Walking on water

She was working again on translations of Galician literature, when it occurred to her to try a familiar poem. What follows has been taken from her journal, so it is just a few ideas jotted down casually, of little value to anyone beyond herself.

The journal

[…………….]

Pasa, pasa caladiño,

Có teu manso rebulir,

Camiño dó mar salado,

Camiño dó mar sin fin,

E leva estas lagrimiñas

Si as de chegar por ali

Pretiño dos meus amores

Pretiño dó meu vivir.

Ay! quen lagrimiña fora!

Prá ir meu ben unda tí...

Quen fixera un camiñiño

Para pasar, ay de min!

Si o mar tibera barandas

Forate ver á o Brasil;

Mais ó mar non ten barandas,

Amor meu, por dond' ey d' ir?

~ Rosalía de Castro, “Pasa río, pasa río” [Go on river, go], from Cantares Gallegos [Galician Songs]

Go, go on, in silence,

With your gentle gurgling,

Heading to the salty sea,

Heading to the endless sea,

And take these small tears

If in fact you reach that place

Close to my love

Close to my life.

Oh, if only I were a tear

So I could go to you dear…

Who could clear a path

To keep going, oh poor me!

If the sea had a handrail

I’d go see you in Brazil;

But the sea has no handrails,

My love, how shall I go?

I was reading this poem for probably the thirtieth time, trying to figure out why it never seems to let me go. Maybe it’s because in it the presence of water defines everything else: life, death, absence. This water, though, isn’t the rain and dampness that were and are characteristic of Galicia’s climate; those were in other poems. No, this water consists of a river, unnamed, and an ocean, necessarily the Atlantic.

I’ve spent a lot of time hating the rain in Galicia, for day after day it can block out the sun and deter people from going about their lives, errands, chores, all commitments washed away until better skies return. When I first went through those weeks of wet everything, I complained a lot and mourned for the snowflakes I was missing. My comments seemed to roll off my friends’ backs like rain off ducks’ backs. I know that’s an easy simile, but so is “I feel like a fish out of water.” Ironically, I did, since I felt like nobody else even noticed the precipitation that was threatening to wash away my very soul.

You see the strange ways water has? Feeling inundated and declaring it made me feel like I was the only one suffering. Everyone else was oblivious and my impression that life stood still when it poured was off the mark. People put on special footwear, encased books or folders in plastic, and headed out with umbrellas that seemed to work for them. I was obsessed with the wetness, determined to conquer it or escape, yet the more I ranted, the more I ended up flopping around in conversations.

Anyway, back to the poem. There’s the river that the speaker urges onward, its waters gentle, murmuring, messengers for the speaker’s thoughts. Readers familiar with Rosalía’s Galicia know it has many rivers of varying sizes and that they are sites of festivities as well as labor, such as the sites of well-assembled stones where groups of women did household washing. Rivers are movement, they are beneficial. The one in the poem is ultimately joined to the sea. Therein begins the problem, because in a sense, and recalling Jorge Manrique’s poem about how our lives are rivers that rush to their end in an ocean, which is death, the little messenger river is doomed to failure. It is unable to carry out the lover’s bidding.

The barrier is also made of water, but its size causes it to lay there before us, frightened and questioning. It may move, has waves, but in essence it lies there with its vast extension, defying us to cross it. It can become roiled and savage, rising to incalculable heights, but still it doesn’t move. Its role is to define distance, echoing and thundering with every lonely thought between the people it separates. It insists on being huge and cruel, yet coaxes the lover to seek its further shore.

I’ve never been especially fond of oceans, precisely because they are too vast to comprehend. I wonder what they seemed like to people one or two hundred years ago, when they ventured to cross them? The speaker in the poem seems undaunted by the thought of a handrail to help her traverse the many kilometers; she’s willing to make the trip. The only deterrent is the lack of that handrail.

Most will understand the historical context for Rosalía’s poem - who isn’t familiar with the famine and diaspora from Europe in past centuries? I can’t even allow myself to think of people who loved people across a sea with no handrail. Of their need to write letters when they as authors and also the ones who received them were unable to read or write? How did they send their hearts, how many rivers did they hope would serve the need?

I think of Rosalía’s nineteenth century rivers and the river-borne heart in her poem, and hear now, today, in this dry, warm room where I sit writing, the words “Amor meu, por dond' ey d' ir?” Oh my love, how can I get there without a handrail? And I think of deep waters, ones unseen yet also moving, far below. Far within. Us. We are not at all like the lover in the poem nowadays, for communication is so easy. We take it for granted and technology makes it seem we’re in the same room with the absent person.

It’s not the same and we know it. Virtual contact is still not quite real, we can’t rely on clones, there is no texture, no feeling, in pixels. And so it is. A poem written in, say, 1860, expresses what we feel today when we are unable to be with ones we love. An ocean is still an ocean, and rivers still run to the sea, where we all end. Desperation is still deep blue, deep, and ours.

Still waters.