Stridentist Poems by Manuel Maples Arce, trans. KM Cascia (World Poetry Books, 2023)

The Neighbors Burn Gasoline as Incense

It happens every year: an undersung Latin American poet, praised by Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, or in this case Roberto Bolaño, is translated into English; small book, no foreword, no translator’s note, to be lost on basement poetry shelves. Which is why World Poetry Books, newly helmed by Matvei Yankelevich, is so refreshing. In KM Cascia’s translation of Manuel Maples Arce’s Stridentist Poems, we read not only poems from Maples Arce’s near decade of writing, but also the “Stridentist Manifesto” underpinning his aesthetic and political program, an introduction by Cascia introducing the reader to Maples Arce through Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, and an afterword which puts both his translation and Maples Arce’s poems in context.

This structure—poems, manifesto, and afterword—has a fascinating effect on the reader. Words from the poems take on new polygraphic meanings, electrified with the stink of history and failed political projects. In the wake of the Mexican Revolution, Maples Arce created Stridentism to fight the solipsistic decadence he saw in Mexican art and engender an avant-garde manifesto suitable for Mexican arts. Sort of an antifascist Futurism manifesto: “Everything approaches and goes away in the moving moment. The means change and their influence changes everything.” The antidote to solipsism is communal flux, removing quasi-literate flourishes and replacing them with intent. “No retrospection. No futurism. The whole world, there, quiet, marvelously illuminated on the stupendous axis of the present moment; observed in the prodigy of its unique, unmistakable emotion.” An aesthetic cri de coeur as well as a political one: to escape the paralyzing yoke of the strict regime through art making. To mix the sacred and the propane.

However, in order to preserve his career, and possibly his life, Maples Arce denounced Stridentism—even going so far as to remove any mention of it from his 1940 Anthology of Modern Mexican Poetry. As Cascia notes in his afterword, Maples Arce was all but forced to renounce Stridentism and communism by the government—controlled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)—suppressing his work and the work of his peers, leaving Stridentism a “suicide mist in greenish streets.” This makes the process of western assimilation easier; already denuded of all radical intent—the same process that defanged Neruda, García Marquez, and women writers like Pizarnik, Mistral, Lispector. Cascia quotes Eugene Ostashevsky: “there ‘is no decolonization in English only.’”

Johannes Göranson expands upon this claim in his pamphlet “Transgressive Circulation”: “Written language becomes a source of confusion precisely because of its ‘transgressive circulation’: writing is dangerous because it puts a work into circulation, opening it up to misinterpretation.” Translation doubly, or triply so, multiplies these opportunities for miscommunication. In Spanish, Maples Arce condenses images and syntax, flattening registers and modes of speech; processes which doubly served to produce wild Stridentist work and further a radical communist program. The accelerating city becomes anthropomorphized, motives become displaced: “City: / Bodyguard streetcars / patrol subversive streets. / Shop windows assault sidewalks, / and the sun sacks avenues.” The city is under attack from itself, an auto-anthropophagy, and the citizens get lost in this assault: from commerce, from the police.

The poet becomes sickly observer to crumbling infrastructure, to the crumbling colorless streets: “(Romantic morning, like foamy noise / spills in colorless neighborhood streets / where sometimes they hand out programs.” Change happens in the streets, but slowly, surreptitiously, so as to avoid state-meted-out violence programs; but still, a chance of love: “and a well-loved girl’s sickly paleness / is a clear music heard with eyes.” Maples Arce ventures into queasy romanticism, as if trying on an old obsolete style. However, he quickly grows bored of it—or is distracted by more pressing concerns: “While a poet, / hung in the window, / dies gargling / electrified / silver.” Private mineral extraction operations infarct the poet’s blood, leaving him “cosmopolitanized.” This narrative disjunction is truth itself, or as Maples writes, “everything approaches,” which is a sort of locomotive extension of Manet’s injunction: tout arrive [everything happens].

This locomotion operates on a literal and metaphorical sense. Maples Arce expands on and corrects F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, which was so fascist that Marinetti was tapped by Mussolini to co-author the Fascist Manifesto. Marinetti writes, “A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath… a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” Marinetti’s dictum is so anti-human and anti-historical it approaches parody, and encompasses everything Marinetti calls for: a radical violent break from history. Maples Arce’s poems are filled with the same machines, whose violent impositions sweep up the poet, his lover, the entire city. “The train is an iron gust / that roams the landscape, moving everything.” But, in contrast to Futurist poems, every instance of speed and locomotion in Maples Arce has an effect on someone, reframing them from an exaltation of speed and technology to their effect on the real people engaging with them. For every moment of joy: “The succinct automobile / has at times / mineral / tenderness. / For the meddling lady friend / devoted to dangerous turns;” there is a moment of terror: “factories burn / in fire of twilight, / and airplanes / execute dusk maneuvers / in bright sky.” In the second example, from “Revolution,” the syntax is clipped and articles are removed, as if these dusk maneuvers had disarticulated the very syntax of the poet. In every poem in the collection, people are harangued by the onslaught of newfound speed, and find themselves in moments of silence on the balcony, with only the slow movement of the moon to catch them.

Everything approaches the poet in the city. In “Prism,” Maples Arce opens with a twist on the opening tercet of Dante’s Commedia: “I’m a still point in the middle of the moment, / equidistant to a star’s castaway shout.” The midpoint of one’s life is the ever-present yolk of the current moment, bathed in the sun’s yellow screams. One sees even here a hint of his future rejection of Stridentism, sidestepping history and archive to become the black hole shout—and one can see why Bolaño loved him. To disappear from history is no small feat, even for a few years. Even better, to enter the library of lost works: Benjamin’s final manuscript, Sibelius’ 8th Concerto, Walser’s Theodor. Lost in a world that extracts your silver: “where, from time to time, / electricity bleeds in the ironed street.”

Maples Arce moves from parody to imitation, surrealist anthropomorphism, earnest yearning, and finally to tag-lining and sloganeering in the breadth of a stanza. He forcibly carves a place in the avant-garde for Mexican poetics. He ends “Prism” by dismantling Yeats’ widening gyre: “Locomotives, shouts, / arsenals, telegraphs. / Love and life / today for Labor, / and everything expands in concentric circles.” The second coming won’t happen as long as we are all in that widening gyre, filling those concentric circles with poems, love, life; refusing the urge to be continuous and successive, but consenting to simultaneity.