Gift Exchanges
by Stephen Collis, Gloria Personne, Alfred Noyes + the poetry of Ramon Fernandez

[Gloria Personne on Ramon Fernandez]

The Plebeian Cantos and Hypothetical Poetry

Even though I am not really a poet myself, my master is—or was—a Spanish poet who died in 1936 under mysterious circumstances. Even more remarkable, perhaps, is the fact that this poet is known only to have published a single, sixteen page poem (or fragment of a longer work).

This hypothetical larger work, the so-called “Plebeian Cantos,” exists only in a few fragmentary notes, sketches, and jottings (there are diagrams too) found amongst Ramon Fernandez’s papers. Mostly destroyed or presumably lost along with his body (somewhere on the Aragon front of the Spanish Civil War, late in 1936), these “papers” largely consist of a single slim notebook with a number of pieces of paper (notes, drafts of poems, and letters) inserted therein, and given to a fellow Catalan only days before the poet’s disappearance.

Or, alternatively, the “Plebeian Cantos” exist complete, whole, perfect—written by Fernandez and lost and/or destroyed by him; that we cannot actually read the “Cantos” does not mean that they do not (did not) exist. They live on as uncertain legends of themselves. They are the past, now, in its complete and timeless pastness. Perfectly inaccessible.

I have read the entire “Cantos” in my imagination. Long nights alone up late devouring them page after page after page. They are fabulous—like nothing in any language’s poetry. Selfishly, I will keep them to myself.

Or, as Stephen Collis has notably suggested, the “Quixote Variations,” Fernandez’s only known published poem (Litoral, November 1920, and recently republished in a new translation by Bookthug, in Toronto), is a part of, an introduction to, a foyer for, the “Cantos.” Thus we can indeed read the poem, or at least, its précis. If we do so, in English, it is best in Alfred Noyes able and exact translation (Bookthug 2008).

I say “foyer,” because Fernandez’s work, in conception, is decidedly architectural, or at least spatial. The “Quixote Variations” were to provide an entry to the longer work, which would build “up and out from there” (the notes indicate this much). In the loss or lack of any detailed notes, Fernandez is not unlike that other great Catalan architect, Antonio Gaudi—minus the conservative Catholicism. The “Plebeian Cantos” are his Sagrada Familia, impossible, incantatory, and incomplete.

Nothing is as dreary as the actualized. The pure potential, the never seen, only half glimpsed, keeps us forever on our toes, on the look out for the rest of what we will never catch again. The purely potential places the future deep in the past, where it continues to reside, awaiting fulfillment. This is why we should resist the completion of Gaudi’s building, and Fernandez’s poem: they should remain a hint, a fragment, a possibility.

What Noyes’s translation gives us is Fernandez’s poem with its incompletion intact (if that makes sense). Noyes stays close to Fernandez’s distorted syntax and circular, looping phrasing. If the Spanish poet, in his pure marginality (we can all aspire to such a true absence), once threw a stone into a pond and watched its rings circle out and slowly disappear, Noyes’s gift is that he has managed to step up to the side of that exact same pond, pick up a stone much like that other stone thrown some seventy years ago, and has thrown his stone into the exact same spot that his predecessors fell. Now we watch Noyes’s rock’s rings repeat the path that Fernandez’s sailed, into a translated oblivion.

I am lucky enough to know Noyes and Collis, and to listen in on their debates about Fernandez. Bookthug’s Quixote Variations, with Noyes’s introduction and Collis’s afterward, give some sense of their contest. As someone who is not a poet, I have the pleasure of not having to judge, but rather, to enjoy. We three form a little gift exchange circuit here. I asked Collis for a poem on Noyes. He responded with one—but also, a poem for me. At the same time, Noyes presented me a new poem from Fernandez—taken from his tattered notebook and dated August 1 1936. In return for all these gifts, I try this little prose. Taken together, these pieces form the outbuildings of our collective hypothetical poetry. We are plebeians all, camped on the outskirts of our master Fernandez’s soaring but unknown (because unknowable) poetry.