The dawn of the 20th century burst forth with a plethora of manifestos. Although The Dominican Republic’s literature was never propagated with the same fervor as that of Chile or Mexico, let along France and Italy, it, too, contributed to the phenomena. By the 1940’s, la poesía sorprendida arose with the triad of manifesto, journal, and an avant-garde aesthetic to inject an international energy into the country’s verse. Poets like Franklin Mieses Burgos or Manuel Rueda produced a body of work that impressed none other than André Breton on his two visits to the island. Several generations prior to that movement, Vigil Díaz (1880–1961) was engaged in introducing free verse, the prose poem, Symbolism and post Symbolism into Dominican poetry. He, too, wrote a manifesto and introduced a new movement: El Vedrinismo. The appellation honored Jules Vedrines (1881–1919), the celebrated French aviator of the First World War, and who was the first pilot to fly more than 100 mph, as well as the inventor of the dangerous “looping the loop”. Upon Vigil Díaz’s return from living abroad in Paris and New York, he sought to invigorate ailing Dominican letters with that verve and electricity.

Much of the verse written on the island was saturated with late Romanticism and traditional prosody. Moreover, the leading Dominican intellectual and literary critic, Pedro Henriquez Ureña, had long left Santo Domingo for post-graduate studies in the United States, and to assist in the creation of Mexico’s public education program and champion the country’s younger poets. Vigil Díaz remained on the island, not well understood by others, although he did publish in numerous journals. An odd fact is that he was one of only two members of El Vedrinismo, the other being the poet Zacarías Espinas whose publications were all posthumous. Despite this relative isolation, Vigil Díaz is singled out as introducing the first poem by a Dominican written in free verse, “Arabesco” (1917).

Soon thereafter, he authored prose poems, numerous poems in free verse, and texts that are entirely sui generis…teetering somewhere between crónicas, poemas en prosa, and gloomy ruminations. In the introduction to his celebrated Galeras de Pafos (1921), Vigil Díaz claimed how, like Baudelaire in his Petits poèmes en prose, he wished to “dream of a musical, poetical prose, lacking meter and rhyme, fundamentally flexible, and rather truncated in order to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of the soul, the undulations of sleep, and the fright stemming from one’s conscience.” The pen of Vigil Díaz depicted the decadence of ancient Rome, sweltering tropical landscapes, lurid passages in charnel houses like something lifted from Lautréamont, landscapes centered in lugubrious cemeteries, and moonlit seascapes exuding the mood of a Caspar David Friedrich canvas. It created a poetics teetering between the Romantic, Modernismo, Symbolism, and the Modern. It is customary that he appears as the trailblazer in anthologies devoted to modern Dominican poetry. As Juan Bosch wrote when speaking of Pedro Mir whose work was unheralded for decades due to his “condition of being Dominican,” Vigil Díaz is little known outside of his country, although his work is on par with much of the best Latin American writing produced during the opening decades of the 20th century.

— Anthony Seidman

Lunar Vision

Milady Moon I have seen you:

over the lofty crags;
over the wild waterfalls;
over the musical and meandering rivers;
over the fickle and treacherous sea;
over the ecstatic lagoons;
over the breadth of lost ships;

Milady Moon I have seen you:

over the dusty and well-traveled roads;
over the solitary ruins;
over the plumage of sleeping swans;
over the vast pampa;
over the gloom of the necropolis;
over barbarian bivouacs;
over the ivory of corpses;
over the puddles of blood;
over the carrion of beasts;
over the grim gardens;
over the mirrors of forgotten fountains;
over the anguish of hospitals;
over the arabesque of the frail;
over the vine-shoots of feasts;

Milady Moon, I have an exotic, profound longing:

I wish to see you asleep, over the gems of her eyes, and over the pale flying buttresses of her gothic hands.

Solemn Pilgrimage

The red and nearly exhausted lagoon looks like an eye violently plucked from its socket.

My dog, swan-white, like the jewels of dilated and sparking eyes; my dog, fatigued and wracked by thirst, her slobbering tongue, parched and beautiful like a purple ribbon, fell after jumping over filthy thorn scrub.

The pigs, using their snouts, rummaged the banks where mud fermented like a lager, then started to trot, grumbling.

A lovely women, upright and lovely as a bronze statue, with her breast practically exposed, her lips impregnated by a vague and deeply sad smile—one of those smiles that the dead wear upon dying—and who carried a fond memory in her soul, pointed out the shortcut leading us to the main road.

Finding ourselves on the firm side of the hill, the humid and affectionate breeze wafted an acrid smell of freshly split soil and furrows.

A pitying of brown turtledoves emerged abruptly from the hollow, skimming the flowering thirsts of a cornfield.

How fitting is the countryside for those possessing a sick and pensive soul: it is ambrosia!

Fragment

The moon, like a giant rose, spills the caress of her pale light over the fronds, across the rushes and nearly imperceptible river current. From the ancient Medieval tower, twelve bell-tolls pour down on the sleeping city, and they harmoniously rhyme with the deep sadness in my soul.

By the docks, like gutted monsters, like the skeletons of the Megalosaurus, the old and sickly ships repose in their wreckage, orphaned from the caresses of seaweed, from the chill kiss of the waters, and from Patrono’s sweet chant to his beloved. Beside the docks, like a flock of seagulls upon perching, the small ships tremble to the tide’s pulse, the ships for brief voyages, those who say not a thing, for their souls are joyful.

And further off, prisoners of the iron anchors, raising their roving masts like supplicant arms to the indifferent stars, taciturn as nostalgic eagles, motionless above the mirror-glass of the waters, rest the great ships, the ships for vast voyages.

Profession of Faith

Enough already of complicating my art, my life; I aspire to simplifying my life and art; I wish to fulfill that miracle without reducing my imbalances nor eliminating my interior carcinomas; to add the sum without counting; have it all the same: one, a hundred, a thousand, a million or nothing; to live near animals, and far off from other men; to have—as music—the music of the sea, the music of the stars, and the music of my interior clavichords.

Mountain Drum

My sweetheart, a dusky woman,
sweet and harmonious like the neck of an ebony zither,
with coconut’s pulp in her smile,
and mandrake’s essence in her deceitfulness,
awaited me by the parapet
to inform me:
“The bastard’s dead.”

On a bed of stones beside the corral,
finished off because of his hairy and lustful hulk,
the father and
lord of the fold,
is stretched out.

Last night, the moon shrouded his cadaver, and this morning, the sun
warmed the fluff of his patriarchal beard.

In the amorous pages of Ovid,
he learned the art of love,
and he conquered a thousand lambs
with the pipes of Pan.

So that the starving hounds dine not on his lubricous carrion,
we shall perform Greek obsequies on the savannah.

Poem Number Two

The landscape jagged as a cactus.

The December sky low-hanging,
yet flowering livid stars.

The moon, an ineffable paleness.

From the mountain, the dry blow of an axe,
and the sad plaint of a lovesick turtledove.

A shortcut… at an angle of oblivion,
the innocent cemetery,
without fences or crosses,
aglow with roving fireflies
that render the night sadder…

The bovine animals scattered over the tombs,
ruminate
ruminate.
They meditate and doze
in Buddhistic peace,
and they lick, re-lick, the sleeping newborns.

The December sky
low-hanging,
yet flowering livid stars.

The moon, an ineffable paleness,
continues on her way,
indifferent to death,
indifferent to life.

Rhapsody

Trees from the white villa of San Carlos: one, two, three, four, five; five aortae full of blood; five basilicas of mysterious shadows where my animula rests, torn by the sluggish claws of time; five amphorae containing perfume that suckle the white and blue serpents of my dreams and my chimeras; five vases containing green and perfumed salves of coolness; pious lamps, at times cheerful, at times deeply sad; stock-still at times, and at times as moveable as sails; at times embossed by the gold of stars, or the silver of the moon; metaphysical Stradivarius, symbolic cellos…when the wind passes its mane over the warp of your antlers, I have felt the mystery of solitary forests; the harangues of Mattathius, the warrior from the Bible; the complaints of Leopardi; the tears of Kosciuszko; the seven armchairs of Emerson and the cruelties of Mars; trees from the white villa in San Carlos; during the Pythagorean harmony of the high night, I have felt the wild feasts of Nineveh and Babylon; I have seen the dunghills of Job and the blazing circles of Dante, Mercury and Shylock weighing gold; Moloch and Nimrod drinking blood; Ariel and the Marquis de Lafayette astride the winged Pegasus… Trees from the white villa in San Carlos;
fantastic memorial stones from my nostalgic and ideal necropolis,
I have carved on your barks, and on my soul: don’t lose hope…

Estival

One o’clock, this aureate day, the sun pours across the earth with volcanic flagellations; the cattle chew and drool somnolently beneath the merciful shade of the thick mango trees and the stately and querulous palm trees attacked by cephalalgia; in the green and dense pasture, the cicadas, with the Wagnerian brass of their elytra, extol the wet heat, love, and life; in the ranches, the simple and rugged peasants rest, while some slovenly maids bustle about, cackle, chat, and stink; I, stretched out in my hammock, annotate my Machiavelli, while intermittently checking on the sky, eager for it to overturn Poseidon’s chariot.

Jonondio

Death, death’s solitude, is the only common certainty.
—Nietzsche

In the crepuscular agony, the necropolis proves a mysterious and gloomy sea. Sepulchers, vessels of the dead, row across the dusty waves of reality. The small, the lowly, and the anonymous feign filthy fishermen’s skiffs ravaged by a squall. Others, paint splattered, or with black and white stripes, appear like cargo boats. The grand tombs jut forth, lofty boats, with poppy-flowers covering masts bearing chiseled words of praise and childish pleas; with severe family figureheads, with swift angels and nubile Panagias; with symbolic statues of porphyry or marble; with multicolored crowns lined with glass beads; with terracotta and porcelain amphorae; with silent harps and bright candelabras. Some, leprous, with worn epitaphs and stubborn parasites, with bursting roots; the pious shadows of the aged, musical pines, or the melancholy willows which imitate nostalgic seals rowing past the glacial floes of indifference…

Such is how the sepulcher ships and the tombs of the dead go forth. Lacking war bonnets, lacking flags of vampirism; steered by the old pilot with silvery beard, eyes the color of emeralds, as clear and sweet as hope itself; with prows headed westward, towards the humid and dolorous jaws of Acheron; with pupils fixed on Eternity…on Nothingness.

Such is how the tombs of the dead go forth, the sepulcher ships: proud, lowly, sad, or joyful. Some, storing horrifying and stinking corpses. Others, full of dust, ashes of vanity, ashes of love, ashes of reveries, ashes of pride, ashes of ruminations, ashes of virtues, ashes of wickedness, of golden miters, of imperial purple, of buffoons’ humps, courtesans’ bowels, avarice’s claws, empty craniums, hollow bones, unburdened of all worries, thoraxes opened like forgotten cages.

Such is how the sepulcher ships go forth, the tombs of the dead.

Vade-Mecum

All desire is grief (Buddha the Wise)
(Imitation of Baudelaire)

Let me gaze for a long, very long while into your deep, black eyes, and beneath the shade of their long lashes, quench the thirst they induce!...

If only you knew all that I see, all that I sense, all that I perceive in their dark depths!...

My soul calmly sails the mysterious black crystal of your eyes, like the soul of Divine da Vinci would sail over color’s enigma: calmly, intensely!...

Your eyes are seas whose waves carry me to the soothing shores of reverie…and hope!..

They are suns brimming with fire, suns that scorch me…and sometimes, cool cisterns where the thirsty, exhausted caravan of my infinite melancholies are watered!...

Your eyes are the embroidered stream and the peaceful oasis. In them, I see heat spreading; in their strange nervousness, I glimpse the fleeting does of your scorn; languishing, enigmatic, voluptuous, exquisite!...

Hate me if you wish—my beautiful mourning made of marble—hate me if you wish, but let me gaze for a long, very long while…your deep, black eyes!...

Be Sad…!

The azure foam of the Ideal rows over the mysterious wave of Sadness…

I adore evenings, because the crepuscules are sad!...

The black gondola softly gliding over the green canals of “Venezia”; the heron pondering by the reeds and lethargic oasis, and the mortal remains from ships strewn across the white shroud of the shore: they, too, are sad!...

Sad is the night, moon, stars, the infinite serenity of space, and the torturing wish for the “Impossible”!

Sad is the poet’s complaint, and the lover’s embrace upon leaving. Melancholy is the stone-curlew’s song, on the wide and solitary pampa, and enigmatically sad is the swan: eternally lovesick for the tranquil pond!...

If you so wish that we love you, Milady, be sad!...

Arabesque

I neither wish for glory nor wealth: I only yearn
to endure in a poem as red as your lips,
as white as your hands. I neither wish for glory nor wealth: I only yearn to endure in a poem as serene as your forehead, thirsty as your tresses, winding as your throat, heroic as your breasts. I neither wish for glory nor wealth; I only yearn to endure in a poem as small as your feet, soothing and rhythmic as your desires…a poem possessing: the soul of Jesus, of Nero, of Nietzsche, of San Francis of Assisi of Saint Teresa of Jesus of Lucretia, Cleopatra, and Salome….

The Miser

One is born generous, splendid, like one who is born a musician, poet, one who is honored, or deemed traitor or scoundrel. Munificence is quite a distinguished coat-of-arms.

Going down the list of humanity’s central personages, we have as points of reference: Xerxes, Alexander, Pericles, Socrates, Jesus, Cesar, Napoleon, Bolivar, Washington, and some other towering great men. They possessed that precious gift.

I could never ever—although my apologists would affirm otherwise—I could never figure myself like unto Aeschylus, Homer, Simonides of Ceo, Virgil, Juvenal, Dante, Goethe, Chopin, sitting on the slain bars of a moneylender or inside the mercurial cage of a banker, like unto a tiger, hyena, or vampire.

The miser!... what despicable vermin yet most worthy of our pity!

Vigil Díaz (Dominican Republic, Santo Domingo, 1880–1961)