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Memory in My Hands: The Love Poetry of Pedro Salinas- Translated with an Introduction by Ruth Katz Crispin
Pedro Salinas (1892-1951), one of the greatest modern poets of any country, is unquestionably the preeminent love poet of twentieth-century Spain. Memory in My Hands includes an ample selection of his three books of love poetry – The Voice I Owe to You [La voz a ti debida], A Reason for Love [Razón de amor], and Long Lament [Largo lamento] in English translation alongside the Spanish original. This trilogy of love poems, the last (posthumous) of which has never been translated before, are of a nature to win a large and devoted they are at once passionate, eloquent, and whimsical. The introduction to Memory in My Hands sets the poems in context, providing the story of the love affair that inspired the poems. It also raises the question of the nature of autobiographical poetry and considers this collection in the tradition of poetic sequences such as Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella .
- GenresPoetry
312 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
2 people are currently reading
59 people want to read
About the author
Pedro Salinas
173 books84 followersPedro Salinas y Serrano (27 November 1891 – 4 December 1951) was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27, as well as a university teacher, scholar and literary critic. In 1937, he delivered the Turnbull lectures at Johns Hopkins University. These were later published under the title Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry.
e was born in Madrid in the Calle de Toledo, 1891, in a house very close to the San Isidro church/cathedral. Salinas lived his early years in the heart of the city and went to school first in the Colegio Hispano-Francés and then in the Instituto Nacional de Segunda Enseñanza, both close by the church. His father, a cloth-merchant, died in 1899. He began to study Law at the Universidad central in 1908 and in 1910 started to study History concurrently. He graduated successfully in both courses in 1913. During his undergraduate years, he began to write and publish poems in small circulation journals such as Prometeo.[2] In 1914 he became the Spanish lector at the Collège de Sorbonne in the University of Paris until 1917, when he received his Doctorate. He had married Margarita Bonmarti, a Spanish girl of Algerian descent whom he had met on his summer holidays in Santa Pola, Alicante, in December 1915. She had been born in 1884. They had two children, Soledad (always referred to as Solita) born in 1920 and Jaime born in 1925. His academic life seemed to act as a model for his slightly younger contemporary Jorge Guillén with whom he struck up a friendship in 1920.
In 1918 he was appointed Professor of Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Seville and he held the post until 1928, although he spent 1922-23 as lector at the University of Cambridge.[3] One of his students in Seville was Luis Cernuda in the academic year 1919-20, to whom he gave special encouragement. He urged him to read modern French literature, in particular André Gide and the poetry of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rimbaud.[4] He continued to publish poems in magazines such as España and La Pluma. In vacations, he spent time as a lecturer at the Residencia de Estudiantes, where he got to know the leading lights of his generation, such as García Lorca and Rafael Alberti. In April 1926, he was present at the gathering in Madrid where the first plans to celebrate the tercentenary of Góngora's death were laid. Salinas was to edit the volume devoted to the sonnets: a project that never came to fruition. While at Cambridge, his translation of the first two volumes and part of the third of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time into Spanish was published. And in 1925, his modernised version of El Poema de Mío Cid was published by Revista de Occidente.
In 1928 he became a researcher at the Centro de Estudios Históricos in Madrid before becoming director of studies for foreigners at the University of Madrid.[6] In 1930, he became a professor of Spanish literature at Madrid and doubled up as originator, organiser and secretary-general of the International Summer School of Santander between 1933 and 1936. This school was set up to accommodate 200 Spanish students (approximately 4 from each of the established universities in Spain) and an international teaching staff.
On 8 March 1933, he was present at the premiere in Madrid of García Lorca's play Bodas de sangre. In August 1933, he was able to host performances at the Magdalena Palace in Santander by the travelling theatre company La Barraca that Lorca led. On 20 April 1936, he attended the launch party in Madrid for Luis Cernuda's new collection La realidad y el deseo.[9] and on 12 July he was present at a party in Madrid that took place just before García Lorca departed to Granada for the last time before his murder. It was there that Lorca read his new play La casa de Bernarda Alba for the last time.
On 31 August 1936, shortly after the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, he moved to the USA, to take up the position of the Mary Whiton Calkins professor at Wellesley Coll
e was born in Madrid in the Calle de Toledo, 1891, in a house very close to the San Isidro church/cathedral. Salinas lived his early years in the heart of the city and went to school first in the Colegio Hispano-Francés and then in the Instituto Nacional de Segunda Enseñanza, both close by the church. His father, a cloth-merchant, died in 1899. He began to study Law at the Universidad central in 1908 and in 1910 started to study History concurrently. He graduated successfully in both courses in 1913. During his undergraduate years, he began to write and publish poems in small circulation journals such as Prometeo.[2] In 1914 he became the Spanish lector at the Collège de Sorbonne in the University of Paris until 1917, when he received his Doctorate. He had married Margarita Bonmarti, a Spanish girl of Algerian descent whom he had met on his summer holidays in Santa Pola, Alicante, in December 1915. She had been born in 1884. They had two children, Soledad (always referred to as Solita) born in 1920 and Jaime born in 1925. His academic life seemed to act as a model for his slightly younger contemporary Jorge Guillén with whom he struck up a friendship in 1920.
In 1918 he was appointed Professor of Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Seville and he held the post until 1928, although he spent 1922-23 as lector at the University of Cambridge.[3] One of his students in Seville was Luis Cernuda in the academic year 1919-20, to whom he gave special encouragement. He urged him to read modern French literature, in particular André Gide and the poetry of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rimbaud.[4] He continued to publish poems in magazines such as España and La Pluma. In vacations, he spent time as a lecturer at the Residencia de Estudiantes, where he got to know the leading lights of his generation, such as García Lorca and Rafael Alberti. In April 1926, he was present at the gathering in Madrid where the first plans to celebrate the tercentenary of Góngora's death were laid. Salinas was to edit the volume devoted to the sonnets: a project that never came to fruition. While at Cambridge, his translation of the first two volumes and part of the third of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time into Spanish was published. And in 1925, his modernised version of El Poema de Mío Cid was published by Revista de Occidente.
In 1928 he became a researcher at the Centro de Estudios Históricos in Madrid before becoming director of studies for foreigners at the University of Madrid.[6] In 1930, he became a professor of Spanish literature at Madrid and doubled up as originator, organiser and secretary-general of the International Summer School of Santander between 1933 and 1936. This school was set up to accommodate 200 Spanish students (approximately 4 from each of the established universities in Spain) and an international teaching staff.
On 8 March 1933, he was present at the premiere in Madrid of García Lorca's play Bodas de sangre. In August 1933, he was able to host performances at the Magdalena Palace in Santander by the travelling theatre company La Barraca that Lorca led. On 20 April 1936, he attended the launch party in Madrid for Luis Cernuda's new collection La realidad y el deseo.[9] and on 12 July he was present at a party in Madrid that took place just before García Lorca departed to Granada for the last time before his murder. It was there that Lorca read his new play La casa de Bernarda Alba for the last time.
On 31 August 1936, shortly after the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, he moved to the USA, to take up the position of the Mary Whiton Calkins professor at Wellesley Coll
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 17, 2021
Did you once love me?
And while you are silent
and it is night, I do not know
if light or love exist.
I need the extraordinary
miracle: another day
and your voice, confirming for me
the same familiar marvel.
And even if you are silent
in the enormous distance,
the dawn, at least,
will speak. The light
that it brings me today will be
the great yes of the world
to my love for you.
*
I don’t want you to leave,
heartache, the last form
of loving. I feel myself
live when you hurt me
not in yourself, or here, but further:
in the earth, in the year
you come from,
in my love for her
and everything it meant.
In that sunken
reality which denies
itself and insists
that it never existed,
that it was only a pretext
of mine for living.
If you didn’t stay with me,
heartache, irrefutably,
I would believe that;
but you do stay with me.
Your truth assures me
that nothing was a lie.
And as long as I feel you,
heartache, you will be
the proof of another life
in which you didn’t hurt me.
The great proof, in the distance,
that it existed, that it still exists,
that she loved me, yes,
that I’m still loving her.
*
When I speak of the impossible
squeeze my hand harder than ever.
And while you are silent
and it is night, I do not know
if light or love exist.
I need the extraordinary
miracle: another day
and your voice, confirming for me
the same familiar marvel.
And even if you are silent
in the enormous distance,
the dawn, at least,
will speak. The light
that it brings me today will be
the great yes of the world
to my love for you.
*
I don’t want you to leave,
heartache, the last form
of loving. I feel myself
live when you hurt me
not in yourself, or here, but further:
in the earth, in the year
you come from,
in my love for her
and everything it meant.
In that sunken
reality which denies
itself and insists
that it never existed,
that it was only a pretext
of mine for living.
If you didn’t stay with me,
heartache, irrefutably,
I would believe that;
but you do stay with me.
Your truth assures me
that nothing was a lie.
And as long as I feel you,
heartache, you will be
the proof of another life
in which you didn’t hurt me.
The great proof, in the distance,
that it existed, that it still exists,
that she loved me, yes,
that I’m still loving her.
*
When I speak of the impossible
squeeze my hand harder than ever.
December 14, 2019
Love documented in poetry.
It's a little sad that everybody knows about the love poems of Pablo Neruda, whereas Pedro Salinas, remains largely unknown, undiscovered. His poetry is just as exquisite, passionate and tender. It needs to be discovered by the English-speaking world.
Though I'd not read and reviewed the other collection "My Voice Because Of You" (which has different content) translated by Willis Barnstone, but I have looked at some translations and I like the ones translated by Ruth Katz Crispin, better.
Memory in My Hands is a bilingual edition of Spanish-English, which covers an ample selection of his three books of love poetry - The Voice I Owe to You [La voz a ti debida], A Reason for Love [Razon de amor], and Long Lament [Largo lamento]. The collection is both ecstatic and elegiac.
The introduction to Memory in My Hands sets the poems in context, providing the story of the love affair between Pedro and Katherine Reding, that inspired the poems. They both realized their mutual attraction and love in a spark. But they had to inevitably separate. Since Pedro was a married man, and Katherine, a single career woman. Even when they broke off contact because of its clandestine nature, it remained alive through the letters and poems of Pedro and the Katherine's memoir. It survived still and readers who have discovered Salinas' poetry have will themselves nourished by dipping in this river of love.
The end of Introduction moved me. Shortly, after their last physical meeting, Katherine had to prepare to teach Salinas' poetry to a class. This made her go through the letters and poems, and she wept, because she did not assure him of her love in the last meeting, but she felt him, with her, palpably. The same time, she receives the news that Pedro passed away and it was no coincidence that feeling his presence in the room, was him reassuring of the love they had.
The translator, Ruth Crispin suggests that one must read the poems as stories, but also only as a work of fiction and not a biography. Seeing it from a perspective of courtly love tradition, the translator further writes that these poems are not just an indication of personal encounter in which a man and woman love reciprocally, but a transformation from such personal encounter, into a mirror of the male lover: and specifically of his desire, which remakes the woman in his image of her, converting her from beloved to muse: from real woman, to divinity.
Katherine was not just a muse. She was the co-creator of Salinas' poetry.
"A Voice I Owe To You" depicts a true love story between Pedro and Katherine and it's separation. These poems are a faithful expression of their romance, the secret pain of separation.
The next part "A Reason For Love" alternates between the drift and departure from love to moments of rapture. It is intense but manages to maintain a certain lightness in it.
The "Long Lament" is even more serious and poignant. It manages to intimately trace the loss of love to it's origin — it's tenderness now present in everything tangible that surrounds the poet — passionate touches of skin are delicately thought of, through the visions of nature and more.
I'm a sucker for writings that conveys the pure transcendental nature of love, and when I come across something like that, it's always something I end up thinking highly of.
Although I cannot be certain if I've absorbed his poetry with the same maturity with which he wrote them, but to whatever degree I did, it has allowed me to see this collection for a marvel that it is.
I've shared many excerpts in a Twitter thread :
A Voice I Owe To You : https://twitter.com/PoetryTrails/stat...
A Reason For Love : https://twitter.com/PoetryTrails/stat...
Long Lament : https://twitter.com/PoetryTrails/stat...
It's a little sad that everybody knows about the love poems of Pablo Neruda, whereas Pedro Salinas, remains largely unknown, undiscovered. His poetry is just as exquisite, passionate and tender. It needs to be discovered by the English-speaking world.
Though I'd not read and reviewed the other collection "My Voice Because Of You" (which has different content) translated by Willis Barnstone, but I have looked at some translations and I like the ones translated by Ruth Katz Crispin, better.
Memory in My Hands is a bilingual edition of Spanish-English, which covers an ample selection of his three books of love poetry - The Voice I Owe to You [La voz a ti debida], A Reason for Love [Razon de amor], and Long Lament [Largo lamento]. The collection is both ecstatic and elegiac.
The introduction to Memory in My Hands sets the poems in context, providing the story of the love affair between Pedro and Katherine Reding, that inspired the poems. They both realized their mutual attraction and love in a spark. But they had to inevitably separate. Since Pedro was a married man, and Katherine, a single career woman. Even when they broke off contact because of its clandestine nature, it remained alive through the letters and poems of Pedro and the Katherine's memoir. It survived still and readers who have discovered Salinas' poetry have will themselves nourished by dipping in this river of love.
The end of Introduction moved me. Shortly, after their last physical meeting, Katherine had to prepare to teach Salinas' poetry to a class. This made her go through the letters and poems, and she wept, because she did not assure him of her love in the last meeting, but she felt him, with her, palpably. The same time, she receives the news that Pedro passed away and it was no coincidence that feeling his presence in the room, was him reassuring of the love they had.
The translator, Ruth Crispin suggests that one must read the poems as stories, but also only as a work of fiction and not a biography. Seeing it from a perspective of courtly love tradition, the translator further writes that these poems are not just an indication of personal encounter in which a man and woman love reciprocally, but a transformation from such personal encounter, into a mirror of the male lover: and specifically of his desire, which remakes the woman in his image of her, converting her from beloved to muse: from real woman, to divinity.
Katherine was not just a muse. She was the co-creator of Salinas' poetry.
"A Voice I Owe To You" depicts a true love story between Pedro and Katherine and it's separation. These poems are a faithful expression of their romance, the secret pain of separation.
The next part "A Reason For Love" alternates between the drift and departure from love to moments of rapture. It is intense but manages to maintain a certain lightness in it.
The "Long Lament" is even more serious and poignant. It manages to intimately trace the loss of love to it's origin — it's tenderness now present in everything tangible that surrounds the poet — passionate touches of skin are delicately thought of, through the visions of nature and more.
I'm a sucker for writings that conveys the pure transcendental nature of love, and when I come across something like that, it's always something I end up thinking highly of.
Although I cannot be certain if I've absorbed his poetry with the same maturity with which he wrote them, but to whatever degree I did, it has allowed me to see this collection for a marvel that it is.
I've shared many excerpts in a Twitter thread :
A Voice I Owe To You : https://twitter.com/PoetryTrails/stat...
A Reason For Love : https://twitter.com/PoetryTrails/stat...
Long Lament : https://twitter.com/PoetryTrails/stat...
October 15, 2018
"But hands almost never know how
to stay open, they always long
to seize, to close, claiming precisely
what you don’t want anyone to have of you"
"And since it was very late
I said goodbye to the depths of your eyes
and I went off to seek you in the void."
"And we’re never far apart when we cry.
Either your tears or mine have
stretched out across the solitudes
uniting distances"
to stay open, they always long
to seize, to close, claiming precisely
what you don’t want anyone to have of you"
"And since it was very late
I said goodbye to the depths of your eyes
and I went off to seek you in the void."
"And we’re never far apart when we cry.
Either your tears or mine have
stretched out across the solitudes
uniting distances"
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews