José Ángel Valente

This will hopefully mark the beginning of a few different posts on some of my comments after reading and re-reading Los fragmentos de un libro futuro from José Ángel Valente, quite possibly one of the most difficult poets to fascinate me.  (Right alongside, of course Lezama Lima -- indeed, they kept correspondence and read each other's work.)

After surveying the criticism on Valente, I recently confirmed some suspicions with a friend of mine: while there has been attention given to the poet, holes are lurking everywhere in the reading of Valente:

Saber de la palabra perdida, de la palabra que es la transparencia del ser.  Antepalabra o palabra absoluta, todavía sin significación, o donde la significación es pura inminencia, matiz de todas las significaciones posibles: palabra naciente.  Tal es al palabra del claro del bosque.

The careful attention to language (so surprising from a poet) perhaps speaks to the aforementioned lack of (some) critical attention.  There is no overt gesture towards the social poetry of the 1950s, or any other ideological positioning for that matter.  His literary touchstones may also be puzzling to one in search of overt radicality, for example Saint John of the Cross.  Mysticism and christianity appear more overtly than other political shades.

In reference to the above, what is intriguing to me is the disucssion of language as something like a terrain, a comparison like Lacan's the unconscious is like a language  (cf. David Abram).  The claro del bosque (a clearing, also a title of M. Zambrano) is an iteration of the forest around it, but also a glimpse into an isolated moment.  The reference to forests and trees is also surely a reference to Saussure.  Elsewhere Valente writes of Saussure: "Un árbol se esconde en el bosque; una palabra, en las palabras.  "Bajo las palabras del poema está sembrada, distribuida, o diseminada --disjecta membra--otra palabra, un nombre...".  This leads us back to the question of the pure moment in the clearing of the linguistic forest, when is it that we recover or uncover la palabra naciente?