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Juan Gelman's Mundar and the Strange Logic of Poetry

Mundar, Juan Gelman’s 2007 collection of verse, comes late in the poet’s career of over fifty years and offers both a retrospective and a reflection on key issues regarding poetic creation in the twenty-first century. While constantly questioning the poet’s ability to bridle the indomitable nature of language, Mundar offers glimpses of solace and joy in the face of the horrors of political discourse and violence. Despite these brief moments of relief that break through its predominantly tortured perspective, Mundar underscores, even more than his earlier works, the unresolvable tensions in Gelman’s vision and his resistance to facile solutions. This is a phantasmagoric world with echoes of both the surrealist and the political César Vallejo, a world that circumvents the “logic” of politics, history, or even story telling. The focus is on creating a poetics of conscience and compassion that demands surrender to the strange logic of the poem. This idiom draws upon a lyric language that is tied to its origin in the spoken word and song and that breaks down the conventions of self, nation, history, and authorial authority. Sophia A. McClennen places these issues at the center of her theory of exile, which is based on her study of the divergent circumstances and texts of Juan Goytisolo (Spain), Ariel Dorfman (Chile), and Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay). She finds that exiles manifest in their writing dialectic and irreconcilable tensions that revolve around their country of origin, time, space, and language. She explains that the experience of exile brings not only a deep ambivalence toward nation and nationalism, but also a sense of having been cast out of the present of the homeland’s historical time, a tension that defines Mundar’s opening poem, “La manzana” (II, 411) and continues throughout the rest of the collection. The resulting suspension of linear time is, according to McClennen, manifested in the creation of temporal perspectives that are alternatively cyclical, primordial (linking exiles from across the ages) and fractured. In some of his earlier, post-exile volumes of verse, Gelman, in