Homesick for Death is a pretty strong title, albeit not one that's likely to induce great enthusiasm in most people. Xavier Villaurrutia was a Mexican poet of the first half of the 20th century, and D.M. Stroud, his translator, taught at Taiwan's Chinese Cultural University at Yangmingshan until recently. Villaurrutia certainly had an obsession with death, as these sometimes eloquent renderings show. But Stroud has a penchant for book titles that are both eye-catching and at the same time perplexing, as his volume of poetry in his own right, The Hospitality of Circumstance (1992) from the same publisher testifies.
The phrase "the hospitality of circumstance" is taken from a book by the Edwardian British writer G.K.Chesterton, best-known for his Father Brown tales -- Roman Catholic polemics masquerading as detective stories, a mongrel genre, enthusiastically taken up by C.S.Lewis in his fairy stories for children (the Narnia books) that clumsily incorporated his own brand of muscular, no-nonsense Protestantism. Chesterton, writing about Dickens, punned on the phrase "taken in," meaning both "deceived" and "welcomed in out of the cold." He said this characterized holy fools, at one and the same time easily deceived and needing help and protection, and in so saying sought to publicize once more his own populist Catholicism. The chance coincidence of the phrase's two meanings was, he claimed, an instance of "the hospitality of circumstance" (or, put simpler, the luckiness of accident).
THE COMPLETE POEMS OF XAVIER VILLAURRUTIA
Chesterton was one of the rather bizarre collection of English writers cited by the now classic Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges as influences on his style. He probably misunderstood Chesterton's essential ordinariness and attempts to confuse readers by verbal trickery, thinking from his South American perspective that he was something subtler than in reality he was. The Anglo-Saxon and Hispanic worlds are subject to this kind of mutual misunderstanding, though they frequently over-estimate rather than under-estimate the other, and hostility is rare. D.M. Stroud, an American with strong links to both South America and Asia (in addition to Taiwan, he's also lived and taught for 20 years in Japan), enters on this territory without undue trepidation. This is probably as well. Too much forethought might have put him off the project altogether.
The evidence of The Hospitality of Circumstance, which doesn't contain any immediately striking poems, is that Stroud is better placed as a translator than as a poet in his own right. If this is in fact the case, then he's doubly lucky in finding a good poet who hasn't been translated into English before. Translators shine by the light of the texts they're translating, and Villaurrutia certainly appears to be an important, if not quite a major, talent.
Chillingly subtitled "Dead nocturnes," these poems certainly exhibit a nocturnal sensibility as well as a morbid one. Villaurrutia appears to have been gay in a secret way, possibly exemplified by his famous precursor T.S. Eliot (though if Eliot was gay, it was even more secretly). Villaurrutia's sensibility, though, was much more Spanish -- dark roses blooming under languorous moons, tombs across which lizards scuttle, alleys redolent of rats, danger and quick sexual gratification.
It's sometimes tempting to believe that thinkers can be divided between the writers who see death as the main fact of life, and those who don't. The former see life as a brief interlude during which only certain limited goals are attainable. The others entertain grandiose schemes, frequently political, as if there were no tomorrow. In his recent book After Theory the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton (a former Roman Catholic) argues that literary theory's value is limited by its failure to take any account of death. In this context, it's highly significant that the most famous Mexican writer of Villaurrutia's era, Octavio Paz, defined the principle that most characterized Villaurrutia's group, the Contemporaneos, as a rejection of the obligation of the writer to engage in political struggle.
His fellow Mexican poet, Elias Nandino, describes Villaurrutia as having been "always an adolescent,"and someone who "matured and died without ever ceasing to be one." The remark describes so many modern creative personalities that it almost passes without making the impression it should.
This book of translations appears to be D.M. Stroud's most important achievement. He calls himself "a poet first, a translator second,"and of course any translator of poetry must have something of the poetic in him to even half succeed. Even so, it's tempting to compromise with him and say instead that he has a poetic nature that has to date achieved his apotheosis with a translation.
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