;
the fountain

mingles with
his fate—

song of my own
cascade

after Rubén Darío’s “Triste, muy tristemente…”

Triste, muy tristemente…

Un día estaba yo triste, muy tristemente
viendo cómo caía el agua de una fuente;

era la noche dulce y argentina. Lloraba
la noche. Suspiraba la noche. Sollozaba

la noche. Y el crepúsculo en su suave amatista
diluía la lágrima de un misterioso artista.

Y ese artista era yo, misterioso y gimiente,
que mezclaba mi alma al chorro de la fuente.

1916

.

.

Francisco Aragón is the son of Nicaraguan immigrants. He is the author of Glow of Our Sweat and Puerta del Sol, as well as the editor of, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. His third book, After Rubén, is slated for 2020 with Red Hen Press. His Tongue A Swath of Sky, a chapbook, was released in 2019. A native of San Francisco, he is a faculty member at the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS) at the University of Notre Dame, where he directs their literary initiative, Letras Latinas. For more information, visit: http://franciscoaragon.net

Alexandra Lytton Regalado’s poetry collection, Matria, is the winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award (Black Lawrence Press, 2017). Matria was listed as one of the “Favorite Poetry Collections of 2017” at Literary Hub and it was a finalist in two categories for the 2017 Foreword INDIES Award. Her poems, stories, and non-fiction have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2018, Narrative, Gulf Coast, The Notre Dame Review, and Creative Nonfiction among others. Co-founder of Kalina press, Alexandra is author, editor, and/or translator of more than ten Central American-themed books. She is a 2019 CantoMundo fellow, winner of the 2015 Coniston Poetry Prize, and she is the recipient of the third Letras Latinas / PINTURA PALABRA DC Ekphrastic residencies. Her ongoing photo-essay project about El Salvador, through_the_bulletproof_glass, is on Instagram. For more info visit: www.alexandralyttonregalado.com