Byobu by Ida Vitale (tr. Sean Manning)
Review by Cath Barton
Do not, says the narrator of Uruguayan author Ida Vitale’s prose collection Byobu, speaking of the nature of story, ‘underestimate its flexible, disordered density’ or the ‘asphyxiating paralysis’ it can bring down on the reader. That is the challenge of this slim but dense collection of philosophical reflections and aphorisms, in a first English translation of the author’s prose. It is concerned with the author’s exploration of language, which must have provided translator Sean Manning with a particularly challenging task in order to convey accurately in English the specificity of thought applied by Vitale in the original Spanish.
Vitale has won many prizes for her poetry, including, in 2018, the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, regarded as the highest recognition for literature in Spanish. While neither youth nor age is essentially material to the worth of an author’s output, it is remarkable that in her 90s she is able to be so incisive and challenging in her use of words to convey complex ideas.
The name Byobu is taken from the Japanese byôbu, meaning a folding screen, representing the façade of the character who goes by this name in the book and is the explorer, investigator and interpreter of external phenomena. The text is laden with diverse cultural references which the curious reader may choose to explore further: unable to sleep, Byobu opens a book and discovers the Yamabushi, Japanese ascetics who commit suicide through mummification; more joyfully, he listens to the French Baroque composer Marin Marais and tells himself ‘music is where our current moral misery should seek refuge’.
Like many South American writers, Vitale has spent a period of her life in exile because of the oppression of a military dictatorship in the country of her birth — in her case, ten years in Mexico, followed by a long sojourn in Texas with her second husband (the Uruguayan poet Enrique Fierro) before returning to Montevideo. Whatever her feelings about this dépaysement, her curiosity about all aspects of her daily life clearly remains undimmed. Byobu is as fascinated by ‘miniscule things lacking in importance’, such as the tiny flower of the butcher’s broom, as he is by the existential choice that the traveller faces at a crossroads, inside the ‘magical mandala’ of which ‘fate might be waiting.’
Vitale, through her alter ego Byobu, regrets the loss of mystery in life, reflecting that through all the crazes that have come and gone, few individuals have been touched by light. He remarks ruefully: ‘It’s true, there were three Wise Men; not quite a battalion’, and that Baudelaire’s ‘flowers of evil’ may be re-blossoming. And of Commerce and Oil, the collective reasons which lead to wars nowadays: ‘Both are beyond the reach of any assassination.’ To focus on Vitale’s pessimism about the future of humanity, though, is to ignore her extraordinary engagement with what she describes as ‘the prodigious coagulations of the alphabet.’ In old age she acknowledges anguish but will not give in to it.
Take a chapter of Byobu at random and use it as a meditation on words. For anyone doubting whether original thought is still possible, as opposed to fashion posing as innovation, giving due attention to Vitale’s prose will bring them reassurance and optimism.
Byobu is published by Charco, 16th November 2021