Reviewed by Paul Martinez

With Spain as its muse, Francisco Aragón’s Puerta del Sol reads as an homage to sound, memory, and language. The book is the result of an encounter with Spain through the eyes of an outsider, or, as Aragón states in the book’s preface, these are the poems of an American in Spain. Yet the book is not a simple slide show montage from a tourist’s camera. Having spent many years living, working, studying and writing in Spain, Aragón’s personal narratives and careful recollections drive many of the poems and demonstrate his personal stake in and affection for the peninsular country. Of course, the danger of such an undertaking is that it risks becoming a memoir that is long on sentiment and short on craft. But Aragón’s collection manages to sustain itself from start to finish--thanks to, among other technical triumphs, the crisp accuracy of his individual lines as they render the sound and rhythm of the Spanish landscape. Any sentimental moments are earned and carefully embedded into the poems, sometimes as turns. For instance, “Tertulia” (a Spanish term that refers to a casual gathering of friends for the purpose of conversing about personal or political topics) begins as a wonderful struggle to properly render memory via image, but then the poem forsakes image as it turns and closes on

...Think
for a moment
of something you love to do
and rarely do anymore. That
is how I often feel
whenever I’m away.

The English version of each poem in the book is followed by what Aragón describes as a Spanish “elaboration” of the poem. To his credit, Aragón makes this distinction between elaboration and translation in a way that avoids the political and linguistic pitfalls of translating poetry, especially one’s own. While there are clear similarities between the English and Spanish versions of Aragón’s poems, the Spanish elaborations underscore the inherent malleability of language and meaning. The elaborations also speak to the poet’s idiosyncratic experiences with the Spanish language--experiences which have molded Aragon’s Spanish into a hybrid of accent and diction due to his contact with the numerous regions and cultures that comprise the larger Spanish-speaking world. On the level of meaning, bilingual readers will appreciate how the Spanish counterparts converse with and, to an extent, revise the English versions by adding a subtle yet relevant, new dynamic to each poem. Additionally, the elaborations afford readers two entirely different sonic experiences of each poem.

A compelling sensuality pervades Puerta del Sol. Readers are beckoned to understand a city’s moon as a “perfect disc...huge / and simmering / low on the capital’s filthy horizon.” Plaza Góngora’s August weather is explained as something one wears like “a sweat-lined shirt / like a second skin.” A musical performance in a Madrid cafe is rendered with the same kind of affection as the ruckus of traffic, turnstiles and bars on the city’s “electric streets.” But the musical elation depicted through Aragón’s images is never far from the eerie silences and anxieties he carefully weaves into some of the poems. An implied danger accompanies the café musicians’ performance, which in its trance-like state seems in need of being reeled in before something bad happens:

...So when the finger and thumb
strike--lighting the fuse--
both player and bass are pulled

back down between piano
and drums, the three
in the end hovering

safely near the ground again.

A similar effect is employed in the poem “Plaza,” which unfolds as a haunting resonant gesture. The poem’s speaker asks an unidentified, older man at Plaza Góngora to recall his memories of the Spanish Civil War, and, subsequently, a seemingly harmless conversation becomes an emotionally and politically charged one. The speaker describes the old man’s voice as “a ball of twine” that gradually exposes

his wound, the evaded
execution, the clinics--para mis

nervios, he sighs, unfolding little
by little (the rim of his beret
moist now as he shifts his weight)

his hands, his tongue, unexplored land.

The old man becomes a sound, a voice, an unfolding history whose memory is fashioned into a poem. Here we bear witness to the intersection of a spoken narrative with a written one. Also, the passage demonstrates how Aragón constructs a poetry that is not afraid to parallel a fascination with the new (or “unexplored”) with a fear of or anxiety about it. It is interesting to note just how the speaker becomes involved in the old man’s narrative--“para mis / nervios”--as if listening to the story is as painful as having actually lived it. Moreover, “Plaza” exemplifies Aragón’s ability to evoke pathos in a small, concise space. The horrors of the war are induced without actually going into graphic detail. Not unlike other moments in the book, this is a poem in which the urgency of emotion takes priority over the specificity of subject matter.

Perhaps it is fitting that “Plaza” opens Puerta del Sol. The poem establishes a speaker who serves as a consistent voice in the book, much of which is written in the first-person point of view. Aragón’s conundrum of having to negotiate the contradictory sensibilities of visitor and native becomes one of the more subtle themes that inform the book. As an American who lived in Spain for a considerable amount of time, Aragón has embraced the condition of being perpetually “in-between”--the problematic of sounding American when conversing with his Spanish compañeros/as and yet sounding Spanish when conversing with his Latino-American friends and family back home. Such a positionality contrasts effectively with the book’s more detached moments in which the author chooses to render Spain via a third-person point of view. Poems like “The Bus Driver” might represent Aragón’s attempt to view Spain from the position of a native Spaniard. Or perhaps “The Bus Driver,” which begins with the line “His visions,” serves as a concession to the notion that each inhabitant of Spain, whether native or not, has his own idiosyncratic relationship with the country and the language. Aragón is aware that the version of Spain that he so delicately renders belongs to him alone and should not be considered an attempt to universally represent Spain. Nevertheless, readers will note a resemblance between the bus driver and the first-person, consistent voice referred to above. In the same way that Aragón’s visions of Spain spill onto the page in the form of poetry, the bus driver’s visions “are spilled across the pages / of sketchbooks;” his Madrid is painted as “a city on the water / like a shimmering image / of Venice but for / the skiffs--not gondolas...” We come to know this character as a bus driver moonlighting as an artist or--better yet--as an artist moonlighting as a bus driver who re-envisions his city through pastels and through dreams.

Whether rendering a musical vernacular in the free-form structure of “Poem,” which depicts the pride in mouthing the name of one’s city, or utilizing the sonnet in “Lunch Break” to capture a tender moment between speaker and his partner (despite images of car-bombs flickering from the TV news), Aragón’s work demonstrates a profound control of pacing and an equal dedication to musicality of the line. Often what occurs in the space of his poems is as intriguing as what Aragón gestures to and evokes in the off-space of his poems. As a whole, Puerta del Sol is personal and sensory, but it is never overly self-conscious nor confessional. It is ultimately an effort to remember via one’s senses and then assign meaning to one’s recollections. The book’s closing lines testify to this:

something in me fluttered
hearing those vowels, as if I started
to understand, as if those rhythms
carried, even then, the message

I’d take years to unravel.