On Pedro Mir

I met Pedro Mir—the poet laureate of the Dominican Republic—for the first time in 1991 in New York City. It was at a symposium honoring him, organized by a group of Dominican American literary scholars. He and I had been corresponding about his poetry, since I was writing an article about it. I was also interested in translating him. He impressed me as a gentleman of the highest order the moment he shook my hand. Firm grip and eye contact and brotherly warmth. I said it’s a great pleasure to meet you in person; he said igualmente (likewise). Our conversation flowed naturally from there. For a giant poet I was a little surprised he actually was a short, thin man, almost fragile. But he brimmed with energy, more than most his age of nearly eighty years. He looked weathered by time with deep wrinkles in his brown-skinned face. His broad smile that made them visible expressed an undeniable joy and also the deep humanity for which he was loved by the people of his homeland. This humanity is the hallmark of the body of his poetry, together with its extraordinary lyricism. “In the Dominican Republic,” my Dominican friend Silvio Torres-Saillant told me at the time, “no one lays a more legitimate claim to intimacy with the yearnings of the Dominican people as well as with the texture of their collective voice than Pedro Mir.” Beyond that, Silvio said something else about him I will never forget: “No author writing in the country enjoys more popularity and reverence than him among both literary and nonliterary readers in virtually all sectors of society.”

I was perplexed then, and still am, that Mir was hardly known among poetry aficionados in the United States, my nation not far from his, tied to his by shared history, just a couple of hours by plane from Miami. He remains an obscure figure in the Anglophone world. He does amazingly original poetic things in Spanish that distinguish him. A major Latin American poet on par with Chile’s Pablo Neruda and Cuba’s Nicolás Guillén—“the equal in lyric vitality, epic ambition, and communal significance,” to quote Roberto Márquez—he had little of his poetry translated into English by the time we met. Why? It may well be that Mir’s work was less known than these other poets because of his homeland, as the Dominican Republic’s literature still today is far less translated and disseminated than that of other countries in Latin America. Born in 1913, in the southerly city of San Pedro de Macorís, of a Puerto Rican mother (she died four years after his birth) and a Cuban father who was a mechanical engineer at a sugar refinery, Mir grew up in the great seaport of sugarcane. As a schoolboy, he liked to read while sitting on the docks, and watch the great ships leave to bring sugar to the United States. He published his first poems in 1937. He soon gained considerable attention not only among young intellectuals, who welcomed him as a “social poet,” but also among the cultural officials of the US-backed dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who viewed him with suspicion (Trujillo ruled the small nation with an iron fist from 1930 until his assassination in 1961). By 1947 it had become clear that Mir needed to leave the country for his own safety. Once he did, the regime’s cultural arm did its best to suppress his name, as seen in a Dominican poetry anthology whose first edition in 1943 had prominently displayed his poems but omitted him completely in the second edition of 1951. My friend Silvio, an expert in Caribbean poetry, explained this to me.

Mir’s dislocations and life in exile were hard for him. Cuba became his first home away from home. He did not join famous intellectual circles. He quietly earned a humble living, doing menial jobs even though he had earned a law degree prior to his exile. But he continued to write. While in Cuba, he published “Hay un país en el mundo” (“There Is a Country in the World”) in 1949. This epic poem, his first major work, achieved wide popularity in his homeland. It has been translated into dozens of languages. In fact, over time it became something of a national anthem in the Dominican Republic. I recently met a woman from there who told me that as a teenager growing up in Santo Domingo in the late 1960s, she and her girlfriends would sing together sections of this long poem—a lyrical masterpiece—which begins:

There is
a country in the world                                   
                                        situated
right in the sun’s path.
A native of the night.                                  
                                        Situated
in an improbable archipelago
of sugar and alcohol.                                 
                                        Simply
light,           
          like a bat’s wing
leaning on the breeze.                                                                                                                                Simply
bright,                                        
                                              like the trace of a kiss on an elderly
maiden,              
               or daylight on the roof tiles.                                                                                                                 Simply
fruitful. Fluvial. And material. And yet
simply torrid, abused and kicked
like a young girl’s hips.
Simply sad and oppressed.
Sincerely wild and uninhabited.  

(tr. Donald D. Walsh)

When Mir returned to his homeland after fifteen years of exile, following the death of the dictator, he immediately won the hearts of the Dominican people, and his poetry readings were mass public events attended by enthusiastic crowds of citizens from every walk of life. In 1982 the legislature of the Dominican Congress conferred upon him the title of National Poet, and in 1993 he received the National Prize for Literature, the highest honor a literary artist can receive in the Dominican Republic.

The year Mir received the National Prize, 1993, saw the first book of Mir’s poetry in English, titled Countersong to Walt Whitman and Other Poems. It remains the only one. Published by a small press called Azul Editions, it contains nine poems, several of which are signature poems. A few are long poems with epic sweep, like the title poem. The book received little attention. Just one review of it. The very favorable review, by Roberto Márquez, appeared in The Village Voice, and opened this way: “The publication, in bilingual format, of this first book-length anthology of work by the Dominican Republic’s internationally acclaimed and locally celebrated National Poet is an event long anticipated, too long delayed.” Márquez went on to say: “That recognition would come to him comparatively late is mainly due to the vagaries of a long exile (1947-63), our own indifference to Dominican culture, and the Trujillo dictatorship’s efforts to suppress any public notice of Mir’s work. When discovery, or rediscovery, occurred, as inevitably as the fall of the dictator, it came, in the Dominican Republic, as a doubly sweet jubilee and, for many abroad, as a dazzling revelation . . . Mir achieves a lyrical synthesis of the most private spaces or emotional registers and the most unequivocally public experiences. His poetry achieves a rare, exceptionally felicitous marriage of poetry and politics, of individual sensibility and the chronicling of quotidian collective drama, the still unfulfilled promise of Latin America, its landscape, peoples, and societies.”

The final poem in the book is “Meditación a orillas de la tarde” (“Meditation on the Shores of Evening”). It is a gorgeous lyric that demonstrates not only Mir’s poetic genius but also his depth of humanity. It begins with these tender lines:

So many, the peoples of the Caribbean, silent
some of them, others sad and nameless, and some
risen from the fountain of oblivion, as happens
              every time night pauses at a bend in the road
              before a beckoning window,                                                                                                                                they are asleep. 

They are asleep. Perhaps unforgettably, with tender
words upon an unsung marble stone. “Here satisfies
her eternal restlessness a countless soul.” And it is any
one of the Caribbean peoples. No, not just any one.
It is the illusory shore on which a heel slips
or struggles. A key dangling beside a wounded note.

 
The translator, the late Donald D. Walsh, captures the lyricism and stunning duende of Mir’s voice—to use the Spanish gypsy word for approximately what African Americans call soul, which Federico García Lorca introduced to Anglo American poets in his famous essay, “Theory and Function of the Duende” (which helped free these poets from the coldness of the dominant formalist verse that reigned for decades until the second half of the twentieth century). Here is the conclusion of Mir’s “Meditation on the Shores of Evening”:

We shall be happy, we peoples of the Caribbean.
Our simple families will return from the dream.
We shall bear all the names gathered up, suddenly,
like a floating wisp rolling in with the foam
at the journey’s end. We shall be happy, there is
no doubt. None whatsoever. We must clean our house.
Everywhere a certain beast of cleanliness is roaring. 

It is right and just that we rejoice and decide.
Our emancipated, mestizo name is victorious.
Yes, of course! We have suffered much and our blood
has enriched many. It was time! Let us greet
the hour. Yes, let us greet the hour and the day,
and let the month and the whole calendar come, too. 

This moment pleases and attracts. It is our moment.
From this moment on we shall transform the blood of
business into the blood of martyrdom or victory’s flower.
So this is that tranquil meditation that I’m telling you
at peace and on the shores of evening
face to face with the immense torrid lap of the Caribbean Sea.

 
The poem exudes duende. Mir embraced not only the people of his homeland but, as he says in this poem, all the peoples of the Caribbean. He spoke for them. Indeed, he is called the Whitman of the Caribbean, for containing the multitudes of his America.

Mir wrote his last poem in 1998, two years before he died. The poem is a long elegy to Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos (1914-1953), “A Julia sin lágrimas” (“To Julia with No Tears”). The poem celebrates de Burgos who died young tragically but who while alive gave voice to her native island and its struggle for independence. A feminist in word and deed, she also spoke up for Afro-Caribbean writers. She furthered the cultural and sociopolitical cause of all Caribbean peoples like Mir, and for her profound contribution to this cause, she became significant to him.

I love “To Julia with No Tears”—its lyrical force, its surrealistic language, and its political clarity. It seems to me a very fitting culmination of Mir’s career as a poet. The poem alludes throughout it to de Burgos’s most famous poems, “A Julia de Burgos” (“To Julia de Burgos”) and “Río Grande de Loíza” (“Great Loíza River”). These are her signature poems. Both appeared in her first collection, Poema en veinte surcos (Poem in Twenty Furrows, 1938). The first is a revolutionary and feminist poem in which her true inner self confronts her public self that is forced to conform to the repressive politics and social norms of her day. The second is a love poem in which the main river in the area of Puerto Rico where she grew up becomes her lover. In it she says “mi niñez fue toda un poema en el río, / y un río en el poema de mis primeros sueños” (“my childhood was all a poem in the river, / and a river in the poem of my first dreams”). Both “To Julia de Burgos” and “Great Loíza River,” like the other poems in her book, owe much in their poetic language to Neruda, whose Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924) she knew by heart.

For the epigraph of his poem, Mir uses four lines of “To Julia de Burgos,” which opens this way, in my translation (his epigraph lines are in italics):

Now people are whispering that I am your enemy

because in poetry I give the world your me.

 

They lie, Julia de Burgos. They lie, Julia de Burgos.

The voice rising in my verses isn’t your voice: it’s mine

because you’re the costume and the essence is me;

and between the two of us lies the deepest chasm.

 

You’re just a cold doll of social falsehood,

and me, the virile flash of human truth.

 

You, honey of courtly hypocrisies; not me;

I bare my heart in all my poems.

 

You’re like your world, selfish; not me;

I gamble everything to be what I am.

 

Her poem continues to build as she battles with herself, and it closes with this fiery stanza:

When the multitudes run rioting in the streets
leaving behind ashes of burned injustices,
and when carrying the torch of the seven virtues,
the multitudes run after the seven sins,
against you and against everything unjust and inhuman,
I’ll be right among them with the torch in my hand. 

(my translation)

Dialoguing with her, Mir’s elegy to de Burgos contains ten sections to form a poetic sequence with tonal movement that ranges from grief and anger to hope. No tears. Here is the first section in its entirety, in my translation:

By a road of salt that belongs to the sun
the Caribbean Sea is reached
by a road of sun that belongs to the sea
then Puerto Rico 

and fast
because the air is transparent
and the water clear 

and what’s more Santo Domingo
is right nearby 

of course it becomes necessary
to know yourself and gamble everything 

(the coin in the air and the time of its flight
over the red carpet covering the rooftops
and even the walking stick of the nocturnal
streetlights along the curbs of the sidewalks
of the city) if it is necessary
for not arguing with yourself
because the Carolina Cemetery
in Puerto Rico is very close
and there Julia de Burgos rests together
with Julia de Burgos who they also called
Julia de Burgos
because in the one thousand and one nights everything is a lie
and Julia de Burgos will never be Julia de Burgos
because if there’s one thing that can’t be denied
it’s that Julia de Burgos was unstoppably
Julia de Burgos
when she looked at the world and took to the street
with a river in her hand
(that was her whip)
and a torch in her hand
(that was her people)
because then she was the real
Julia de Burgos

because then she was
for emancipation and for independence
and not for sadness and tatters
nor for dissipation being tattered
Julia de Burgos 

The second section of the poem shifts in tone. My translation of it was a labor of love, at times a creative struggle both painful and joyous to find/get the right words, to recreate Mir’s genius with language operating on multiple levels true to his in meaning and poetic quality:

And hers was the voice that fed the echo and so

the popping of seed destined to be a rice field

 

the multitude of voices that populate her throat

and the sweat of rivers turning soon into mist

 

and the resounding hands and the mouths and so

her very daring poise at the bridal competition

 

of the Rio Grande de Loíza in whose secret

bedroom the Borinquen girl became a poet

 

and in its secret bedroom she became Borinquen

not by birth nor just by growing up Antillean

 

nor because she wrote her name in its currents

and started to sing and forgot about oblivion

 

but because in the choirs of cinnamon-skin dawn

her voice made Puerto Rico more Puerto Rican

 

and made Santo Domingo more strong willed and so

it was the noisy bell-tongue of her immortal verse

 

that ultimately made us all more Puerto Rican

on the condition we become more will than daydreams

and turn our crystal angers into rock

The final hopeful section of the poem contains lines that remind me of the joy I saw in Mir’s open smile when I first met him. It sings with language that dances. My reward in translating it came from the pleasure of embracing it thoroughly, listening to its lines over and over while reciting them out loud as I walked by myself in Riverside Park along the Hudson River, considering a range of different possibilities for them in English, until at last:

Butterflies will come from factories

but once again beware

beware with care

Julia de Burgos beware of suicide

humanity doesn’t commit suicide

humanity is a climbing vine

it just climbs and clings to barren walls

and fills them with flowers we know so well

Julia de Burgos beware of Julia de Burgos

Latin America beware of Latin America

everything else is just any shadow

in the pit of the heart

shadows whirl doing a merry contradance

and Julia de Burgos will be back dancing

once again with Julia de Burgos

the merry contradance of life

Vendrán las mariposas de las factorías

pero una vez más cuidado

cuidado con el cuidado

Julia de Burgos cuidado con el suicidio

la humanidad no se suicida

la humanidad es una enredadera

sólo trepa y se agarra a las paredes

muertas y las llena de flores sobrentendidas

Julia de Burgos cuidado con Julia de Burgos

América Latina cuidado con América Latina

lo demás es una sombra cualquiera

en el fondo del corazón

las sombras danzan una alegre contradanza

y una vez más volverá Julia de Burgos

a bailar con Julia de Burgos

la alegre contradanza de la vida]

For me, this poetry is the perfect gift of language at its most beautiful, most life-affirming expression of what it means to care about the world around us with passion. This is Pedro Mir.

On the occasion of the poet’s death in 2000 at the age of eighty-seven, the president of the Dominican Republic declared three days of national mourning and celebrated his memory and his work: “Don Pedro will always be with us because his thinking was transcendent, and he truly fathomed the national Dominican soul.” Mir also fathomed the collective soul of all the peoples of the Caribbean. He even embraced us in the Colossus of the North, calling us brothers and sisters, understanding it wasn’t the people who supported murderous Trujillo, but the U.S. government. He called Whitman his constant companion, and his poetry answers Whitman’s words to future poets to “justify” him (“Poets to Come”). It is clear to me that more of Mir’s poetry and his other writings, which include his remarkable fiction and essays, should be translated into English. His considerable work awaiting translation will transport readers in the Anglophone world through the originality of his voice and vision, especially those in the United States. He composed several brilliant American epics—American in the original continental sense of the word denoting both North and South America. In translation, Mir expands the boundaries of the national literature of my country in a much-needed Pan American way, full of song and a deep humanity, to foster mutual understanding between the Americas. He is a socially committed poet of the first order, like Neruda. His early love poems with their telluric symbolism rival Neruda’s: “I speak your love language / and understand roses” (“Pour toi”). At times, he can be very playful with language, just having fun with it like a boy skipping stones on a river. Words as words. Most of all, Mir is a giant poet and writer who invites readers to his island and shows them the beauty and struggles of its people and their world and the sea surrounding it.