An Interview with Nidia Hernández
For the last three decades, Nidia Hernández has been a leading figure in the world of Latin American poetics. Her radio show, La Maja Desnuda, has served as an archive for poets across continents and eras, and has survived censorship from the Maduro administration. Over the course of several exchanges, Hernández and I discussed the history of her show, fleeing Venezuela, and her newest project with Arrowsmith Press.
“If you want to get closer to poetry,” Nidia told me, “you have to look like her: elusive, unattainable, silent.”
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Jonny Lipshin: La Maja Desnuda has been on the air for more than three decades. How did the project start? Can you describe how the show evolved into its multimodal format?
Nidia Hernández: The Nude Maja began its broadcasts on October 5, 1988, in Caracas, Venezuela, on La Emisora Cultural de Caracas, FM. They commissioned me with the poetry segment in a radio magazine with different topics: music, astrology, philosophy, gastronomy, the magazine did not progress, but I stayed with the idea and sat down to modulate the proposal with my friend, the poet Carmen Leonor Ferro and we put on the air: The Nude Maja.
The first program was Poesia Latinoamericana en la voz de la mujer, with Blanca Varela, Fina García Marruz, Cristina Peri Rossi, and Ida Vitale, among other poets. Since then, La Nude Maja has devoted himself to collecting the poets' own voices, because we understood that Hertzian waves were perfect for transmitting and listening to poets on the radio.
In 1998 we won the Radio Alfredo Cortina Biennial. Then in 2004, we made a digital version of the program on the internet, lamajadesnuda.com, which in 2005 won the Award in Venezuela: The Best of dot.com (Literature Category).
In 2011 lamajadesnuda.com "was selected by the Grand Jury of the World Summit Awards among the 157 nominated countries, as one of the best electronic content applications in the world, in the E-Culture & Heritage category".
JL: The program has an extensive database of poets, throughout the centuries, from all over the world. How have you balanced the archive function of La Maja Desnuda with the search for contemporary works? What effect has the web had on finding poets old and new?
NH: We have a very important collection of poets' voices, which we have compiled and obtained, thanks to institutions from different countries, to trips we have made in that search, and also thanks to Poetry Festivals and Book Fairs.
The Embassy of India and Brazil in Venezuela gave us the voices of Rabindranath Tagore and Drummond de Andrade respectively. We have also broadcast the voice of Ungaretti, of Pasolini, the voice of Sophia de Mello was courtesy of her children, especially her daughter Maria Andresen who received us in what was the house of Sophia de Mello in Lisbon. We owe the voice of Pär Lagerkvist, Elsa Grave, and other Swedish poets to the Swedish Institute and to a trip to Sweden and Finland that we did in the 90's. We recently recorded directly Adonis, Blanca Varela, Cees Noteboom, Charles Simic, Luisa Castro, Darío Jaramillo Agudelo, Gail Mazur, Marie Howe, just to name a few poets.
It is interesting to mix contemporary authors with the Masters in the same site because it is as if the great family of Poetry meets timelessly.
JL: In addition to the namesake of the project, how important is Francisco de Goya's painting to your La Maja Desnuda?
NH: When we chose the name The Nude Maja, in October 1988, the Radio was alone, in its frequency, not like now that we have more and more multi-media windows, the Radio is essentially: voice, sound, hearing. We chose a Visual element; a painting by Goya; The Nude Maja, to work on radio and play with that the sound is seen, the smell is auditory, the taste is palpable. Listen to a painting on the radio to share the experience of poetry with the audience.
JL: Before coming to the United States, I understand that La Maja Desnuda was (still) the only radio program in Venezuela dedicated to poetry. How did the Maduro administration affect La Maja Desnuda? Did you or the show experience any censorship?
NH: For a long time we were the only poetry program on the radio in Venezuela, the particularity of La Maja was to transmit the voices of the poets themselves. When Chavismo arrived in Venezuela, they created a policy of communicational hegemony to appropriate or subject to the media to his political project, La Emisora Cultural de Caracas, was not spared from that assault and went from being a Cultural Station to being an Ideological station, and a propaganda station for Chavismo.
We moved to the Classic Channel of Radio Nacional de Venezuela, which was still classic and was directed by a musician I knew, the country was already severely threatened, and this channel was also taken over by the dictatorship. I stayed there with the idea of taking half an hour of political propaganda from the “revolution” a week and offering poetry in exchange.
In 2013 The Nude Maja was serving 25 years uninterrupted on the air, and the new director prohibited the program from being broadcast. Everything was uncertain in Venezuela, either you folded the regime or you left. 80 of the 155 newspapers that circulated until 2017 disappeared, 46 radio stations were closed and television also ended. So I made the decision to "emigrate radially" to Valencia, Spain, since 2014 to La Emisora de la Universidad Politécnica de Valencia. We were also until the beginning of this year 2020, in a Station in Mannheim, Germany: BermudaFunk.
Our programs can be heard both live; Wednesdays at 4:00 p.m. in Spain, as delayed, as they are posted on the UPV Radio site: https://www.upv.es/rtv/radio/la-maja-desnuda
JL: I saw you had a residency at Penn State a couple of years ago. How did it come to fruition? What was the nature of your stay?
NH: As you know, since 2017 I have been an immigrant in the USA, but I began to participate in the Miami Book Fair in 2014. We arrived thanks to a grant from the United States Embassy in Venezuela, (When I operated in Venezuela, it no longer works because the American Embassy was closed). Then we covered the years: 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 and this allowed us to interview a very important part of American poets. As you point out, we were invited to Penn State University, by the English Department in order to record poets, not only from Penn State University but also other poets from Philadelphia. I recorded 27 poets from the region in 2018, a very important experience for me, the recording days were very enriching and walking, talking, eating, and living only with poets, so kind, and who were my only company, gave me the gift of feeling again that in the world there was a place for me. I'm not going to stop to describe what a foreigner feels, a foreigner with no country to return to, and worst of all, without my books that remained in Caracas. They don't know, but I’ll say it now, the poets of Philadelphia gave me a kind of faith and confidence in the world that I needed at the time. Some names: Shara McCallum, Gabeba Baderon, Julia Kasrdof, Emily Grosholz, Katie Hays, Meg Day, Sara Grosmann, Robin Becker, Todd Davis, Erin Murphy, and Katie Bode-Lange, among others.
JL: Is there a part of the world you would like La Maja Desnuda to travel to and which it has yet to?
NH: In these times of confinement in which traveling, being outside, is a threat to others, because I take refuge in the order of the stars not to go out, to seclude myself and resort to virtual windows to find out about family, friends and of poets. When the quarantine is over, I'd like to tour New England.
JL: What's next for you and La Maja Desnuda? (I would love to hear about your own poetry).
NH: Thanks to the benefits of our digitized world, I continue to record the programs from here and send them over the Internet. Since 2014 I haven't been to a recording studio, the times of sound engineers, of microphones on tables, have passed, and I almost don't miss them. The Nude Maja goes on, her digital backup www.lamajadesnuda.com as well. I am very well surrounded, I am fortunate, I live and interact with noble and beautiful people, near where I am there is a pond, the sun reveals the nuances of the trees since time immemorial and my myopic eyes register it; I see turtles, fish, birds, butterflies, I keep my friends, I know about them and I can watch and caress a dog and a cat.
At the moment I'm ordering and writing a book, like someone who doesn't want to finish it and doesn't want to teach either. What I have learned with La Maja Desnuda, among other things, is that if you want to get closer to poetry, you have to look like her: elusive, unattainable, silent.
Thanks to Arrowsmith Press and its Director Askold Melnyczuk, I am doing a Latin American Poetry Curation that we started with the poets: Rafael Cadenas, Venezuela, Blanca Varela, Peru, Fina García Marruz, Cuba, in which we offer the voices of the poets and are read in English, by Askold Melniczuk https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/poesiaudio On the other hand, I am creating a collection on Spotify and iVoox with the recordings that I have been compiling here in the US Putting them online at the service of all is the idea. https://open.spotify.com/show/067eGjWuudbROJ7SY0UPkc?si=HgGxvNqnRvSHRUHBRdi-pw
Important poets like: Marie Howe, Charles Simic, Gail Mazur, Robert Hass, Joy Harjo, Peter Balakian, Shara McCallum, Eileen Myles, Robert Pinsky, and Edward Hirsch, just to name a few. It is a larger project that will include our entire voice archive. I'm doing it.
Jonny, I really appreciate the opportunity Arrowsmith Press gives me to be grateful for this present time. Let me also thank and name Marie Howe, Sheila Gallagher, and Jude and Matthew Littell, my family here.
Jonny Baltazar Lipshin is a writer based in Dorchester, MA. His work has been published by Oyster River Pages and Flaunt Magazine. He is an MFA Candidate at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he is also a Graduate Teaching Fellow. Before moving east, Jonny was an elementary school teacher in Los Angeles.