Bringing you translated literature from around the world during troubling times, this week’s In This Together presents a selection of Spanish writer Jordi Doce’s journals. Translator Lawrence Schimel introduces this work and its significance below:
These entries come from Spanish poet, translator, and critic Jordi Doce’s careful attention to and recording of the minutiae of life under quarantine, his looking inward (while at the same time observing the world around him) just as Madrid began that explosive & expansive flourishing that is Springtime.
Originally published on his blog, forty entries (the literal “forty days” of the Italian “quarantena” that ships suspected of carrying disease were required to be isolated before passengers and crew were allowed to disembark) spanning eight weeks—Sunday, March 15th through Monday, May 11—are about to be published in book form under the title La vida en suspenso (Life on Hold), by Fórcola, in June 2020.
Jordi has been a steady if intermittent diarist since the Spring of 1997, as he notes in La puerta del año. Enero-febrero 2004 (The Year’s Gate: January-February 2004), the first of his diaries to be published in book form. He continues to write his diaries, first and foremost “out of a need to order my thoughts, to soothe them, but also with a will of lightness, almost weightlessness, as if wanting to remove the thorns of reality.” Sometimes (as in the case of these entries) he also shares them online or in book format, when the observations can stand on their own or make a sort of thematic sense or unity.
I began translating these entries into English while Jordi was still writing them—a curious twist which perhaps helped him at a dark moment. As he noted, “the tone has grown darker and even bitter with the days. I guess it was inevitable, but I resist. I don’t want to turn these notes into an account of aggravations and laments.”
He wrote: “If these notes brought a bit of serenity to friends, a bit of patience and good humor, I’d be satisfied.” Hopefully, his satisfaction is even greater as these notes and observations are now available to an even broader audience, in English translation.
Confinement Notebook
by Jordi Doce
Confinement Notebook 8
Tuesday, March 24, 2020
The midday sun (a clean sun, like one between storms) warms the large cauldron of the patio. One can see clothes hung out to dry at the rears of buildings and people (few) working on their balconies. Others simply emerge to get some air or smoke a cigarette. The light falls directly on the window and dazzles me. I’ve had to lower the blind. In the street it’s cool, but here I note how the studio heats up in just a few minutes. I feel the urge to greet the sun, like in Frank O’Hara’s poem, but I don’t yet have the necessary level of intimacy. I prefer to celebrate it with words.
José Luis tells me in his message yesterday that the day he doesn’t have trouble falling asleep is rare and that his dreams “are, to say the least, odd.” That sentence amused me because it is precisely my own experience: fleeting dreams, turbulent ones, with occasional gusts of violence which ruin their Fellini-like air. Luckily, this unrest doesn’t last long. Mornings are full of obligations and I soon forget my nocturnal phantasms, that dribble of unreality that filters or purifies my daily concerns. It wouldn’t be bad to have the glamorous dreams of my daughter. She tells me that yesterday she met Leonard Cohen, no less, and they had a chat. Only their conversation was the lyrics of “The Stranger Song”: “It’s true that all the men you knew were dealers / who said they were through with dealing.” This is one of Cohen’s most ominous texts, and it’s nothing short of curious that her dream logic rewrites it as a duet. Everyone processes their unease as they can. We spend days between four walls, but nobody said anything about nights. The “strangeness” of these days is like water: it always finds a way to seep through and to continue on its way.
I stumble time after time against the initial paradox, that stubborn stone I cannot remove from my sight, and it is that our greatest act of solidarity consists of mutually isolating ourselves, keeping a distance, remaining locked in our cubicles. There is no other remedy, it’s true, and that’s what the experts and common sense tells us, so we’ve all agreed and accepted, but basing solidarity on the very thing that numbs it under normal circumstances (suspicion, fear, prohibition of touch and retreat into the domestic space, living out that old slogan “my home is my castle”) doesn’t seem the best omen for the future. I take consolation in thinking that if something eludes the laws of logic, it’s human relations, social life, so I place all my hopes on being wrong.
I was going to write that the women who take our their dogs for a walk are usually more pleasant than their male counterparts, always so dry and standoffish, but the walk this morning has made me doubt. I crossed paths with three women and not one returned my greeting: one walked with a pinched face and her eyes fixed on the ground; another was talking on her mobile and crossed to the opposite sidewalk the second she saw me; and the third was tugging exhaustedly at her dog and baby carriage and paid me no heed. So let’s not draw any conclusions before it’s time. The field study will be extended.
Confinement Notebook 9
Wednesday, 25 March, 2020
The small family of cats that lives on the other side of the patio has begun to lie in the sun and stretch on the corrugated rooftop of the garage. I call them “family” but they are instead a street gang, all different and without much relationship among them. From what can be seen from my study, they coexist without touching one another nor establishing alliances. I guess they have enough food or at least they can find it without effort. The gabled rooftop is large and with a gentle incline, ideal for lying on and watching the flights of birds. I guess that it must be a purely aesthetic contemplation, for those birds (magpies, pigeons, there are no longer sparrows) are too far out of their reach. I think it was Sánchez Rosillo who once wrote that “to look is to have.” That’s very possible. But on the condition, as these street cats well know (“Greetings, my good Thomas O’Malley”), of having their basic needs met.
For a few days I’ve been reading Cuando editar era una fiesta, the “private correspondence” of Jaime Salinas, just published by Tusquets. The book is a puzzle, a collage of texts from different sources, notable among which are the letters he wrote for half a century to his partner, the Icelandic writer Gudbergur Bergsson, who he met in Barcelona in the 1950s. The task of assembling these texts fell to Enric Bou, who has ably summarized a difficult undertaking: to tell the various veins or threads of Salinas’ life since his arrival in Spain and his joining the publishing house Seix-Barral. To articulate them, I say, with clarity, marking the boundaries of interests and front lines without distorting the richness of a life that seems to have revolved around others, on what was outside of himself: his editorial work, his relationships with writer friends in Madrid and Barcelona, his sense of duty when in politics… Shortly after starting to read, I underlined a sentence by Salinas that I keep coming back to: “I often think that this question of time, the time that happens to one, is something like what I felt during the war, when I was on the front lines and there was more or less danger; then I had a sort of groundless almost fanatic assurance that nothing would happen to me. To feel true danger, I almost had to make an effort of imagination, of complex calculations.” I realize that this quote, with its reference to the war, might be deceptive (the bellicose metaphor of the war against the virus” only seems justifiable to me in the case of the hospitals, the overwhelmed emergency rooms, the morgue at the Palacio de Hielo skating rink, the police controls, etc., but not in our confinement, that of the ordinary citizens, as passive as we are mundane, so rapidly normalized) but I think that what called my attention in this quote was Salinas’ awareness that life, in order to be real, so that it seems real to us, has to be filtered or re-elaborated by the imagination. It’s not enough to live; one must take charge of this life of ours with an imaginative effort, those “complex calculations” of which Salinas spoke, which also entails an exercise of empathy with the life of others. This is easy to say, of course. The conceptual recipes have this problem. In my case, it’s not enough to watch, I must carry that gaze inward, internalize it; and it is not enough to think, I must carry that thought outward, externalize it and make it brush against (be stained by) the thinking of others. I’d like to think that this contrary movement, like interlocking gears, opens a space in which there is no space for narcissism, the need for posturing, false or exaggerated expectations. But who knows. There’s always the fear of playing a “spectacle” as Mafalda might say. For now, and until further notice, my greatest crutch is to keep reading.
The surprises continue. It now turns out that the hooligans who decided to patrol the streets of Tacoronte, in Tenerife, insulting their neighbors with a loudspeaker and getting their kicks out of their confinement, were “youth of twenty-two to thirty-seven years of age”. Attention, reporters of La Sexta: it seems that someone on the island has discovered the fountain of eternal youth.
Confinement Notebook 10
Thursday, March 26, 2020
The light of a early morning on the tops of the pines. Those blue skies and the mug of coffee in my hand, its sure warmth. Then the headlines in my mobile, the graphs, the latest analyses. It’s not just one’s impotence or the growing sense of alarm. It’s the contradiction between worlds that share seams, which don’t stop brushing against one another. The precarious but compulsory disguise of normality. The pure unreality of the real.
A friend tells me that yesterday I was putting on airs in talking about Salinas’ book. That might be. Also (to compensate, I guess) that he likes these notes, but he sees them too close to my poems, where few people usually appear and everyday life is reduced to the more or less melancholy steps of a flâneur: “Now the atmosphere in the streets is like that in your books.” I don’t know if there is some hidden reproach in his words. I feel remorse to not be talking about what’s going on in the emergency room or that terrible morgue they’ve improvised in the skating rink, but I’m not a journalist and I don’t think I could add anything to what the television informs us of at all hours. I prefer to talk of this corner of the world, which won’t be very different from that of those who read me. What’s certain is that the days are linked without any sort of continuity, to the point where Marta just asked me what day it was today. And then I remember (“a sad breeze through the olive trees”, Lorca) those old lines by Gonzalo Rojas, “And this they call constellation/ of living? this science / of waste? this draining / of one Friday at 3pm to another Friday?”
With regards to that stone of which I spoke two days ago, these words from Rafael Behr, political columnist for The Guardian: “Democracy is confined to quarters, as is necessary to prevent transmission of the virus. We know that lockdown can save lives. We do not yet know which muscles of civil society will atrophy from lack of exercise.” These are words which must be put into the context of British politics, whose constitutional guarantees or vaguer or more diffuse than ours; more dependent, in any case, on the temperament of their governors. But it is that “atrophy of civil society” that worries me and makes me doubt (I insist) the virtuous lessons in solidarity of our confinement. We shall see.
This is what we’ve come to, literally. This morning the only noteworthy thing is a neighbor (plump, balding, in his thirties) who came out onto the balcony while brushing his teeth. Otherwise, hanging laundry and a thick, municipal silence. We are all of us so wrapped up in our world that even the pigeons have gone elsewhere taking their song with them.
The notifications from Idealista continue to arrive. My bewilderment persists. And I’m starting to wonder whether these advertisements might not be a fiction aimed at calming us down. Who could tell? Everything stays the same, like in the song. When this is over, don’t forget about us. When this is over, look for another four walls in which to lose yourself. When this is over.
Translated from the Spanish by Lawrence Schimel
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Jordi Doce is a Spanish poet, translator and critic living in Madrid. He has translated the poetry of W.H. Auden, John Burnside, Anne Carson, T.S. Eliot, Charles Simic, Paul Auster, and Charles Tomlinson, among others. He has published seven books of poetry, two collections of aphorisms, and numerous works of literary criticism. Lawrence Schimel’s translations of his collections Nothing is Lost: Selected Poems and We Were Not There are published by Shearsman.
Lawrence Schimel writes in both Spanish and English and has published over one hundred and twenty books in many different genres—including fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and comics—and for both children and adults. Recent poetry book translations into English include: Destruction of the Lover by Luis Panini (Pleiades Press, 2019), Bomarzo by Elsa Cross (Shearsman, 2019), Impure Acts by Ángelo Néstore (Indolent Books, 2019), Poems the wind blew in by Karmelo C. Iribarren (The Emma Press, 2019; winner of a PEN Translates Award from English PEN), I Offer My Heart as a Target by Johanny Vazquez Paz (Akashic, 2019; winner of the Paz Prize), Itinerary of Forgetting by Nelson Simón (Skull & Wind, 2020) and Hatchet by Carmen Boullosa (White Pine, forthcoming). Recent translations into Spanish include poetry collection Amnesia colectiva by Koleka Putuma (co-translated with Arrate Hidalgo, Flores Raras, 2018), children’s book Tú eres tú by Richard van Camp, illustrated by Julie Flett (Orca Book, 2020), and graphic novel Nos llamaron enemigo by George Takei (Top Shelf, 2020). He has lived in Madrid, Spain since 1999.
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