Garcilaso

 El dulce lamentar de dos pastores,     [2, 6, 8, 10]            A

Salicio juntamente y Nemoroso,            [2, 4, 6, 10]           B

he de cantar, sus quejas imitando;        [1, 4, 6, 10]            C          

cuyas ovejas al cantar sabroso            [4, 8, 10]                 B

estaban muy atentas, los amores,       [2, 6, 10]                   A

de pacer olvidadas, escuchando.        [3, 6, 10]                   C

Tú, que ganaste obrando                [1, 4, 6]                        C

un nombre en todo el mundo        [2, 4, 6]                            D

y un grado sin segundo,                [2, 6]                                D

agora estés atento sólo y dado    [2, 4, 6, 8, 10]                    E

al ínclito gobierno del estado    [2, 6, 10]                               E

albano, agora vuelto a la otra parte,    [2, 4, 6, 10]                F

resplandeciente, armado,                    [4, 6]                            E

representando en tierra el fiero Marte;        [4, 6, 8, 10]        F

Look how only three lines have an accent on an odd-numbered syllable.  There are no accents on odd numbered syllables after syllable 3. My rules are simple. Content words get an accent; articles, clitic pronouns, one syllable prepositions, etc... do not.   Note how seamless is the combination of lines of 7 and 11 syllables. Every line rhymes, but not predictably.  

Dream of blocked door

 I had to enter my dwelling place through a crawl space of some kind; the door was blocked. It was very difficult to move my body horizontally through the hole, after having some up from the basement. Curiously, though, I could exit through the door with no problem. Only egress was verboten. 

hendeca

 You can think of the Spanish 11 syllable line as an iambic pentameter, with a feminine ending, and a more "lilting" sound than in English:  

Los invisibles átomos del aire

The stress on syllable 10 is obligatory: 

Los invisibles átomos del aire

Syllables 7, 9, 11, cannot have accents (with a few exceptions).

Siempre la claridad viene del cielo.  [note stress clash here between syllables 6 and 7]. 

There is almost always a strong stress on 4 or 6.  If the stress is on 6, there will also be a stress on 1,2, or 3 (usually).  If there is a stress on 4, there will also be a stress on 8 (typically).  

We could see the structure as relatively free in the first four syllables of the line, and then resolving in a cadence in the seven syllables at the end:   

oXoooXo

This is also a typical rhythm for the 7 syllable line.   

So the line could be conceived of as iambic:

oX oX oX oX oXo

But it is more typically this:

oXoooXoooXo. [el dulce lamentar de dos pastores]. 

or this:

oooXoooXoXo

Flexible, flowing verse paragraphs can arise from the combination of lines of 7 and 11.  Note the tendency of accents to fall on the even numbered syllables. The enjambment, the unpredictable alternation of lines of 7 and 11, the unpredictable rhymes. This is the equivalently fluid verse paragraph that corresponds to English blank verse. (If you look at free verse in Spanish, you will see that it derives from this. All you have to do is add in some lines of 9 and 14 syllables and stop rhyming.  Then you have Vicente Aleixandre.)  

Piramidal, funesta, de la tierra                                4,6,10
nacida sombra, al cielo encaminaba                       2,4,6,10
de vanos obeliscos punta altiva,                            2,6,8,10
escalar pretendiendo las estrellas;                        3, 6, 10
si bien sus luces bellas,                                        2,4,6
exentas siempre, siempre rutilantes,                    2,4,6,10
la tenebrosa guerra....                                           4,6

Ilu Ros

 Right after I wrote the post on Bernarda in translation I got a book in  the mail--an illustrated edition of Lorca's rural tragedies that I preordered month ago and was only published just now, by Ilu Ros. Now I can bring that in for my students to look at, after we just discussed adaptations on Tuesday. There are a lot of these picture books about Lorca now. Bernarda's daughters here look a bit like the artist herself. 

It makes me want to do a visual book about Lorca, although I am no artist.  

Kafka's precursors

 Another classic JLB text, on Kafka's precursors. It tell the same story as Pierre Menard, but without the magic. Several texts, written in diverse periods and places, have the air of what we would later associate with Kafka's writing. They are prophetic in that regard. And yet these texts do not resemble one another; without Kafka we would not perceive them as similar at all. The writer creates his own precursors. This seems anachronistic, but it is possible, simply because the reader creates these connections. They are as real as anything else. 

It follows that literary history is a fiction. It is a story we make up in order to explain these connections to ourselves.  

BA in adaptation

 Bernarda Alba has a lot of adaptations. Set it in Iran, in Pakistan, in Miami, in Scotland. Do it as a musical, a film. I haven't made a list, but there are dozens I've found on google and YouTube in just half an hour.  

Any adaptation automatically creates a palimpsest.  I think of Borges decrying the phenomenon of anachronistic "modern dress" versions of classic literature, in "Pierre Menard." Notice that Borges decries both simplistic ideas: that epochs are the same ... and that they are different. In other words, a false universalism: we can adapt to another setting and the story still works... and a false belief that a work needs to be kept up to date in order to appeal to contemporary audiences. Notice, too, that despite despising such things, Menard counts this anachronism as one of his inspirations. 

***

"... Otro es uno de esos libros parasitarios que sitúan a Cristo en un bulevar, a Hamlet en la Cannebiére o a don Quijote en Wall Street. Como todo hombre de buen gusto, Menard abominaba de esos carnavales inútiles, sólo aptos ­decía­ para ocasionar el plebeyo placer del anacronismo o (lo que es peor) para embelesarnos con la idea primaria de que todas las épocas son iguales o de que son distintas."

Dream of high school crush

 I had a crush in high school on E, never reciprocated. She always had other boyfriends, etc... and probably did not know how I felt. We were friends, and reconnected through facebook after many years. I only saw her once as an adult, when I visited her at her job at the Natural History Museum in Manhattan. (She died this year of cancer.) 

In my dream, we had reconnected, living in the same town somehow, and were going together to some social event, just as friends but with a certain ambiguity about our feelings toward each other. It wasn't particularly sexual in nature. It was more like a purely emotional form of love, much as I had felt when I was 14. 

After I woke up, I then was thinking about it, and then it took me several minutes to remember that she had died...