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By Root 388 0

us and said we’d now take questions from the audience, that microphones were in the aisles, if needed. The house lights were raised a little. The first questions were for particular panelists, but not for me, and I felt increasingly confident that I would be required to speak very little for the remainder of the panel. Someone asked Teresa how she thought her perspective on the relationship between politics and art differed from, say, Elena’s because she had never experienced Franco, being born so near his death, and at some point during her answer, she said something about everyone reflecting his or her historical moment. In a burst of bravado I leaned into my microphone and added: “I agree. No writer is free to renounce his political moment, but literature reflects politics more than it affects it, an important distinction.” Again the murmur, whether of agreement or disagreement, I couldn’t tell, but certainly no one suspected me of being a monolingual fraud; it was a respectable point made well.

But it was stupid to have talked; now Elena, distinguished professor, directed a question at me: “Then why write at all?” She said it without malice, but I was unequivocally the addressee, and I was now required to respond, and against the backdrop of my memorized quip, my speech would seem all the more halting and confused. Any answer would do, cryptic or funny, but I was unable to locate my Spanish; time was passing and I’d parted my lips, but I could not formulate any response. Finally, I said: “I don’t know.” Luckily, Javier took this up as a serious answer, offering a cliché about the art choosing the artist as much as the artist chooses the art. I would not repeat, I promised myself, the mistake of speaking unless forced to speak. The panel continued and there was a long exchange with Francesc about a Catalan writer I’d never heard of, and a skirmish with Javier about El País’s coverage of some political affair. There were multiple questions for Teresa about her participation in the protests, the possibility of literature as protest, and so on, but I had trouble comprehending her answers. Whenever my fear decreased, a profound fatigue, a fatigue that made concentration as impossible as the fear, broke over me. It was when I was emerging from a spell of fatigue that I realized a question had been addressed to me.

“Can you repeat the question, please?” I asked.

“What Spanish poets have had the greatest influence on your writing and your thinking about the relationship between poetry and political events?” was more or less what I thought he said.

To avoid a long period of silence resulting in another “I don’t know,” I threw him a quotation barely related to his question, if at all: “I’m hesitant to speak,” I said, “about Spanish literature as if I were an expert; to do so would be to fulfill the stereotypes regarding American presumptuousness.” Why it was presumptuous to list Spanish poets I admired was anybody’s guess.

“But who are the poets who have influenced you personally?” the man repeated. This question, perhaps offered out of sympathy for how few queries had been addressed to me, could not have been easier to answer. Just list a few names. “Lorca,” I lied. “Miguel Hernández.” But then, to my horror and amazement, I could not think of another poet; my head was emptied of every Spanish proper name; I couldn’t even think of common names to offer as though they were little known authors. Forget annotating the list, explaining how one poet’s sense of line or of the social influenced my own poetic practice, or relating these poets to my previous comments: just list a few fucking names. Finally I thought of two famous poets I’d barely read: Juan Ramón Jiménez and Antonio Machado, but the names collided and recombined in my head, and I heard myself say: “Ramón Machado Jiménez,” which was as absurd as saying “Whitman Dickinson Walt,” and a few people tittered. I corrected myself, but it came out wrong again: “Antonio Ramon Jimenez,” and now those who were baffled understood my unforgivable error, so extreme they might have