That "cojones" is very strong, in Italian we have "coglioni" which means
testicles. It is an exclamation used as damned, fuck you, or any similar
expression, in English I don't think you have anything as strong.

One of the many typical things of Florence that are about to disappear with
very old people are their curses. There was an ill-famed bar (there were
many) that sold cigarettes and was open just about till dawn and there you
could hear some actual litanies of the worse species:

Ah la Madonna bucaiola figlia de tu ma' ...

cannot remember more but such a sing-song could continue for about fifteen
minutes in extemporaneous soliloquies of elderly drunkards. If you read Dino
Campana you can find the stench of those places and the human fauna that
dwelt there. Nothing explicitly political but very political fundamentally
if you read what you are reading.


On 8/25/07, Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> At 03:52 PM 8/25/2007, you wrote:
> >On 8/25/07, Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > > In general agreement here, except:
> > >
> > > 1. whether a poem is "political" epends on the scope one gives the
> term
> >
> >sure , but to mis-quote Eagleton, if everything is political then the
> >term becomes meaningless.
> >I can make up a situation where this poem maybe a political gesture,
> >that's not to say it is. You could make a case for the equivocation
> >between religion and humanism. If that's political, then so be it. I
> >don't think I'd sign my name to such a thing.
>
>
> My work on Cuban poetry has sensitized me to this
> question. In Cuba and its diaspora "political" in
> its broadest sense and in particular has been the
> default position since the late 19th century, and
> poets who weren't overtly political would be
> called out for it by critics. This is way before
> Castro., and has to do with the prestige afforded
> to poets in Cuba and Latin America in general and
> their status as public figures. The defense of
> those accused of being apolitical was often "not
> only are we not apolitical, but in our greater
> engagement with the moment we're more political
> than you are." Which may be read as an
> understanding of the social and cultural as political.
>
> In recent years in Cuba, in the period following
> the dominance of social realism in the 90s, most
> poets have steered clear of the overtly political
> in the narrow sense. But it sneaks in in the
> strangest contexts. Fernandez Larrea ends El pais
> de los elfos (The Land of Elves), a poem of childhood reminiscence:
>
> el país estará siempre lejano
> como un sueño como un vientre como el país de los elfos
> cojones
>
> that land will always be far away
> like a dream like a womb like the land of elves
> damn
>
> Nothing in the poem prepares one for that cojones
> at the end, and I asked him about it. "I left
> Cuba in June of 1995 with a phoney invitation
> from a Spanish organization, supposedly to direct
> some documentaries," he answered. "I had been
> abroad at various times: in 1985-86 in the
> Angolan War; in 1986 in the former German
> Democratic Republic; in 1990 in Czechoslovakia.
> The following year I was in France, where I
> thought to remain, but decided otherwise. And in
> 1993 I lived in Guadalajara, Mexico, for several
> months, but I returned to the island. By '95 the
> situation (my situation) was insupportable and
> unsustainable. Out of all this weariness comes
> the 'damn' (cojones) of 'The Land of Elves,'
> which is something like 'the promised future, idyllic communism.'"
>
> Here's a question: is Ponge's great poem Le Pré,
> which catalogues a meadow, ecological, although
> it espouses no system of or phylogeny for it, no coherent
> ecosystematization?
>
> Mark
>