A don Ramón del Valle-Inclán 致雷蒙 廸來 華耶-然卡蘭

It's a beautiful Sunday. No work! That's enough to make it good already. What made it better was that I could indulge in one of my current crazes once again: learning more about modern Spanish poetry. I continued my study of Machado and found another short poem, dedicated to to another of Machado's poet friends Ramón Maria del Valle-Inclán (1866-1936). So here it is with my translations.

A don Ramón del Valle-Inclán               To don Ramón del Valle-Inclán        致雷蒙 廸來 華耶然卡蘭

Yo era en mis sueños, don Ramón, viajero I was in my dreams, Mr Ramón, traveller 雷蒙先生，在我夢中，

del áspero camino, y tú, Caronte  of the tough path, and you, Caronte   艱苦途中之旅客，與你，加朗蒂

de ojos de llama, el fúnebre barquero   with eyes of fire, the funeral boatman    眼睛火紅，那亞郎蒂河

de las revueltas aguas de Aqueronte,  of the rough waters of the Aqueronte, 波濤兇湧中的殯儀船夫。

Plúrima barba al pecho te caia. He likes the beard falling upon your chest.他喜歡瀉在你胸膛的鬍子。

(Yo quise ver tu manquedad en vano.) (In vain I wanted  to see your lack .) (我無望看到你之所欠。)

Sobre la negra barca aparecía            Over the black boat appears                你異教神祗般的蒼老

tu verde senectud de dios pagano     the green senility of your pagan god. 在那黝黑小船上現身。

Habla, djiste, y yo: cantar quisiera   Talk, you said, and I: you'd love   你說，銳罷，而我：你儘情

loor de tu Don Juan y tu paisaje, to sing praises of your Don Juan and your landscape,歌頌你的唐璜與

en esta hora de verdad sincera.     in this hour of sincere truth.           你的田野吧，在此說真心話之時。

Porque faltó mi voz en tu homaje,     As I lost my voice in your honour,  我既無聲向你致敬

permite que en pálida ribera            allow me in this pale shore               就容我在這蒼涼之岸

te pague en áureo verso mi barcaje. to pay your freight in verses of gold.以金詩付你我的運費。

 

In this poem, Machado is paying homage to Ramón del Valle-Inclán upon the latter's death. Ramón del Valle-Inclán must be one of the most colorful writers of the Generation of 1898. He is a dramatist, novelist and poet. He first started his writing career by writing a series of novelettes describing the amorous adventures of the leisure classes in elegant surroundings, based largely upon his own very bohemian life-style in Madrid e.g. Palabras Divinas (Divine Words 1920) and Luces de Bohemia ( Bohemian Lights 1924). In such novelas, he made fun of the hypocrisy, the sentimentality, the absurdity, the meaningless outward adherence to codes of masculine honour, patriotism, monarchism and satirized the dishonest morals of those who professed to follow the Catholic religion in Spain. He also wrote a number of dramas in which he adapted his novelettes for the stage and wrote some new dramas on various themes, some in prose and some in verse form. Later in his life, he also wrote novels to satirize the conduct of the  South American dictators e.g. Tirano Banderas. His political ideas bothered on anarchism. Some view him as a kind of Spanish James Joyce.

His novels and plays are usually set in fantastic, supernatural and rather surreal surroundings, but he would sometimes use even vulgar imagery, mainly as a protest against the "polite" society to  which the Spanish middle classes were accustomed. He is totally irreverent to Spanish political authorities and for a short time in 1892, after the death of his father, he went to live in Mexico and wrote about his experiences in Bajo los tropicos follwoing which he visited Cuba and then Paris before returning home, got a job at the Ministerio de Formato which he immediately quit to do his own novelist writing and then became an actor in Benevente's comedy Le Comida de Fieras. He was acquainted with Rubén Dario, one of the foremost advocates of the techniques of modernism and of the French Symbolism in Spain.

Valle-Incán had also written poetry like Aroma de Leyenda ( Aroma of legend 1907), La pipa de Kif (the pipe of Kief 1919) Claves liricas (Lyrical Keys 1920) . His works are too numerous to be listed here. But many consider that his most important influence was in the Spanish theatre. Every year, his statue in Madrid receives homage on the National Theatre Day.

Ramón always wore an extreme long beard and always went about the Madrid cafes like Nuevo Cafe de Levante and the Cafe Negro Gato where he met his literary friends and Bohemian artists. He was always very particular about how he looked. He would wearing a long black overcoat almost throughout the year. Perhaps it was for this reason that we got the reference to his beard in the poem. Ramón's life has never been easy but despite that, he was a most prolific writer. He never ceased to write from 1895 until 1936, the year in which he died. Throughout his life, there is hardly a year in which he did not have one new publications or another. almost every year. That's may be why Machado describes his senility as "green". He was fascinated by love all his life and throughout his life, he wrote about the amorous adventures of his aristocratic characters in elegant surroundings and exposed them them for what they were in the form of either little novels, narratives or farces. Hence Machado's references in the poem to Don Juan and his landscape. He was an evergreen writer who never ceased to write for a single moment! And as he was anti-clerical and always attacked the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, Machado described his god as a pagan god. Machado was probably watching his funeral from the shore. Hence the reference to the river banks. But he was too emotional to say anything there and then and probably wrote this homage later in substitition of the usual funeral oration.

Here again, we find Machado following his ideals of using the minimal number of words: the use of "Habla" (in the second person singular imperative) " dijiste" (in the second person singular indefinido), "cantar quisiera" ( third person singular imperfect subjunctive and infinitive in reverse construction for emphasis ) and "faltó" (in the first person indefinido) and "permite" ( present imperative second person singular) in respect of which he completley omitted the subjects or personal pronouns of all the relevant clauses, allowing the form of the tense to let us know who he was referring to. He omitted even the quotation marks for "Habla" which was supposed to be addressed by Ramón to the narrator Machado. Then he would use paradoxical looking contrasts. He used a rather unusual but concrete adjective "green" to qualify an abstract noun "senility" relating to the age of Ramón.  Finally, he used a very conversational style of writing poetry because he wanted to write in the "voice" of the people, the way that the common folk would talk but in a vastly more concise way. To talk about his emotional and possibly literary debt to Ramón Valle-Inclán, he merely employed the metaphor of difficulties of the "path" of the writer's career which he compared to the turbulent waters of the Aqueronte River at the beginning of the poem and the word "freight" at the end of the poem to convey the idea the debt he owed Ramón Valle-Inclán which he could only repay by writing the poem as his homage and which he failed to pay at the time of the funeral perhaps because he was then too overcome by sorrow to talk. You pay freight only if you have asked somebody to carry cargo on his boat for you. Therefore the use of the word suggest that Ramón has in some way helped Machado in the past. In what way is not mentioned. Earlier he used the word "quise" to describe that he wanted or desired to see the "manquedad" or something lacking. But it was in vain. What was he expecting that would be lacking in Ramón? He did not say. Hence there is always an ambiguity in Machado's use of language. It is precisely because of that ambiguity that the reader's imagination would be piqued! To make what he wrote more credible, he framed the relevant imagery in the context of a dream. I really like this poet. He simply doesn't waste words! I don't think he can very welll economise further on words without losing emotional impact.