THOSE SUMMERS

 

THOSE SUMMERS

 

By Jorge Guillen

 

Translated by Cola Franzen

 

Slow summers of childhood

of hill and sea, with luminous hours,

hours stretched out on beaches

between games in the sand,

when the most peaceful, carefree air

never involves anything that dies,

and the festive days sink deeper

in light of vacation without respite,

the future has no limit,

life is a luxury and passes very slowly.

 

A member of the influential Generation of 1927, Jorge Guillen was one of the greatest Spanish poets of the 20th century.

 

Guillen was an advocate of “pure Poetry”. Many of his poems are characterized by serene contemplation, languorous tone and restraint fervor; an effort of achieving vital interaction with the world, sometimes hard-won meshing of the observer and the observed. How beautifully Guillen infuses nostalgia into this poem about childhood when we were carefree spirits. Nothing died in those summers and time and joy were abundant in everything we indulged in.

 

 

EXTINCTION

EXTINCTION

by Jorge Guillen

Translated by Cola Franzen

When love is extinguished little by little,
without the jolt of a rupture,
it is difficult to recount vicissitudes,
to carry the story to its pathetic
knot,
to stop the instant when love
turns into not love
beneath a summer's light,
a slow slow summer across skies
still glowing though the sun's now hidden,
when a barely perceptible negligence
gives the late step of the strollers
a calm of neutral peace,
and while the attention
wander among intimate fogs,
sketches of abandonment
dissolve in the dusk,
and though inspiring to the soul
those hours deeply branded
by that love remain extinct.

Jorge Guillen, one of the greatest Spanish Poets of last century, was a poet of luminous intelligence and possessed a metaphysical passion for reality. He was a poet of spacial and temporal essences, which he delineates in his passionately smart poems. " I am decidedly in favor of compound, complex poetry," the poet said in 1926, "of the poem made of poetry and other human things." 

His  ideal has always been to create pure poetry. Much of Guillén's work explores the relationship of form to matter while delighting in sensuality and clarity of perception. 

This is a lovely poem . The slow atrophy, sometimes unknowingly, of a noble emotion like love can sometimes be more catastrophic than a sudden rupture in relationship. The poet then turns his eyes into the nature with lines that speaks of summer with the Sun hidden. The poem has a meditative quality, which is a hallmark of many of his poems. He is  always concerned about the underlying essence of the cosmos.

Source : Horses in the Air and other Poems by Jorge Guillen. Translated by Cola Franzen. Publisher City Light Books

PENURY

Jorge Guillen


Translated by Cola Franzen


PENURY

(Castile)

Herds of sheep graze

over the mountains in winter

the tenderest  green yet to come.

Even the branches of the poplars

lining the river banks are old.

Tiles cover adobe houses

now lacking the hue that gilds

the long afternoon. Everything

leads towards sleep and its crossing:

nothingness with colorless night.

Jorge Guillen is regarded by many critics as the initiator of 'pure poetry, in the intellectual manner. Born in 1893 the heartland of Castile in Spain, Jorge Guillen  lived in Switzerland, France, England, and the United States. He has been professor at Oxford University and in several Universities in the United States. 

Guillen's poetry has an intangible and elusive quality that often makes it difficult to feel. It is this spontaneous and intuitive response that Guillen wished to evoke. "Pure poetry," he once wrote, "is all that is left in the poem after the elimination of everything that is not poetry. Pure is equal to simple, chemically speaking. Guillen is the preeminent "pure poet." For Guillen,  Poetic and prosaic language do not stand in opposition. The difference between them is one of degree: the language of the poem is simply a more carefully selected and refined version of already adequate language of everyday life. He has the conviction that “Poetry does not require any special poetic language. No word is excluded in advance; any expression can give shape to the phrase”.


Guillen allows only genuinely poetic attitude towards language: to be a poetic is,  necessarily,  to have faith in the word. His nature is to stand apart from his creations and has therefore been regarded by some as  cold. He polishes and repolishes his poem as a lapidary does his stones. His imagery is often abstract, but he catches the beauty of the visible world and the precious quality of life. His poems are songs of affirmation "In praise of oneness of being", as he has stated. "Man affirms himself in affirming Creation; he shares in a universal value, though his part will always be lesser." Every object is dense with its own being, and reality's essence exists "even in the humblest particle of our planet".


This poem has a languid rhythm as the poet invokes through several images the slow decadence in nature and how everything tends to sleep and oblivion . It fits in with his philosophy -" Look. Do you see? That is enough"

Ref: Horses in the Air by Jorge Guillen. Translated by Cloa Franzen. Publishers-City Light Books, San Francisco.