STANLEY KUNITZ [6.082] Poeta de Estados Unidos

Stanley Kunitz

Estados Unidos. (1905- 2006) Profesor, Periodista y Editor.

Stanley Kunitz nació en Worcester, Massachussets, en 1905 y murió el 14 de Mayo de 2006 a la edad de 100 años. Junto con su esposa la pintora Elise Asher dividía su tiempo entre Provincetown, Massachusetts (donde fundó el Centro de Trabajo de Bellas Artes) y Nueva York (donde fundó la Casa de los Poetas de Nueva York). En el año 2000 fue nombrado Poeta Laureado de Estados Unidos.Entre sus libros de poesía se encuentran: The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz (2000); Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected Poems (con el que ganó el Premio Nacional del Libro en 1995); Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays (1985); The Testing Tree (1971); y Selected Poems, 1928-1958 (con el que ganó el Pulitzer Prize).

Fue pacifista y hay en su canto cálidas tonalidades ecológicas.

La ballena de Wellfleet

Hace algunos veranos, en Cape Cod, una ballena encalló en la playa, una ballena “Fin”’ de diecinueve metros. Cuando retrocedió la marea, me acerqué a verlo. Estaba tendido, en su desolación monstruosa, emitiendo sonidos aterradores, gimiendo roncamente, gruñendo. Coloqué mis manos en sus costados y pude sentir la vida que había en su interior. Y estando allí, de pie junto a él, vi que su ojo se abría súbitamente. Un ojo grande, rojo y frío, que me miraba directamente. Hubo entre los dos un escalofrío de reconocimiento. Luego el ojo se cerró para siempre. He estado pensando en ballenas desde entonces.

Entrada del diario

1.


También tienes tu idioma,
inquietante popurrí de chasquidos
ululatos y trinos,
llamados de ubicación y de amor,
silbidos y gruñidos. Ocasionalmente,
es el ruido de muebles destrozándose,
o el crujir de una puerta enmohecida,
sonidos que se derriten, todos, en una líquida
canción de infinitas variaciones,
como para compensar
la vasta soledad de los mares.
Una voz inmaterial irrumpe a veces,
como de lejanos arrecifes,
y escucharla es casi intolerable
con su ancho lamento enlutado,
su tristeza sin nombre, que a la vez excede
y no alcanza lo humano. Su rumor
se arrastra en el oído como
un disco deteniéndose.




2.


No hubo viento. Ni olas. Ni nubes.
Sólo el murmullo de la marea,
retirándose, acariciando la orilla,
una perezosa corriente de gaviotas en lo alto,
y puntos mínimos de luz
burbujeando en el canal.
Fue en el confín del verano.
Te deslizaste desde la boca del puerto
hasta donde pudimos verte,
destellando la noticia de tu advenimiento,
cortando la superficie diamantina
con el creciente de tu aleta dorsal.
Aplaudimos tal esplendor
cuando hizo erupción la negra barrica
de tu cabeza, embistiendo las aguas,
y floreciste para nosotros
en la alta fuente de tu respiración.




3.


Toda la tarde nadaste,
incansable, contornando la bahía,
con tan plácido movimiento,
los leves giros de tu aleta caudal,
y la tenue ondulación de las dorsales,
hacían pensar en una cosa vertida,
y no guiada; en el feliz matrimonio
de la gracia y el vigor
Y cuando elevaste tu salto por los aires,
batiendo las aletas ,
sentimos el placer de contemplar
la pura encarnación de la energía
en la nobleza de la forma.
Parecías no querer que te viésemos
con empatía, ni amor,
ni comprensión,
sino con asombro y sobrecogimiento.


Esa noche te contemplamos
nadando bajo la luna.
Tu espalda era de un gris fundido.
Adivinábamos tu paso silencioso
por la fosforescencia de su estela.
Al amanecer te hallamos varado entre las rocas.




4.


Un muchacho se acercó y luego un hombre
y aún llegaron otros corriendo, y dos
niñas de colegio, con trajes amarillos
y un ama de casa acicalada
con sus rollos, y familias completas en vehículos
de playa, con un surtido de perros aullando.
La marea se había apartado completamente.
Era posible rodearte a pie,
mientras tus pesados suspiros te hundían en el bajo,
clavado por tu propio peso,
colapsado en ti mismo,
tus aletas estremeciéndose
en temblores, tu espiráculo
burbujeando espasmódicamente, rugiendo.
En la fosa abierta de tu boca
se descubrían las barbas alambradas,
un penacho de cerdas como cuernos.
Cuando el Encargado de Mamíferos
llegó desde Boston
para tomar unas muestras de tu sangre
ya rezumabas por debajo.
Alguien había tallado sus iniciales
en tu flanco. Los buscadores de souvenirs
habían arrancado tiras de tu piel,
membrana delgadas como el papel.
Estabas ampollado y herido por el sol.
Las gaviotas te habían estado picoteando.
El ruido que hiciste fue un balido irregular y ronco.


¿Qué nos atrajo, como un imán, hacia tu muerte?
Creaste un vínculo entre nosotros,
centinelas de la guardia nocturna,
que te rodeamos en círculo,
embriagados a la luz de la hoguera.
Cuando llegaba el alba compartimos
contigo la hora de tu desolación,
la pasión tenaz y gigantesca
de tu clamor de ultramundo,
mientras echabas tu cabeza ciega
hacia nosotros y abrías laboriosamente
un ojo inyectado de sangre, brillante,
en el que nadamos con pavor y reconocimiento.




5.


Viajante, jefe del mundo pelágico,
trajiste contigo el mito
de un país lejano, recordado apenas,
en el que reptiles voladores
atravesaban el vapor de los fangos
y los lagartos del trueno con sus trompetas
se regodeaban en los cañaverales.


Mientras sobre la tierra se erigían y desplomaban imperios,
tu patria, que dio pecho al mar abierto,
se meció al ritmo consolador
de las mareas. ¿Quiénes, de nuestros ancestros, fueron los primeros
en hundirse dentro de aquellos coloreados crepúsculos
para escudriñar el fondo de la oscuridad?
Te extendías por el camino del Atlántico del Norte
desde Puerto España hasta la Bahía de Baffin
bordeando los témpanos de hielo
atravesando el grosor estival,
golpeando el agua con tu cola[1], elevándote en el aire,[2] voceando, [3]
pastando en las dehesas del mar
un plancton anaranjado, rico en krilles[4]
y crujiente de vida.
Descendiste por la plataforma continental
guiado por el sol y las estrellas
y el sabor de los sedimentos aluviales
en tu camino hacia el sur
hacia las temperadas lagunas,
el trópico del deseo,
donde los amantes yacen vientre a vientre
en la sensual refriega de su deporte;
y te diste la vuelta, como un dios exiliado,
apartado del ancho elemento primigenio,
cedido a la misericordia del tiempo.
Maestro de las rutas de las ballenas,
permite que las alas blancas de las gaviotas
extiendan su manto sobre tu cuerpo.
Te has convertido en nuestro semejante,
desgraciado y mortal.

[1] lob-tailing: sacar y golpear la cola contra el agua

[2] breaching: dar saltos en el aire, con el cuerpo completamente fuera del agua.

[3] sounding: la ballena exhibe su cola o aleta caudal y emite un sonido al golpear el agua que forma parte de su sistema de comunicaciones no vocales.

[4] krill: Banco de crustáceos planctónicos semejantes al camarón, que constituye el alimento principal de las ballenas.

Traducción: Rossana Plessmann










El retrato


Mi madre nunca le perdonó a mi padre
el haberse matado
en un momento especialmente inoportuno
y en un parque público
esa primavera
cuando yo esperaba nacer.
Encerró su nombre
en el más hondo de sus gabinetes
y no lo dejó salir
pero yo escuchaba sus golpes.
Cuando bajé del ático
con un retrato a pastel en las manos,
de un extraño de labios largos
y valiente bigote
y ojos cafés, hondos y nivelados,
ella lo hizo pedazos y sin
pronunciar palabra alguna
me dio una fuerte cachetada.
A mis sesenta y cuatro años
aún siento arder mi mejilla.


Traducción Nancy Robles







Fosforescencias


Formas del verbo ser
dormidas
desde tiempos adánicos,
salen de sueños malos,
fosfóricos
del mineral deseo.


Heridas
del frote de la tierra,
dejan sus intrincadas
huellas de espina,
en lechos de piedra.


Y por largos caminos de la historia
bajan,
borrachas de banderas
y de pequeñas lunas


A aquel, cuyo nombre es yo soy
-tras él marchan- lo marcan
con sus brotes de llamas
para que -tolbanera
de nubes- él les guíe
hasta el exilio blanco
donde habita la idea.





Las capas

He andado muchas vidas,
entre ellas algunas mías,
y no soy el que era,
aun si algún principio queda
del ser del que me esfuerzo
por no alejarme.
Cuando miro hacia atrás,
como debo mirar
antes de reunir fuerzas
para seguir mi viaje,
veo empequeñecerse
los hitos hacia al horizonte
y alejarse los fuegos lentamente
de campamentos abandonados
que con pesadas alas rondan
ángeles de carroña.
Mis querencias más ciertas
me fueron convirtiendo en una tribu
desperdigada.
¿Cómo reconciliar el corazón
con su fiesta de pérdidas?
Se alza el viento y el polvo
maníaco de mis amigos,
los que fueron cayendo en el camino,
me da amargo en la cara.
Pero me vuelvo, sí,
me vuelvo, algo me exalta,
intacto el ánimo de ir
a donde necesite,
y cada piedra del camino
me resulta preciosa.
En mi noche más negra,
con la luna cubierta,
vagaba entre los restos,
y una nublada voz
de nimbo me lo dijo:
“Vivo en las capas,
no en la basura”.
Me falta el arte
para desentrañarlo,
pero sin duda el próximo capítulo
de mi libro de las transformaciones
está ya escrito.
No he terminado con mis cambios.

Versión de Aurelio Asiain


Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006)

American poet, editor, essayist, translator, whose career spanned nearly 80 years. Kunitz became 10th poet laureate at the age of 95, succeeding Robert Pinsky. Kunitz's first collection of verse appeared in 1930. He wrote in conversational tone of such complex themes as the work of a poet, loss, time, and the chaos of inner life. Kunitz's self-scrutinies in the realm of the soul are discerning and touching but calmly restrained: "If I could cry, I'd cry, / but I'm too old to be / anybody's child." Kunitz’s poetry has been translated into more than a dozen languages. In 1955 his selected poems, Passing Through, won the National Book Award. "The poem comes in the form of a blessing," he once remarked, "like the rapture breaking through on the mind."

"How should I tell him my fable and the fears,

How bridge the chasm in a casual tone,

Saying, "The house, the stucco one you built,

We lost. Sister married and went from home,

And nothing comes back, it's strange, from where she goes." 

(from 'Father and Son')

Stanley Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. Family tragedies shadowed Kunitz's early life: his father, Solomon Z. Kunitz, committed suicide in a public park a few weeks before his son's birth. The prosperous dress-manufacturing business, that his parents operated, was discovered to be bankrupt. His mother, Yetta Helen (Jasspon), an immigrant from Lithuania, opened a dry-goods shop to support her family. She refused to talk about her late husband and "locked his name / in her deepest cabinet". When Kunitz was 14, his stepfather, Mark Dine, died. Kunitz sisters married and died young. The theme of lost father frequently appeared in Kunitz's poetry. 'The Portrait' opens with the lines "My mother never forgave my father/ for killing himself" and 'Father and Son' from Kunitz's second collection explored a son's grief at the loss of his father. Love and loss and traumas haunt also the life of the next generation, as in 'Journal for My Daughter': "You say you had a father once: / his name was absence. / He left, but did not let you go." (from The Testing-Tree, 1971)

Kunitz was educated at Worcester Classical Highschool. There he became enthralled by the poetry of Robert Herrick (1591-1674), whom Swinburne praised as "the greatest song-writer ever born of English race". Other writers who inspired him during these years were John Keats, Alfred Tennyson, William Wordsworth, and William Blake, whose devotion to inner visions Kunitz has much shared. "Poetry emerges out of the mystery and secrecy of being,'' he has said. ''It is the occult and passionate grammar of a life.''

Kunitz won a scholarship to Harvard, and graduated summa cum laude in 1926, at the age of 22. Because of his Jewish background, he was told indirectly that he could not continue as an assistant at the English Department; "Anglo-Saxons would resent being taught English by a Jew." Kunitz left Harward and then worked as a reporter, editor, and later unsuccessfully as a small farmer during the Depression. He also spent some time in Europe, editing the Wilson Library Bulletin from abroad.

While working as an editor he contributed poems to such magazines as Poetry, The Dial, The Nation, The New Republic, and Commonweal. In 1927 Kunitz tried to find publisher for Bartolomeo Vanzetti's letters –Vanzetti, an anarchist, had been convicted and sentenced to the electric chair with Nicola Sacco after a controversial murder trial. Kunitz's first collection of poems, Intellectual Things, was published in 1930. Its metaphysical explorations of "the vast, uncharted reaches of the inner world", as one critic wrote, did not fit in the main currents of modernism, and Kunitz kept a hiatus of fourteen years before he published his next collection. During the 1930s and early 1940s Kunitz co-edited for The H.W. Wilson Company a series of biographical reference books about authors – the series is still among the best in its field.

In 1944 Kunitz published Passport to the War, which contains one of his most famous poems, 'Father and Son'. In this highly individual collection Kunitz did not court his critics with its boldy imaginative use of language and social and political themes. Like his first book, it did not awake attention of the literary establishment. It was not until 1958 when Kunitz gained acclaim with Selected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

"I keep trying to improve my control over language, so that I won't have to tell lies." (Kunitz in Contemporary Poets, 1975)

Regarding his religious background, Kunitz defined himself as a freethinker rather than an atheist, saying once that "Moses and Jesus and Lao-tse have all instructed me. And all the prophets as well, from Isaiah to Blake." During World War II Kunitz was a conscientious objector.  He had wished to join the Medical Corps, but eventually he served three years in the army as kitchen porter or digging latrinens largely in North Carolina, where he also edited an Army news magazine and wrote for the Air Transport Commant. "A combination of pneumonia, scarlet fever, and just downright humiliation almost did me in," Kunitz later recalled. In 1945 he was discharged with the rank of staff sergeant. He spent a year in Santa Fe on a Guggengeim grant and began his teaching career at Bennington College, where he replaced his close friend, the poet Theodore Roethke who suffered from a bout of manic depression. Since then Kunitz held many teaching posts, among others in Yale, Princeton, Rutgers, the New School for Social Research, and Columbia University in the graduate writing program.

In the early 1960s Kunitz saw the state of American poetry higher than it ever has been, and called it a "Silver Age." Compared to British poets their American colleagues took more risks, but the Beat poets according to Kunitz managed only produce squeals and bleats after Allen Ginsberg's Howl. He was not particularly enthusiastic about experimental poetry as such – "A writer is experimental or dead. Most of the writers, however, who insist on labelling themselves in capital letters as experimental are merely betraying their insecurity." (from 'Poetry's Silver Age' in Writing in America, ed. by John Fischer and Robert B. Silvers, 1962)

You have your language too, 

an eerie medley of clicks 

and hoots and trills, 

location-notes and love calls. 

(from 'The Wellfleet Whale')

Kuniz travelled in several countries in Europe and Africa on lecture and reading tours. In 1967 Kunitz visited the Soviet Union, travelling from Moscow to Tbilisi. This journey inspired him to translate poems from such Russian writers as Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Andrei Voznesensky.

Kunitz's several literary awards include the Pulitzer Prize, Bollingen Prize, National Endowment for the Arts Senior Fellowship, Harriet Monroe Award, and Ford Foundation Award. In 1993 he received the National Medal of the Arts in 1993 and in 1999 an 'In Celebration of Writers' award from Poets & Writers. At the age of ninety, he won a National Book Award. Kunitz was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He served as Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress in the mid-1970s and in the 1980s he was the first State Poet of New York. In 1968 Kunitz founded in Provincetown the Fine Arts Work Center, a resident community of American artists and writers. With Elizabeth Kray he founded in 1985 Poets House on Spring Street in SoHo.

Kunitz was married three times. In 1930, he married Helen Pearce, a poet. They restored in Wormwood Hill, Connecticut a farmhouse which was destroyed by a tornado. After the divorce in 1937 he never saw her again. Two years later he married Eleanor Evans, an actress. With her Kunitz raised chickens and planted trees in New Hope, Pennsylvania. From 1958 he was married to the painter Elise Asher, who died in 2004. For her Kunitz's wrote one of his most moving lines in 'Touch Me' (1995): "Darling, do you remember / the man you married? Touch me, / remind me who I am." For a long period Kunitz divided his time between Greenwich Village and Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he was occupied by his 2,000-square-foot terraced garden facing the bay. The garden was a subject of many of Kunitz's poems, and it became also a source of renewal for him after a cardiac irregularities and exhaustion in 2003. Kunitz died of pneumonia on May 14, 2006, at his home in Manhattan. His last book was The Wild Braid (2005), a collection of essays and conversations.

For further reading: The Light Within the Light: Portraits of Donald Hall, Richard Wilbur, Maxine Kumin & Stanley Kunitz by Jeanne Braham (2007); To Stanley Kunitz With Love: From Poet Friends for His 96th Birthday, ed. by Stanley Moss (2001); Interviews and Encounters With Stanley Kunitz by S. Kunitz (1990); A Celebration for Stanley Kunitz: On His Eightieth Birthday by Stanley Moss (1986); Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry by Gregory Orr (1985); Stanley Kunitz by Marie Henault (1980); Contemporary Poets, ed. by James Vinson (1975); World Authors 1950-1970, ed. by John Wakeman (1975)

Selected works:

Intellectual Things, 1930

Living Authors, 1931 (editor, as Dilly Tante, with Howard Haycraft and W.C. Hadden)

Authors Today and Yesterday, 1933 (editor, with H. Haycraft and W.C. Hadden)

The Junior Book of Authors, 1934 (editor, with H. Haycraft)

British Authors of the Nineteeth Century, 1936 (editor, with H. Haycraft)

American Authors 1600-1900, 1938 (editor, with H. Haycraft)

Twentieth Century Authors, 1942 (editor, with H. Haycraft)

Passport to the War: A Selection of Poems, 1944

British Authors Before 1800, 1952 (editor, with H. Haycraft)

Twentieth Century Authors, 1955 (editor)

Selected Poems 1928-1958, 1958 (Pulitzer Prize)

Poems of John Keats, 1964 (editor, with Vineta Colby)

Antiworld, by Andrei Voznesensky, 1966 (translator, with others)

European Authors 1000-1900, 1967 (editor, with Vineta Colby)

Antiworld and the Fifth Ace, 1967 (translator, with others)

The Yale Series of Younger Poets, 1969-77 (editor)

The Testing-Tree, 1971

Stolen Apples, by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1972 (translator, with others)

Poems of Akhmatova, 1973 (editor and translator, with Max Hayward)

The Terrible Treshold, Selected Poems 1940-1970, 1974

Story under Full Sail by Andrei Voznesensky, 1974 (translator)

The Coat Without a Seam, Sixty Poems 1930-1972, 1974

A Kind of Order, A Kind of Folly: Essays and Conversations, 1975

The Lincoln Relics, 1978

Orchard Lamps by Ivan Drach, 1978 (co-translator)

The Poems of Stanley Kunitz 1928-1978, 1979

The Wellfleet Whale and Companion Poems, 1983

Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays, 1985

The Essential Blake, 1987 (editor)

The Ageless Spirit, 1992

Passing Through: The Later Poems New and Selected, 1995 (The National Book Award in Poetry)

The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 2000

The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden, 2005 (with Genine Lentine, Marnie Crawford Samuelson)

The Layers

 I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.  




Touch Me

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that's late,
it is my song that's flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it's done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.