Woman in Dream

Carol A. Stos is an assistant professor of Spanish Studies at Laurentian
University.

“Mujer en sueсo” is a long poem by Zeller that was published in
1975. This volume contains the Spanish poem, an English translation of
it (“Woman in Dream” by A.F. Moritz), and a French translation of it
(“Femme en Songe” by Jean Antonin Billard). Much of Zeller’s other
work also appears in trilingual editions.

In her introduction to this volume, Anna Balakian explains that Woman
in Dream is “in the tradition of the ancient ‘blason’ of
adoration”; but in Zeller’s surrealist approach, the image of woman
is not immobilized by means of synecdoche or metonymy—rather, it’s
imbued with “the dynamism of the beloved and her relation to exterior
nature, which is no longer the body’s frame but its foil.” She
becomes the landscape of his desire and the eternal and erotic
embodiment of all aspects of the natural universe.

Zeller is a visual artist as well as a poet, and his poetry is full of
images. But they are not static: there is a passionate rush of images, a
constant and urgent movement from one representation to the next. At
times, it is all sensuality: “My hands travel through your interior
like oil / Drawn up into lamps that devour their flames.” At other
times, it is all violence and turmoil: “There is no mercy no rest in
the convulsed bird the womb / That gives birth to the storm of images
you breathe / Over the flute-bones of your lovers when you shatter.”
Long preoccupied by the idea and theme of dreams and dreaming, Zeller
here seamlessly moves within and between the waking state and the dream,
blurring the distinctions between the dreamer (the beloved and/or the
narrator–poet) and the dream (hers and/or his).

Woman in Dream is a paean to woman and the eternal feminine as the
source of all life and renewal. It is a poem that resists simple meaning
and demands multiple readings—in Spanish, French, or English—to
plumb the complexities of its imagery.