Breach of Trust/Abuso de confianza

by Ángel Escobar, Kristin Dykstra (Editor), Kristin Dykstra (Translator), Kristin Dykstra (Introduction)

Overview

The best-known work by acclaimed Cuban poet Ángel Escobar

Ángel Escobar’s Breach of Trust / Abuso de confianza is known by many as the most devastating book of his poetic generation. It is his first to be offered to an English-speaking audience. Merging personal and collective meditations, these twenty-three poems perform an indictment of violence. Escobar’s poetry delineates lacerations etched on bodies and minds by the sanguinary twentieth century, which unfolded out of a longer modernity spanning the Americas.
 
Breach of Trust / Abuso de confianza outlived its author, who took his own life in 1997. Brief and implicit appeals for justice and love offset the book’s abject theatricality. Escobar’s tragic masterpiece deftly interweaves themes into a striking synthesis offered in the spirit of survival.
 
Award-winning translator Kristin Dykstra introduces this collection with a comprehensive examination of Escobar’s life, work, and the times within which he wrote. Dykstra situates Escobar’s poetic abjection as his drive to confront thingification face to (non)face.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817390716
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	07/15/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	120
File size:	742 KB

About the Author

Ángel Escobar was born in Cuba’s eastern province of Guantánamo in 1957. A student of theater, Escobar moved to Havana in 1977. His work includes the poetry collections Viejas palabras de uso (Old Well-Used Words), Cuéntame lo que me pasa (Tell Me What’s Happening to Me), Cuando salí de La Habana (When I Left Havana), and the theater piece Ya nadie saluda al rey (Now No One Greets the King). His work received the Premio David in 1978 and the Premio Roberto Branly in 1985.

Kristin Dykstra, recipient of the 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship, also translated Reina María Rodríguez’s Other Letters to Milena / Otras cartas a Milena and Juan Carols Flores’s The Counterpunch (and Other Horizontal Poems) / El contragolpe (y otros poemas horizontales), as well as various other books of Cuban poetry. 

Read an Excerpt

Breach of Trust / Abuso de confianza

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By Ángel Escobar, Kristin Dykstra

The University of Alabama Press

Copyright © 2016 University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-9071-6

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CHAPTER 1

Against Thingification (Or, On Becoming Inadvisable)

People who knew Angel Escobar enjoy arguing about which book is his best, and how each one will figure in literary history. I chose to translate Escobar's 1992 collection, Abuso de confianza (Breach of Trust), because other writers in Cuba described it to me as the most devastating work of his generation.

This is the first of Escobar's books to appear in English translation, so it introduces him to readers of English as a poet of dissent, in the broadest and most generous sense: Breach of Trust inveighs against forms of thingification shaping the modern world. He explicitly places the term "thingification" into his opening text, his "damned enigmatic harangue." It is one of the most challenging pieces in the book. Entitled "Broken mind," it is a poetic manifesto synthesizing an array of images and ideas while parsing selfhood through otherness in the spirit of Arthur Rimbaud, who wrote in 1871, "I is someone else" (366). At the climax of his prologue Escobar teeters between an emphatic NO and a fragile yes, foreshadowing the spiral of negations and affirmations that characterize the book as a whole.

Throughout the prologue, Escobar draws the past into his present. One point defining his long historic span dates to the colonization of the Americas, signaled through an appearance by the Taíno cacique (chieftain) Hatuey. Originally from Hispaniola, Hatuey encouraged indigenous peoples to reject the Spanish forces in the Caribbean, and their teachings too. In 1512, the Spanish burned him at the stake in Cuba. This ancestral figure has moved from history into mythology, in the sense that Hatuey's name is now shorthand for resistance and martyrdom in the Caribbean. Escobar's poetry is all the more powerful when understood in dialogue with this cultural backdrop. Even more pressing for this first translation of a book-length collection into English: in the wake of his 1997 suicide, Escobar himself is making a transition from marginalized historical personage into a mythologized icon in the island's literary pantheon. This passage of the poet into mythology is most comprehensible in counterpoint to the iconic figures and legacies of poetic resistance that he synthesizes in Breach of Trust.

Hatuey's emblematic story appears within The Devastation of the Indies, the famous call by Father Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1556) to examine the violence of conquest in the Americas. Las Casas tells that when Hatuey was tied to the stake, a Franciscan friar informed him that he could still embrace Christianity. Hatuey asked if Christians all went to heaven; and when the friar replied yes, Hatuey said he would prefer to go to Hell. The tale of the defiant cacique insistently reminds readers not only of his death, or of the violence with which European colonization arrived in the Caribbean, but also of a competing reality: that tales of resistance are themselves life-giving.

Centuries after Hatuey's death, Martinique's Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) famously penned the equation "Colonization = 'Thingification'" in his Discourse on Colonialism, shorthand for the dehumanization and wide-ranging destruction of colonial enterprise (42). Césaire not only asserted the relevance of African diasporic experiences of thingification, but examined the broader condition of colonial violence on social relations. Explicitly aware of these cultural legacies, Escobar launches his own contemporary NO in response to sorrows that are inseparably historical and personal.

Escobar was born in 1957, toward the end of the decade when Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism appeared in print. His life began in eastern Cuba, in the mountainous agricultural province of Guantanamo. In his early childhood the family lived near a tiny rural village called Sitiocampo. As an adult, Escobar would remember that he came from a place so small it didn't appear on maps. Geographical marginalization was compounded with other challenges, such as legacies of poverty and racial discrimination. Escobar's family, who counted slaves among their ancestors, struggled with privation. The lands his family worked had long been associated with a history of hunger and difficult living.

As a student Escobar took a special interest in the theater, which would become the focus of his educational degrees. In 1977, he won an award for poetry, a national prize designated for emerging writers. He followed a pattern shared by many people from the island's eastern, rural provinces in the late twentieth century: he moved to the urban west, to the city of Havana, in search of opportunities. There Escobar made himself the author of many more collections of poetry, a book of short stories, and a play. Pursuing readings and conversations about criticism and theory, as well as world literatures and visual art, he incorporated Havana's cosmopolitan cultural influences into his repertoire. While he spent time close to the city's historic center, he also lived part of his life in the enormous housing community at Alamar, a development located on the eastern outskirts of Havana that has housed displaced and marginalized peoples. As Escobar connected with diverse cultural communities around the greater Havana area over the years, he earned a reputation as a restless, troubled, powerful poet.

His literary career lasted only two decades. Escobar took his own life in 1997 by jumping off a building, and it was not his first attempt. Today, his work and death resonate with writers and critics of different affiliations and tastes, perhaps the reason that copies of his Poesía Completa (Collected Works of Poetry, released by Ediciones UNIÓN in 2006) can still be found in Havana bookstores despite economic circumstances severely restricting print runs of most contemporary poetry collections.

Over the course of his books Escobar played himself out like a kaleidoscope, continuously rearranging shards of lines, images, and lives into startling new arrays. Breach of Trust is his tragic masterpiece, synthesizing disparate elements with assurance and musicality. Probably influenced by Escobar's gift for synthesis, some critics claim that he displays no clear rejection of a prior generation or style. Instead they place him in "a postmodern geography in which distinct poetic tendencies are superimposed without discrimination": the poet selects the most interesting elements of many traditions to incorporate into his own body of work ("una geografía posmoderna en la que se superponen las distintas tendencias poéticas sin discriminación"; Esteban and Salvador xxxix).

Summarizing a different and more specific line of criticism that has emerged around his career, María Lucía Puppo distinguishes three phases in Escobar's writing. His early books, which were celebrated and promoted by Cuba's National Union of Artists and Writers, display lyricism of a relatively straightforward and colloquial sort. Seen in retrospect, though, they contain the seeds of Escobar's eventual drift away from the conversationalist style popular at that time. When he composed La vía pública, first published in 1987, he entered a distinct new stage in which his poetry became recognizable as profoundly transgressive expression. Breach of Trust appeared five years later. It displays Escobar's roots in colloquial speech but, in keeping with the second stage of his work, crosscuts everyday imagery with competing stylistics and a stronger sense of irony. For Puppo and others, the aesthetic complexity of Breach of Trust positions it at the pinnacle of his second period of writing. Breach of Trust would be followed by three final collections comprising his third period, two of them edited after his death. In this series of mature works, Escobar built a lasting home in an abject lyrical tradition.

Breach of Trust projects many contrasts. Writer Carlos Aguilera suggests that to fully appreciate these poems, readers should keep Escobar's extensive experience with the theater in mind when reflecting on the contrasting tonalities of his poems. Aguilera depicts Escobar's speakers as marionettes jerked around a stage, their comic energies indivisible from the tragic scenarios that frame them. Abrupt, assertive rhythms of the street punctuate the poems alongside eruptions of baroque phrasing, which are meaningful in their luxuriance of sound and sudden density.

In Escobar's prologue "Broken mind" alone, the reader encounters a series of specific oppositions: ecstatic and dystopian visions, bumpiness and fluidity of expression, juxtapositions of elite and popular cultures, the highs of flight and the lows of falls. The prologue grows slippery and flirts with unintelligibility. A voice warns the reader that it will resist behaviors perceived to be reasonable, advisable: "I don't reason with the reasonable reason of the other, the other ones." Yet the prologue offers the reader accessible entry points too, as in terse statements about suffering. Escobar also touches down in critical and poetic conversations before he takes off again in search of (or in a theatrical rendition of?) a poet's transcendent vision. See for example his citation of the essay "Kitsch y objeto" (Kitsch and Object), by Abraham Moles and Eberhard Wahl, or his adoption of the question from Yehuda Halevi, "It is ill: when will it be cured?" Can a poetic embrace of irrationality, of the outcast, give comfort when rationalism fails the modern world?

Translating the action of Breach of Trust into English for the first time has been a particularly complicated process due to the minimal attention granted to date to Escobar's work outside Cuba, especially in English-language circles. Many poets and translators research the literary works they intend to translate, and they consult scholarship and previous translations while developing their own presentations. In this case, there were few resources as I began. Fortunately a book of short essays celebrating Escobar's life had appeared in Cuba, and more detailed scholarship is in progress now. I anticipate that the discrepancy between his positive literary reputation and the dearth of contextual resources will continue to change for the better in the future.

Another helpful approach for translators is to discuss the work with the author, but that was absolutely out of the question in this case. Ángel Escobar was deceased before I came to his book. Instead I've collected what research materials I could find, translating several short Spanish-language essays by his Cuban colleagues into English and referring to others here, in order to trace the beginnings of a more extensive and increasingly international archive about this impressive writer. I have also heard innumerable stories about Escobar. Since there can be a fine line between storytelling and archive — the oral and written contexts surrounding a poet — I've chosen to include comments here referring to personal interactions and some of the thoughtful, albeit undocumented, remarks I heard.

All manner of discoveries over time affected the language of the translation I offer here. For example, I developed a sense for certain sound qualities that represent a crucial element of Escobar's delivery, and so I tilted toward sonorous choices in my translation of his book. I discarded some literal or obvious options in order to evoke a more multi-leveled experience of his poetics. Meanwhile his rhythms are complex. I decided not to duplicate them stress for stress every time, instead seeking to generate English versions that would be alternately assertive and hesitant, musical, exploring the tension created when flows meet breaks. I was also influenced by personal, historical, and literary contexts, because Breach of Trust presents interwoven, knotted, evasive and/or multivalent meanings. Some poems led me toward context relatively quickly. At other times Escobar's fellow poets and family members, as well as critics intimately familiar with Escobar and his work, shared new perspectives with me that changed my understanding of a piece. And just as I was completing final preparations on the manuscript another poet, Duriel Harris, reminded me of the marvelous aesthetic and intellectual density of the thingification Escobar re/creates in reference to Césaire's term. As she told me about her performance piece entitled Thingification, then in progress, Duriel caused related ideas to click into place for me. There will surely be future reflections on the impact of African diasporic literature on Escobar's career, as well as reflections on the relevance of his writing to topics such as mestizaje, the histories of suppressed and public expression from Afro-Cuban populations in Cuba, the cultural dynamics of flow and transformation that Fernando Ortiz famously named "transculturation," and the relationships between Escobar's literature and popular culture. But these connections have yet to be traced more fully, and English-language readers will best be able to participate after additional books by Escobar are translated. In this introduction I'll present more general background information about Escobar and his writing, framed through a set of topics pertinent to Breach of Trust.

Merging personal and collective meditations, Breach of Trust is his indictment of historical forces spanning Latin America. It portrays lacerations left on bodies and minds by a violent century, and by the longer modernity of the Americas containing that century.

Ghosts

Breach of Trust is a haunted text. In this sense it's a good introduction to Escobar's career as a whole, in which foundational tragedy served as a recurrent drumbeat. Escobar and his siblings experienced extreme violence early in their lives, an incident that appears in both open and coded terms in his books: his mother was stabbed to death when he was only a child. Later the death of his youngest brother would add to Escobar's profound sense of loss.

Another factor that affected Escobar's daily life and mature writing was illness, which surfaces openly in the subject matter of Breach of Trust. His schizophrenia intensified during the years in which he composed this collection. Poems such as "Hospitals," "Guests," "Funny Papers," and "The four stories" display literal connections to that lived reality.

Commentators who knew Escobar during his lifetime highlight his references to pain and sorrow across the larger body of his work, referring alternately to recurring themes in his poetry and to their memories from his daily life as a writer. Images such as the splinter, both noun and verb, appear frequently throughout his poems (Martín Hernández 49–50). His fellow poet Pedro Marqués de Armas, who provided medical treatment to Escobar over the years, remembers the patient taking ironic attitudes toward death as a means for survival as his condition worsened. Efraín Rodríguez Santana, who has worked extensively with Escobar's writing, sees in the later poetry "an extensive journey through spaces of the schizophrenic self, condemned to the accident of hypersensibility and surrounded by people invested in normality" ("un recorrido vasto por zonas del hombre esquizofrénico, condenado al percance de la hipersensibilidad entre hombres interesados en la normalidad" [2002:9]). The speakers in Escobar's later poetry experience hostility emanating not only from external forces, but increasingly from inside themselves, as well as from forces difficult to locate with any precision.

From the home, tragedy leaks into the city — or is it the other way around? Personal and public, domestic and political realms merge. Puppo highlights Escobar's dystopic cityscapes: urban space is a meeting ground for his "social commitment, the great questions (philosophical, political, aesthetic), and the misfortunes figuring in his personal mythology: the misery and terror he experienced during his childhood, his mother's death at the hands of his father, his marginalization as a black man, the schizophrenia that finally steered toward the poet's suicide" ("el compromiso social, las grandes preguntas [filosóficas, políticas, estéticas] y las desdichas de la mitología personal: la miseria y el terror experimentados en la infancia, la muerte de la madre a manos del padre, la margin-ación por ser negro, la esquizofrenia que finalmente derivó en el suicidio del poeta," 226). In Breach of Trust Escobar gives glimpses of a city only in murmuring fragments, while a sensation of claustrophobia invades domestic interiors, leaving the speakers no recourse to safety.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Breach of Trust / Abuso de confianza by Ángel Escobar, Kristin Dykstra. Copyright © 2016 University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments: Support for the Translation

Against Thingification (Or, On Becoming Inadvisable)

Mente rota / Broken Mind

El castigo / Punishment

La novela de Oersman / Oersman’s Novel

Desde el suelo / From the Floor

Apuntes para una biografía de Helene Zarour / Notes toward a Biography of Helene Zarour

Gestos / Gestures

Dos capítulos / Two Chapters

Tartamudea el ángel / The Angel Stutters

Siempre escasea un relámpago en la mesa / Always a Shortage of Lightning on the Plateau

Veintiuno y diez. Me fijo / Twentyone and Ten. I See

El escogido / The Chosen One

La visita / The

Visit

La edad / The

Era

Hospitales / Hospitals

Graffitti / Graffitti

Huéspedes / Guests

Así en la paz / In Peace

Beulah / Beulah

Los cuatro cuentos / The Four Stories

But on, but on, mira la jaula / But on, But on, Look at the Cage

Otro texto sobre otra prueba y otra prueba /Another Text about another Proof and another Proof

Funny Papers / Funny Papers

Abuso de confianza / Breach of Trust

Notas sobre el texto original / Notes on the Original Text

Editorial Reviews

"The complexities of Escobar's poetry are typical of the best authors from his generation in Cuba; a generation that grew up with the revolution, often benefiting from the opportunities it provided, as Escobar himself did. . . . Escobar was lost to this world too soon (in 1997 he committed suicide by jumping off a building). Thankfully this collection keeps his poetry alive, both in Spanish and English."

—The Kenyon Review

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"Breach of Trust is a book of poetry by one of the most extraordinary Cuban poets of the twentieth century that begs to be studied by students of Latin American and Caribbean literature, poetry, and translation, as well as by writers and readers of global literature. Ángel Escobar is a poet’s and philosopher’s poet, whose every turn of phrase is as intensely maneuvered in Kristin Dykstra’s translation as it is in the original writing. Dykstra successfully translates the anguish, solitude, and pain involved in Escobar’s unraveling of the margins of experience. What we come to understand is a pervasive mood of both disconnection and connection, not through formal equivalence, but rather through a dynamic one.”

 —Jacqueline Loss, author of Dreaming in Russian: The Cuban Soviet and Cosmopolitanisms and Latin America: Against the Destiny of Place

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From the Publisher