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The shortcomings of any verbal
representation attempting to faithfully reproduce a work of visual art are
inevitable. In contrast to this ambition however, an ambitious ekphrastic
poem can expose a speculative gap that exists between the verbal and the
visual: a place where the poet might transgress from being merely descriptive
to aim at something brazenly transformative. This is not just an act of
homage but more akin to what is already familiar to us in the contemporary
gallery or public art space, where works are commonly accepted as acts of
appropriation.
In his introduction to the new dual language poetry edition of Ernest
Farres's Edward Hopper, the translator
Lawrence Venuti states that ekphrasis is concerned with 'saying what cannot
be seen, a saying that prompts a different kind of seeing ... [it] engages in
an emulative rivalry that borders on critique Ð and sometimes plunges into it,
possibly without the writer's awareness'.
Venuti has translated this collection by Farres from the original Catalan,
which was first published in 2006. Based upon the work of the celebrated
American realist painter Edward Hopper and grouped almost according to theme,
each of the fifty-one poems takes its title from one of his paintings.
According to Venuti, who has also compiled an informative section of endnotes
about the lives of the painter and the poet as well as their work, these
poems 'freely speculate, using Hopper's paintings as springboards for
reflection and invention'. With these poems Farres is clearly attempting to
make subtle verbal evocations which depend upon the visual richness of the
imagination, while in Venuti's case, it is perhaps a search for verbal
expression that encompasses an equivalence between translator, poet and
painter. However, certain questions must be asked of the finished collection.
Can these poems in their striving for meaning avoid not only a literal
description of what already exists on Hopper's canvas, but also bypass any
form of narrative suggested by the human presence (or absence) in these
figurative images? In other words, do these poems transcend commentary and go
beyond both received opinion on the reclusive Hopper and the constraining art
historical interpretation that surrounds his iconic images of post first and
post second world war America?
In the opening poem 'Self Portrait, 1925-1930' Farres states that the
painting is
a mirror that reproduces not so much
the painter's face as the static reflection
of my image. Make no bones about it:
Hopper and I form one single person.
The painter is already defined as the poet's alter ego as if the poem might
become the site of a ventriloquist act. As the poem continues Farres seems
engaged more in impersonation by suggesting the artistic context that he
occupies with Hopper:
You're off the track to see representations
of
North America where what really stirs
is the agitation of human solitude
For both painter and poet the mirror's reflection offers only distortion and
despondency 'where we intuit the fears, obsessions, anxieties, / dilemmas or
states of mind of the artist'. Farres discovers the same inwardness inherent
in Hopper's own creative speculation despite the apparent outwardness of the
painter's realist depiction of existence. As with Hopper's painting, so
Farres's poetry moves into the hinterland of identity.
If this poem marks the journey of a writer setting off in a search for his
mimesis, many of the poems that follow also contain a strong sense that
isolation and displacement are an inevitable outcome of the human condition.
In 'House at Dusk, 1935', the speaker finds himself in an apartment where he
is barely known, surveying the adjacent buildings 'as they catch the
crosslight / against a sunset of sulphur and mud'. Despite the strong colour
as 'night gradually settles' the sky becomes a sombre motif of the bridgeless
gulf between someone 'used to being the passive observer' and all those other
people living in close proximity:
The darkening sky envelops my room
in an air of secrecy
and permits me to see inside
other windows illuminated
from within by nag neighbors,
owl neighbors, hedge neighbors,
neighbors in dark pigment,
neighbors
with olive branches in their lips
and shouting neighbors
who appear to me in interlacing haloes
like veritable strangers.
A major theme of the collection is the impact of the city both on the
individual and on personal relationships. Farres repeatedly shares the
painter's misgivings about how desire for what the city promises serves only
to disguise the emptiness that will prevail. For the couple seated at the bar
in 'Nighthawks, 1942' there is a grim certainty about the realization of
human redundancy:
Man: Your problem is you've
realized
no one at work is irreplaceable,
everything is relative, everything is temporary.
Woman: How can you be so
sure that's the problem?
Man: Or maybe your problem is
you've realized
nothing in life is irreplaceable?
This condition of alienation identified in Hopper would be theme enough for a
collection in itself but Farres's scope for what he discovers in the painter
is wide. As well as the
ceaseless thrum of the metropolis which pulses through many of the poems,
Farres brings together images of urban architecture with not only changing
qualities of light but also the smell and grime of the deserted streets. In 'August in the City, 1945' such a
collision is brought about with careful deliberation as the speaker advises
'You've got to stay put in spots where the sun blazes / and expose yourself
to a blast of hot air and a heavy, / unbreathable stench of asphalt, sticky
pollution / and grease.'
Though Farres's poems are informed by close observation and analysis of the
original paintings, there is not any sense he is writing art history. Even
what seem to be straightforwardly descriptive passages are never content with
mere illustration. 'Gas, 1940',
for example, where 'Dust rises as the car pulls to a stop / at the filling
station and the attendant / who works the pumps doesn't even turn / his
eyes', where 'The crickets' cadenced grating echoes / in the luminescent
evening air', compresses the loneliness of this forgotten spot on the empty
highway into a single existential moment of longing, 'that costs dearly / to
reach', redolent of so many American road movies of the late twentieth
century:
..., the solitude of wilderness
and the kind experienced only
by those who grip the steering wheel
to escape from urban loneliness
There is a constant interplay between this aloneness and dreaming and the
imperative urge for self-determination. 'New York Movie, 1939' has the
speaker turning his attention away from the film on the screen to the
usherette who 'is lost in thought' waiting only to 'fly into the arms of the
shining city', and he imagines that
Like her, we do the same,
impenetrable and contradictory:
linking reason to unreason,
dividing ourselves like paths or rivers
and, split between self and other
or real and fictive, in transit
incessantly.
Farres wants to evoke the cinematic sensibility that underpins so many of
Hopper's compositions and most effectively the luminous presence of the sea
forms a backdrop to several of the poems inspired by the Cape Cod paintings
which close the collection. In these Farres perhaps gets closest to an ekphrastic
process that insightfully transforms the visual image it represents into
something that is more interrogative and decisively his own. 'Room by the
Sea, 1951' is situated so that 'From inside the house you can see the ocean /
delimited by doors and windows', as this is a time and place for
philosophical clarity:
and the sky is clear, like no other. At times
like these, the rooms look great,
so unbuttoned. People already
know they're
everything and nothing.
Combining interior and exterior speculation, Farres revels here in both the
bleakness and luminosity of one of Hopper's strongest works, which is the
product of an older, wiser, more minimal painter whose increasing awareness
of mortality is reflected in a particular coastal light. In this poem especially Farres's
lines are as carefully placed and weighted as Hopper's pastel tones,
achieving an equivalent unsparing vision in his own clarity of thought: a poignant moment where 'A shard of
luminosity / assails us'.
© Peter Gillies 2010
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