Rafael Cadenas: Poetry and Conscience
Rafael Cadenas is ninety this year and his long life has been dedicated to caring for language, using it to disclose a vision of reality as near to true as language itself can allow. He was born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, in 1930, went to a school attended by other well-known writers — Salvador Garmendia, J.M.Briceño Guerrero — and began to write poetry at an early age. His interest in politics also began when he was very young, and his activity as a Communist led to his being exiled in Trinidad for four years, until 1957.
Since then he has lived in Caracas, and the events of his life have been intellectual and intimate rather than active. He was one of the founders of the cultural and political journal Table Redonda (Round Table), which, in the 1960s, defended a Marxist perspective on happenings in Venezuela, and published many new and important writers. Subsequently he belonged to no particular group. For many years he taught at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, including courses in English literature.
His works include essays, aphorisms, and translations, but it is as a poet that he has spoken most strongly to a wide audience — in Venezuela and, after a time, in the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. He has been awarded many prizes, including the National Prize for Literature, the prize of the Feria Internacional de Literatura de Guadalajara, the Federico García Lorca international poetry prize, and the prestigious Premio Reina Sofía.
Rafael Cadenas is in every sense Venezuela's senior poet, a very human voice that for sixty years has accompanied thinking people, bringing pleasure, understanding, the recognition of affinity, and (especially in later years) consolation and encouragement for his insistence on truth — the unsparing acceptance of things as they are.
He has always been interested in religious traditions, especially Eastern, but his own approach to the spiritual or essential does away with labels or affiliations. He prefers to speak of life, reality, being — his whole career consists of the effort to allow being to shine through language. His words seek, and at the same time reveal, what is beyond words through immediate intuition, the perception of the timeless in the usual, truth revealed by the intense desire to be part of it. His poetry almost always uses the first person, which does not imply a narcissistic obsession with self, but the use of himself, severely and courageously, as an instrument to explore the doubts of his own authenticity, and the relationship of consciousness and language with being.
The poems of his first published book Una Isla (An Island, 1958) are relatively simple, celebrating a love and its setting on a tropical island, though they are aware of the fragility of the festive present. His next book, Los Cuadernos del Destierro (The Exile Notebooks, 1960), also arises from Cadenas' experience of political exile in Trinidad, but employs a contrasting language, exuberant and richly inventive, exceptional in his career. It also becomes concerned with questions about his own identity and his connection to a challenging reality: "My horoscope marked me out for a life of plenitude, but clinging to torment." Doubt begins to undermine all his sensations and reactions.
This doubt was to follow him through many years and many books, filling his poems with contradictions, alienations, and uncertainties. In the years after his return to Caracas, the crisis of confidence produced many of his best-known and most-quoted poems. Falsas maniobras (False maneuvers, 1966) includes the poems ‘My Little Gymnasium’:
It consists of a bolster that I beat to a musical accompaniment.
A sand bag where I unload the whole weight of the streets.
A mat for doing contortions that cause forgetfulness.
A triangular hole where I hide so as not to see.
A rope where I punish myself for all the caution of the day.
A contraption in the shape of an O that I fold myself into to evade the complaints of my conscience.
... and 'Failure':
You've offered me only nakedness.
It's true that you taught me roughly — and you cauterized
me yourself! — but you also gave me the
happiness of not fearing you.
Cadenas' most celebrated poem, 'Defeat,' belongs to this period:
I who have never had a trade
who before any competitor have felt weak
who have lost the best qualifications for life
who as soon as I arrive at a place already want to leave
.....
who refuse to recognize facts
who always slobber over my story
who was born an imbecile and worse than an imbecile
.....
who will never wear a tie
who can't find my body
.....
I will pick myself up more ridiculous than ever to go on mocking
others and myself till judgment day.
These poems have an ingredient of exaggeration and irony; if the poet's dissatisfaction, and the harsh treatment he inflicts on himself, were to be taken completely seriously, they would be tragic, and they are not. Instead, their wholehearted challenge to the inadequacy of the self, and by implication of the reality with which the poet is confronted, is exhilarating.
Intemperie (Exposure, 1977) marks a radical change of both tone and form in Cadenas' poetry. He has accepted his inadequacy, his lacks, without protest or irony — in fact he welcomes them:
Life,
demolish me,
sweep away everything,
leave only
the empty shell, not to be filled again,
scour, scour without reservations
and drop what you were holding,
keep nothing.
A new style takes over, a coupling of language to breath, an extreme paring down of images and precision of wording, which will last through the rest of Cadenas' published work. As he writes in 'Ars poetica':
Let each word carry what it says.
Let it be like the tremor that sustains it.
Let it maintain itself like a heartbeat.
It is significant that this new tone arises together with the first appearance of the female figure, which will be the focus of and guide for several years and books. She is already present in Memorial (Memoranda, 1970), which Cadenas dedicates to his wife Milena, and which brings together aspects of past visions (Trinidad), his now muted sense of alienation, and new perspectives, in a corresponding variety of styles.
Amante (Lover, 1983), by contrast, is a unified work, a long meditation, prayer, complaint, hymn of praise addressed to a female figure, sometimes ethereal, sometimes earthy, who represents the goddess, woman, the anima as Jung understands it, language in itself, and the essence of being. Symbol, metaphor, goddess, she arouses lively emotions and makes the poet gather himself in each word he addresses to her. Two brief examples:
He feasts you
without tasting you
and it’s been a long time
mouth
used to poverty.
You bring the space
where just existing
surpasses any action.
Secret religion of wonder
restoring to our hands the land of origins.
Gestiones (Dealings, 1992) continues, after a long interval, the dialogue with Her, and deals as well with more immediate and impersonal concerns, such as a conversation in a restaurant or the view from Cadenas' apartment. It ends with a long section about poetry, the Spanish language and poets with whom Cadenas feels an affinity. In this poem addressed to Rilke, he is referring equally to himself:
Did you know
inside yourself
that poems are not enough?
.....
Who can speak
not aware of being
a miracle?
It is worth mentioning also that in 'Warnings,' Cadenas anticipates a subject that at present concerns him vitally:
Don't listen to the man with his claws out. Prefer the word that
reaches you undistorted. What happens under the surface,
circulating softly.
Let what can't be heard take you by the hand. Forget the
garrulous country. Be vigilant.
It is a concern for his oppressed country, the country of which he wrote many years ago in a poem in False Maneuvers:
Does anything of yours not unfold like lost music in me?
Country I return to each time I'm poor again.
.....
Country where the lines on my palm lead, place where I'm
someone else, my wedding ring. You are surely close to
the center.
It also reflects his constant concern with the careful and truthful use of language, and, increasingly over the years, with the danger of political rhetoric and its connection to totalitarianism. Cadenas' prose works (Realidad y literatura, 1979, Anotaciones, 1983, En torno al lenguaje, 1985, Dichos, 1992 and Apuntes sobre san Juan de la Cruz y la mística, 1995) develop the same concerns with life, literature, and language as revealed in his poems. Literature, he insists, is only of value insofar as it illuminates and connects us to life itself.
His Dichos [Sayings] encapsulate his wisdom, giving the reader little (and pleasurable) shocks of surprised recognition:
With the word 'matter' we give another name to the mystery.
Any man is an aggression in search of a flag.
One can't write anything of value without having been in hell.
If what exists doesn't seem enough to us, what can satisfy us?
We ran aground long ago, and there are still people who don't know it.
You create the voice, but it creates you too.
Cadenas' latest books, Sobre abierto (Open Envelope, 2012) and En torno a Basho y otros asuntos (About Basho and Other Matters, 2016) celebrate moments of perception in poems of haiku’s brevity and intensity, and continue to reflect on the uses of words — for poetry, for power, for truth and falsehood.
What unifies all of Cadenas' poetry, in spite of variations in style and emotions from one period to another (and although he may say he is not the same person who wrote his early poems), is an intention, a constant will to reveal being in its nakedness, at the frontier where the poetic word is born. And it is the effort to be awake, to recognize things as they are in the light of that contact with being, a fundamental sincerity, that is the only hope of the human race in this age of lies.
Rowena Hill was born in England in 1938, and has lived for forty-five years in Venezuela. She has published five books of her own poetry in Spanish, as well as translations of South Indian poetry including medieval metaphysical poems, a collection of the work of the dalit poet Mudnakudu Chinnaswamy, and an anthology of contemporary women poets. Her translations into English include South Indian poetry, a bilingual compilation of Venezuelan women poets (Profiles of Night, bid&co, 2007), Selected Poems of Rafael Cadenas (bilingual, bid&co, 2009), Goodbye to the Twentieth Century, Eugenio Montejo (bilingual, Ed. Actual ULA, 2014), and The Blind Plain, Igor Barreto, (Tavern Books, 2018).