A quick hopscotch from Sonny Rollins to Lope de Vega and back again.
When I think of Sonny Rollins the first thing that comes to mind isn't Saxophone Colossus or The Bridge, as fine as those records are, but his early work with the trumpeter Clifford Brown, first as a sideman in the Clifford Brown and Max Roach Quintet (Clifford Brown and Max Roach at Basin Street), along with the pianist Richie Powell and bassist George Morrow, and then as a leader (with the same line-up) on Sonny Rollins Plus 4. Rollins and Brown were close contemporaries, born just a few months apart, but Brown (and Powell, and Powell's wife Nancy) were killed one terrible night on the Pennsylvania Turnpike not long after those records were made. Rollins outlived him by almost seventy years.
I can't remember that Julio Cortázar ever mentioned Sonny Rollins, but he certainly must have known who he was, since he was a great admirer of Clifford Brown, about whom he wrote the following (in Thomas Christensen's translation):
When I want to know what the shaman feels in the highest tree on the path, face to face with a night apart from time, I listen once more to the testament of Clifford Brown, a wing-beat that rends the continuum, that invents an island of the absolute within disorder. And afterwards, once again the custom wherein he and so many others are dead.Cortázar took up the theme of the "others" who have gone before late in his life, in Un tal Lucas, in a brief piece that in Gregory Rabassa's translation is entitled "Steady, Steady, Six Already":
After the age of fifty we begin to die little by little in the deaths of others. The great magi, the shamans of our youth, successively go off... Everyone has his beloved ghosts, his major interceders — the day arrives when the first of them horribly bursts out in the newspaper and radio scene. Maybe we'll take some time to realize that our death has begun on that day too; I knew it the night when in the middle of dinner someone indifferently alluded to a television news item that said Jean Cocteau had just died in Milly-la-Forêt and a piece of me fell dead too onto the tablecloth in the midst of the conversational phrases.The perplexing title that Rabassa provides is barely more inscrutable than the original "Burla burlando ya van seis delante," but this turns out to be an allusion to a famous sonnet by Lope de Vega, the "Soneto de repente" or "Instant sonnet," an amusing bit of metapoetry in which the poet says that someone named Violante has asked him to write a sonnet, and he responds by writing a sonnet about writing the sonnet.
The rest have followed along, always in the same way, radio or newspaper, Louis Armstrong, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Duke Ellington, and last night, while I was coughing in a hospital in Havana, last night a friend's voice that brought the rumor from the outside world to my bed, Charles Chaplin. I shall leave the hospital, I shall leave cured, that's for certain, but, for a sixth time, a little less alive.
Un soneto me manda hacer Violante,There are translations available online and I won't attempt another. The relevant part for us is the first stanza, in which, roughly paraphrasing, he says that Violante has asked him to make a sonnet, that he's never been in such a quandary, that a sonnet, they say, is made up of fourteen lines, and that just playing around three have already gone ahead. Cortázar changes "three" to "six," since he's counting six "major interceders" who have gone before him. Although he may not have realized it at the time, Cortázar, already beset with health issues, would soon catch up with them, in 1984.
que en mi vida me he visto en tanto aprieto;
catorce versos dicen que es soneto,
burla burlando van los tres delante.
Yo pensé que no hallara consonante
y estoy a la mitad de otro cuarteto,
mas si me veo en el primer terceto,
no hay cosa en los cuartetos que me espante.
Por el primer terceto voy entrando,
y parece que entré con pie derecho
pues fin con este verso le voy dando.
Ya estoy en el segundo y aun sospecho
que voy los trece versos acabando:
contad si son catorce y está hecho.
In a statement released upon his death, Rollins said “I think when the creative person ends, he continues in the next existence. I’m a person who believes this life isn’t the be-all and end-all of everything. A spiritual person doesn’t feel like that.” I'm not "a spiritual person," but I'm content to give him the last word.
2 comments:
There’ll never be another Sonny Rollins.
The Lope de Vega poem (which I didn’t know) reminds me of Ron Padgett’s “Haiku”:
First: five syllables.
Second: seven syllables.
Third: five syllables.
Which reminds me that Ron Padgett recounts Ted Berrigan, Dick Gallup, and Pat Mitchell (later Padgett) walking on the Williamsburg Bridge to escape the heat of their apartment and hearing someone playing a saxophone.
The Padgett haiku is priceless. There's a story making the rounds, attributed to Rafi Zabor, that Sonny Rollins once stepped out of a club during a solo and went for a stroll, playing the whole time. He made his way to John and Alice Coltrane's house, where he serenaded them from the sidewalk for several minutes, then returned to the club, where he was annoyed because the rhythm section had stopped playing in his absence.
Post a Comment