| The Greatest Artistic Gift of the Twentieth Century... Essay by Leonard J. Cirino "... so then so very gently you pull out one of the feathers of the bird and you write your name in a corner of the picture." Jacques Prevert from "To Paint The Portrait Of A Bird" is not the Modernist verse of Pound and Eliot who were, probably in one case, surely in the other, Fascists; not the Communist inspired social realism of Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and the other great Mexican muralists, not the abstraction of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollack, Robert Motherwell and others who flourished after freedom brought the world "to order." Not even the corporate jingoists of pop art as much as they meant to defy and mock, not the elite destruction of language by the Post Moderns and the deconstructionists, or the Democratic realism of Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Ernest Hemingway, or the expatriates and their poetic disciples, the Beats, who left drunk and disordered like Bukowski. Not those who bastardized Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams with a chit chat approach to verse. And not any of the fifteen minutes of fame, self-flagellants, who promote their work as art. The greatest gift to art in the twentieth century is surrealism. Not in its beginnings with Dada or Andre Breton, Jean Cocteau, Antonin Artaud, or even the showy salesmanship of Salvador Dali. Although the French developed and practiced the first surrealist aesthetic, with the exception of Jean Follain and Jacques Prevert, most of the great surrealists in the literary world were either Spanish, Greek, Italian or eastern European. My reason for saying this goes back to deep readings (but only in translation) of many of the poets involved in surrealism. When I read most of the French poets who practiced and adhered to surrealism I usually come away disappointed. Similar to the philosophers who later developed post modern theory these French always seem to have their heads in the air, but without their feet on the ground. They seem to manipulate their words merely for the effect of strangeness, without a deeper understanding of why and how they are doing so, and without any substantial meaning. As one translator said of Benjamin Peret, "You could substitute almost any word for any other while translating him because he is so unspecific in his imagery and vocabulary." Of course these French poets have a wonderful fantasy world, but is that really using the imagination? Or is it leaping into a downpour of disconnected images without a raincoat or boots? In comparison to the French are the southern European poets of Italy, Greece, and Spain. Garcia Lorca's startling images of fruit, the moon, women, war, and Gypsy life, compare in depth to the great literature of past centuries in that they relate the difficulties of life and its ultimate meanings, as well as use language in an original and inventive way. I'm speaking of Sappho, Catullus, Horace, Li Po, Tu Fu, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Dante, Villon, up through the Romantics, including Hopkins, and Emily Dickinson. Lorca's counterpart, Miguel Hernandez, along with Gloria Fuertes, Blas de Otero, Luis Cernuda, Francisco Brines, and most of the Spaniards who are identified with the Poets of '27, are among the finest artists of this century because their surrealism, when they chose to use it, is not based on the dichotomy of earth and spirit, body and soul, mind and matter, but because it encompasses all these seeming opposites and incorporates them into the entire evolution of the human species, as well as most of the natural world. There are other Spaniards who do this including the Nobel Laureate, Vicente Aleixandre. The Greek poets of the first half of the century, who lived either their youth or adult lives during World War 11, learned to use their imaginations to understand some of the harsh realities of those times. The two most well known Greeks, George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis, both won the Nobel Prize. They were very good, I think, but the greatest Greek poet of the century is Yannis Ritsos. Ritsos actively fought the Nazis in his homeland. But because he was a freethinker and an anarchist he was subsequently imprisoned by both the Communist and Fascist governments. During his incarceration of over a dozen years he managed to leave a great volume of work -- much of it surrealistically influenced -- yet it remains a fierce legacy of what one person can achieve under stifling conditions, and still result in a near pure freedom. Others of my favorite Greek poets who were influenced by surrealism are George Themelis, Zoe Karelli, Nikos Pappas, and Nikos Gatsos. Because (or in spite) of the extreme conditions and daily cruelties they learned to transcend, most of these poets offered an even more real world of imagination to themselves and their readers, a world that had not been made apparent before them. The Italians of the same and later period also had to combat totalitarianism in their lives. My favorite poet of Italy in the twentieth century is the little known and rarely translated magician with words, Carlo Betocchi. Somewhat the Italian counterpart to our Wallace Stevens, he wrote verse that is challenging, insightful, lyrical and imagistic to an exquisite degree. Among the other great Italians are Ungaretti, Bartolo Cattafi, Cristina Campo, Franco Fortini, Rocco Scotellaro, Cesar Pavese, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Andrea Zanzotto. As Octavio Paz says in his poem THIS AND THIS AND THIS Surrealism has been the spit on the host and the carnation of dynamite in the confessional and the open sesame to the bank vaults and the iron bars of asylum... Surrealism has been the drunken flame that guides the steps of the sleepwalker who tiptoes along the edge of the shadow that the blade of the guillotine casts on the neck of the condemned... Notes Most of the southern European poets I have mentioned are available to the English reader in the anthologies: ROOTS & WINGS; Poetry From Spain 1900-1975, Hardie St. Martin, ed. from Harper & Row; MODERN GREEK POETRY from Cavafis to Elytis, Translation, Introduction and Notes by Kimon Friar, Simon and Schuster; and FROM PURE SILENCE TO IMPURE DIALOGUE, A Survey of Post War Italian Poetry, 1945-1965, edited by Victoria Bradshaw, Las Americas Publishing Company. The Paz quote is from A TREE WITHIN, first translated in THE COLLECTED POEMS OF OCTAVIO PAZ 1957-1987 pp 517-519, edited by Eliot Weinberger, New Directions, 1991. Appeared in part in Whelks Walk Review, Vol. 2, Number 1. HOME PAGE & ARCHIVES
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