I find José Ángel Valente's poetry fascinating. Apparently his work is known for its difficulty - possibly because he tends to depart from concrete social/historical realities and dwells in the possibilities of the written word. (In my mind this is all for the best!) Furthermore, I am not so sure that he has nothing to say on social or political realities. As I was reading more of Punto cero (a rather large anthology of various collections), his (mystical) fascination with the word (lyric) allows for a variety of different (albeit difficult) reformulations of reality. I would think this might have something to do with his fascination with Lezama Lima. For example, his poem "José Lezama Lima":
Yo que he viajado
acaso he visto una serpiente
en la mesa del maestro cantor.
Y, sin embargo, ignoro aún que he visto,
aunque bien sepa
que la palabra, recayendo otra vez sobre mí,
ha de decirme a qué porción de tu secreto pertenezco.
Tal vez, mientras tú hablabas,
yo pude adivinar aquella oscura
complicidad de tu nombre con la luz
o acaso tú mismo me hayas dado
por abundancia de ti el sésamo
desde tu rapidísima quietud.
Pero yo vovleré.
Yo que he viajado volveré.
Y acaso vea entonces al maestro cantor
en el lúcido ojo de la misma serpiente.
There are multiple folds of time here and each express a different sense of uncertainty (as we all should when considering the oeuvre of Lezama). The first lines narrate a possible string of events -- perhaps there was a snake. Yet the futurity in the last lines contains an uncanny sense of return.
I can totally relate this to my reading of Lezama.
In Lezama, there is repetition that becomes obsessive. It always seems to be the same lines of Pascal, Góngora, Yi King, yet its situatedness in Lezama's topography alters the image. The serpent on the table of the master poet (singer) becomes a trope, but his texts always work like sea changes, the tide's ebb and flow alter the form of the animal... and of the visible and invisible poetic content.
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