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Paradise Empty: Poems 1983-2013
Paradise Empty brings together a wide selection of poetry from eleven collections by Hugo Mujica, one of Argentina's most renowned and respected poets. Mujica's work might be described as the poetry of thought. There is nothing superfluous in his poems - his images are crystal clear, his rhythms simple, his language precise - and their impact, in terms of both words and the silences between words, is powerful. Although his poetry is already well-known throughout South and Central America and in many European countries, Paradise Empty is the first collection of Mujica's work to be published in the UK, and in this beautifully modulated translation by Katherine M. Hedeen and the poet Victor Rodriguez Nunez, it is sure to resonate with English-language readers.
159 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 2015
4 people want to read
About the author
Hugo Mujica
69 books33 followersHugo Mujica estudió Bellas Artes, Filosofía, Antropología Filosófica y Teología. Estos estudios se reflejan en la variación de su obra que abarca tanto la filosofía, como la antropología, la narrativa como la mística y sobre todo la poesía. Su vida y sus viajes han sido el material principal de su obra, hitos como el haber vivido y participado de la década de los 60 en Nueva York, como artista plástico. Entre sus libros de ensayos se encuentran Pensado el acto creador (2007), La casa y otros ensayos (2008) y La pasión según Georg Trakl, entre otros.
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September 5, 2020
Based solely on this modest survey of Mujica's work, it seems that his mid-period works are the richest. Whether one considers the richly allegorical prose poems of his 1992 collection, Paradise Lost, or the dark meditative works of Night Open (1998), these excerpts show a poetical ethos foreign to so many poets of the past few decades: necessary minimalism, substance over style and absolutely no posturing toward any kind of "cult of personality" stance. In place of the usual contrivances which attract most readers' attention, we have writing which, to my impression, feels as natural as breath. Given Mujica's preoccupation with silence--he was a Trappist Monk for seven years, after all--his poetry is more about the spaces between each breath.
in the heights wings don't flap
and in the silence
silence isn't named.
We know nothing of god
that nothing splits
all knowing,
that split is what's learned
the absence remaining
the trace where I utter myself.
Considering Mujica has been a Catholic priest for the past two decades or so, it's a somewhat puzzling privilege to see how his poetry still approaches metaphysics and yet does not throw itself into that false depth of empty resonance where so many supposed poet-mystics have already thrown themselves. If there's an emptiness in Mujica's work, it's in how he commits himself less to theological abstractions and more to what we all have yet still so often fail to articulate: inner experience. Inner experience cannot be approached as object and, therefore, gives us no place to begin its definition. In this way, the mind becomes understood as "no-thing-ness", as most of the old Zen masters agreed, rather than some horrible inward void. Thus tending to inner life often gives the sense of entering another kind of sanctum sanctorum. Every time one turns from the daily routine of rote communication to enter solitude, there is always the silence before the mystery of being at all--stripped of all human contrivances. The silence that pervades these poems is not so much mystical, in the bastardized mainstream sense of the word, but is Mujica's respect paid to maintain the integrity of solitude: neither falling into hysterical anguish over the emptiness of things nor taking a distant intellectualized stance far removed from experience.
And in spite of silence being the inevitable end of every thought--no matter its depth--and every word--no matter its clarity--Mujica still acknowledges the potential of language to be a lantern which reveals, however slowly or partially, a world whose layered realities still remain so resistant in their uncertainty to any kind of interrogation. This excerpt from "Later, Letter by Letter" demonstrates the lucidity of Mujica's faith in the power of the word:
In the beginning all was white, moon white (the nakedness
of a nameless
body), later, letter by letter,
writing
(and the shadow of the words:
the path to narrate the night).
in the heights wings don't flap
and in the silence
silence isn't named.
We know nothing of god
that nothing splits
all knowing,
that split is what's learned
the absence remaining
the trace where I utter myself.
Considering Mujica has been a Catholic priest for the past two decades or so, it's a somewhat puzzling privilege to see how his poetry still approaches metaphysics and yet does not throw itself into that false depth of empty resonance where so many supposed poet-mystics have already thrown themselves. If there's an emptiness in Mujica's work, it's in how he commits himself less to theological abstractions and more to what we all have yet still so often fail to articulate: inner experience. Inner experience cannot be approached as object and, therefore, gives us no place to begin its definition. In this way, the mind becomes understood as "no-thing-ness", as most of the old Zen masters agreed, rather than some horrible inward void. Thus tending to inner life often gives the sense of entering another kind of sanctum sanctorum. Every time one turns from the daily routine of rote communication to enter solitude, there is always the silence before the mystery of being at all--stripped of all human contrivances. The silence that pervades these poems is not so much mystical, in the bastardized mainstream sense of the word, but is Mujica's respect paid to maintain the integrity of solitude: neither falling into hysterical anguish over the emptiness of things nor taking a distant intellectualized stance far removed from experience.
And in spite of silence being the inevitable end of every thought--no matter its depth--and every word--no matter its clarity--Mujica still acknowledges the potential of language to be a lantern which reveals, however slowly or partially, a world whose layered realities still remain so resistant in their uncertainty to any kind of interrogation. This excerpt from "Later, Letter by Letter" demonstrates the lucidity of Mujica's faith in the power of the word:
In the beginning all was white, moon white (the nakedness
of a nameless
body), later, letter by letter,
writing
(and the shadow of the words:
the path to narrate the night).
Displaying 1 of 1 review