![]() The section is, I assume, named for Theophrastus, an ancient Greek scientist and philosopher who was a student of Plato and succeeded Aristotle as the head of the Lyceum. In the “teophrastus” poems, he is more interested in individuals than Calvino’s Marco Polo, who describes mainly architecture and landscapes, but both González and Calvino are attempting to understand how culture is exchanged. ![]() Like Calvino, González is doing a similar sort of anthropology in Upper Volta, albeit with mostly real places and people. “teophrastus” features a sequence of prose poems that remind me of Marco Polo’s descriptions of fictional cities in Italo Calvino’s wonderful Invisible Cities. History and international cultural exchange are central themes, and a section titled “teophrastus” brings them to the fore. Still, at the end of the poem the speaker is still anonymous, and their relationship to González the writer is unclear. Alternatively, the speaker could be an immigrant or refugee working as a caregiver, giving the homesickness that much more weight. This relationship re-contextualizes the opening line’s “as if I did not want to,” retroactively imbuing the slightly off-kilter line with homesickness. The phrase “as I cared for their children” is nearly halfway through the poem and is the first time a relationship between speaker and subject, “they,” is established. This is what they discussed as I cared for their children The opening poem, “Example,” begins with the line, “They want me to leave as if I did not want to,” but it’s not until several lines later that we understand that, perhaps, the speaker is an au pair: Information is withheld or parceled out in bits and pieces, often necessitating rereading. In addition to the distraction of these overlapping passages, it’s not always clear in González’s poems who is speaking, to whom, and in what context. We literally have to read between the lines, filtering out certain portions of text to parse the poems. The effect of these visual overlaps and the lack of sources for the quotes is to distract or destabilize the reader. ![]() Sometimes, it’s not even clear whether the quotes are real and searching direct quotes yields nothing online. Auden and Gabriela Mistral, but others are attributed to figures I haven’t been able to track down (including Aedo, above). Some of these passages are attributed to known figures, such as W. The gray text varies in size, from large characters of short passages, to text smaller than the text of the poems when the passages are longer. ![]() This is enacted literally on the page with text, often quotes with attribution, printed in gray literally overlapping the black text of the poems themselves. Voices in these poems speak over one another, sometimes because those speaking are doing so intentionally, and sometimes as if we as readers are hearing multiple conversations simultaneously. Black Volta, one of the main parts of the river (the others are White Volta and Red Volta), forms the border between three African countries, including Burkina Faso, and this connection of history and international borders is perhaps a place to start understanding the poems in Upper Volta. The Republic of Upper Volta was named for the Volta River, itself named by Portuguese traders. González is a Chilean poet and anthropologist, and Upper Volta takes its title ( Alto Volta in Spanish) from the colonial name (French: République de Haute-Volta) of the country now known as Burkina Faso in West Africa. Every now and then I encounter a book that I can’t quite get a handle on, and this month’s Stanza Break selection, Upper Volta by Yanko González, translated by Stephen Rosenshein, is one of those books.
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