‘Here in this Spring’: Introduction

Imagine a summer morning in Swansea, 1931, when the warm air gently brushes against the fabric of a neat jacket and a head of curly hair left to its own devices. In the office of the local newspaper, the South Wales Daily Post, a sixteen-year-old boy waits for the editor-in-chief (he has taken advantage of the school break to make the decision to look for a job and abandon his studies). He takes out a notebook and jots down a few lines. Would you like to read them? Today they are in the Lockwood Memorial Library at the University of Buffalo, New York. Some of the many biographies of Dylan Thomas place him in the later years, in the period covered by the poetry presented here, as a figure who began to stand out on the London art scene not only as a poet and storyteller but also as a bohemian. Eighteen months after joining the aforementioned newspaper, he left to become a freelancer. Working as a reporter allowed him, as his friend Charles Fisher pointed out, to ‘go anywhere’.

The poems in this selection belong to the books Eighteen Poems (1934) and Twenty-Five Poems (1936), reorganised in a new arrangement with the intention of shifting the focus to the well-travelled writing of our poet. The Spanish versions we present here aim to capture the essence of each rhythmic and semantic structure, inviting us to appreciate the images and textures of this poetry which, in my personal opinion, remains fervently relevant today.

Who is now here in this spring? Perhaps the young man who understands in nature a message greater than that of culture, that young man who is also another young man in another time, a poetic revelation incarnate. And where is this springnow? Perhaps anywhere, where the poet’s effervescent blood wants to go in order to leave soon and thus continue the true journey, the inner journey. Throughout these fourteen poems, the reader can draw their own conclusions. What do we see when ‘the film of spring hangs from our eyelids’? Nature and cinema are presented as a modern crossover that brings Thomas’s work into the here and now. The way in which the images acquire vertigo and are juxtaposed makes us think of procedures that were developed in subsequent decades by Western poetry. With advances in cinema, language could not be left behind, the poet seems to have thought. Throughout his life, he worked on numerous screenplays, some of which fared better than others. His letters reveal how frustrated he was with the film industry, even leading him to consider publishing some of these writings in book form (Letter to Laurence Pollinger, 28 June 1944), but he never ceased to enjoy cinema as an art form. An interesting fact, pointed out by Christopher M. Williams in a thesis for the University of Liverpool (1997), was his passion for ‘Saturday matinees and B movies’.

We might think of a syntax based on montage that gives these poems a special character. The visual and the sensory in general are capable of suddenly forging unusual material in one or two lines: “the bitter grass that tells me all I know / pierces the eye with the worm-eaten winter”. The signal grass, in the intricate poem “Especially when the October wind”, proposes a play on words that refers both to the species brachiaria decumbens, known as bitter grass or cattle grass, and to the world of words. This piece brings together the idea of perception with the material of language, a montage that constitutes the subject of his poetry. In other words, for Thomas, the world seen through the eye is a world-language. The sign order allows the poet to enter into an ecstasy of composition and perception, as if it were a sequence shot that recreates the time of the spirit.

This imprint leads me to think of Godard’s cinema, which years later would question the notion of the real image and its capacity for representation, appealing to a fragmentary gaze. In turn, going back in visual art, we can find the figure of Paul Klee, who was a contemporary of Thomas and with whom he has been compared on several occasions. The unfocused style, with undefined forms that seem to change with each observation, converging in the Angelus Novus (the angel of history, Walter Benjamin would say), who in 1920 was already contemplating the ruins of a stormy time, reminds us of Dylan’s ‘broken ghosts’. The spectres, those ghostly characters that populate the verses presented here, can be read in the same key: “Thus vanished my spectre companion with maternal eyes, / while blowing on the angels”. I also suggest paying attention to the paintings of a friend of Thomas’s (from the Kardomah Café group), with whom he first moved to London in the 1930s, Alfred Janes. Upon seeing his works, we can immediately link them to the poet’s intentions: disintegrating figures, abstract mechanisms, the sea and the human in a continuous spiral.

Language as a problem in itself reveals another advance on the interests of the time and its context. Some reviews of Dylan Thomas’s early poetry characterized it as ‘difficult, irrational and undisciplined’ [1]. Sometimes the best praise comes from detractors. The symbolism that runs through his poetry should not be confused with the essayistic approach he takes to the treatment of language with its Welsh influences: ‘Locked up, too, in a tower of words, I distinguish / on the horizon, walking like trees / the verbal figures of women (…). Some allow me to create you with the signs of the meadow’. Some words allow the subject to be an authorial part of Creation. Nature, reminiscent of that Celtic root that returns like an echo, is a source of symbols, as well as new, original, emerging images, typical of a creationist attitude: “Where once your green knots sank their ties / into the tied rope, there goes / the green untangler, / its greased scissors, its knife ready / to cut the channels of origin.‘

The final poem, ’I have longed to get away,” which was poem number twenty in the series Twenty-Five Poems, is (in addition to being a perfect lyrical gem) a reflection on the writer’s internal conflict. Truth / lie, the ‘ghostly echoes on paper’, that which poetic exploration (which, in authors as committed as Thomas, is the subject of “poetry”, something that exceeds the ‘making’ of poetry) exposes and turns into a voice that exceeds the control of subjectivity. Therein lies another of his concerns: madness. His fear for his own mental health establishes a relationship with the opacity of his style. He expressed it this way in one of his letters:

Automatic writing has no literary value, however interesting it may be to the psychologist and the pathologist. So, perhaps, after all, I am nothing more than a literary oddity, a minor freak of nature whose madness is expressed in the printed word rather than in delusions and illusions. It may also be an illusion that keeps me writing, the illusion of being a misunderstood poet of talent. [2]

It will be up to the reader of this 21st century, not so different from that man of the interwar years, not so free from the terrors produced by the adventure of recognising oneself, of allowing oneself to be dazzled. After having worked for a long and beautiful time on these versions, I believe that it is impossible to enter Thomas’s writing and not be captivated by his universe. A universe that, no matter how many hours we spend on social media and buy lab-grown food, will have an emotional impact on us. We suddenly find ourselves under a flowering tree, surrendering to the fresh air and the scent of wild fruits: we are here, it is our turn to inhabit the words.

Notes

[1] Olson, E. Poetry of Dylan Thomas. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1954. In this work, Olson compiles contemporary opinions such as those of H. G. Porteus and Stephen Spender.
[2] Thomas, Dylan. The Collected Letters: 1914-1953, Ed. Paul Ferris. New York: Macmillan, 1985, p. 51.