An Interview with Cristina Peri Rossi
Winner of the 2021 Miguel de Cervantes Award
Cristina Peri Rossi is one of the most acclaimed voices in Hispanic letters. Born in 1941 in Montevideo to a family of Italian immigrants, she began publishing at a very young age, winning most of the significant literary prizes in Uruguay before going into exile to Spain in 1972 where she became a citizen in 1975. Peri Rossi is the only female writer linked to the phenomenon known as the Latin American Boom alongside male colleagues such as Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa. She was also good friends with Julio Cortazar who dedicated his Six Poems for Criss to her. Cortazar also helped her flee to Paris in 1974 when the Spanish government collaborated with the Uruguayan regime in denying her a Spanish passport. Peri Rossi has continued writing prolifically. She has published over 40 novels, essays, translations, short stories, and poetry collections. Often focusing on political, social and gender issues, her work has been translated into over 15 languages. She’s been honored with, among others, the Rafael Alberti International Poetry Prize, the Don Quijote Poetry prize, the Jose Donoso Ibero-American Literature award in 2019.
The following is from an interview with Nidia Hernández:
Nidia Hernández: What is poetry for you?
Cristina Peri Rossi: Poetry is a perception, a state of mind. As a subjective perception, as a state of mind, it is not found in the objects themselves; it is found in the projection we make of our way of feeling and looking at an object, person, or situation.
When the beloved asks Bécquer — a great poet — “what is poetry?” and he replies: “Poetry is you,” she makes that projection: she places outside, in the woman he loves, what he feels: he sees her as the incarnation of poetry. We project onto a landscape, an object, a situation, the emotions and feelings — or the thoughts — that we carry within us. Because poetry is not only in the verse. Turner's shipwrecks, Caspar D. Friedrich's seas, Hopper's paintings, tangos, scenes from a movie, a perfume, a look and an equation, the resolution of a theorem can be poetic. Antonio Machado said that intelligence did not write verses, but he was undoubtedly referring to rational intelligence; I know men and women of science who are poetically entranced by Einstein's relativity equation. Now, not all emotions are poetic; someone who turns them into poetry is needed: who projects and who perceives that projection. Double mirror: who perceives, what is perceived and who perceives what another perceived.
NH: How do you approach a verse? How does the poem shape you? Do you have some ritual or special need? A place, a time, some particular conditions?
CPR: I write from an emotion (or rather, and I quote Bécquer again: “I don't write when I'm excited, I write when I remember the emotion”) and I get emotional with extraordinary ease and intensity, I don't follow any ritual; I would say that poetry assails me, surprises me, enlightens me. And when he does, I go into a trance state, so I can't think of any ritual. In a poem I published a long time ago, I called this “access” of poetic perception a “state of grace.” Almost always it is a verse that assails me at any moment, but that without a doubt, was formed in my unconscious from everything lived, dreamed, felt, desired, or longed for. Once a journalist asked me how long it took me to write a poem. I replied: “All my life.” She was not referring to the chronological “time,” but to me and my circumstances, as Ortega y Gasset would say. No poet can accurately recognize the path that led him to that line, from which he drew the poem, like a vein in the cave.
Nostalgia seems to me an inexhaustible source of poetry. We want to retain what we lose, and we lose at all times. Right now I am losing what I write: this moment will not be repeated. So maybe, in a few days, I can write a poem that goes something like this: “The afternoon was hot and gray // distant, ancient music played // and I answered Nidia Hernández’s questions//….” It is just an example. A poem from my book General Linguistics says: "We write because the things we want to talk about // are not there." Ontologically, nothing is: everything is fugitive. For this reason, there will always be poetry, which pursues the ephemeral as the archer pursues the fleeing bison.
NH: Do you review, erase, recompose, return to the poem, let it walk alone? What is your creative process?
CPR: I don't work the poem. Either it flows like a river flows, or it isn't. I don't work it. I'm impatient with writing and I don't set schedules, I don't correct, I don't go back over the written poem (the same thing happens to me with narrative). I love not knowing what the next verse will say and finding out. If I knew rationally, I wouldn't write it. Only later do I discover that in an unconscious way I knew. The ancient Greeks spoke of the Muses; I call them messages from the unconscious. Before, I wrote the poems by hand, on any paper, in notebooks, on loose sheets; now, for functional economy — back pain — and because I like to see them as if they were printed, I prefer the computer.
NH: What is the function of a writer, if there is one?
CPR: The function of the writer appears for the first time in history in Egypt, during the reign of the Pharaohs. They appointed some very important officials, the scribes, and gave them two functions: to describe the present, and to predict the future. These two functions are fundamental: the first is to bear witness to everything that exists, so that if a meteorite destroys the earth but the books of the scribes are saved, there is a record of how the world was. As for predicting the future, this is a transcendental function: if we, in the present, know how to read the signs of the future, we will be able to save ourselves, to guide the direction of History. And remember, there is an equivalent figure in classical literature: the tragic Cassandra, condemned to foretell without being heard. It is a terrible destiny, perhaps the most dramatic that can be conceived: to speak without being heard. One cannot imagine a greater loneliness (in The Aeneid, she tries to save Corebo, her lover, telling him to flee from certain death, but Corebo does not listen to her, and dies). You have to be very lucid and very diabolical to imagine a prophetess who isn’t listened to. Even Jesus had listeners, but Cassandra did not. Well, in general, I think that the Pharaohs got it right, and the "civic" tasks of writers are still to record the present and foretell the future. With humility, but with fortitude. To record the present is an almost impossible task, hence the humility: I will record what I can, because the whole is unapproachable (Balzac tried it with 19th century French society in his great project, The Human Comedy). It ranges from describing exile to how certain couples make love, how Hitler came to power and how women menstruate. As for the future, Kafka, in his conversations with Janouch said, "Literature is sometimes a clock that goes forward." Unfortunately, most writers have followed Cassandra's fate: they foretell without being heard. And I don't mean to say that their prophecies are always true, but they usually get more things right than the plans of the ministers of economy or finance.
I subscribe to that tradition: record the present, read the future. I wrote a story in 1971 entitled The Children's Rebellion. In it, the coup soldiers killed the rebels, including pregnant mothers, and gave the babies to "good" families to be educated, far from their parents. I couldn't publish it at that time in Montevideo because I was censored. But I published it a couple of years later, in Venezuela, in Monte Ávila Editores. When the dictatorships of the Southern Cone fell, it became known that this had been the usual procedure of the repressors: kill the mothers and deliver the babies to families of the oligarchy or the military. I hadn't invented it: I put myself in the head of a military coup leader and the idea sprang to me, as it must have sprung to them. They were not the first. In the Spanish Civil War — I found out much later — the same thing happened. And they will have happened hundreds and thousands of times throughout history. We human beings repeat ourselves maniacally. Mostly we repeat the injustices, the cruelties.
NH: Do you consider yourself classic, traditional, modern?
CPR: I write rigorous contemporary poetry, which allows it to be universal and timeless. I am interested in the world in which I live, the time in which I live, although to know more about it, I have to find the roots and origins in the past and in other cultures. For example: to be able to admire an astrolabe and talk about it in a poem, I have to refer to the Arab culture, only in that aspect. For me it was confirmation of that intuition to find an aphorism by Rimbaud: "The poet must be modern." Modern does not mean being fashionable, but being a man interested in his time.
NH: When you write a poem, where in your poetry is the world we live in?
If I understand your question correctly — and it is a good question — you are asking me about “where am I” in relation to reality when I write a poem. Well: I like poetry — literature and art in general — much more than reality, because reality is full of uncertainty, chiaroscuro, banalities, nonsense, imbecility, arrogance, errors; on the other hand, in art, the interpretation is guaranteed and uncertainty is a game (as it happens in police novels that I never read). We need art because it is an order in the midst of everyday chaos and nonsense. Psychologists and parents often wonder why children obsessively need the story we've told them hundreds of times not to change a single word, everything to be identical to the first time. I think it is because children have unconsciously understood that the story is an order: it configures, it structures a fiction with overtones of reality. If the little ant (from The Little Traveling Ant, which fascinated me as a girl) had a red dress when she left the anthill, the second time we told the child the story the dress cannot change color. That would be traumatic for the boy or girl, who needs certainty. The first certainty they need is that things do not change to the liking of the person telling them. We prefer art because reality is better structured in it. Even if it is a diabolical and horror movie, or a drama, or a gothic, tragic landscape: even for horror we need an order. When there is a serial killer, in reality, the hypotheses immediately arise: he is paranoid, mentally ill, suffered childhood trauma... what a relief when we find an explanation. The function of religions is the same: to give meaning to suffering, inequalities, injustice, death, accidents, pain. Also to beauty. Beauty is haunting. The restlessness of beauty that was perceived by Stendhal, among others (Journey to Italy) is the subject of my novel Love is a Hard Drug, because I also suffer from Stendhal syndrome: beauty provokes physical and psychological reactions in me, a tremendous excitement, a disorder of thought. In literature, even evil and cruelty are better ordered. I can't stand the Marquis de Sade (with apologies to my dear Julio Cortázar and Alejandra Pizarnik) but without a doubt I would better bear the stories of him than having lived them in reality.
NH: Tell us about Cristina Peri Rossi in relation to art, religion, community, poetry and power, exile…
CPR: Art is like religion: it reassures us, in a certain sense, it gratifies us in the face of the pain and disorder of the world. Gives meaning to experiences. I imagine a society without religion, but never without art.
Civically, I have fought for all the causes that have seemed fair and noble to me, and I continue to love education, pedagogy, what the Ancients called “paideia.”
I still love music, which is poetry. And poetry is music.
I think that one of the functions of literature is social and political criticism, but away from any dogma. I always said that if I hadn't had to go into exile from Uruguay for a right-wing dictatorship, I would have gone into exile for a left-wing one, and once I met Milan Kundera in Paris, at a colloquium, and we criticized the same things, he from a communist dictatorship, me from fascism.
The best definition I know about power is that power means being able to cause suffering, and for that it disgusts me. And power is egocentric: it only loves itself. I prefer authority to power. Authority is the respect earned by certain ideas, certain feelings or emotions, certain people, by their quality, not by force.
As an exile that I was, my relationship with power has been one of opposition, confrontation, rejection, and they have persecuted me. I was also exiled from Francoism: surviving has been miraculous.
NH: Will you give us an anecdote, my dear Poet?
CPR: In 1976, I think, I was invited to a poets' congress in Montreal. All poets had to express themselves in French. In order to make the sessions more intense and to avoid the rigors of a tremendously cold winter, we were installed in a hotel in a forest outside of Montreal, suitably equipped. If we weren't in the sessions, we could only be in the hotel bar, or in the game room, or reading the other poets' papers. By the way: there were fifty men and only four women. I, the only Spanish speaker.
Among the guests was the excellent American poet Robert Duncan, a man much older than me (he must have been over 70 then, I was 35). I was solemnly bored in the sessions, and I looked outside: the wonderful forest of maples, red in the fall. It seemed to me the most poetic of the whole congress: the great reddish forest, with snow on the ground, fallen leaves and the perfume of the trunks (remember that the maple is the symbolic leaf of Canada). The sessions were long, slow. At one point I couldn't take it anymore: I wanted to walk through the woods, touch the leaves, the trunks, the snow. I slipped inadvertently to the door of the meeting room, and slipped away into the woods. I managed to get there without being seen, and immediately, full of pleasure, I began to caress the reddish leaves, the moss, the snow... Suddenly, I realized that someone else had managed to escape from the very tiresome sessions: the old Robert Duncan. He, like me, was ecstatic in the forest. He looked at me, we smiled at each other (we had only met at the congress) and he told me: “Ça, cést la vrai poesie” — This is true poetry. I completely agreed. Among fifty or so poets, we were the only ones who escaped to be in the midst of nature, the creator of poetry.
When the dictatorship of the Pinochet monster fell, I was invited by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chile to speak about my novel La Nave de los locos at several Chilean universities. I did it. The minister invited me to see any place I wanted. I told him that I wanted to go to Isla Negra, where Pablo Neruda had his wonderful collections of objects from the sea, and others, no less beautiful: bottles, butterflies, women's shoes, women's boots, seashells, in short: the collections that I would have liked to have, but my poverty prevented me. I had published a beautiful book of Neruda's poems and photographs of Isla Negra — which is not an island, nor is it black — and it is one of the most beautiful books that have ever been made at the Lumen Publishing House in Barcelona.
A ministry car took me — driven by Ariel, an official who had been Pinochet's wife's driver, and now was the exiles’. I was received by the director of the three houses of Neruda, converted into museums. I was fascinated. Everything I would have liked to see was there: figureheads, bottles with ships, boats, seafaring nets, knots, blown glass jars, an infinite variety of shells, butterflies, women's boots, watches... Neruda used to say: objects come to me. But unlike Neruda, I am not a collector — perhaps because I have not had his economic possibilities. It is enough for me to see the objects, I want to look at them, contemplate them, but I draw the line with having to own them (perhaps it is resignation).
Nidia Hernández was born in Venezuela, and has been living in the US since 2018. She is a poet and translator of Portuguese poetry, an editor, broadcaster, and radio producer, and a poetry curator. Nidia directs the editorial project lamajadesnuda.com, which won the 2011 WSA prize for Cultural Heritage. She curates Poesiaudio (Arrowsmith Press) and is a contributor for Mercurius Magazine. She has presented works drawn from the 31 years of her radio program (also called La maja desnuda) which has more than 1,560 broadcasts. Currently, she is broadcasting the program through UPV Radio 102.5 FM in Valencia, Spain.