Books have always played an essential role in my life both academically and personally. I remember reading during quiet time and how it slowly changed my feelings towards books, from a task to an enjoyable escape. And my favorite moments have always been the ones where I got lost in the world, in the words, presented to my eyes and accepted by my mind. This was a feeling that I, even now, and most likely for a long time, will continue to chase. I have recently reacquainted myself with this feeling. In the spring of 2023, I found myself completely enamored with the poetry and avant-garde style Jack Spicer used in his book After Lorca. A collection of poems and letters directly addressing Lorca and mimicking his style, while simultaneously adding to his already published work. It was like reading a conversation between a living and dead poet from the grave, and for a brief moment, a seance ensues. To me, it felt like a pinnacle of some point, as if some sort of impossible form of communication had finally been solved. Before reading Amaranth Borsuk’s The Book, I understood Jack Spicer’s “translations” in After Lorca as acts of lyrical and creative homage as well as intentional misreading-a postmodern game with authorship. However, Borsuk’s “the book as idea”, provided the crucial framework to see them as acts of bibliographic remodeling: Spicer does not merely translate Lorca’s words; he deconstructs the original, using its fragments as physical material to bind a new one. A co-authored volume that performs its own haunted making and acts as an ephemeral conversation, the connection severed as soon as the last page is turned. In this personal essay I will be focusing on my own personal understanding and relationship with Lorca’s introduction and his ‘dead’ letters to Lorca. As I believe the scope of his poetry becomes far to dense and broad to discuss in a relatively shorter essay, let alone one that sides on the personal rather than academic.
I. Before and After The Introduction
The introduction to Spicer’s is signed as Federico Garcia Lorca himself, somewhere just outside of Granada, Spain, in 1957. Now, Lorca was in fact assassinated somewhere outside Granada in 193,6 so given this context clue, we can already establish an element of ghostly conjuring coming to fruition here. Spicer is almost immediately telling us(the reader) that his book is a recombinant structure. The faux introduction is there to say to us something Lorca wants us to know but only if piecing together that it is in fact him behind the veil. This specific notion of hauntology is further stressed by Daniel Katz, “Spicer’s sense of poetry as dictation and the poet as a ‘receiver’ of a voice which is Other needs to be emphasized, as it goes a long way towards illuminating a notable, and indeed noted, oddity: that After Lorca, the book through which Spicer himself felt he had reached his poetic maturity, was in its conception a book of translations.”(201). In other words, this whole book was merely supposed to translated poetry. How did Spicer come to this conclusion and what can I gain from that insight. Or rather, what am I now to make of it with this new perception of mine. They are haunted words, written by a supposed dead poet, almost chastising Spicer on his endeavor. It was in one of Borsuk’s chapters that this book came to me and specifically this passage: “-because nothing compares to spending several hours holding artists’ books in your hands. They are first and foremost, meant to be activated by a reader, and thus describing them in brief simply does not do them justice.”(Borsuk 149). This book, Seance, transforms the conversation into something powerful; it manifests itself through the reader’s eyes. “Frankly, I was quite surprised when Mr. Spicer asked me to write an introduction to this volume.” What is now clear to me is that this artist’s book is a special work, more so to Spicer himself. He is letting us peer at his conscience while simultaneously leaving a work unguarded and abstract for hundreds of thousands to read.
I remember picking this book up after writing a quick blurb for it during my internship with Poetry International. I thought I had a finite time with it as I borrowed the book from Professor Alcosser’s library, but to my surprise, she let me keep it. And ever since then, I read and re-read the short yet puzzling collection of “translated” poems and faux letters. It’s a mesmerizing experience and a rewarding challenge. I had thought that much of the goal was to decipher what was what. What part of Lorca’s translations are bastardized poems, and what parts were accurate translations? In other words, where did Lorca end and Jack begin? But now, after having met a completely different perspective and way of thinking of books themselves, in all their shapes and forms, I think finding an answer in that regard is pointless. But my role as a reader completely changed after taking this class: “But books are always a negotiation, a performance, an event:-” (Borsuk 147). My role as a reader changes when engaging this text, and it has also changed since taking this class. Now, I no longer simply look for when one artist begins and the other ends, but instead, when I hold the book in my hands, I ask myself, “What is this object in my hands doing and what is my role in its performance?” Katz weighs in on this notion by saying, “And for Spicer, the task of the translator consists not so much in bringing the dead poet ‘to life’ as in’ hauling the live translator, precisely, into death. Herein lies one of the true values of the act of translation for Spicer and also, perhaps, much of his fascination with
the myth of Orpheus*. In his penultimate letter to Lorca, ‘Jack’ claims that poetry freezes the instant the poet ‘ceases to be a dead man’. The relationship between poetry and death, but also poetry and prose, obsesses the book.”(5) I never really read much into this book beyond its pathos and the emotion that it holds. The words are lonely and finite, macabre, yet delicate, but I think what I can see and understand now is far beyond what I had previously perceived.
The introduction is disdainful in tone, written by Lorca himself, and also acknowledges his own death, “The reader is given non indication which of poems belong to which category, and I have further complicated the problem ( with malice aforethought I must admit) by sending Mr. Spicer several poems written after my death which he has also translated and included here.”(Spicer 4). Having all to do with poetics, as a fiction student myself, the poetics, the idea had gotten lost on me, had become too abstract. And it really wasn’t until Borsuk that I really started to grasp, or at least think differently, regarding the introduction(but much of the volume itself).
Daniel Katz comprehensively dissects this part, both highlighting the strange emulation and also perhaps the reasoning behind the tone of a spectral Lorca:
“That the dead are ‘notoriously hard to satisfy’ points not only to the debt that
the translator may be said to owe to the ‘original’ which he parasites and
exploits – it also recalls the manner in which the dead most classically express
this dissatisfaction, to wit, as truculent ghosts. But the question left open is
whether this act of translation is the transgression for which appeasement must
be made, or the act of appeasement itself, extending as it does the ‘life’ of the
dead poet’s text. In his work on Pound, Daniel Tiffany has stressed how trans-
lation may be seen as a sacrifice on the part of the translator, who would deliver
himself over to the service of the alien ‘voice’. In this way, translation appears
as ‘a process whereby the original author or text is brought to life, resurrected,
through a depletion of the translator’s vitality, or, more seriously, through a
reification, a deadening, of his native language. There is a terrible risk, of
course, in feeding the dead from the store of one’s own vitality’.6 Yet if the ‘orig-
inal’ text may be seen as a ‘succubus’ or ‘parasite’ feeding off the vitality of the
living translator, the reverse is equally true, for the translator is a consummate
‘grave-robber’, as Chamberlain has referred to Spicer in this context, stealing
an alien ‘voice’ through which to speak what is, after all, his own tongue. Thus
the importance of the Introduction by ‘Lorca’: in this book, not only will Lorca
‘speak’ through the ‘voice’ of Spicer, but the blatant forgery of the Introduction
reminds us that Spicer is also always speaking through the ‘mask’ of ‘Lorca’.”(204)
What strikes me now is the provenance of this section. Spicer was a heartbroken poet; he died in the poverty ward of the San Francisco General Hospital in 1965. His last words were, “my vocabulary did this to me.” I remembered this exact line during class, and the quote about words being left unguarded. Its a huge risk, and as Spicer puts it himself, in terms of a poet, there’s an audience for the poet but very rarely one for their poetry. I think this serves well for understanding something, and in this case, a text. Did I, as a reader, do harm, neglect, or harm this text and its voice by not understanding as I am capable of now? Before the words and their arrangement seemed like a game, one where I would pull the tail of an author and find it to be either Spicer or, quite honestly, Lorca himself. The mask was definitely stronger before as well. When reading that introduction on my first read, I was utterly convinced it was Lorca, and I simply chalked up the part about acknowledging his own death to poetic freedom. But learning from my midterm project I began to think beyond the words and more about the text’s provenance. Both Spicer and Lorca were queer men, one dutifully martyred. His beliefs and morals stood firm during the Spanish Civil War, and this led to his assassination somewhere on the outskirts of Granada, Spain. His body was never recovered, yet it is said to most likely be buried in a mass grave. This also gives further context to this line in the introduction, “Even the most faithful student of my work will be hard put to decide what is and what is not García Lorca as, indeed, he would if he were look into my present resting place. The analogy is impolite, but I fear the impoliteness is deserved.”(5) The relationship posed by Spicer in this volume is dense to say the least but at its very core has to do with Spicer, a lonesome poet, one who has said that loneliness is necessary for pure poetry, is finding a tether, a connection to a great poet who has now become a ghost; a conjured specter. It has all to do with Lorca but all the more with poetry itself. But now I ask myself, why this route? Why choose the dead over the living? Katz makes another point, specifically through the lens of translation, “As translation becomes the search for ‘correspondences’, on the level of both he signifier and the signified (as the example of ‘seaweed’ rendering ‘lemon’ indicates), it can be effected only through the sort of ‘correspondence’ or exchange of voicings Spicer punningly has in mind in these letters, as he makes clear in closing this one: ‘Even these letters. They correspond with something (I don’t know what) that you have written (perhaps as unapparently as that lemon corresponds to this piece of seaweed) and, in turn, some future poet will write something which corresponds to them. That is how we dead men write to each other. Love, Jack’. Translation is literally letter-writing, as Spicer sees each of his renderings as at once a response addressed to Lorca, prompted by his work and also as a correspondence, re-placing that work in another time, language and context. Spicer sees himself as sending Lorca’s work back to him as well as extending Lorca mediumistically.”(205) In terms of the artist’s book, and as the book as ephemeral, Spicer precisely correlates both ideas, creating something akin to a seance. The deconstruction of Lorca’s work becomes the focus of Spicer’s poetry, and the conversation between the two is finite as the reader not only serves at a witness but as an activator.
II. The Dead Letters
Spicer’s letters to Lorca are haunting. Both heartbreaking and entrancing, Spicer laments in almost letters, of his function as a writer and the purpose of his and Lorca’s ghostly ‘meetings’. The very first line of the first letter reads, “Dear Lorca, these letters are to be as temporary as our poetry is to be permanent.” Spicer immediately confronts the aspect of time in his first letter. He continues further with, “The fools that read these letters will think by this we mean what tradition seems to have meant lately—an historical patchwork (whether made up of Elizabethan quotations, guide books of the poet’s home town, or obscure bits of magic published by Pantheon) which is used to cover up the nakedness of the bare word. Tradition means much more than that. It means generations of different poets in different countries patiently telling the same story, writing the same poem, gaining and losing something with each transformation—but, of course, never really losing anything. This has nothing to do with calmness, classicism, temperament, or anything else. Invention is merely the enemy of poetry. See how weak prose is. I invent a word like invention. These paragraphs could be translated, transformed by a chain of fifty poets in fifty languages, and they still would be temporary, untrue, unable to yield the substance of a single image. Prose invents— poetry discloses.”(Spicer 9). This passage reminds me a lot of Jorge Luis Borges’ The Library of Babel in what it conveys. This notion of an infinite number of similar stories being told yet never the same is a central theme in Spicer’s exploration of time and poetry. When thinking about the ephemerality of this specific text’s ideas, “Much as we love books, archiving them in libraries for future generations and exhibiting them behind glass as art objects, they are a vulnerable medium. Not only are their physical forms(including the tablet, scroll, codex, and variations) susceptible to decay, their power to spread ideas makes them vulnerable to censorship, defacement, and destruction, particularly motivated by the ideological and political difference. Some artists’ books embrace this impermanence, inviting us to meditate on our fears that books might go up in smoke.”(Borsuk 179). We can see this concept working throughout Spicer’s letters. In his final one to Lorca he laments and yearns for the relationship to last and not cease but he caves and professes that it was all a “game” birthed out of the necessity for poetry but a game nonetheless. Yet, the poems are still there, the connection was made and the meaning will last as long as we give it one. I will provide the final letter in totality as its a wonderful piece of writing:
“Dear Lorca, This is the last letter. The connection between us, which had been fading away with the summer, is now finally broken. I turn in anger and dissatisfaction to the things of my life and you return, a disembodied but contagious spirit, to the printed page. It is over, this intimate communion with the ghost of Garcia Lorca, and I wonder now how it was ever able to happen. It was a game, I shout to myself. A game. There are no angels, ghosts, or even shadows. It was a game made out of summer and freedom and a need for a poetry that would be more than the expression of my hatreds and desires. It was a game like Yeats’ spooks or Blake’s sexless seraphim. Yet it was there. The poems are there, the memory not of a vision but a kind of casual friendship with an undramatic ghost who occasionally looked through my eyes and whispered to me, not really more important than my other friends, but now achieving a different level of reality by being missing. Today, alone by myself, it is like having lost a pair of eyes and a lover. What is real, I suppose, will endure. Poe’s mechanical chessplayer was not the less a miracle for having a man inside it, and when the man departed, the games it had played were not less beautiful. The analogy is false, of course, but it holds a promise and a warning for each of us. It is October now. Summer is over. Almost every trace of the months that produced these poems has been obliterated. Only explanations are possible, only regrets. Saying goodbye to a ghost is more final than saying goodbye to a lover. Even the dead return, but a ghost, once loved, departing will never reappear.
Love, Jack” (Spicer 64).
Maybe loneliness is necessary for pure poetry, but then again, maybe not, what am I to know about any of that? I write prose. To me this text conjured itself in my mind because of this class and the themes of deconstruction of the book as we know it. I had never read a ‘book’ like this. But after knowing the provenance of this volume, the author’s duty to his work, and the book’s function as a text, I think I gained a better understanding of it than I had before our ‘Books!’ class. What seemed to be a passionate yet incomprehensible poetry book turned into an example of this very class’s main idea: the book is an ever-changing medium, fit to take on the form best suited for its time and influenced both by it and by the ones who read it. Much like the feeling this book gave me on a first read, I hope to capture the thoughts and ideas that this class gave me again.
Jacob
Works Cited
Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. The MIT Press, 2018.
Katz, Daniel. “‘JACK SPICER’S AFTER LORCA: TRANSLATION AS DECOMPOSITION.’” Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader, edited by Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor, Edinburgh University Press, 2007, pp. 201–06. JSTOR,
Spicer, Jack, and Peter Gizzi. After Lorca. New York Review Books, 2021.