“Hace
tiempo me preguntaron quienes eran mis maestros, aun hoy lo tengo claro: Me
educan todos los días personas anónimas.” / "Some
time ago they asked me who my teachers were, even today it’s clear to me: The anonymous
ones educate me every day."
Nine years ago, Eduardo Galeano visited
the Seattle Public Library. He leaned back in his chair to look up at us,
hundreds of admirers, and said slowly, “In English they have called my book Voices of Time.” He paused and gave the
barest hint of a shrug. “It is okay. The voices are the intimacy of trees, of
rocks, of stones.”
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| Seward Park, Seattle, 2014, WLC |
|
Several months
later, I showed off Seattle’s famed
Elliott Bay Book Company to
Mark Fried, Galeano's translator, who brought
Bocas del Tiempo’s 341
pages
into
Voices of Time (though he also disagreed with the English title). We
hunted the bookstore for his book, finally finding it in the Biography
section.
“Why is it
here?” I wondered.
“That’s what the publisher
wanted,” Mark said. “They decided they had to market it as a memoir.”
A
what?
Because
some of the entries are autobiographical, Mark explained to me. I suppose in
some cosmic way that’s true. Galeano’s rich life (one truly well-lived) included many discussions with trees and rocks
and stones; his mind seems to work on the scale of evolutionary time, taking in
everything from blue-green algae to smart bombs. The book’s English subtitle, A Life in Stories–invented by the
publisher, Henry Holt–is slightly
more accurate than the translated title. It’s only one letter off: the book is
about life in general, not just one
life.
Many
of
Voices of Time’s short, mostly
true stories originally appeared in Latin American newspapers. I first
encountered one in August 2000, in Mexico City’s
La Jornada. Titled
“The Shrimp,” its 175 words appeared on the front
page.
Es la hora de los adioses del sol.
– “It’s the hour of the sun’s goodbyes,” it began, then concluded: “From the
looks of them, no one would imagine that these whiskery creatures harbored such
a poetic bent. But from the taste of them, any human would swear to it.”
What the hell is that? I thought at the
time. Still, I was impressed: a prose poem on the front page of a major,
national newspaper. It was Galeano at his best, inserting art into quotidian
life.
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Language lesson on Radio Huave,
Isthmus of Tehuantepec, 2007, WLC |
|
It is the
quotidian, on the smallest and largest scales, that occupied Galeano. In his
books, people with household names and people whose names no one ever knew are
given equal time. For Galeano, they were equally important, equally ephemeral. Three
moments from
Voices of Time:
“Every afternoon,
Paulo Freire snuck into the movie theater in Recife’s Casa Forte neighborhood
to see Tom Mix.”
“There she was
born, there she took her first steps. / When
Rigoberta returned, years later,
her village was gone. Soldiers had left nothing alive in what had been called
Laj Chimel….”
Only a handful of
Bocas del Tiempo’s stories are about Galeano
and even those are “about him” in the way that “Song of Myself” was “about”
Walt Whitman.A 1942 anthology titled
A Concise Treasury of Great Poems English
and American From the Foundations of the English Spirit To the Outstanding
Poetry of Our Own Time With Lives of the Poets and Historical Settings Selected
and Integrated offers a few of the tamest lines from “Song of Myself,”
noting that the critics of Whitman’s time “were revolted not only by Whitman’s
use of the vernacular, but by his egotism. They failed to realize that
Whitman’s ‘I’ was a symbol representing the common man and that, when he seemed
to celebrate himself, he was celebrating all men.”
Times have changed
(is there anything beyond the ‘I’ these days?), but the marketing staff for
Voices of Time made the same mistake:
they failed to realize that Galeano’s ‘I’ represented not himself, but all
people.The first time I read
Bocas del Tiempo, Whitman’s poem came to
mind again and again. Reading Mark Fried’s translation and “Song of Myself”
side by side, they braid together.
I
lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
Galeano begins by telling
the reader, “We are made of time.” He goes on to explain, “Then one fine day, a
day that lasted millions of years, some blue algae decided to turn green. And
bit by tiny bit, the green algae begat lichens, mushrooms, mold, medusas, and
all the color and sound that came later….”
A
child said, What is the grass? Fetching
it to me with full hands;
How
could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
Like
Whitman, Galeano understands the wisdom of children; he listens to the answers
they give to questions no one bothered to ask them. A three-year-old girl – “a
young researcher,” Galeano calls her – thinks about immigration and then
declares: “Poor people are the ones they close the door on.”
Or
I guess the grass is itself a child, …Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic.
Galeano decodes
bits of the earth’s hieroglyphics for us, noting those individuals that have figured them out. He writes of the
Shibo people, who “avoid drowning whenever the Ucayali River wakes up in a bad
mood and rolls its white-capped waters inland over everything in its path.” How
do they know? “Snails give warning. Before each calamity, they lay their eggs
on tree trunks above the line where the water will crest. And they never get it
wrong.”
Why
should I pray? Why should I venerate and be ceremonious?
God does not
appear often in Voices of Time, but
when he does, it’s without reverence. On Christmas Eve a young child overhears
her aunt, recently widowed, declare, “They say we have to love God. I hate
him.”
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Fishing lantern, San Francisco del Mar,
Isthmus of Tehuantepec, 2003, Chris Treter |
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The
friendly and flowing savage, who is he? Is he waiting for civilization, or past
it and mastering it?
Galeano tells us
about the U’wa people of the Samoré Mountains in Columbia, whose land was
drilled over and again by Occidental Petroleum, to no avail. They couldn’t find
the oil they had been sure was there. “The U’wa proved once more that the earth
is not deaf. She heard their pleas…. In their language, U’wa means people who think.”
Unlike Walt Whitman, Eduardo Galeano does not
seem optimistic, though he’s surely hopeful. Both are eyes-wide at the wonder
of the human spirit. But if Voices of Time
(and perhaps, all of Galeano’s work) has an overarching theme, it’s a tsk tsk at the train wreck of modernity
and a nod to those who (still) know better. In Voices of Time’s 160th story, “Are You There?”:
Two trains crashed into each other just outside London’s
Paddington Station. / A fireman fought his way on board with an ax and stepped
into a car tipped on its side. Through the smoke, which added fog to the fog,
he could see passengers strewn about like mannequins smashed to pieces amid the
splintered wood and twisted steel. His flashlight moved across the debris
searching in vain for some sign of life. / Not a moan could be heard. Nothing
broke the silence except the ringing of cell phones, calling and calling and
calling, from the pockets of the dead.
And yet, as Whitman reminds
us,
The smallest sprout shows there
really is no death. Galeano leaves us with this final line in his book: “Do
birds announce the morning? Or by singing, do they create it?”
