La Jornada: “His true vocation: poetry and his faith in it,” says Esteban Moore

This June 3 marks the centenary of the birth of a voice made of jazz, sex, Buddhist prayers and nocturnal cities: Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997).

For the Argentine poet, translator and journalist Esteban Moore, who lived with the author of Howl and translated part of his work into Spanish, the core of the American writer was never in the myth beat not even in the hippie stereotype.

“All that was secondary to his true vocation: poetry and his faith in it,” he said in an interview with The Day.

Moore met Ginsberg personally in July 1990, during a writers’ meeting at the Naropa Institute, home of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, in Boulder, Colorado. After an exhausting trip with four stops, he was barely arranging his things in the apartment assigned by the university when someone knocked on the door.

“My surprise was great when I met Allen Ginsberg to welcome me.” The poet carried with him a book by Ed Sanders and another by Andrei Codrescu. He handed them to them as if he were sharing essential reading.

I had heard that he was preparing a translation of Lawrence Ferlinghetti for the Collection of Representative Works of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. “Tomorrow I’ll present it to you,” he said with absolute naturalness. And so it happened. During the following days he brought him closer to Anne Waldman and other writers who circulated through Naropa.

He retained the image of Ginsberg as someone determined to put books in the hands of others, recommend authors and prolong conversations well into the afternoon. He was, in his opinion, “a very generous man in making known not only his work, but that of those he considered relevant.”

In one of those conversations, Ginsberg wanted to know if I knew translations of his work into Spanish. The Argentine author responded that he had barely read the anthology published by Penguin Books with Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “the other two souls of the movement.” beat”.

The next morning he found an envelope in front of the apartment. Inside was White Shroud, Poems 1980-1985, dedicated and illustrated by Ginsberg himself with a drawing close to a dragon or an indefinite monster crowned by a disproportionate sex.

Moore returned to that scene because a good part of the readings around Ginsberg ended up reduced to the flower power, the anti-war protest or the image of the guru beat.

Although his figure was linked to the demonstrations against the Vietnam War and the defense of civil rights, he maintained that the poet remained at the center of everything. “Many use these facets to make them functional for their own agendas, but he had absolute faith in poetry.”

The strength of Howl (1956), he explained, was never in the scandal, but in “its rhythmic structure, the images and the orality that Ginsberg called the vernacular of his country.”

Added to this were two ideas that the writer took as a compass for his work. The first came from William Carlos Williams: “No ideas, only things.” The second was born from a phrase by his Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche: “First thought, better thought.”

While working on the translation of Howl For Alción Editora, published in 2012, Esteban Moore corresponded with Ferlinghetti, who left him a decisive observation. “The terms ‘poetic’ and ‘poetically’ are bad words; they should be avoided.” Afterwards, a phrase persisted that he still kept as a guide to approaching Ginsberg: “The concrete is the most poetic.”

Those words accompanied the entire translation process. He opted for the Castilian spoken from the Río de la Plata to convey that orality. He did not want a rigid or neutral language, but a language capable of sustaining the rhythm of the poem. “I used my own colloquial language,” he summarized.

Then he returned to a phrase by Jorge Luis Borges that accompanied him during those years: “Language is action, life, present time.”

Text that breathes

The main challenge was to preserve the internal breathing of the text. To do this, he returned to Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound in English, authors who helped him understand the way in which Ginsberg organized his verses.

The poem accumulated jazz, desire, madness, social criticism and Buddhist prayers without losing breath. The American writer compared the structure of the poem to a brick latrine: part by part, line by line. According to Esteban Moore, “the rhythm is born from a higher vertex and expands towards the base, joining with the breathing of the poetic voice.”

Within Naropa, Ginsberg preferred long conversations to solemn lectures. He spoke passionately about admired authors, even those who did not share his vision of poetry. Moore recalled that he conveyed the need to read to the classics and also to his generational contemporaries.

Over the years, the Argentine continued to spread Ginsberg’s poems and translations on his blog. To the top of the word. He did it because he considered that his work still needed new perspectives. “There are those who only read fiction and others who do not read and it shows,” he warned.

“He was one of the poets who set the definitive tone of American poetry.” In his verses “life, love, death and the atrocities that man produces” still resonate.

Among the main celebrations for the centenary of Allen Ginsberg is the tribute that The Poetry Project will carry out in New York on the same day of the commemoration, with readings, music and archival projections in the sanctuary of the church of San Marcos, where figures close to the tradition will participate beat such as Ed Sanders, Bob Rosenthal, David Amram and Anne Waldman.