Selection from Dulce María Loynaz, GARDEN: A Lyrical Novel (Original title: Jardín, novela lírica, copyright 1951 by Aguilar S.A. de Ediciones, Madrid; renewed 1993 by Dulce María Loynaz). Translated by David L. Frye.

PRELUDE

This is the disjointed and monotonous story of a woman and a garden. There is no time or space here, as in Einstein's theories. The garden and the woman are at any meridian on earth - the most curved or the most taut. And at any latitude - the highest or the lowest - on the circumference of time. There are many roses.

This is not, thank God, a human novel. Perhaps not even a novel. The Dictionary declares (and it must be believed) that a novel is a literary work narrating a fictional action; it is worth asking if action is not too fine a name for this indefatigable coming and going, for this making a woman stroll interminably through a garden.

If it is too fine a name, there is no novel here, at least according to the best rules of rhetoric. If, on the other hand, we have fulfilled this condition and there is action here, it must be admitted that the plot has become so stretched and weakened, so drawn out, that it scarcely suffices to support the framework of the chapters - which, in spite and in ignorance of how shaky their foundations are, have each decided to carry a name and a number, as all the pretty chapters do these days.

I do not know if, now that it is finished, my invertebrate story might not break apart in other hands less cautious than my own, and with less cause for caution. I do not know if my pretty chapters won't fly away at the first hand to open the book. Foreseeing this end, I have decided to append the adjective lyrical to the word novel. This is not meant as a paradox so much as an extenuation, or an explanation.

Nothing saves this, however, from being an untimely book, for all that woman and garden are two eternal motifs: for a woman in a garden gave rise to this world.

Untimely because, to my great fatigue, I have been swimming against the current. Since I have never been able to get interested in modern cooking or in the idylls of the Sunday social club, I have come to make the child of my book a being of little flesh and less bone, an unreal character, impossible to cram into our molds, our modes, our tastes, or even into our beliefs.

This is how she emerged from the tip of my pencil; this is how I disentangled her from her garden, and returned her to it, still fresh with a plant's freshness, and intangible.

I am quite aware that this intruding guest, this unexpected newcomer, solely by her presence, without even moving her much, without even touching her, places me face to face with great dangers: including the danger of implausibility, of the hatred of implausible things in our times, when everyone must live in reality... and die of it.

Perhaps I could have gotten away with these furtive incursions into the realm of fantasy, this lightness, this fluttering along the borders of the forbidden, if in the final analysis I had proposed something useful, or at least explained it that way.... But I cannot claim even that much in my defense.

If, instead of giving my hero such a harsh name - Bárbara, a strong, emphatic name that seems to weigh heavily on her delicate shoulders - I had named her something like Psyche, I would have at least accomplished some objective. I would have come close to creating a Symbol - the only school, the only aggregate that still stirs me, and perhaps the only one to which I might aspire.

But even that, little as it was, proved too much for my strength, so turning the pages that follow will be, for whoever wishes to turn them, a disconnected and sometimes faltering succession of trees and water, trees that we confuse with human figures, or dehumanized figures that we take for trees, that we leave behind, that we can barely distinguish, as if we were watching them pass fleetingly by through the window of a moving train.

At some point the woman will infect us with the ancient vegetal mystery that imprisons her life; at some other point, it will be the garden that abandons its woody rigidity, that comes alive to a trembling of systoles and diastoles that she has managed to penetrate, through to the deep root, to the tepid stem.

I should still confess, since the reader has the right to the writer's honesty at least, that it was never my aim to make this an easy read. Perhaps I did not write down Bárbara's scantly interesting story so that anyone would read it at all. Perhaps I was only looking in her adventures for a vague way of freeing her from herself, of strengthening her benumbed feet on a new road, not knowing for sure where my road might take her...

Since it has taken me seven years to finish, I do not think this is an excusable work. It is an untimely book; it isn't bad, just out of season.

I would have preferred to make it wait even longer in my shadow. Things grow very slowly inside me, and I would have had patience to spare to make it wait another twenty years; what moves me today to push it forth from this dark shadow where it has remained suspended is a small, insidious fear that suddenly assailed me one morning, that the time and hour for this book is not yet to come, but has already passed.

A wise German thinker should console me for these regrets. Schleider wrote: "In what way is the garden farmer who presents us with delicate fruits inferior to the consummate botanist who describes for us the tissues of plants? Is it really scientific for one to disdain the other?"

Old philosopher of the North, tell me, too, in what other way I have set out to deal with plants and earth - for I too love greenery, and in my own way I pursue it, or give to it the dark soul beating in its chlorophyll, sensitive mystery of light; tell me in your calming words that this book will also be worth no less than the fruit of the patient horticulturists. May it be - nothing more - like the fruit, like the fruit they present to us, smiling, one summer evening...

Havana, June 21, 1935,

at a quarter to seven in the evening.


This translation copyright 2000 by David L. Frye -- all rights reserved