Concerning the Angels

Rating:
Summary: Alberti's Best Work
Review: Rafael Alberti (1902-1999) is one of the most notable poets of the 20th century. He is not nearly as well known as his friend Federico García Lorca and most of his work is still unavailable in English translation. City Lights has made an invalubable contribution in the effort to widen the availability of Alberti's work to English speaking readers. This collection from 1929, here in a bilingual version, is considered by many to be Alberti's greatest poetic achievement. Translator Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno set himself a monumental task and he comes through with dignity and grace. The brief introduction by noted Hispanist Ian Gibson (a Lorca specialist) is helpful and Alberti's autobiographical note (from 1955) is fascinating.
Critical inertia has set "Concernng The Angels" in a surrealist context, but the work is not at all exemplary of surrealist art nor does it reflect in any important ways significant surrealist influences. The collection is, rather, an immensely creative narrative of the redemptive value of imaginative art. Alberti, who two years after publishing this book began a life long engagement with the Communist Party and a commitment to political activism, here makes his best and most radical political statement. Read this book and discover what it is.

Rating:
Summary: Alberti's Best Work
Review: Rafael Alberti (1902-1999) is one of the most notable poets of the 20th century. He is not nearly as well known as his friend Federico García Lorca and most of his work is still unavailable in English translation. City Lights has made an invalubable contribution in the effort to widen the availability of Alberti's work to English speaking readers. This collection from 1929, here in a bilingual version, is considered by many to be Alberti's greatest poetic achievement. Translator Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno set himself a monumental task and he comes through with dignity and grace. The brief introduction by noted Hispanist Ian Gibson (a Lorca specialist) is helpful and Alberti's autobiographical note (from 1955) is fascinating.
Critical inertia has set "Concernng The Angels" in a surrealist context, but the work is not at all exemplary of surrealist art nor does it reflect in any important ways significant surrealist influences. The collection is, rather, an immensely creative narrative of the redemptive value of imaginative art. Alberti, who two years after publishing this book began a life long engagement with the Communist Party and a commitment to political activism, here makes his best and most radical political statement. Read this book and discover what it is.

Rating:
Summary: Poetic catharsis
Review: Rafael Alberti's "Concerning the Angels" stands as not only one of the strongest & greatest collection of poems by a Spanish author in the twentieth century, but as the back cover states it is on par with other essential poetry books from all countries of the last century. Alberti's brief & poetic autobiographical statement at the beginning brings light to his mental state when he wrote the book in 1927-28. "What was I to do? How could I speak? How could I shout? How could I give form to that enmeshing tangle with which I was engaged in combat? How could I raise myself again from that catastrophic pit in which I had sunk? Submerging, burying myself more and more in my own ruins, covering myself up in my own rubble, with my insides torn, my bones splintered." Judging from the poems alone, one can tell that Alberti was in an anguished state. Alberti's recurrent idea of the soul in it's different conditions deserves to be examined closely & not be taken in a religious context, just as he informs us that, "the angels revealed themselves to me, not as Christian, bodily angels of the sort found in beautiful paintings or prints, but instead as irresistible forces of the spirit, maleable to the most turbid and secret states of my nature."


If people now find it hard to contemplate the notion of the soul in other than a strictly religious context, I have no reservations in stating this is one of the more lamentable effects of our consumer-driven society. As much as Alberti writes about the soul it is evident from these poems that he was witness to man's demoralization:

"body that for soul

had the void, nothing,"

"Ruined men, fixed,

in the wrecked cities,"

"Lost among equations, triangles, formulas and blue precipitates,

between bloody events, ruins and toppled crowns,

at the time of gold hunters and bank robberies,

in the tardy blush on the flat roofs

voices of angels anounced to you the casting off and loss of your soul."

Lorca brought "Concerning the Angels" with him to New York & was influenced by it while writing, "Poet in New York" esp. in his poems criticizing the greed of American capitalism. If capitalism & industrialized societies have offered us comfort & luxury, it has been enormously detrimental to our being, modern capitalism has turned people into exploitable objects with a dollar sign on everything. Beginning with Blake & Novalis, poets have been warning mankind about the negative effects of capitalism.


For Alberti physical death is preferable to anguish, especially after the loss of love. Rimbaud gave us a memorable definition of this when he wrote, "the only thing that is unbearable is that nothing is unbearable." The poet Ruben Dario writes of a different hope in death: "...Tell me that this horrible dread of agony which posesses me is my own wicked fault; that, dead, I will see the light of a new day, and then will hear you say, "Arise and walk!" Indeed, in extreme desperation what Alberti longs for more than anything else is either the void of death or a return to a state prior to becoming acquainted with love's disappointments. Usually this state assumes the form of childish innocence, but since this is more unlikely than the void of death, the most memorable lines of the book belong to the latter solution:

"Fly now from me, dark

Lucifer of quarries without dawn,

of wells without water

of caverns without sleep,

now, ember of the spirit,

sun,moon...

Oh, burn me!

More, more, yes, yes, more! Burn me!"

"Ugly one, sooty and muddy

I don't want to see you!

Before, you were snowy, gilded,

in a sled across my soul.

Ornamented pines. Slopes.

And now through the carriage houses,

of charcoal, filthy.

Out! Out! Away!"

"Always at counterlight,

never overtaken, alone,

soul alone...

Soul in pain:

lifeless brilliance,

you conquer."

In "Concerning the Angels" anguish usually appears in the form of mist, in fact three sections of the book bear the title, "Guests of the Mist", a line from G.A. Becquer, who Alberti dedicates one of the greatest poems of the entire book, "Three Remembrances of Heaven." This mist is the physical manifestation of Alberti's mental states, either completely obscuring anything colorful & promising or bringing back even more painful memories:

"Neither sun, moon, nor stars,

neither the unexpected green

of lightning or thunder

nor the breeze. Only mists."

Again the poem mirrors the conditions under which Alberti wrote them, "a creature of darkness, I began to write blindly at any hour of the night without putting on the light in my room."

We move with the poet through these skeins of mist, knowing all along, "to go to hell there is no need to change one's place or posture." Alberti keeps searching for what will eclipse his pain completely, the reason it is usually death he sees as the answer is because with every other solution, even a new love, there is the potential of old memories reappearing and throwing him back into extreme agony, what Alberti wants from death is to be cauterized not only from his present torments but from the painful memories as well. The poet's hope he puts into his death is, "there is always a last time after the fall of the wasteland, the advent of cold in forgetful dreams, and the tumbling down of death on the skeleton of nothingness." Alberti's conviction in the soul & his longing for the complete void of emotions that death promises may at first seem a paradox, but it is not. Only for someone who acknowledges the soul as something absolutely vital to living, as opposed to merely existing, would require death's permanence as a solution to their persistent agony, and the reason it is so intolerable is because it refuses to end. With "Concerning the Angels" Alberti has given us one of the most magnificent poetry collections, a veritable catharsis of the soul.



Rating:
Summary: Inspired, breathless, imaginative, inventive, superb
Review: This book illustrates why City Lights Books is the most important tourist stop in San Francisco - they are the publishers of this excellent book. The Andalusian poet is a contemporary of Lorca, Dali etc. In his brief autobiographic note, he states that these poems were written at night in a frenzy. I believe him. At least three-quarters of the poems have a sense of being inspired rather than crafted i.e. as if they came as whole to the poet, i.e. as if they came directly from within as an expression of state-of-being rather than being created consciously by the artistic intellect.

Within the poems there is a significant variety in structure and tone although most share a sense of disorientation. There are very inventive images which absolutely fit in the poem although standing alone, that seems impossible. Throughout the poems there was only one image that jarred, one (to my mind) misplaced "piano". Some examples: "Ah yes. A suit of clothes went by / uninhabited, hollow" or "The earth was an enemy, / because it fled. / The sky an enemy, / because it never stopped."

This volume is bilingual - something I appreciate (or demand) in translations of poetry. It is a volume that bears reading and rereading in either or both languages.

Rating:
Summary: Inspired, breathless, imaginative, inventive, superb
Review: This book illustrates why City Lights Books is the most important tourist stop in San Francisco - they are the publishers of this excellent book. The Andalusian poet is a contemporary of Lorca, Dali etc. In his brief autobiographic note, he states that these poems were written at night in a frenzy. I believe him. At least three-quarters of the poems have a sense of being inspired rather than crafted i.e. as if they came as whole to the poet, i.e. as if they came directly from within as an expression of state-of-being rather than being created consciously by the artistic intellect.

Within the poems there is a significant variety in structure and tone although most share a sense of disorientation. There are very inventive images which absolutely fit in the poem although standing alone, that seems impossible. Throughout the poems there was only one image that jarred, one (to my mind) misplaced "piano". Some examples: "Ah yes. A suit of clothes went by / uninhabited, hollow" or "The earth was an enemy, / because it fled. / The sky an enemy, / because it never stopped."

This volume is bilingual - something I appreciate (or demand) in translations of poetry. It is a volume that bears reading and rereading in either or both languages.