"Valentine was a witch. She was convinced and she fostered my certainty herself. Being a good witch, she was surrounded by an impenetrable mystery, so palpable that I stayed prudently at some distance," wrote Anthony Penrose, the son of painter Roland Penrose and photographer Lee Miller, referring to her father's first wife, the surrealist poet and narrator Valentine Penrose.
Few words are so precise when describing the writer born as Valentine Boué in Mont-de-Marsan only two years before the arrival of the 10th century . Today few remember her name, but yes of the bloody Countess , Elizabeth Báthory, whose life Valentine Penrose would reconstruct in a long prose poem of which Alejandra Pizarnik would be her most attentive reader. In fact, the Argentine poet published in 1966 a story about Báthory in the journal Witness , after having read the book in which Penrose, as Pizarnik herself points out, finds beauty in the bloodiest and saddest of stories: Penrose " plays admirably with the aesthetic values of this dark history, it inscribes in the underground kingdom of Erzsébet Báthory in the torture room of its medieval castle: there, the sinister beauty of the nocturnal creatures is summed up in a silent of legendary paleness, of insane eyes, of hair the sumptuous color of crows. "
What attracted Penrose from the bloody queen of the Carpathians? Was it his interest in esotericism, in the black magic that finds its place between "the acrid smoke of the belladonna and stramonium leaves"? Or was it the question about evil, the irresolvable question about a woman, the countess, in which the poet found beauty and cruelty in paradoxical harmony? It is reading The hidden surrealist , where his prose and poems meet, and The Blood Countess , both books published now by the Wunderkammer publishing house, that all these doubts arise and is in search of his answers, never unique and always approximate, that the reader delves into the complex and unique universe of Penrose.
She was portrayed by Man Ray, wrote for Breton's Surrealist Magazine, met Picasso and Dora Maar and participated in L'age d'or , the second film made by Buñuel and Dalí. His name, however, did not transcend into a literary history with too many female absences . Surreal and unclassifiable, Penrose was and continues to be a singular voice, a poet difficult to define: surreal images, of great power and great metaphorical load, which fill his poems, his pantheistic relationship with a nature sometimes described with romantic reminiscences, his interest in Eastern philosophy, a discipline he studied in the Sorbonne, and esotericism, his inquiry into the female universe and his exploration of lesbian love .
All these elements are present in Penrose's work, from that first poem, Pater , a reinterpretation of the Our Father published in 1924, to those who wrote after his trip to India in 1936. " The cup the crescent moon the dolphins of the sky white / love how good it was to love it was daytime / under the dead sky love changed the talisman / beautiful sunken of happy blue and disappeared / your sandals dried on their vowels of water ". In these verses, written in India after the days shared with Alice, poet and ex-wife of the Austrian painter Wolfgang Paalen, we find echoes of that same love evoked in other verses written in those same weeks (" This female body here hangs like a distant drop / towards another here this time feminine / where the same hair crossing the smile ") as well as references to the moon, recurring image in all his poetry and recurring image of one of his most beloved poets, Federico García Lorca , of whom he was One of his first translators.
Next to the moon, there is the sky and the sea, the two extremes of a world that Penrose embraces as a whole, as an indivisible unit of which the individual is also a part. Influenced by Vicente Galarza, viscount of Santa Clara, who would become his guru , Penrose's work evokes this universe where the separation between individual consciousness and material reality is denied: for the poet, there is not only a correlation between the consciousness of being and physical reality, but also between will and representation, between the self and the world of which it is a part. "I FLOWER in a circle like a tiara like a dawn / my hand gives a star and a star the other / I speak to the sparks ", we read in his poem Grass to the moon , expression of a self that is born and feels part of the nature, supreme and ultimate manifestation of that indivisible whole.
For Penrose, as for other surrealists, nature is not a simple literary motive, his fascination for her, Arthur recalls, had nothing to do with "a passion for the study of botany," although his knowledge of natural history does not They were scarce. He felt, on the contrary, "a purely romantic feeling" towards nature , the place where everything originates, the place of mystery that surrounds existence, the secret that Maya's veil -figure that the poet collects from Hinduism - hide. "Wanting to wake up from not being alive is what makes people fond of blood, the blood of others where perhaps the secret was hidden that, since birth, had been veiled," he writes about the bloody countess, although, at times , seems to be talking about herself. And it is that we read in one of his poems: "On the altar of the woods the dazzling blood in the corner the ivy and then the wind". The blood appears not as an expression of violence, but of life , as the element that unites in a single image the human being with the earth. And, in fact, it is in the impenetrable forests for which he likes to get lost, in which Penrose seeks to discover the veiled secret, knowing that he can only evoke it, through poems converted into pagan prayers. "Natura is a temple whose living pillars / sometimes leave confusing names," Baudelaire wrote in one of his most recognized sonnets, Correspondences . The verses of the symbolist poet seem to evoke the poetry that, years later, Valentine would write, for whom the world was also built from secret correspondences that only writing could make emerge.
Through his poems, Valentine passes through forests of symbols, which evoke that "dark and deep unity, / vast as night," as described by Charles Baudelaire. He liked the darkness, the one he found among the trees, because, paradoxically, it was there that he saw better. It was an animal noir , it only approached the moon, "more powerful, but less bright than the sun."
As its editor, Elisabeth Riera, points out, in many of her poems we observe "her preference for the senses over dogmas, for nature over almost anything else, transforms Catholic good and evil into a good and evil of human scale , free and loving, where you pray for joy, nights and flowers, the supreme Good. " Hence, Riera defines her as a pagan goddess, hence also Anthony sees a magician in her , because in Valentine they dialogue the magical and the spiritual, the material and the transcendental, romanticism and surrealism, the western tradition and the Eastern philosophy
It is this combination of elements that makes Penrose a difficult poet to circumscribe in a closed poetic category. Without neglecting his erudition, Penrose seems to write from the senses and from experience. His poems are born from his trips to the East, from his personal relationships, but above all from his contact with the natural space, from his long walks in the forest, as Anthony recalls: "Every time Valentine returned from one of his long walks through the woods, around Farley Farm, had some magic treasure in the hollow of his hand, like a lumpy piece of wood, a dried mushroom or even a mummified toad. "
And those treasures, strangers for some, wonderful for others, collected in that forest, so similar to the one that the Countess went in search of herbs for potions and spells , became poetic material, thus establishing a close correlation between earth and writing . The mystery of the forest is the mystery of its hermetic writing, bearer of a deep meaning that is (re) veiled, showing itself as it is hidden.
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