Heather McHugh, the poet and translator and twice-laureled genius (by us and then by the MacArthur people), traveled to Spain with Frizzelle last week. As hinted at a couple days ago, the trip was inspired by McHugh's crush on an 11th-century poet. —Eds.
Spain wounded me in precisely the right way, ways anyone working in Emerald Cities or Emerald Isles is starved for. I had gone partly because I have a crush on a poet who lived in Malaga and Granada and wrote between 1000 and 1050 AD—same time Su Tung P'o, my other big crush of the millennium, was writing in China. Like Sun Tung P'o he's a figure of great contradictions—and a poetic kinship I immediately recognize across centuries and languages.
- You can buy medicinal herbs and a spectrum of mystery delights in the shadow of the cathedral.
All of Granada smacked of such apparent (and I suppose illusory) paradoxes: monochrome extremely finely-carved stonework next to geometrical blazes of colored tile; elegant diners in the fountained courtyards of former convents paved with stones marked for dead nuns (here lies Sister Filomena of the Sorrows, having suffered 20 vomitings of blood with the ultimate patience and spirit; here lies Sister Maria de la Conception who suffered adversities with the most beautiful voice....and so on) as the fountain sings and the orange trees glow and the glasses clink; stone corbels of mythic men holding up four storeys of edifice right next to complex geometrical avant-garde art street-lamps; nuns living in the present walking next to stiletto-heeled girls in short shorts fit for posterity; figs next to chilis; ornamental chairs stacked on stone lions in antique shops; incredibly crafted ornate Islamic arts jammed right up against incredibly crafted ornate Roman Catholic and Jewish arts... ah, the people of the book... how they torment and tormented each other most of the time.. but this moment, this place, in me they cohere around him, HaNagid...who wrote things like:
*About the nature of wrong and right
Inquire, if you are wishing to be wise,
Of your teachers— seekers like yourself—
And the students who doubt your replies.*
The rich are far from common
And the brilliant likewise few
And the number you'll notice is further reduced
When they step side-by-side into view.*
She said: "Just count your blessings God has got you
To the age of fifty in this world;" she doesn't know
There is no difference between pasts—
Between mine, let's say, and Noah's—
Of whose years I've heard. In this world all I haveIs the hour I'm in— which stands
For a moment, and then,
Like a cloud, moves on...*
The many troubles of man— the slander
and pain— they amaze you, brother? Consider the heart
that holds them all, and keeps them strange,
and doesn't break.*
How could you NOT love such a vizier, if you're going to love viziers? If you see Granada see it with friends or beloveds, people you can ooh and ahh and laugh with. It's not a big city, it's sunny, it has hills and a very snowy Sierra Nevada over the squares springing with happy children and fountains and palm trees and orange- and lemon-laden courtyards... amazing restaurants with fountained interiors and hillside tapas tables with long views of indirectly-lit cathedrals and Alhambras; and everywhere a quirky art of LIFE I just can't stop saying I fell in love with.
Learn one sentence: LO SIENTO MUCHO — NO HABLO ESPANOL — and they kindly forgive you. (Americans think English is the world's only language though they don't speak it themselves yet—and in matter of fact should damned well be learning Chinese, and fast.) In the languorous meantime, with all its contradictions, its financial distress and its spiritual excess, its gravitas of love and its mortal comedies, its shady shops and its luminaria lanes, its ski-slopes and its orange-groves, its children thrilled by bubble-blowers in the monumented squares, and glowing crowds that come alive at midnight—in the meantime, all the time, in a pocket of timelessness there, named for the pomegranate, there's Granada.
