Biography for the Use of Birds By Jorge Carrera Andrade—National Poetry Month 2023

Jorge Carrera Andrade--distinguished Ecuadoran poet.

Jorge Carrera Andrade was an Ecuadorian poet, historian, author, and diplomat of the 20th century. He was born in Quito, Ecuador in 1902 and died in 1978. During his life and after his death he has been recognized with Jorge Luis Borges, Vicente Huidobro, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, and Cesar Vallejo as one of the most important Latin American poets.

He was published in Aurora Estrada y Ayala’s literary magazine, Proteo which she started in 1922. Other contributors to the magazine included future Nobel Laureate Gabriela Mistral.

From 1928 to 1933 Carrera first experienced traveling in Europe. He served as Ecuadorian Consul in Peru, France, Japan, and the United States. Later he became Ambassador to Venezuela, the United Kingdom, Nicaragua, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. He also served as Ecuador’s Secretary of State.

While living in the United States, Carrera developed many literary relationships with American writers, in particular Muna Lee whose critically acclaimed translation of his poetry, Secret Country, was published in 1946. His work was praised and championed by John Malcolm Brinnin, H.R. Hays, Archibald MacLeish, Carl Sandburg, and William Carlos Williams.

In 1972 his Obra poetica completa, which gathered the totality of his lyric work, appeared in Quito. Most of his poetry has been translated into French, English, Italian, and German. He also published books of essays, history, and an autobiography, El volcan y el colibri (The Volcano and the Hummingbird) in 1970.

One of Andrade's most popular books in English translation.

Biography for the Use of Birds

I was born in the century of the death of the rose

when the motor had already driven out the angels.

Quito watched as the last stagecoach rolled away,

and at its passing the trees ran past in perfect order,

and also the hedges and houses of new parishes,

at the threshold of the countryside

where cows were slowly chewing silence

as wind spurred on its swift horses.

 

My mother, clothed in the setting sun,

stored her youth deep in a guitar,

and only on certain evenings would she show it to her children,

wrapped in music, light, and words.

I loved the hydrography of rain,

yellow fleas on apple trees,

and toads that rang two or three times

their thick wooden bells.

 

The great sail of the air maneuvered endlessly.

The cordillera was a shore of the sky.

A storm came, and as drums rolled

its drenched regiments charged;

but then the sun's golden patrols

restored translucent peace to the fields.

I watched men embrace the barley,

horsemen sink into sky,

and laden wagons pulled by lowing oxen

travel down to the mango-fragrant coast.

 

There was a valley with farms

where dawn set off a trickle of roosters,

and to the west was a land where sugarcane

waved its peaceful banner, and cacao trees

stored in coffers their secret fortunes,

and the pineapple girded on its fragrant cuirass,

the nude banana its silken tunic.

 

It has all passed, in successive waves,

just as the useless ciphers of sea foam pass.

Entangled in seaweed, the years slowly died

as memory became scarcely a water-lily,

its drowned face

looming up between two waters.

The guitar is only a coffin for songs

as the cock with its head wound laments,

and all the earth’s angels have emigrated,

even the dark brown angel of the cacao tree.

 

—Jorge Carrera Andrade