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I hook back the curtains and slide open the plate glass.
Early morning humidity shimmers in. But this is not an insomnia-or-tequila-induced
mirage. For now I have him — a large, iridescent blue-black bird
perched on the topmost branch of the mango tree outside my hotel window.
He points his long slender bill skywards and puffs up his body feathers.
He takes a deep breath, thrusts his head with its solar iris upwards and
forwards, extends his wings out like oars, then lets his breath out in
a series of ascending glissando shrieks, and as he deflates, quivers his
wings.
I feel like David Attenborough when he first witnessed the display of
birds of paradise. An unearthly hum suddenly filled my living room, as
the camera moved from their vibrating plumes to his pale hushed face and
he whispered to us how he was so excited he had a headache. I have not
yet identified my bird as the great tailed grackle, aka the crow blackbird.
He is like a counterpart to the gold bird of paradise, trailing his inky
tail like a night shot through with exotic stars. Is this how the universe
sings? Perched in the crown of a heavenly tree, clown-like, earnest, driven
by desire? Poet of the Tampico treetops, his boat tail shivering in the
heat, scattering masts of ships moored on the horizon.
Had I been able to understand the languages of the poets in Letras en
el Golfo — International Literature Festival, I think I would have
felt as I did when I caught the performance of Quiscalus mexicanus. And
did feel, on the occasions when English or French were the poets’
native tongues. Up on the palm-decked stage they looked some-thing like
a cross between a pulsar and a crow blackbird, their faces magnified on
the sea-blue screen behind them, their bodies animated, their hands gesturing
wildly.
Tonight is the closing gala ceremony. On the stage, eleven Mexican writers
are matched with eleven foreigners — from Cuba, Uruguay, the US,
France, Spain, Italy, Austria, South Africa, Germany, and the UK. The
line-up includes Carlos Fuentes, Margaret Drabble, Hans Magnus Enzensberger,
Antonio Tabucchi, Breyten Breytenbach, Paolo Ruffilli, and Luis Alberto
de Cuenca. And who knows what Latin American poets there are to discover.
For I am on a mission to find fine translations of astounding new poems
and publish them in Poetry London. That these resulting pages are dotted
with ships, sailors, seafaring tales, is pure co-incidence, but they arrive
freshly translated from the port of Tampico — “new bearings”
for British eyes and ears to go into “strange curlings”.
And there are other tales to bring back, of thousand-thronged auditoriums.
Of readers mobbed by students and schoolchildren — their hunger
for literature keen as the Mexican hunger for life (this festival opened
just after the Day of the Dead). Of highways flanked with Letras en el
Golfo banners. Of the hotel lobby’s daily jungle of cables and TV
monitors, nationwide live broadcasts and non-stop press conferences. So
what is their secret? The festival director — Víctor Manuel
Mendiola — was a student friend of Tomás Yarrington Ruvalcaba,
now Governor of Tamaulipas State. When they were young they shared a dream:
Víctor Manuel would one day become a poet, Tomás would become
a governor, and fund a major international literary festival which his
friend the poet would run. And so it happened, in one of the poorest states
of a Third World nation.
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