Why the Captain’s Verses?

The Captain’s Verses / Los Versos del Capitán was written while Neruda was in exile in Italy, longing for Chile and swept in his relationship with Urrutia. It was a relationship they kept secret for fourteen years, which may be why these poems were published anonymously in an edition of fifty copies. Neruda’s original intention was for the books to stay in Italy and, as he phrased it, “leave no traces in the southern sands.” This, of course, didn’t happen, and as he notes in a preface to the 1963 version of the book that named him as the author: “to reveal its source was to strip bare the intimacy of its birth. And it did not seem to me that such an action would be loyal to the ecstasies of love and fury, to the disconsolate and ardent climate that gave birth to it.”

That’s part of what drew me to these poems. They feel different than Neruda’s other love poems, which hadn’t ever resonated very much with me. Here he seems to be speaking directly to one particular person and that person alone. These verses aren’t just about her; they are for her. As I read them, I felt the presence of a person behind his words, as if she wrote them, too.

I think that’s the beauty of writing about — which to me also means with — someone you love. If you can find a way to capture them in all their human complexity, rather than as a romanticized abstraction, there’s space for them to be all of themselves, even on the page. That’s a form of freedom.

Is this a feminist reading of romance?

I don’t know what makes something a feminist reading — I’ll have to think more on that —, but this project is certainly inflected by feminist thought. I wouldn’t say this work has a particular aim, but looking at it now and tracing back what I was reading and thinking about while making this, how could it not be a feminist reading?

WHAT were you reading?

A lot of bell hooks. hooks is someone who I’m always thinking and creating with. When I first started this project, I was also thinking about language and performance. I circled back to Judith Butler and J.L. Austin. And I think I’m always asking myself what Toni Morrison meant when she said, in her 1993 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, that “we do language.”

SO YOU’re DOING LANGUAGE here?

I don’t know that I am, or what that would even look like. But part of what made me curious to play with the existing text was a curiosity about the language of romance. Much of it can be easily read as a language of possession: I’m yours. My this. My that. What does it mean to have someone call you “mine?” That can sound off-putting or enveloping, depending on who’s saying it, right? When you turn that language on its face and refract it back onto the subject of the work, it starts to feel more like belonging than possession. She belongs to herself.

Oh, yEs, you can hear that in Bella especially.

Absolutely. That was the first poem I experimented with. I read it at Bowery Poetry during a Spanish language poetry series called Se Buscan Poetas. I remember reading it & feeling Maya Angelou’s Phenomenal Woman running through me, especially towards the end. There’s a raw power in how she’s claiming herself in those last few lines. The intensity of his desire for her is transmuted into a power all her own.

That felt like electricity when I read it.

Someone once told me, “The reverence of women is not the objectification of women.” I think he might have been trying to convince me to date him {laughs}, but the point stands. When you switch the perspective from an outside gaze to an internal one, this distinction becomes clear. You can revere yourself, but you can’t quite objectify yourself. Objectification requires an outside viewer. In this rewriting of Bella, there’s no gaze on the narrator but her own.

That INTERIORITY is significant.

Yes, and I think it’s related to your question about whether this is a feminist reading or retelling. I long understood feminism as something that necessarily takes bold, declaratory forms. It does take these forms. But there are also quiet feminisms, ones the make room for a turn inward. I was taken aback at how introspective the poems felt with the shift in narrative perspective. I felt a cocooning as I read them.

I THINK THAT’S what struck me about what you’re doing. a tiny turn in the language can CREATE A HUGE SHIFT. IT UNLOCKS THE WHOLE POEM.

Maybe, yes. I think there’s also something simpler happening. I often ask myself, what if we could all see ourselves through the eyes of the people who love us? This project is about that, too.

Why did you record in Spanish but not in English?

I find it hard to read Neruda in English. I don’t know if it’s because my social context for certain words in English is different than the one I have in Spanish, but when I hear those words in English, they sound more overt than they do in Spanish. It’s a different sensory experience.

I say that with immense admiration and gratitude for translators, who’ve given me access to work I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to access, and whose work seems impossibly difficult, particularly with a writer like Neruda. I’m not adept enough at working with the English language to be able to translate these poems, in part because the language is so direct but the auditory experience is so different between the two. To do with English what Neruda does with Spanish would require a great deal of skill and imagination. Reading the poems in English instead of Spanish feels like finding a freshly picked plum on a picnic in June and choosing to eat a bag of Skittles instead.

YOU DID LEave THE WRITTEN TRANSLATION.

Yes, to provide a grounding for those who don’t speak or fully understand Spanish. But it was important to me to keep the recordings in Spanish. There’s a lot to hear in Spanish, even for those who don’t speak it. I love listening to languages that I don’t speak or understand. I find myself listening for patterns or just taking in abstract sounds, rather than trying to process words and make meaning. It’s a way of experiencing my own alterity that’s not possible in a world of constant translation. It’s a reminder that there are worlds that exist in languages and systems of logic that are entirely different than my own, spaces that I may not ever be able to fully understand or inhabit. It’s a way of making room for difference in the world.

I also found there’s more room to play in Spanish. For example, in La Hija, the shift from “verte” to “verlo” creates an ambiguity that can’t happen in English. In English, the shift is from “see me” to “see him.” In Spanish, “verlo” can mean “to see him,” but it can also mean “to see it.” In the context of the poem, that’s an opening. She’s imagining motherhood, with or without a man. Or maybe something else entirely. What is the “it” she crossed an ocean to see? It creates space for a reaching, a desire that is entirely hers, that she doesn’t need to explain or define, that exists beyond what’s articulated in the poem.

THAT MAKES ME THINK OF a LINE FROM ANNE CARSON’S “IF NOT, WINTER.”

“because I prayed this word:

I want”

That’s the Line.

Anne Carson is someone else I carry with me sometimes, even when I don’t always realize it — like now. Thanks for finding that for me.

IN SOME WAYS, this project is about finding the people artists carry with them, even when they don’t realize it, and sometimes even when they do.

It is.

You’ve Dedicated this work to every artist who was ever called a muse. Can you tell us more about that?

The idea of a muse is fascinating to me. I was named after Petrarch’s muse. Even the word is evocative to me. Muse. But I hadn’t ever thought about it critically until it found its way into my work in law, specifically around the question of authorship.

Copyright defines an author as the person who fixes the work in a tangible medium of expression. Having an idea doesn’t carry much weight in law. What matters is whether you put it into a form of expression from which others can discern the idea. Copyright recognizes the labor it takes to put words on a page, paint on a canvas. This is important in incentivizing the production of works, but it undercuts the collectivity involved in the production of knowledge and art. Unsurprisingly, the collective nature of creative production has long been recognized in non-white cultures, but not in the conventional U.S. copyright regime.

AND THIS IS RELATED TO MUSES BECAUSE…?

When I think about the women who male artists have called muses, I think about the extent to which these women might have been authors or artists themselves. In many instances, the historical record supports this view. For example, Camille Claudel was a sculptor and Rodin’s muse. There is no question that her work would fall under a conventional view of singular authorship, in its legal definition.

This project was about asking whether this conception of authorship leaves out those who do not fit that definition of author, but who are central to the production of knowledge and art. This can mean recognizing the invisible labor that goes unaccounted for in a creative process or the collectivity that is at the heart of the production of knowledge and art, for example the conversations that find their way into a work, often uncited.

A lot of this project was about challenging the idea that the author is necessarily the one who puts the words on the page. Much of it came from imagining Urrutia as the author and Neruda as her scribe. He put the words on the page, but to what extent did she write the poems by living them? He describes her body, but she’s the one who carried it through the world. If authorship is defined by the ability to bring an idea into a tangible form, shouldn’t the woman who embodied the idea be considered if not the author, then perhaps an author? What if a muse creates the work because she lives it into existence?

Tell us about the last poem.

I think the poem speaks for itself, but I can share a story that might be related.

My grandfather was a poet. His formal education stopped at fifth grade. He worked blue collar jobs his entire life, and he made poems nearly every day of his life. My grandmother was the reason he began writing.

In the 1940s, in small-town Sicily, when a boy liked a girl, he would go to the town poet and have a poem written about her. Then he’d gather his friends, someone would bring an accordion, and he would sing this poem — a canzuna with a particular melody to which the poem is sung — outside her window. And so, my grandfather went to the town poet to have a poem written about Giovanna Oliò. He soon began writing his own poems, first for her, and then about other topics. He went on to publish two books and to win awards for his poetry.

I grew up watching my grandfather write poems. And whenever he would recite a love poem, my grandmother would chime in. I don’t think I ever heard one of my grandfather’s love poems without my grandmother’s voice, too. It was as if she knew those words written for her and about her, but also very much with and by her. It was as if they both knew these words belonged to both of them.

I always heard love poems in two voices. If there’s an origin story to this project, that might be it.