Profane Comedy by Giannina Braschi first published in Barcelona as La comedia profana in 1985 (Anthropos Editorial).
Giannina Braschi’ s Profane Comedy
Review of Contemporary Fiction
“Profane Comedy” combines elements of New York City’s diverse and dramatic street life, yet never actually takes place on the ground amidst people and places. Rather the “Comedy” frolics through images of shepherds, buffoons, clowns, and drunkards all comprising a cast of non-characters that sail in and out of view. The longest and most complex section of the book, “Profane Comedy” is presented as a theatrical undertaking with cues, costumes, and a’ narrator-like voice that provides perspective and often humor.
Giannina Braschi has earned her preferred label of modern writer. Latin American, Puerto Rican, New Yorker, and feminist are apt labels as well, but though they might be selling points, they do little to describe her writing. Braschi writes with a strong poetic tradition behind her, and from her erudite standpoint she forges an odd mixture of poetry, prose, drama, and a little of what could be considered music. She imbues her text with jollity and brilliant energy that stretches its audience from lovers of modernism to seekers of a broadened artistry of language. In a let-loose cadence, Braschi combines fantastical images of New York City with self-conscious postmodernism. She uses words for their rhythms and image-making, rather than to tell a story or to describe a fixed object or idea. Her words dance from visual evocation to nonsensical mutability, swirling through a series of sections entitled “Assault on Time,” “The Profane Comedy,” and “The Intimate Diary of Solitude.” “Assault on Time” consists of a thoughtful, single mind’s musings on time, silence, love, words, and memory. Sentences shift midway, as in “I always knew that a bit farther or closer but never in the exact spot a heart beats at the bottom of a painting and we are the breaking glass.” “Profane Comedy” combines elements of New York City’s diverse and dramatic street life, yet never actually takes place on the ground amidst people and places. Rather the “Comedy” frolics through images of shepherds, buffoons, clowns, and drunkards all comprising a cast of non-characters that sail in and out of view. The longest and most complex section of the book, “Profane Comedy” is presented as a theatrical undertaking with cues, costumes, and a’ narrator-like voice that provides perspective and often humor. “The Intimate Diary of Solitude,” with its two sections, “The Death of Poetry” and “Rosaries at Dawn,” is the most self-reflective, with the author herself shape-shifting into other characters. Braschi blends her own identity with the Queen of Beauty, Charm, and Coquetry, the professor, Mariquita Samper, and the Macy’s makeup artiste. Braschi’s linguistic playground gathers issues of gender, history, literature, and diversity and turns them over upon themselves, never making statements, but always subverting assumptions. She paints her modernist text with images from Beatles songs, Shakespeare, department stores, and memories, sampling from a multitude of mixed cultural influences.
La Comedia Profana
Alicia Ostriker provides a wonderfully academic yet passionate introduction, followed by a few words from Tess O’Dwyer, the devout translator. Both sing praises for their avant-garde artist who has lived in many cities, and “rocked a lot – from east to west.” “But only in New York,” Braschi says, “do I write. And only in New York do I dream of empires.”
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/review
Carolyn Kuebler was a co-founder of the literary magazine Rain Taxi and for the past ten years she has been the editor of the award-winning New England Review. Her stories and essays have been published in The Common, Joyland, and Colorado Review, among others, and “Wildflower Season,” published in The Massachusetts Review, won the 2022 John Burroughs Award for Nature Essay. She lives in Middlebury, Vermont. Liquid, Fragile, Perishable is her first novel.
Keywords and tags: Carolyn Kuebler, Alicia Ostriker, Profane Comedy, Asalto al tiempo, Assault on Time, Empire of Dreams, El imperio de los suenos, comedia profana, contemporary american epic poem, Puerto Rican epic, Puerto Rican epic poem, Spanish Caribbean epic poem