{"id":270396,"date":"2009-04-15T16:00:10","date_gmt":"2009-04-15T16:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2009\/04\/15\/pluriverse\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:24:07","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:24:07","slug":"pluriverse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2009\/04\/15\/pluriverse\/","title":{"rendered":"Pluriverse"},"content":{"rendered":"

Readers of English, thank your gods: the breadth of Ernesto Cardenal\u2019s amazing poetic career is now available for your consumption thanks to New Directions and the recently published Pluriverse.<\/em> Spanning fifty-six years, the book presents Cardenal in all his guises: revolutionary, spiritualist, chronicler of man\u2019s inhumanity to man, chilling visionary, and cosmic quasi-historian. The poems in this collection are often long, deceptively assessable, and quite dazzling.<\/p>\n

\n

They told me you were in love with another man
\nand then I went off to my room
\nand I wrote that article against the government
\nthat landed me in jail.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When I first encountered the above four lines\u2014the eighth section of Cardenal\u2019s long poem \u201cEpigrams\u201d\u2014I was sure I was reading a Latin American writer concerned, a la Neruda, with love and political strife in equal measure. I was right, but little did I know of the complete depth of Cardenal; little did I know that this poem, which is wonderful, was not necessarily a perfect synecdoche of the poet\/priest\/activist\u2019s total abilities. \u201cEpigrams\u201d is early Cardenal, written in a period of reaction against Somoza in Nicaragua. Though its deep political leanings manifest before long, the poet as sad bastard makes an appearance first:<\/p>\n

\n

This will be my revenge
\nthat one day you\u2019ll hold in your hands the book of a famous poet
\nand you\u2019ll read these lines that the author wrote for you
\nand you won\u2019t even know it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Reading the poem alongside the more famous \u201cZero Hour,\u201d one can see the development beginning in Cardenal from romantic young poet to mature writer documenting injustice:<\/p>\n

\n

     . . . the United Fruit Company
\nwith its revolutions for the acquisition of concessions
\nand exemptions of millions in import duties
\nand export duties, revisions of old concessions
\nand grants for new exploitations,
\nviolations of contracts, violations
\nof the Constitution<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cZero Hour\u201d remains one of the most striking examples of the poet as witness. The artful translation by Donald Walsh (one of seven translators contributing to this collection) captures the horror and history permeating throughout Cardenal\u2019s long, unsettling poem: <\/p>\n

\n

Oh, to be able to sleep in your own bed tonight
\nwithout the fear of being pulled out of bed and taken out of your house,
\nthe fear of knocks at the door or doorbells ringing in the night!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Pluriverse<\/em> jumps from these early works to contemplative, spiritual poems that fuse Cardenal\u2019s socio-political concerns with his religious vocation\u2014\u201cIn respect of riches, just or unjust, \/ of goods be they ill-gotten or well-gotten: \/ All riches are unjust.\u201d (from \u201cUnrighteous Mammon (Luke 16:9))\u2014sorrowful meditations, such as his \u201cPrayer for Marilyn Monroe\u201d and the nightmarish vision of his classic \u201cApocalypse,\u201d a poem that seems all the more prophetic when read today:<\/p>\n

\n

And the angel gave me a check drawn on the National City Bank
\nand said unto me: Go thou cash this check
\nbut no bank would for all the banks were bankrupt
\nSkyscrapers were as though they had never been
\nA million simultaneous fires yet not one firefighter
\nnor a phone to summon an ambulance nor were there any ambulances
\nnor was there enough plasma in all the world
\n                                to help the injured of a single city\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Cardenal always keeps his eye fixed firmly to his subject, even when bouncing from place to place, as in his \u201cTrip to New York,\u201d a poem that offers North Americans a look at a foreigner\u2019s view of our rampant capitalism:<\/p>\n

\n

                      . . . And I look
\nat the deep canyon, the sunken gorge of buildings
\nwhere the hidden persuaders<\/em> hide behind their windows
\n          selling automobiles of True Happiness, canned Relief (for 30\u00a2)
\n                ** The Coca-Cola Company**
\nwe cut through the canyon of windows and trillions of dollars<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

A seller of old books in the Village in love with my shirt
\n              my cotton peasant shirt from Nicaragua
\nhe asks me who designed it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Reading Pluriverse<\/em> from cover to cover is, in effect, charting Cardenal from his beginnings to his current, Cosmic Canticle<\/em> era writings\u2014poems that chart the progression of the universe, the Earth, and the individual all at once. The new poems in Pluriverse<\/em> strive to balance all of creation on the tip of the poet\u2019s pen, fusing a connection between man and the cosmos:<\/p>\n

\n

Our cycle follows the star cycle:
\nstars are born, grow, die; our cycle is short
\n            \u2014 theirs too.
\nThey seem stable
\nbut like us they\u2019re slowly dying.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

If the universe is expanding
\nfrom which center is it expanding?
\nOr is every point the center?
\nSo then the center of the universe
\nis also our galaxy,
\nis also our planet
\n(and the girl who once was for me).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The cosmic\/mythical quality of these new works matches the storied life of their author. Cardenal, at age eighty-four, after political opposition, after serving as ambassador for the Sandinistas, after forming the Our Lady of Solentiname commune, after being publicly admonished by Pope John Paul II, after being harassed by the current incarnation of the Sandinistas, has earned the right to look not only backward but beyond, into the furthest regions of space. His findings match the remarkable quality of his past poetry. This is essential reading. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Readers of English, thank your gods: the breadth of Ernesto Cardenal\u2019s amazing poetic career is now available for your consumption thanks to New Directions and the recently published Pluriverse. Spanning fifty-six years, the book presents Cardenal in all his guises: revolutionary, spiritualist, chronicler of man\u2019s inhumanity to man, chilling visionary, and cosmic quasi-historian. The poems […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[1836,22336,56,22346,10576,22356],"class_list":["post-270396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-cwp","tag-ernesto-cardenal","tag-new-directions","tag-pluriverse","tag-poetry","tag-vincent-francone"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270396"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":353276,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270396\/revisions\/353276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}