Citario. It derives from the Latin citāre —to cite, to summon— plus the suffix -ārium —repository—, similar to bestiary. A twenty-first-century neologism, born among the Spanish-speaking scholars of Bookish & Co., with roots in ancient anthologies and florilegia. “Citario” is related to medieval commonplace books —such as those of Erasmus of Rotterdam— and to nineteenth-century proto-examples such as Familiar Quotations. This “Citario Octavio Armand” celebrates the eightieth anniversary of his birth through a selection of critical quotations on his work: readings, approaches, and flashes that accompany, from different angles, a writing made of displacements, fragments, irony, exile, and poetic thought.
[Octavio Armand] has been one of those writers who have gradually constructed an atypical, visceral, lunatic space within Cuban literature.
Carlos Aguilera
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I do not know what you might imagine one feels when a master takes one poor page of one’s own, interprets it, and makes it luminous and legible even to oneself, with absolutely clear codes, with new codes; and that has happened to me among the many emotions Madrid has given me, especially this afternoon. Thank you very much, maestro Octavio Armand.
Thanks to the Efory Atocha page, I came to know an extraordinary intellectual, a truly great intellectual of whom I had heard nothing in Cuba. I immediately wrote to Chago and asked him, “But who is this guy? Where did he come from?” I read some interviews, some pages, some poems, some fragments, and I was dazzled; since then I have been his reader.
Octavio Armand is one of the gods of Cuban conversation, a man to whom all Cubans owe the duty of teaching him to other Cubans, and of understanding and reading him more and more each day.
Sigfredo Ariel
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Armando —I know the play on words will be lost in translation, but that does not keep me from playing it: literature is made of such vain intentions— a structure of words, Octavio Armand has created his own verbal universe: sometimes incorporating other voices, other times repeating a refrain until it comes to seem insane. Thus appear his verses, which are his versions: a miniaturist collage of moments read and heard, at times more heard than read, because his voice is also nourished by the spoken voice.
But there are, almost more accomplished than his verses —which, for their part, seem not to exist, so elusive are they— his prose poems, as these few samples demonstrate. Octavio Armand has learned well the Mallarméan lesson of the spaces of his poems. And yet, in these prose poems what appears is a plethora that leads him to push words to their ultimate limit and there to split them, disvertebrate them, only to find them more than whole again at the beginning of the next line, infected by the previous one like a new boustrophedon: reading not as the ox plows, but as the writer designs. This plethora —and once again I find myself with this word, which seems to appropriate both plenitude and fullness— is a conjuration of the poem’s space. There is much to say about Octavio Armand’s new art of composing a poem —I do not wish to speak here of meaning, but only of the words that seem to refuse to compose it—, but it is not good for the presentation to become longer than what is being presented. Thus we leave you, who are on the other side of the page, with the achievements —and the assertions— of this young poet, already wise in the use of all his possibilities: Octavio Armand is the voice behind the voice: one, many, all torn from that great voice that is language, to be left beside that other great voice of literature.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
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When one finishes reading El aliento del dragón (2005), one is left breathless: everything has been demanded of the reader. One begins with irreproachable lines, searches for air in a filigree where style and data fit together to the point of anguish, and when one tries to breathe calmly, lightly, one realizes that one is already lost —one has entered a dimension from which one cannot return except at the price of indifference or stupidity.
The essay on American identity ceases to function as a historical correlate in Murena; in him, the cosmic breaks through by means of the idea of orphanhood. In Octavio Armand, it acquires an ontological dimension of planetary validity… a writing in which erudition has ceased to be an act of certification and becomes revelation.
Miguel Ángel Campos
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There was something festive in Armand, but also a pain, the pain of exile, to which, however, he did not resign himself. I think that in his smile, that of an old veteran of arms and letters, I now glimpse a laugh. The one Cervantes describes when, at the end of his novel, he speaks of Don Quixote’s “laughter of deep melancholy.” I think that behind the lights of the festival of art, there was also night, a night that united us and that only now, after some years, can I attempt to define.
Víctor Carreño
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Sergio Chejfec
I think that, perhaps more than some others, Cuban literature has tended to monumentalize, from one side and the other, several of its writers. I mention three authors whom I admire and whose works, in a low voice, tend to evade those mandates or destinies: Octavio Armand, Lorenzo García Vega, and Antonio José Ponte.
La Noria, no. 9, May 2015.
In some books of poems, such as Biografía para feacios, everyday life seems to organize itself into annotations, which in turn are poems that translate experience. It would be wrong, however, to say that they merely annotate concrete experience, because they lack spoken language and are traversed by complex rhetorical operations.
Diario de Poesía, no. 70, September–December 2005.
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I feel very ashamed for thanking you so late for your letter, which was immensely kind, and for sending me Biografía para Feacios. Its mystérieuse transparence —“transparency” would not convey the full meaning of the French— especially attracted me. I particularly liked [Sarah?], although I cannot rationally explain why. Perhaps you might find the explanation.
Letter from Emil Cioran
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This afternoon the latest collection of Octavio Armand’s essays was waiting for me in the mailbox: Escribir es cubrir(Pulpo de ensayos), El Estilete, Caracas, 2017. Armand, I have said it before, is the living Cuban essayist who most interests me. His way of carrying Western tradition, of casting it into other molds, of placing it at the service of a playful and risky vision of culture and ideas, places him aboard the little train on which travels the best of the essay that I have read and continue to read, from Montaigne to Cioran, from Mañach to Guy Davenport. And of course I was moved that the volume closes with “Una tarjeta postal a Jorge Ferrer,” the text he dedicated to me a decade ago when we were talking about escandalar, the magazine he directed for years in New York. Read Armand: it is an enormous pleasure and challenge to look into the work of this man from Guantánamo whom I am honored to call a friend.
Jorge Ferrer
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Together, Octavio and I had our backs to New York; that is, we almost never left the ugly street of the ugly neighborhood where, afternoon after afternoon —and in those afternoons, thinking of Joseph Cornell, my dream of Tokol also took shape, the Hungarian mulatto from Central Australia whom I turned into the Builder of Little Boxes— we went to drink coffee at the eatery, Casa Wong, run by the Chinese man who had been in Guantánamo.
It was, then, very curious, that condition of strolling that Octavio and I had. With our backs, or apparently with our backs, to the New York in which we lived, we walked afternoon after afternoon —sometimes we had to stop the conversation, because the elevated train, the Flushing train, passed above us— along the same street, that same street, monotonous —and I return to the quotation from Clarice Lispector that I have already used: “Because boredom is expressionless and resembles the thing itself”— which we provincials repeated and repeated, always, without tiring.
And all of this, in Casa Wong, or around Casa Wong: and my tantrum about seeking the story with the incomplete character or with the nonexistent character, in order to make them enter the story that cannot be told, together with Octavio the verbal spinning top who had once ridden in a carriage with the cubist Regino Boti, was what at that moment wove something that happened later, and that has been one of the most beautiful things that has happened to me in my life: the appearance of the magazine escandalar, where I wrote my Collages de un notario. For escandalar, made by a solitary Octavio in New York, with the collaboration of a Lorenzo with a first heart attack from a Playa Albina, never ceased to be a magazine woven as if in the air, without a ground to sustain us; but despite this, and despite how spectral those years were for me, there we managed to touch something, and that was good.
And, moreover, on a personal level, escandalar, together with Újule, the magazine that, with water up to our necks, I tried to make with Carlos Díaz and Octavio, have been the only places where I have felt well, at home, that is, without iron lungs or unbearable Catholicisms.
And all of this that I am saying about my relationship with Octavio had, as its backdrop, a harsh New York experience, without a doubt. An experience of alcoholism and great troubles, so I am not idealizing any past.
The New York experience, for me, was not something to be idealized; but for that very reason, because it was a hard experience, Casa Wong and the Octavio inside that Casa Wong of all that time are what remain safe from any lie with which memory smears the past.
Lorenzo García Vega
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From Martí I will choose his final and scarcely commented-upon scene: the description that the medical corporal Juan Trujillo offered of the body of the Cuban “Apostle” when he recognized him, dying, at Dos Ríos. “When Martí fell it seems that he drew his revolver,” says the Spanish medical corporal, “for I saw him lying on the ground with his arms outstretched and the revolver in his right hand. After he died, I observed that his tongue was bitten and that his teeth were literally sunk into it.”
The tongue that would produce an epic for the nation, the normative tongue of the great orator who bequeathed the conditions for a future community, was suddenly derealized beneath the piercing cruelty of that final scene. Armand’s poetry seems to develop as the scrutiny of that suffocated tongue, as if his poetry detached itself from that scene of mutilation and autophagy. Armand’s numerous metaphors in which a broken, coiled, boiled, and uncontrolled tongue appears seem to refer back to this scene of radical dispossession; from there he seems to extract the dislocating principle, the particular mode of occupying language that characterizes the work of this poet of Cuban exile.
Johan Gotera
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Octavio Armand’s essay on the flying fish is one of those strange encounters between poetry and the natural sciences, or natural history. It is the animal as poetic image, and evolution itself as a poetic making: in order to survive, the fish aspires to a celestial medium that is denied to it. It cannot live like a reverse dolphin, living in the air and descending to breathe water; it can only live by leaping out of it to evade the predator, but returning to the waters, dragged down by gravity, trapped by its species.
Jeudiel Martínez
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After reading El acto gratuito, published this year [2021] by Editorial Casa Vacía, the possibility arose of a conversation with its author. Armand generously agreed to answer some questions prompted both by that reading and by admiration for one who has known how to establish himself as one of the most important voices in Cuban literature.
Although that adjective used above to describe a literary body, that “Cuban,” should be subjected to critique and above all to mockery —it is well known that it is much too small for him—, the fact remains that Armand has always reaffirmed that belonging and his implication in a genealogy from which it is entirely impossible to expel him.
But Armand is a flying fish, a hybrid writer, and his Cuba —the one in this story and in many other pages of his— is an overflowing, in-continent one, and at the same time one of communicating vessels; it appears connected to other geographies through the multiple reflections of a single reality. A Caribbean worldview that appears to us in El acto gratuito in order also to establish its own links with History, that History which, to put it with Steiner, gives one reason to think it has too often behaved like a fool.
Michael H. Miranda
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History appears for Armand less in its convulsive circularity than in its confused experience of uchronia. “I was no longer what I am,” the poet once scratched across the surfaces of his writing. On his skin-history, on his skin-word.
There is no resemanticized word in Armand; each word is brought by its name, the ethereal vacuity is not searched in pursuit of the hidden meaning behind the verb. The poet is not concerned with naming. Unlike another Cuban poet, Eliseo Diego, who from Cuba writes, in 1973: “I am going to name things.” In Diego, the relationship with place is profoundly mediated by nomination.
In 1980, Armand writes: “naming would be useless.” His work with the word implies a deliberate literality. It is a writing that dismantles the letter, by force of decomposing what is named, specularly and typographically.
Armand, however, does not resist so much as desist, nor does he desist so much as dissent. The history of letters is perhaps accompanied by the history of resistance to the omnipresent word, to that which lets itself be said. Nothing more deceitful than a beginning and an end, nothing more false than a mirror,
that clean, excluding surface.
Superficies is Octavio Armand’s best book of essays and his best book of poems. It is also his first book of essays, so labeled, beyond its explicit hybridity. Its strategy: […] to provoke an excess of surface, like an excess of nudes, so that the gaze may not cover the sun with one eye, burning itself.
Lizabel Mónica
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Octavio Paz
I truly like your book —not all of it, of course, but many of the poems and texts that compose it, and all of it for its tone. It is not easy to say this of a new book: much of the poetry published today —and prose too— is frayed, shapeless. Some believe that rags dress better and that they are something like a sign of authenticity. Others dutifully repeat the formulas of the old avant-garde. Although your poems reveal familiarity with the tendencies and procedures of modern poetry, you often avoid the double facility that ruins so many young attempts: the affectation of verbal poverty and the affectation of starched complication.
Before most of your texts one feels what one rarely feels before a contemporary poem: what you say is said. The poet was not born to preach gospels or to announce the end of the world: the poet was born to say. (…) What you say is said with the certainty and authority of the poet. The certainty comes from knowing that what he says strikes exactly on target; the authority comes from knowing that through his mouth language itself speaks.
“Entre testigos,” In/Mediaciones, 1979.
The fragments of the Estética de la fealdad impressed me. They are well written and give one something to think about. But to think about with a shiver. I was surprised by your allusion to Casanova’s adventure in the Place de Grève. I immediately remembered an afternoon in 193…, in Mexico, in the library of my professor Julio Torri —the smell of naphthalene against moths, and the light from a large window falling over the red, blue, green, and black spines of the books on the shelf. Torri had gathered several editions of Casanova, some curious and others notable, and that afternoon he showed me an illustrated edition —by whom, perhaps Van Dongen? Libertine scenes, not obscene ones. Among all those images —bedchambers, billows of sheets, cushions, mirrors, pink bodies— one struck me: it shows Casanova’s attouchements with a lady who, with others leaning on a balcony, contemplates the quartering of Damiens. Reflections and reflections of the gaze: the ladies look at Damiens’s torture; Casanova watches himself touching his lover’s body as he writes the account of his adventure; Van Dongen reads it and paints the scene; Julio Torri looks at it with eyes I do not know whether mischievous or murky and shows it to one of his students. Half a century later, the gaze of that student crosses with yours.
Send something to Vuelta in the genre of that essay. Or a poem, as you wish.
Letter to Octavio Armand, October 16, 1989.
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Rafael Rojas
The fetishization of Paradiso as the “summa” of Lezama’s poetic system seems to Armand a concession to the demand for historicity in Cuban literature. By positing himself as a dislocated subject, without a precise place in Cuban history or literature —let us recall his exemplary essay “La partida de nacimiento como ficción” (1979), in escandalar—, the Lezamian maxim of “having a novel,” as an imperative of national identity, loses its power to summon. The very novel that establishes itself as Book or foundational document has its limitations, such as the fact that all the characters speak alike —as in Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres, Armand notes—, or that the supposed challenge to Aristotelian causality or to “successive order” ends in Chapter XII in a perfect symmetry that wishes to be baroque from classicist premises.
“Octavio Armand y el sombrero de Zequeira,” Diario de Cuba, May 2016.
While the young Cuban narrator Jorge Enrique Lage measures the island’s time in “years of realism,” the exiled poet Octavio Armand (Guantánamo, 1946) measures it in “sones of absence.” Armand knows himself to be “erased” and “absent” from Cuban literature since he began to write. A symptomatic essay, titled “La partida de nacimiento como ficción,” written in 1979, just as the second edition of his first chapbook Piel menos mía (1976) appeared, and published in the magazine escandalar, which he directed during his New York exile in the early 1980s, proposed his birth certificate, in Guantánamo, in the mid-1940s, as his first literary text.
“Jugando cubilete con Octavio Armand,” Libros del crepúsculo blog, June 12, 2014.
Between the early 1970s and today, between Piel menos mía (1976) and Clinamen (2013), Octavio Armand’s poetry undergoes a journey back to literature, which is also a return journey to the poet’s skin. The avant-gardism of the 1970s, in New York, which forced an exploration of the limits of the literary, has mutated, forty years later, into an internment within the body of literature. An internment that nevertheless carries with it the estrangement of that avant-garde, the mark of its wandering.
“Vuelta a la piel de Octavio Armand,” Libros del crepúsculo blog, June 2014.
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Severo Sarduy
Armand does not express ideas; there is not the slightest aphoristic character in his verses: he does not convey concepts, but rather gives them to be seen: the page is a cube, open on one of its sides; the poem a sudden staging. Or the staging of the sudden to which Lezama alluded: that is, the encounter with a word, revealing a relationship that until then we ignored, and that arises from the coincidence or fusion of two previous and similar words, emerging like the striking of a match, or like the entrance of a bird into a cage —Lezama uses the words bird and cage, in German, to obtain the word copula, similar to the preceding ones. The same theatricality, the same representation operates in Armand: to make visible in the most convincing way; another of the supports of the baroque.
Octavio Armand, who in Superficies, as is logical, studies the paradox / paradiso, has assumed, from Lezama’s modernity —that is, from the tradition of literature in Spanish— the “gift of listening,” which could be included, after all, as a grace, as a theological virtue —in insular theology— besides. Also: the sense of the page as celebration, laughter, pyrotechnics, and fruition. Rigor and amusement configure a voluptuousness, a volute, a will to compel the lines of discourse to fold themselves to the contours of a representation. And that figure, like a dedication, adds one more line to the text: that of drawing, surprising and clear. We return to Apollinaire.
“Un pensamiento en diagonal,” Antología, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 2000.
Superficies is not limited to an excess, or a luxury, of parentheses, diagrams, drawings, typographies, and hieroglyphics; these are not simple logo-grams. Rather, as in Apollinaire’s applied drawings, it attempts, or succeeds, in revealing something beyond decorativism, although taking as the support of revelation precisely the plastic contour, the double valence of representation. Thus, the sonnets, songs, décimas, and sones composed of a single repeated line can be read, in addition to being a mockery of the laws of meter and stanza —also as a mockery of economy: a squandering of ink and pages—, as a fairly clear theory —very Cuban too, because of the voluntarily plain effectiveness of its argumentation— of signification as the exclusive product of repetition.
“Superficies: la fundación de un tono,” escandalar, vol. 4, January–March 1981, no. 1; collected in Acercamientos a Octavio Armand.
The book of poems —he is referring to Entre testigos— was a celebration, a drunkenness. Cut, schizo, there where the sun of the sign is about to reach its zenith, there where the line is about to shape its meaning, there where the subject, lying in wait like a thief, is about to burst forth, to install itself, to emerge, hollowing out the page.
Letter to Octavio Armand, December 1, 1977.
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The reading procedure that Octavio Armand demands implies attention to rhetorical devices such as metathesis and paronomasia, to typography, to the use of space… With them he takes advantage of all the verbal oddities that are the correlate of culture’s Frankensteins. In that sense, Octavio Armand belongs to the group of “morphological exceptions” into which he included —using an expression from Lezama— Lezama and Darío. Perhaps that description merely seeks to expand the concept of clinamen until it includes the literary practice of one who writes “with hedgehog.” A constant deviation from straight meaning, that adaptation of Lucretius is like the fiction of poetry magnified a thousand times, until it becomes the only truth —“But even Frankenstein was nothing but a journey to the mirror,” we read in El aliento del dragón. Yes, the trompe-l’oeil says what it says by resorting to semantic dispersion.
Luis Moreno Villamediana
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Superficies, by contrast, is a book read as one reads one of the participants in a dialogue. A book with literary theorems accompanied by hypotheses that await both development and counter-hypotheses from the reader; a book with tongue twisters, graphic designs, typographic explorations; a book with linguistic jokes that remain waiting for a response, like a vaudeville comic always in need of a straight man to give him his cue: in this case, once again, the reader.
A book desirous of three-dimensionality, seeking to make the page explode. (…)
A book that despairs of pulverizing the page and the printing press, but that, accepting them enthusiastically, with no intervention other than writer and reader, paradoxically insists that the end of the Gutenberg galaxy is not, by any means, near; for Superficies is proof of how poor the exploration of that universe has been and of the enormous road that could still continue to be traveled through it.
Fernando Villaverde
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…and opening it at random —she is referring to Superficies— I read: “Writing, trace of the voice; page: trace of silence: to silence with one lip what the other silences: trace upon trace,” and I rejoice before, because of, at the edge of such clear water… thank you.
María Zambrano, letter to Octavio Armand, July 30, 1982.
The editors express their gratitude to the essayist and critic Johan Gotera for the compilation of the majority of the fragments in this Citario.
