The Brooklyn Rail

James Nolan, in his translator’s introduction to If Only For a Moment (I’ll Never Be Young Again) refers to Jaime Gil de Biedma as a “poet of the ‘in between,’” who, in his life and work, in his language and form, represents the contradictions of postwar Spain, the Spain that was sundered by the Spanish Civil War and the fascist regime of Francisco Franco that infiltrated all areas of public and private life. A child during the Civil War, Gil de Biedma inherited the uncanny effects of being internally exiled, but as a gay man moving through climates of homosexual criminalization, he also intensified this displacement, negotiating his life, as he did his poems, through the proliferation of masks—“the poet Jaime Gil de Biedma,” chief among them—and earnest addresses to lovers who are always on the page, yet just outside the frame. Nolan asserts that we might read the “bridge generation” of postwar Spanish poets to which Gil de Biedma belonged to better understand the transgenerational effects of war and dictatorship, as well as to glean evidence of an intact modernity amidst the regressive decay wrought by totalitarian repression. Without wishing to conflate distinct social, cultural, and political conditions, I can’t help but think that there’s no better moment to learn from the poetry of Jaime Gil de Biedma than this one, when the casual subversion of constitutional rights in the United States is only matched by its daily rationalization by the media.

In the six months since Donald Trump was sworn into the Executive Office for the second time, the number of denaturalization attempts in the US—cases filed to revoke the citizenship of naturalized citizens—sharply increased and directives for deportation became commonplace and indiscriminate. Government agencies made removal of citizens from countries they define as “terrorist nations,” such as Cuba, North Korea, and Syria, a state priority, a shell game that depends upon the cooperation of other countries to accept deportees who are not their own citizens in exchange for financial assistance and the promise of future trade benefits. As I write this, the executive order aimed at ending birthright citizenship, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” introduced by the President on his first day of office, remains on hold. Against this backdrop of authoritarianism and the incremental erosion of democratic norms arrives the recently republished selected poems of Jaime Gil de Biedma, which collects, in dual-language Spanish and English, poems from Gil de Biedma’s final three books, representing nearly a decade (1959-1968) of what would become his central work.

Reading Gil de Biedma may teach us about the past, too. La poesía de la experiencia (the poetry of experience) became a dominant style in Spanish poetry during the decade of my own birth, the 1980s and the drawn-out end of the Cold War, but the movement’s emphasis on everyday language and the immediacy, and accessibility, of lived experience, is indebted to Gil de Biedma, alongside other poets of Spain’s Generación del 50 (generation of ‘50), including Ángel González, José Agustín Goytisolo, and Francisco Brines, and readers of If Only For a Moment can observe these literary developments chronologically on the page.

True to the “in between” status ascribed to him by his English translator, many of Gil de Biedma’s poems are intensely situated within the magnificent event of here/now, though the relation of this handheld granular intimacy is almost always confronted by its speaker’s lack of certainty and agency, a fuzzy gaze that undermines conventional authorial control and cleanliness, as in the poem “From Now On,” which begins:

As after a dream,
I couldn’t pinpoint
the moment it happened.
                                        They called.
Once started, something wouldn’t wait.
…
Right now I can’t describe
exactly what I was looking for
or what my expectations were

Despite the alleged incapacity of the speaker to locate a finite beginning, we are brought to a determination indebted to love and friendship, of finding one’s self through all the others, “when I woke up / and found I wasn’t alone.” These are a poetics that want to undermine the artificial clarity of periodization through the kaleidoscopic tangle of desire, to subvert precision through intention, and yet Gil de Biedma’s sense of language is both economic and outspoken; Nolan, in his introduction, cites Gil de Biedma’s response to a question about his body of work compared to that of other poets of his generation: “It’s briefer,” Gil de Biedma remarked. It’s that same crispness and candor with which Gil de Biedma imbues his poems, juxtaposing the social political charge of their subject matter with conversational reflections of his youth and self-reflexive critiques of his own positionality as an educated and cosmopolitan businessman in an age of Spanish isolation and abjection.

A poem later, in “Piazza del Popolo,” which closes Gil de Biedma’s earliest collected work, 1959’s Compañeros de viaje [Traveling Companions], readers enter the scene through exactitude and indirection, a testament to the poet’s desire to work metaphor as a way to muddle not just space but time:

It was a night like tonight,
the balcony doors wide
open just as they are
now. I caught the heavy
scent of the nearby river
in the darkness. Silence.

The situational and the habitual, the recurrence of the past with/in the present, are each and at once employed in Gil de Biedma’s work, perhaps to call attention to the hallucinating experience of the decades-long underdevelopment effected by postwar political programs, in Spain as in its former colonies. It is not coincidental that Latin America carried its own Generación del 50 in the wake of US military intervention, mass disappearances, ritual censorship, and economic collapse. All of these writers were in some way responding to the unreality of everyday life. And for Gil de Biedma, who moved back and forth, from Spain to the Philippines, where he tended to his family’s business (the General Company of Tobacco of the Philippines, where his father was a director), the cycle of labor exploitation, resource extraction, and economic migration, and the specters of imperialism and colonialism, were never far from his sensitive gaze.

Reading Gil de Biedma, one has the feeling of entering the scene midway into the story being told, though it’s this element of time, its limits and prescriptions, that the poems’ speakers, in their persistent celebration and commemoration of the moment, endeavor to overcome. Indeed, such moments of the past relived in the present, despite the residue of the original’s immediacy and intensity, is often “overwhelmed,” as he writes in “Anniversary Song,” “by what is.” What concerns Gil de Biedma as an aesthetic project is in fact what exists beyond the scope of time: nocturnal alleys; a single doorway in Rome; a familiar song; the stain on a suit jacket; a fold in the bedsheets, and the way the light frames the scene from his hotel window—all of these micro details are coordinates of transport: “desire, music remembered / inside the heart, so romantic / I’ve barely put it in my poems” (“Anniversary Song”). In such poems, Gil de Biedma slyly calls attention to his poetic recipe while denying the existence of its ingredients. Forced to live a double life both outside and, maneuvering the repressive policies and temperatures of Francoist Spain, within his poems, he employs the landscape of the poem to create yet another persona: the poet. The poet, whose origins are frequently being rekindled on the page, and whose death, by the collection’s third and final section, 1968’s Poemas Póstumos [Posthumous Poems], is ultimately prefigured. As if to participate in the performance or heighten the dramatic staging, the editors of If Only For a Moment (I’ll Never Be Young Again) preface the collection’s final turn with four photographs of Gil de Biedma, images of the poet in various settings that take on, as a visual preface to these so-called ‘posthumous’ works, written more than two decades before the poet’s death of complications related to AIDS, the museal spectrality of the archive.

Buttressed between the gauzy ruminations found in his early work and the intellectual recreation that marks his last is the collection’s second section, 1966’s Moralidades [Morality Plays], whose poems feels meatier, more critical, more direct, though not without Gil de Biedma’s intelligence and wit, his deflective irony and cutting sarcasm. His subjects here move beyond and draw parallels between the Franco dictatorship and other political struggles at the time, including the US orchestrated Bay of Pigs operation on Cuban soil; mediated by pop culture parodies, literary allusion, and ancient and medieval invocations, these poems extend and bridge disparate movements and moments, often looking back at the poet’s privileged youth, as in “I Try To Give Shape To My War Experience,” when Gil de Biedma writes of the coddled childhood that sheltered him from the war and at the same time facilitated its romanticization; the cost of such a whimsical adolescence, paved as it was with a “love for mesa-land winters” and “the almost million dead in Spain,” is precisely the horror of accounting for the contradictions between one’s experience and one’s ideas. Gil de Biedma’s speaker does not attempt to abruptly reconcile it there, in the space of the poem, but instead aches for a sustained and renewed responsibility, to tend that wound, to endure not in spite of but because the damage is not—will not be—healed by enclosing the personal and political within a blanket (statement) or neatly wrapped bandage, the salve and salvo of art. Gil de Biedma is not after the moralizing parade of social justice as it is ventriloquized by declarative manifesto, a speaking about and for the people, but by interrogating injustice’s ritual reproduction through self-implication, indicting his own past and present being.

Although Moralidades was published when Gil de Biedma was only thirty-seven, the poems hone his unceasing fixation on aging, wasted youth, anniversaries, the procession of time—unapologetic about a susceptibility to nostalgia, as well as his speakers’ general sentimentalism, which is always modulated by their equally lavish transparency about the lies we tell ourselves and each other, responding to a well-worn jadedness with the earnest entreaty of “a little dreaming” together, and only for this night, with a lover. Indeed, if Gil de Biedma can be thought of as the “poet of the ‘in between,’” we might also pay attention to the ways in which he adeptly moves across discordant emotional complexions and linguistic registers. The philosophical and the chatty; bitterness tempered by idealism and enthusiasm—his belated gratitude for even the dreams that didn’t come true as well as an unrelenting attachment to the itinerant occasions of everyday life, to celebrate such banal moments as if they were the poem, and in making them into the poem, they, too, are elevated to the realm of the beautiful, the eternal. If his project is about the rescue of certain spare moments of living, it is also about the charge of the present when it is imbued with the drama of the past. As when the familiar melody of a favorite song can make everything suddenly feel like yesterday. “[B]ut something’s missing,” he acknowledges, moderating the flush of idealism with pragmatic resignation in “Elegy in Memory of the French Song.” “We’re not waiting for the revolution any more. … We from back then are no longer the same, / although occasionally we like a good song.”

“The Poem-Writing Game” is, as its title implies, representative of Gil de Biedma’s ranging style and roving gaze, which turns inward as much as it opens onto vistas both distant and close at hand. As the final poem included from Morality Plays, it also offers readers a glimpse beneath the curtains, an explanation of craft vis-à-vis the performance of the self being reinscribed. “And poems are how,” he writes, “we choose to be / understood by others / and by ourselves.”

What’s essential
to explain is life,
its philanthropic aspects
and its Saturday nights.

That certain way it has,
especially during summer,
of turning into paradise.
Although if anyone considers

…

The history of what’s happened
in these past few years
if he considers how life
cracks us into splinters
…

his conscience bogs down
with the sneaky way
he tries to delude himself
that he’s still honest

The melting of the monumental (“its philanthropic aspects”) into the incidental (“its Saturday nights”), the turn from cultural examination (“if anyone considers”) to self-study (“if he considers how life”) is not just an inventive slippage, but demonstrative of the elaborate “tango” that, as Gil de Biedma writes stanzas earlier, “Word becomes.” Attentive to Gil de Biedma’s darting shifts and abrupt vanishing points, Nolan’s translation is masterful—accommodating both the nuances of the Spanish language and illuminating the social and political significance of Gil de Biedma’s verses through careful and courageous renderings, at times echoing references to Francoist propaganda for contemporary Anglo American ears through the insertion of US nationalist rhetoric. Of this bilingual edition, Nolan, in his epilogue, calls the second, English-language side, a mirror, like a reflection that is “similar but somehow different” capable of breaking “away from its Siamese-twin to start a life of its own.” I like to think that all of Gil de Biedma’s poems are engaged in that game of light or flight—mimesis, subversion—a tango, or better yet, seesaw between counterparts whose desire is not synthesis but further splintering, iteration, instability, a desire that is endlessly repeatable and yet always on the verge.

In view of this, I can’t help but read “Against Jaime Gil de Biedma,” which opens the final Posthumous Poems, as a queer corollary to Jorge Luis Borges’s flash fiction, “Borges y Yo” (published in the uncategorizable collection El Hacedor around the same time, in 1960), in which each aging author-speaker looks back at the persona they have produced within the bodies of their words, wondering if their emplacement in and as literature has replaced the flesh behind it, the object not just outlasting the subject, but its image being taken for the real. Though any semblance of a pure tragedy is countered by Gil de Biedma’s distinguishing humor, adulterating the kernel of truth through casual revelation: “O what lowdown drudgery to love another / and the lowest / is to love yourself!” At a time when a distinct flavor of prevailing poetry is still candied with the uncritical aftertaste of an autobiographical lyric I, Gil de Biedma’s poems, animated by his use of address, the always anonymous and amorphous “you” who populates his poems—exercise a different, more complicated route one might take and take up in the endeavor of self-investigation, namely the “self” under scrutiny. The scholar Duncan Wheeler has argued in his 2020 book, Following Franco, that Spain “skipped modernity and went from being a premodern to a postmodern society.” In this respect, Jaime Gil de Biedma’s work recovers more than just the past but is also a testament to another, more unfamiliar history, one that is as acute and insightful for readers today as it was in Gil de Biedma’s ever-present moment.