Oh Resplendent Pool of Light

By Joan Guenther

O Resplandor is about friendship and the slippery nature of the singularity of the self. It is also a consideration of the material genius of language, the effect of language on the body, in the body, as body, producing body.

“I was given over to language and it was withholding itself even from me” (34) muses E.M., a character in the narrative that frames and motivates the poems in this book.

O Resplandor is a prose narrative, though O Resplandor is also a book filled with poems, poems that emerge from other poems and go on to generate further poems. It’s a book about text revised, amended, translated, re-translated, altered.

Not only text is altered through these forms of revision and translation, but time as well; temporal order in this narrative is undone.

“Each time, time’s rupture must be admitted, for every translation destroys time.” says or thinks or writes the character E.M. (6)

From its first pages, to read this text is constantly to have in mind the expression “Erín Moure”, the name of a writer who has published books of poems, essays, and translations, whose name appears on the front cover of O Resplandor. “Erín Moure” appears to denote the author of this text. However O Resplandor dismantles the very idea and trope of author/reader/narrator/subject. Such a taking apart, or ‘mangling’ both organizes and undoes the text and has its way as well with the reader.

Yet on page 144 there’s a photograph captioned “Author photo.” What is the reader to make of a photograph that claims to represent an author whose text in the reader’s hand serves to undermine the very idea of an author?

Photographs are important in the fractured narrative of O Resplandor. Characters scan photographs for answers to questions about presence, location, and proximity. In these photographs bodies are half hidden, partly apparent, apparent in parts, entering or exiting the frame. Visual details act as clues to, or evidence of, the identity and purposes of the person depicted, the absent friend, the mysterious double, the doppelgänger. Such close and often urgent examination always fails, does not reveal intention or motivation. And whatever information the photographs in this book do reveal frequently leaves the characters breathless or perturbed or panicked.

O Resplandor presents the enigmatic peregrinations of three friends who are poets and translators, all of whom translate yet other poets. The book offers the poems of five poets, some fictive, some real. Nichita Stănescu and Paul Celan are both here, in English translations of poems originally published in Romanian.

Romanian is a romance language spoken by 25 million people around the world; there are Romanian-speaking communities in many Canadian cities including Calgary and Montreal, two settings crucial to the protagonists of O Resplandor. The city of Bucharest figures importantly as well, though each location is a dreamscape where characters come and go, only so as to connect or fail to connect—with each other, with the languages spoken there, and with the poems generated in the languages spoken.

The paths taken by each character are like lines on a map, from Calgary to Montreal to Bucharest and back, lines that are either congruent or parallel, either cross at some point or never do. Such is the geometry/geography of O Resplandor.

Who are the central protagonists of the narrative that frames and motivates the poems in this book? There is Erín Moure, (E.M.), who translates the poems of Paul Celan, quotes or ‘alters’ Derrida, claims English is “the old tongue of no one, tongue of us all, gibberish…” (91).

There is Elisa Sampedrín (E.S.), who moves between three languages, Galician, English, and Romanian, translates Stănescu, and quotes and ‘alters’ Derrida and other writers too.

Finally, there is O.A. who translates both Celan and Stănescu, the only one of three who actually speaks Romanian. O.A. befriends both E.M. and E.S. and mediates the anxieties these characters express should their life paths actually cross.

“Never let me meet Elisa. Never let me ask her to put language into my mouth,” E.M. asks of O.A.

“You can’t meet Elisa now, don’t worry. She’s not there,” O.A. replies (17).

In fact the reader can extrapolate further multiplicities of identity: Erín Moure becoming E.M. becoming simply upper case E., and similarly, O.A. becoming O. a proliferation of semblance and difference, another excess of play that both structures and subverts the narrative progress of O Resplandor.

There are probably lots of ways to read this book but the way I read it is with the constant insistence “Wait! Wait!” the cry of a reader who wants to regain her readerly poise.

However, as Elisa Sampedrín says, “That’s what reading wants to do, turn you inside out.” (109)

Where there’s more happening in this book than this reader can keep up with I search for something fixed, a clue (a word), a stable location or subject or repetition, especially repetition. And there are in the text many resonant reiterations, fields and photographs, books that disappear and reappear (their provenance uncertain), tongues and mouth pain, a roof, notebooks, pages from notebooks, factories and a map of Calgary, sciences of the retina and light.

There’s also humour. In a narrative moment of hysterical panic, of which there are a number in this book, E.M. has a realization: “I knew O. was not writing about me, but about E.S. I felt the terrifying plunge of an elevator. As if my endocrine system were reeling to a stop.” (34)

What is the reason for such anxiety in anticipation of friends meeting, all the circumvention and avoidances between E.M. and E.S.?

Jacques Derrida, or J.D., as E.M. is wont to call him, is an important presence in the book and his writings provide a clue to the central motif and paradox of the narrative: though they never cease to seek each other out, Erín Moure and Elisa Sampendrin must never actually meet.

Derrida writes about friendship, time, and the gift, three important themes of O Resplandor, but also writes about ghosts, hauntings, and the ‘other’. Indeed he is himself a phantom in this book filled with Derridean quotes, reliable or ‘altered’ and therefore not so reliable citations; even the texts of J.D. cannot be counted on as unified and original.

Derrida’s notion of the other may be a real other—or may be a spectral other. Elisa Sampedrín is almost certainly an ‘other’ of Erín Moure; she’s a conceit but has acquired a history and resumé of her own. She’s a published poet, translator, and editor. At the same time she remains an invention always in this text insisting, “Wait. Wait.”

If binaries organize our meaning, such binaries as presence/absence, reality/fiction, visible/invisible, what would be the effect, on this narrative, on this text, on the author, should the phantom appear, the invention show up; as Derrida writes, “…the image itself becoming the author…” (35)

The fact is Elisa Sampedrín is both of and, as time passes, not of, her inventor. She may by now have her own past but what of her future? Isn’t her future entirely at the behest of her creator, a gift only Moure can offer, gift of friendship, of the yet-to-be, a gift without obligation or recognition of the one who gives?

In reading O Resplandor characters and layers of authorship and translation begin to accumulate and I find myself returning to the first poem. Who, of the many ‘selves’ of this text, I ask myself, is the author of the poem called “from Initial Elegy”. (3)

This poem is a quatrain with lovely enjambments and one graceful metaphor asserting air is like knowledge. The epigraph and the footnote (another four-line stanza, perhaps excerpted from a longer poem) are written in what appears to be a romance language. But it’s a language I don’t recognize with any certainty. I recognize words that could mean no, love, of, what, or maybe why, penetrate, complete, air. Or do I?

What kind of reading is this, a reading of words in a language utterly foreign and opaque? If reading as reading involves simply continuing with pleasure then yes this is reading. To read such a writerly text is to have the act of reading foregrounded.

In the opening pages of S/Z, Barthes isn’t offering a binary or defining a category when he theorizes about writerly texts but opening a space for play. O Resplandor is a writerly text, a riddle that will not be solved or that has as many solutions as readers and has as many readers as readers who take up the book again and again.

Two poems, “KEY TO READING ‘Two Accurate Translations of One and the Same Poem by Paul Celan’*” (126) and “a poem now to be assembled in any order, by anyone’s hand” (131) are exercises that invite the reader to experience through the undoing of a re-translation of a translation, the absolute disruption of any notion of some original, unified text.

So O Resplandor leaves the reader in a writerly state, compelled, to create a new text in response to the original, an original that throughout claims what is written cannot be original but can only be a retranslation of a translation. It’s a text insisting on the impossible translation of difference—and demanding the preservation of difference.

In O Resplandor, language, both spoken and written, resonates in the body, the body of both reader and writer. Thus the body becomes a text. E.M. says, “I translate Celan and feel myself all aching mouth everywhere.” (32) and “The wind gusts away all syllables before they can be heard. It’s the moment before the first letter is inscribed. In this moment we are in Burureşti, falling seven stories onto a page.” (134)

More is said of the relationship between language and body in O Resplandor.

“What is it, this organ, the mouth? When you turn to take in the word, so that it touches the space in the letter? To translate is to harken to everything that comes out of this body. How do I know how the word entered? How can I truly say that any of it is really mine.” (117)

These words are taken from the notebook kept by O., friend of both E.M. and E.S. The friendship between these three writers is not simply about proximity and agreement, but brings them as individuals into a relationship of responsibility.

But, as a relationship of responsibility, friendship is also a relationship of alienation; there is always the choice to withdraw. One withdraws to preserve the freedom of the self, the freedom of the poet, a necessary freedom given the exigencies of being a writer.

In the eyes of her friend, her other, the author understands she exceeds her own existence as a writer, her own existence as an isolated being. This is Poetry’s Arithmetic. (113)

One plus one doesn’t make two,

one plus one makes three,

are four, are five…

 

A poet knots the word…

Given the extensive citation of Derridean theory, the motif of friendship inO Resplandor is associated with the theme of mourning, the constant presence in life of loss to come.

The failure of the living body is drawn with great tenderness in eight poems, pages 99 through 106, one of which inquires

When a blind person holds their hands over their eyes

to face us,

what are we asked to see? (103)

Death is the event where words fail, the parent who is gone cannot answer, the friend cannot wait, the teacher cannot clarify, the lost one being absolutely other yet absolutely intimate to the one who remembers.

There are eleven elegies in O Resplandor. On page 44 the reader finds in Initial Elegy a translation of the mysterious quatrain that opens the text. It seems the outcome of continuing to read in expectation of pleasure is not an answer to an enigma but a space for more questions.

Air’s loveliness crowns her, and I am made to know

this, though it is something I so rarely know,

unless…

O Resplandor is a layered, erudite, tender book, aspiring, inspiring, declarative, a book of principled assertion and lovely description.

O Resplandor never ceases to demand the complete engagement of the reader; distrust the text for pleasure’s sake. As E.S. says, “E.M. always talks about the poplars being the highest thing in that field, but you can’t always believe E.M.” (112)