CLEARVIGIL IN SPRING
A
Mayan Myth
Miguel Ángel Asturias’Clarivigilia Primaveral
Authorized English Translation
By Robert W.
Lebling
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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Translated with permission of ALLCA, University of
Paris X, Nanterre, France.
Electronic Book published by Pennylesse
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About Miguel Ángel Asturias
The author of Clarivigilia Primaveral (Clearvigil in Spring) was born in Guatemala City in 1899. After studying law in Guatemala, he moved to Paris and took up writing poetry and fiction. His first novel, Leyendas de Guatemala, was well received by European critics. He won further fame with his later novels—including El Señor Presidente, Hombres de Maíz and Mulata de Tal—and his substantial contribution to the novelistic technique called magical realism. His native country treated him variously as a dignitary and an outcast. During the 1940s, and early 1950s, he was Guatemala’s Ambassador to Mexico, El Salvador and Argentina. A less hospitable regime sent him into exile. He wrote Clarivigilia Primaveral during the 1960s in Europe and published it in 1965, two years before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in Paris in 1974.
About Robert W. Lebling
Robert Lebling photo by Stephen L. Brundage.
The translator of Clarivigilia Primaveral (Clearvigil in Spring) is a writer, editor and communication specialist based in Saudi Arabia. Born in Bethesda, Maryland, he studied politics and anthropology at Princeton University and Middle East studies and Arabic at the University of Chicago. He has worked as a journalist in Cairo, Beirut, Jiddah, London and Washington, D.C. He is author of Legends of the Fire Spirits: Jinn and Genies from Arabia to Zanzibar and co-author with Donna Pepperdine of Natural Remedies of Arabia.
Introduction by the Translator
Paul Valéry called Miguel Ángel Asturias’ Legends of Guatemala (Leyendas de Guatemala) a collection of “history-dream-poems," and the same description applies to Clearvigil in Spring (Clarivigilia Primaveral), a history-dream-poem in which Asturias— winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967 — evokes the creation of artists by the Mayan gods, distancing himself entirely from the known texts. But these primitive artists are destroyed, according to this poem which in itself is a legend, by earth-born forces inimical to arts and magics. The earth is subjected to punishment by fire and water, and when centuries later it is reborn, the expression of artistic beauty is entrusted in painting to birds of beautiful plumage, in music and song to birds of prodigious throat, and in sculpture to rocky hills and stones shaped like animals. The Mayan gods, observing that all of these things are beautiful but do not possess magic, once again create artists, or those entrusted with magic, and to keep them from being destroyed, place them in the four corners of the sky. But these artists spend their time flattering the gods and creating works for the taste and liking of the divinities, forgetting about man. As a result, for the second time the artists created by the gods stand at the brink of destruction. Heavenly forces pursue them and wound them, and from the wounded arts emerges humanized art, the art of all for all. In this poem-legend we encounter word plays, onomatopeias and myths translated to epic form in a creation ever more American, more characteristic, more authentic, and unconnected to the literatures of Europe. The Nobel Committee took special note of his poetic cycle, Clarivigilia Primaveral, calling it an “impressive” work that “deals with the very genesis of the arts and of poetic creation, in a language which seems to have assumed the bright splendor of the magical queztal's feathers and the glimmering of phosphorescent insects.”
Translator’s Note: This translation is based on Editorial Losada’s second edition of Clarivigilia Primaveral (Buenos Aires: 1965). Footnote quotations attributed to”MAA” are my translations of notes from another Asturias work, Leyendas de Guatemala (sixth edition, Buenos Aires: Losada, 1975), containing local information of value to the reader.
CONTENTS
In the Light of the Goldthinking-Stars
Punishment of Profundities
Yes, But No Magic
Navels of Sun and Precious Copals
Magicians-Men-Magicians
Hidden Crafts
The Celestial Hunters
The Hunt
Dates of Stone
Movingroot of the Flower of the Air
The Dance of the Chimeras
IN THE LIGHT OF THE GOLDTHINKING-STARS
The Night, Nothingness and Life,
the Immense
Widows,
and the Twohanded Tattooer of worlds
that HE
created with his eyes
and tattooed with his sunflower stare,
created with his hands, one real and one dream,
created with his
word, a tattoo of resounding saliva,
worlds that he, though
blinded,
redeemed from the silence with the snail-curl of his
ears
and from the luminous murk
with his extinguished
constellation touch,
with his fingers bejeweled with numbers and
hummingbirds.
The Night, Nothingness and Life,
the Immense
Widows
in the light of the Goldthinking-stars,
Emissaries who
lost their way in the nickel sky
without revealing their message
and the Twohanded Tattooer
blinded by the threadlike rain of
eyes.
The rain scorched the whites of his eyes,
the
quicklime corneas,
in the presence of those who bejewel the
earth
with water tattoos,
tattoos in motion, navigable
tattoos,
Fluvial Tattooers;
before those who pearl the fields
with tearful dust,
Tattooers of the Dew;
before those who
set out to tattoo the beaches
with snails, sponges and
sargassos,
the raucous skeleton of the sea,
Oceanic
Tattooers;
before those who steal from serpentariums
tattoos
that shorten distance
and move away the near,
Tattooers of
Roads;
before the Tattooers of the Dusk,
their hands with
handfuls of sunset clouds...
Before the Tattooers of the Night,
their hands with amulets of fire...
The Night, Nothingness and Life,
those
Immense Widows
in the light of the Goldthinking-stars,
Emissaries who lost their way in the nickel sky,
without
revealing their message,
and the Twohanded Tattooer
with his
hollow pupils,
craters of extinct volcanoes
in the cemetery
of his corneas,
on the move — Blinded by Fresh Rain,
those
Blinded by Fresh Rain see what they dream —
in all the white
shadow his steps provided,
his countless feet moving beneath the
tunic woven
with amnesia of silkworms,
the silver-dust cloak
in the wind at his shoulders,
to keep from losing the thread of
the tattoo
when crossing the shadowy world
where touch is
demagnetized
and one must dodge, transformed into dream,
jaguars forged of fire,
blue turkeys forged of sky,
corals of
coral vipers,
breathless jades,
women cut into islands,
masks pockmarked with rubies,
skulls with teeth encrusted with
jadeites,
horoscopes of breeze
and cities of white copal(1),
until one emerges at respiration,
at respirations,
at scent,
at pollen,
at the calendar of ashes,
at the hailstorm of
hieroglyphics...
Ceiba-tree(2) fingers
combed the cottony
memory,
and from it fell dialects
with the roar of woodpecker
rains
and all the sounds
of terrestrial words...
The
words,
workers of the light...
The fingers combed
the memory of lake
tresses,
from which fell lacustrine languages,
syllabic,
tattooed with bubbles,
and all the sounds
of aquatic
words...
The words,
workers of the light...
The fingers combed
the memory of sun
tresses,
from which fell languages of astronomies
spoken
throughout the stars
and of marimbas(3) with mirror keyboards
that pounded great elastic raindrops
into calendar dates
festooned with hornpipes and drums,
and all the sounds
of
celestial words...
The words,
workers of the light...
The Night, Nothingness and Life,
the Immense
Widows,
the immense widowhood of the heavens
after each
lightning flash
and the sobbing and weeping of the turtledove
for what the Emissaries kept secret,
a message of which only
reflections remain,
tresses of the Goldthinking-stars
spread
on the azure plates.
The sobbing and weeping of the turtledove
for
a life without message,
life tattooed blindly
by the
Twohanded Tattooer
who decanted, from one world to another,
living immensities,
universes,
dynasties of iguanas,
aquariums,
tails of comets,
floating gardens,
markets of
words,
oils,
stars,
fire beetles,
butterflies...
A Twohanded Tattooer
who, after peopling his blindness,
created with his touch,
created with his breath —
the sound
from his face
colliding against his heart —
those who would
be entrusted
with the raising of beings,
things and sounds of
dream.
The ones entrusted:
Those of the songs soaking,
clearvigilant
shamans of poetry,
clearvigilant, clearsleeping, clearwaking.
Those of the stones soaking,
clearvigilant
shamans of sculpture,
clearvigilant, clearsleeping, clearwaking.
Those of the colors soaking,
clearvigilant
shamans of painting,
clearvigilant, clearsleeping, clearwaking.
Those of the darkness soaking,
clearvigilant
shamans of gourdcarving,
clearvigilant, clearsleeping,
clearwaking.
Those of the feathers soaking,
clearvigilant
shamans of the art of plumagery,
clearvigilant, clearsleeping,
clearwaking.
Those of the sounds soaking,
clearvigilant
shamans of music,
clearvigilant, clearsleeping, clearwaking.
Those of the metals soaking,
smelters,
goldsmiths, gemsetters,
clearvigilant, clearsleeping,
clearwaking.
Those of the songs soaking,
clearvigilant
shamans of poetry,
spewed mirror water from their lips
to see
and make seen
things soaked as in dreams...
clearvigilant,
Clearsleeping, clearwaking.
Those of the stones soaking,
clearvigilant
shamans of sculpture,
floated eyeless at the bottom of the azure
jewel-case,
their touch exposed to the pecks of the light of the
air,
clearwaking, clearvigilant, clearsleeping.
Those of the colors soaking,
clearvigilant
shamans of painting,
swept away reality with feathered brooms
to clear a path for enigma,
clearwaking, clearvigilant,
clearsleeping.
Those of the darkness soaking,
clearvigilant
shamans of gourdcarving,
set loose the blade-smoke drifting
through the black-varnish(4) night,
clearwaking, clearvigilant,
clearsleeping.
Those of the feathers soaking,
clearvigilant
shamans of the art of plumagery,
restored the wing of the
quetzal(5)
to candescent flight
in the gemstone of the wind
and in the tufts of plume,
guardian of the temples,
clearwaking, clearvigilant, clearsleeping.
Those of the metals soaking,
smelters,
goldsmiths, gemsetters,
mined gold from the light of the air,
silver from the lunar light,
gems from the water’s light,
clearwaking, clearvigilant, clearsleeping.
Those of the sounds soaking,
clearvigilant
shamans of music,
spoke for the sun,
the sun whose tongue the
eclipses consumed,
they spoke for the sun
with the sound of
stone,
marimba wood,
ocarina,
drum skin,
pierced
reed,
fish scale,
tortoise,
rattles
of the rattlesnake,
clearsleeping, clearvigilant, clearwaking.
But the word does not grasp,
the music does
not enclose,
voice and sound soak the porous space
of the
vast blue jug
and vanish through its pores.
Not so the fastening magics,
those that keep
the tremor of the substances
in temples, altars and monuments
tattooed with warriors,
priests,
name days,
presences,
astronomic dancers,
and in the ceremonial robes
tattooed with
butterfly wings,
and in the jewels tattooed with stars,
and
in the bark of the amatl(6)
tattooed with colored calligraphies
in equinoctial boil.
In calculation lies the substance of the star,
just as in these magic tattoos
of lines, forms and colors,
lies the substance of the Universe,
of the Universe visible
and immobile.
And for those cagers of creation,
the ones who
raised beings,
things and sounds of dream,
the sketchers,
painters,
sculptors,
engravers,
goldsmiths,
gourdcutters
(so fine is the cutting edge of the flint
that
it turns to thread in the varnish of the gourd cup),
plumists and
weavers of huipiles(7)
with tendrils of silk measuring
fruitlike breasts and hips;
for these clearvigilant magicians
assisting the Twohanded Tattooer,
the earth,
the light,
the wind,
the sky,
the water,
the sun,
the air,
weep in the cage of the perforated night,
blindness without exit.
Canina,
the Eagle of the Rabid Dogs,
flung himself against the Twohanded Tattooer.
“Everything’s
eroded by your sketchers!”
— he cried, his frill rising in a
circular fan,
his eyes nougats of glass,
his claws soaked
with glacial sweat —
“Everything’s eroded by your sketchers
or missing from the canvases of your mirror-painters!
If you
weren’t a blind chewer of shadows
you’d know the work of your
artists!
I hate your gourdcutters, I hate them,
from the
gourd in their hands come cups and platters
entangled in
spiderweb sketches!
And your sculptors and stonecutters
who
capture the laughter of the stones
in the light and shadow of the
bas-relief!
Your goldsmiths and jewelers! They have gems
in
place of fingertips,
so much precious stone passes through their
hands!
Your potters, through them the clay tells lies!
Your
plumists, their beautiful plumagery art
humanizes the swift
wing!...
I hate everything your artists create
in the
artificial light that is the night without tresses.”