Rafael Cadenas, Premio FIL de Literatura 2009

The Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas (Barquisimeto, 1930) has just been awarded the 2009 FIL Literary Award at the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL) in Mexico. A few of my translations of poems by Cadenas, along with essays about his work, interviews with him and other miscellaneous material which I’ve published at Venepoetics over the last seven years, can be read in the links below.

Cadenas is a poet, essayist and translator. He has translated Walt Whitman and Robert Creeley, among others, into Spanish. In 1986 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship which he used to conduct research on Whitman and Emerson in Cambridge, MA. For many years he was a professor at the Escuela de Letras at the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas, where he lives today.

In 2001, literary critic Rafael Arráiz Lucca said of Cadenas: “One of the most important poetic oeuvres in Venezuelan history belongs to Rafael Cadenas. [...] Whoever ventures into the labyrinth of these pages will be able to examine some of the recurring threads in the thought of the poet from Barquisimeto: his condemnation of nationalism, the ego as the center of human dilemmas, the obsessive search for humility as an organizational and catalytic vortex, the defense of the individual above any collective intent to impose limitations, the fascination with Christian mystics and, last but not least, the assimilation of Asian philosophy within the West itself.” (You can read my full translation of his essay, “Rafael Cadenas and the Other Voice,” below.)

I have also included the official English-language press release from the FIL (with a few of my own corrections of minor grammatical errors). The photograph of Cadenas is taken from a news item in today’s El Universal.

Poems:
“Manuscritos de autores”
“Un momento separado”
“Amante”
“Anotaciones”
“Nunca he sabido de palabras”
“Las triunfales inconsecuencias”
“Los cuadernos del destierro”
“Charles River”
“Nuevo mundo”
“Conjunto residencial”

Interviews:
With Harry Almela, 2008
With Diego Arroyo Gil, 2007
With Marjorie Delgado Aguirre, 2005

Essays About Cadenas:
Cantórbery Cuevas, “Metafísica de los sueños” (Tal Cual, 2008)
Rafael Arráiz Lucca, “Rafael Cadenas y la otra voz” (El Nacional, 2001)

Miscellaneous:
Political Statements by Cadenas (2008)
Rafael Cadenas, “Sobre la barbarie” [essay] (El Universal, 2001)

*

Official Press Release from FIL Guadalajara:

Rafael Cadenas, FIL Literary Award 2009

Guadalajara. August 29, 2009

Rafael Cadenas, FIL Literary Award 2009

The Venezuelan author will receive the award for an ouevre that has not hesitated in breaking with the “forms, genres and discourse” of modern poetry.

Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas (Barquisimeto, 1930) is this year’s FIL Literary Award in Romance Languages recipient for a lifetime dedicated to literature. The Jury, integrated by María Luisa Blanco (Spain), Ana María González Luna (Mexico), Gustavo Guerrero (Venezuela), Darío Jaramillo (Colombia), Lucía Melgar Palacios (Mexico), Vicente Quirarte (Mexico) and Raymond L. Williams (USA), said in their statement that Cadenas’s work is “a demanding critical exercise that seeks the most authentic, bare and limpid expression, far from any rhetoric or stylistic or aesthetic intent. (…) Lucid and vigilant, Cadenas has not hesitated in breaking with the usual forms, genres and discourses of modern poetry.”

Cadenas currently lives in Caracas, a city he returned to in 1958 after his exile in Trinidad, in 1952, caused by his communist activism. He is part of the Venezuelan generation of 1960. He was part of Tabla Redonda, alongside Arnaldo Acosta Bello, Jesús Guédez, Ángel Eduardo Acevedo, Darlo Lancini, José Barroeta and Jesús Sanoja Hernández. Critic Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda has called him “a secret language renovator”, a poet that slakes from aphorisms the silence and immediacy of life. Cadenas has defined himself as someone who “writes from normality with a sense of awe.”

According to the Jury Statement, “Cadenas embodies, for the younger generations, the horizon of an act of writing that moves away from traditional lyricism and carries the duty of being the voice for all who can no longer find its own spaces.” Among his works are Cantos iniciales (1946), Una isla (1958), Los cuadernos del destierro (1960), Derrota (1963), Falsas maniobras (1960), Anotaciones (1973), Intemperie (1977), Memorial (1977), Amante (1983), Dichos (1992), Gestiones (1992). In 2000, the Fondo de Cultura Económica published his Complete Works. He is a translator of poetry in English, he was a university professor and has an extensive collection of essays that are considered an essential reference of contemporary literature in Spanish, among which are his books En torno al lenguaje and Apuntes sobre San Juan de la Cruz y la mística. He received the National Prize for Literature in Venezuela, the Pérez Bonalde International Poetry Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and honoris causa doctorate from the Universidad Central de Venezuela and the Universidad de Los Andes.

Since 1991, the Civil Association of the Juan Rulfo Latin American and Caribbean Literature Prize has recognized important representatives of Latin American literature. Today, the 150,000-dollar FIL Literary Award in Romance Languages is considered one of the most important awards around the world. Under the name “Juan Rulfo” the award was bestowed to Nicanor Parra (1991), Juan José Arreola (1992), Eliseo Diego (1993), Julio Ramón Ribeyro (1994), Nélida Piñón (1995), Augusto Monterroso (1996), Juan Marsé (1997), Olga Orozco (1998), Sergio Pitol (1999), Juan Gelman (2000), Juan García Ponce (2001), Cintio Vitier (2002), Rubem Fonseca (2003), Juan Goytisolo (2004) and Tomás Segovia (2005). As FIL Literary Award, it was granted to Carlos Monsiváis (2006) and Fernando del Paso (2007). António Lobo Antunes was the first to receive it as FIL Literary Award in Romance Languages in 2008.

Ocho segundos con Nicanor Parra / Roberto Bolaño

Eight Seconds with Nicanor Parra

I’m only sure about one thing regarding Nicanor Parra’s poetry in this new century: it will endure. This, of course, means very little and Parra is the first to know it. However, it will endure, along with the poetry of Borges, of Vallejo, of Cernuda and a few others. But this, we have to say it, doesn’t matter too much.

Parra’s wager, the probe Parra projects into the future, is too complex to be treated here. It’s also too dark. It possesses the darkness of movement. The actor that speaks or gesticulates, however, is perfectly visible. His attributes, his clothing, the symbols that accompany him like tumors are currents: it’s the poet who sleeps while sitting on a chair, the leading man who gets lost in a cemetery, the speaker at a conference who tosses his hair until he pulls it out, the brave man who dares to piss when he’s on his knees, the hermit who watches the years go by, the overwhelmed statistician. It wouldn’t be too much to require that before reading Parra one consider the question Wittgenstein asks of us and himself: Is this hand a hand or is it not a hand? (One should ask the question while looking at one’s hand.)

I ask myself who will write the book Parra had planned and never wrote: a history of World War II told or sung battle by battle, concentration camp by concentration camp, exhaustively, a poem that would somehow become the instantaneous opposite of Neruda’s Canto general, and from which Parra has only saved one text, the Manifiesto, where he lays out his poetic aesthetic, an aesthetic that Parra himself has ignored however many times he has felt necessary, among other reasons because that’s what aesthetics are for: to provide a vague idea of the inexplorable territory inhabited by true writers, though not very often, and which are almost useless at the hour of concrete risks and dangers.

Let the brave follow Parra. Only the young are brave, only the young have the purest of spirits. But Parra doesn’t write youthful poetry. Parra doesn’t write about purity. He does write about pain and solitude; about useless and necessary challenges; about words condemned to be dispersed like the tribe is condemned to be dispersed. Parra writes as though he were going to be electrocuted tomorrow. The Mexican poet Mario Santiago, as far as I know, was the only person who read his work lucidly. The rest of us have only seen a dark comet. First requirement of a masterpiece: to pass unnoticed.

There are moments in a poet’s journey when he has no other choice but to improvise. Even if the poet is able to recite Gonzalo de Berceo from memory or knows like no one else the hepta-syllables and 11-syllable verses of Garcilaso, there are moments when the only thing to do is launch oneself into the abyss or stand naked before a clan of apparently educated Chileans. Of course, one must know how to accept the consequences. First requirement of a masterpiece: to pass unnoticed.

A political note: Parra has been able to survive. It’s not such a major event, but it’s something. Neither the Chilean left with its profoundly right-wing convictions has been able to defeat him, nor has the neo-Nazi and forgetful Chilean right. The Latin American Stalinist left hasn’t been able to defeat him nor has the now-globalized Latin American right, until recently silently complicit with repression and genocide. The mediocre Latin American professors on American university campuses haven’t been able to defeat him, nor have the zombies who walk the village of Santiago. Not even Parra’s followers have been able to defeat Parra. Moreover, I would say, surely won over by my enthusiasm, that not just Parra but also his siblings, with Violeta at the head of the pack, and their Rabelaisian parents, have put into practice one of poetry’s greatest ambitions of all time: to fuck with the public’s patience.

Verses chosen at random: “It’s a mistake to think the stars can help cure cancer,” said Parra. “Regarding rifle, I remind you the soul is immortal,” said Parra. He’s as right as a saint. And we could go on until no one’s left. I remind you, regardless, that Parra is also a sculptor. Or a visual artist. These explanations are perfectly useless. Parra is also a literary critic. He once summarized Chile’s entire literary history in three verses. They are: “Chile’s four great poets / are three: / Alonso de Ercilla and Rubén Darío.”

The poetry of the first years of the 21st century will be a hybrid poetry, just like fiction is already doing. We’re possibly already heading, with frightening slowness, toward new formal tremors. In that uncertain future our children will contemplate the encounter on an operating table of a poet who sleeps in a chair and a black bird of the desert, one that feeds off the parasites of camels. On certain occasions, at the end of his life, Breton spoke of the need for Surrealism to become clandestine, to immerse itself in the sewers of cities and libraries. Afterward, he never mentioned the topic again. It doesn’t matter who said it: THE TIME TO SIMMER DOWN WILL NEVER COME.




{ Roberto Bolaño, Entre paréntesis, Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2004 }

Ernesto Cardenal / Roberto Bolaño

Ernesto Cardenal

Those of us who wanted to be poets when we were twenty, in 1973, read Ernesto Cardenal, the author of Epigramas, Oración por Marylin Monroe, Salmos, Homenaje a los indios americanos, this last title quite superior in certain aspects to Neruda’s Canto general, and a new attempt, probably unsuccessful, at rereading Whitman.

Now a new book of memoirs with a lapidary title appears, Vida perdida (Seix Barral), and one can’t help, when reading it, but remember the time when reading Cardenal, a Catholic priest, fascinated us, precisely those of us who were lascivious and sinners and who never went to church, among other reasons because of the unbearable heaviness of priests and also because most of us didn’t believe in God either. And we had no intention of reforming ourselves, on the contrary, with every passing day we were more sinful, and we were helped in that endeavor, not to say encouraged, by Ernesto Cardenal’s poetry. Now this book appears, irregular like almost all memoirs (and like life), and Ernesto Cardenal’s voice sounds the same as it does in his memorable poems, but everything has changed, and what was once hope, an invitation to the unknown (or at least it seemed so to us), is now a silence and a quietude that surge from a lost province where the poet Cardenal still lives and still moves, despite having lost so many battles, recounting with slow prose the vicissitudes of his family, because that is what we find in this Vida perdida [Lost Life], the fate of a family and the fate of a man who is one Latin America’s greatest poets, along with the portraits of a few friends who remain beyond death, such as the American writer Thomas Merton, also a priest, and all of that together gives us a life more won than lost, and the final image of Cardenal who lives in limbo, which isn’t such a bad way to live, already so close to the sky.




{ Roberto Bolaño, Entre paréntesis, Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2004 }

El Corno Emplumado revisitado / Heriberto Yépez

El Corno Emplumado Revisited


El Corno Emplumado was the most innovative Mexican poetry magazine.

It was created by Sergio Mondragón, Margaret Randall and Harvey Wolin (who retired) in 1962.

A while ago Letras Libres did a “tree” of Mexican literary magazines. El Corno Emplumado didn’t appear on it. Half a century from now, El Corno will be thought of as a revolutionary magazine throughout the West. Its mistake: to be ahead of its time, to be a contemporary of all space. It was the first magazine, and still the only one!, to publish innovative poetry in Spanish and in English as it appeared. Here in Mexico it wasn’t understood. One needed to be educated in order to appreciate it.

No one has noticed that El Corno Emplumado wasn’t just an exceptional magazine, it was an anti-group, a post-Mexican avant-garde. If Paz’s club was Aztec pyramid and platonic banquet and Infrarrealismo was band & disorder [banda & desbandada], El Corno was diapason and diaspora. Figures ranging from Roger Bartra to Raquel Jodorowsky converged around it. A cultured, pioneer, bi-national and forgotten counterculture.

It was superior to and more cosmopolitan than American magazines considered classics.

El Corno, extra bonus, published books by American authors who are now legendary (like Robert Kelly).

Info glitches [baches] exist. One glitch that always occurs here is gringo poetry [poesía gabacha].

To this day, Mexican literary magazines publish traditionalist American poetry. When they publish new poets it’s tourism or fashion runway, and when they publish innovative poetry it’s because it has already become canonical. Our anglophilia is naive. The same goes for Mexicanists in the United States. What is astonishing about El Corno is that it built a transnational poetry platform throughout the continent. Certain North American poets – like Clayton Eshleman – noticed it and it almost dissolved national limits in poetic activities within small critical communities.

It wasn’t able to do it: Mexican poets were more traditional than their American counterparts. An asymmetry that persists.

And over there they lost interest and didn’t know Spanish. They were counterpoets and gringocentric.

The magazine published 31 issues, sometimes uneven. Its failure: eclecticism. Its good sense: within eclecticism they hunted for poetry that opened up structures and strictures. They liked rarities, isms and emissaries; they had a letters section that today is an archive of curiosity and criticism.

El Corno closed in 1969, after what a crazy tlatoani ordered in Tlatelolco.

40 years after its disappearance we have to acknowledge the following: Randall and Mondragón were visionary editors. The project of a continental avant-garde literature has yet to be achieved.

El Corno Emplumado, intercultural agitation, has been the closest thing to a rupture of the national limits of poetry in this hemisphere.

El Corno Emplumado and Concretism. Except El Corno was not a pilot clan but rather a pioneer platform. It took more risks: volatile vanguard.




Translator’s Note: The original Spanish version of this essay can be read online.




{ Heriberto Yépez, Suplemento Laberinto, Milenio (México D.F.), 22 August 2009 }

La evocación por el cigarrillo / Eduardo Mariño

Evocation for the Cigarette

Arrowed smoke you reach my memory.

Two hundred thirty-six cigarettes since I’ve seen you
are leaving a stain in the eye
a certain trembling
in the writing hand.




{ Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital, Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }

Fervor de Blog

Six years into this blog, I find myself moving further away from the self and closer to translation, to the pleasures of reading. In my boxes in storage at my family’s house outside Boston, I’ve come across several books that point to those pleasures, including my copy of Cortázar’s Rayuela and several editions of Borges. One of these, Obra poética, 1 (1923-1929), includes his first book Fervor de Buenos Aires. I’d first read his poems for a seminar on Borges ten years ago and I recall being underwhelmed by them. But rereading his poems now I find plenty I like, such as this fragment:


“En busca de la tarde
fui apurando en vano las calles.
Ya estaban los zaguanes entorpecidos de sombra.”
(“La plaza San Martín”)


In his 1932 book of essays Discusión, he makes comments about translation that help me in my own versions of Juan Sánchez Peláez, or in these quicker excursions here on the blog. The blog allows an avenue for immediate dissemination and, more importantly, a sense that I can read alongside others, in the company of fellow readers. I now translate what has already been translated from his essay on Homer, “Las versiones homéricas”:


“Bertrand Russell defines an external object as an irradiating, circular system of possible impressions; the same can be said about a text, given the incalculable repercussions of the verbal. A partial and precious document of the vicissitudes it suffers remain in its translations. What are the many versions of the Iliad from Chapman to Magnien if not diverse perspectives of an event in motion, if not a long experimental raffle of omissions and emphasis? (There is not an essential need to change languages, that deliberate game of attention is not impossible within a single literature.) To presuppose that any recombination of elements has to be inferior to its original, is to presuppose that draft 9 has to be inferior to draft H – since there can only be drafts. The concept of a definitive text only correponds to religion or to exhaustion.”


Traveling in Mérida last month, I was amazed by the scale of the mountains there, the overwhelming beauty of how the clouds would roll into the valleys, hills and villages of the Páramo region above the city of Mérida, the sound of the wind as it moved among the pine trees surrounding the Laguna de Mucubají, or the river as it passed through the town of Apartaderos. In Mérida and in Caracas I was lucky enough to find a few books for this library I inhabit with gratitude. The less I write here about myself the better, as there’s so much to read and the trees and fog are vast enough.

A partial list of Venezuelan books I’d want to comment on or translate from here, if I could find the time: Carlos Ávila, Mujeres recién bañadas (Mondadori, forthcoming), Israel Centeno, Calletania (Editorial Periférica, 2008), Luis Alberto Crespo, En lugar del resplandor. Antología poética (1968-1990) (Monte Ávila Editores, 2007), Enza García Arreaza, Cállate poco a poco (Monte Ávila Editores, 2007), Ángel Gustavo Infante, Cerrícola y otros relatos (Memorias de Altagracia/La Liebre Libre, 2004), Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital (Monte Ávila Editores, 2009) and La salvación por el hastío (Fundación Editorial el perro y la rana, 2006), Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez, Retrato de Abel con isla volcánica al fondo (Editorial Troya, 1997), Mario Morenza, Pasillos de mi memoria ajena (Monte Ávila Editores, 2007) and La senda de los diálogos perdidos (Editorial Equinoccio, 2008), Ramón Palomares, Antología poética (Monte Ávila Editores, 2005), Gabriel Payares, Cuando bajaron las aguas (Monte Ávila Editores, 2008), Armando Rojas Guardia, Patria y otros poemas (Editorial Equinoccio, 2008), Ludovico Silva, Teoría poética (Editorial Equinoccio, 2008), Víctor Valera Mora, Nueva antología (Monte Ávila Editores, 2004). Fervor de blog, reading oneself in others.

A la salida del fastuoso recital / Eduardo Mariño

Leaving the Lavish Recital

Sometimes love
I feel embarrassed for poets:
So much lacerated intent
so much forced ego
and yet
they’re always sad
they’re always scarce.




{ Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital, Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }

La quietud presurosa / Silvio Orta Cabrera

The Quick Stillness

Eleazar León foreshadowed his death many times. In 1977, in his book Cruce de caminos, he does it in a certain, shall we say, indirect manner, imagining in the poem “Orfeo ve al amor en una última mirada” that the son of Apollo and Calliope, when he reads the palm of Eurydice’s hand, glimpses the death of the beloved and the immortality that awaits her, since he says to her: “... you shimmer somehow in each woman.” And, towards the end, “I see you / for the last time and I find no other prayer. // You have / that taste of oblivion that belongs to hope, / Eurydice my fog, my greenness.”

In the same book we find “Sin comienzo ni término,” a poem where the key points of the relationship between creator and the life-death pair flower. One shouldn’t think, after the previous phrase, that finding it will be difficult. We should recall, as Rafael Arráiz Lucca points out in El coro de las voces solitarias, that Eleazar León is one of the poets from the Universidad Central de Venezuela who in the 70s made “of literature his academic object” and, therefore, in his poems we find evidence, alongside his experiences, of “organized knowledge” (p. 313).

It’s worth noting that this UCV poet arrives at the Escuela de Letras already a poet, as the rennovation movement is well underway (1969). The Rennovation in Letras had its very own features, among which stood out the quotidian creativity in how to think about the phenomenon and how to face its dynamism, while maintaining convergence among divergence, in other words, the natural experience and coexistence of the singular amidst the plural. If a revolution calls itself life, in order to give itself and keep growing it should promote such a consciousness, not subjugate it.

How does Eleazar proceed in “Sin comienzo ni término”? As a poet and teacher. As if he were doing nothing special, so as to unveil the conclusion, he asks: “Did something ever have a beginning at one point?” He doesn’t strain in search of an answer. On the contrary, in an Asian manner, he thinks “of the slow water of certain springs / down the mountain, flowing / until dying of cold in the muddy river-bed / of a well in the sun.”

What then does poetic knowledge discover, the one Saint-John Perse, when receiving the Nobel (1960), points to as an open road when those of philosophy and science seem obstructed? He discovers “that a spring doesn’t cease when a spring ends,” that “The water is lost perhaps, but not the current, / but not the quickness seeking stillness / that departs again once it finds it.”

Such a discovery that makes us understand that Eleazar having died this August 7th, his spring will not cease, it is a rain of stars on the poems of Descampado (1999), the highest and most beautiful prefiguration the poet had of his urgent stillness. We will encamp in his pages, as soon as the pain passes.




{ Silvio Orta Cabrera, Tal Cual, 17 August 2009 }

La traducción es un yunque / Roberto Bolaño

Translation Is An Anvil

What is it that makes an author so beloved by those of us who speak Spanish become a second or third rate author, when not absolutely unknown, among those who communicate in other languages? The case of Quevedo, Borges recalled, is maybe the most flagrant one. Why is Quevedo not a living poet, which is to say a poet worthy of rereading and reinterpretation and ramifications, in fields beyond the Spanish language? Which leads directly to another question: Why do we consider Quevedo our greatest poet? Or why are Quevedo and Góngora our two greatest poets?

Cervantes, who was underestimated and disdained while he was alive, is our greatest novelist. There is hardly any disagreement about this. He is also the greatest novelist – according to some the inventor of the novel – in lands where Spanish is not spoken and where the work of Cervantes is known, above all, thanks to translations. These translations can be good or not, which isn’t an obstacle for the Quijote’s reason to impose itself or fertilize the imagination of thousands of readers, who don’t care about verbal luxury or the rhythm and force of Cervantean prosody which any translation, no matter how good it is, will undo or dissolve.

Sterne owes Cervantes a great deal, and in the XIX century, the novelistic century par excellence, Dickens does too. Neither one, it’s almost too obvious to say it, knew Spanish, from which we can deduce that they read the adventures of Quijote in English. What is marvelous – and yet natural, in this case – is that those translations, good or not, knew how to transmit what in the case of Quevedo or Góngora they didn’t and probably never will: what distinguishes an absolute masterpiece from a dry masterpiece, or, if it’s possible to say so, a living literature, a literature that belongs to all mankind, from a literature that merely belongs to a specific tribe or to a segment of that specific tribe.

Borges, who wrote absolute masterpieces, already explained this on one occasion. The story is the following. Borges goes to the theater to see a version of Macbeth. The translation is dreadful, the mise en scène is dreadful, the actors are dreadful, the set design is dreadful. Even the seats in the theater are extremely uncomfortable. And yet, when the lights go down and the play begins, the spectator, Borges among others, once again immerses himself in the destiny of those beings who travel across time and he once again trembles with that which for lack of a better word we will call magic.

Something similar happens with popular representations of The Passion. Those determined, improvised actors who once a year play out the scene of Christ’s crucifixion and who emerge from the most frightening ridiculousness or from the most unconsciously heretical situations astride the mystery, which is not such a mystery, but rather a work of art.

How do we recognize a work of art? How do we separate it, even if only momentarily, from its critical apparatus, from its interpreters, from its tireless plagiarists, from its denigrators, from its final destiny of solitude? That’s easy. We must translate it. That the translator not be a genius. We must rip out pages randomly. We have to leave it strewn in an attic. And if after all this a young person appears and reads it, and after reading it makes it his own, and is faithful to it (or unfaithful, it makes no difference) and reinterprets it and accompanies it on its journey to the edges and both are enriched and the young person adds a grain of value to its natural value, we are in the presence of something, a machine or a book, capable of speaking to all human beings: not a tilled field but a mountain, not the image of the dark forest but the dark forest itself, not a flock of birds but the Nightingale.




{ Roberto Bolaño, Entre paréntesis, Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2004 }

Caracas sin Cabré / Mario Morenza

Caracas without Cabré

From the balcony Fabiana and I have witnessed how the city’s silhouette changes continuously. Buildings grow and an entire block of houses crumbles. A neighborhood is lifted and three others are born on top of what used to be a park or a parking lot. The city, with its Guaire river, with its Parque Central towers, becomes dangerous and gray at night and during the day, with its criminals who, just like streetlights, don’t feel time. The city ripens and grows fat like humans do, though not with grease and calories, but rather with cement and vehicles that install insufferable traffic. And yet, Caracas is still there, it endures and expands. Fabiana and I have been slow witnesses to the changes. The city grows downwards, subterraneously through the Metro lines. It grows toward its sides so as to join with suburbs and commuter cities in a single gray stain. The hills are populated and abandoned, so as to be savagely populated once again. Our mountains aren’t green, but rather brick and zinc. The ecosystem has reinvented itself in order to establish a new stratification. It has no trees, only light posts and stairways improvised by an architectural anarchy. The city moves and breathes and we are the ones responsible for this disturbing unreality. Coche, Catia, Chacao, Casalta, Caricuao, Cotiza, La Candelaria, after all, Caracas is full of citizens who are consumed by life and unreality, order and the notion of law wear a police uniform, from this city whose neighborhoods have lots of Cs, the most ruthless angels. Coche, Catia, Chacao, Casalta, Caricuao, Cotiza, La Candelaria, after all, Caracas is being recognized throughout the world because it devours lives amid its smoke, its cement and its river of manure that cuts through it like a dagger. Caracas is always there, sticking its tongue out at us and about to play a dirty trick on us. “Stop right there,” any criminal says to us on any day pretending to be a stoplight.




Translator’s note: Manuel Cabré (1890-1984) was an artist known for his landscape paintings of Caracas.




{ Mario Morenza, La senda de los diálogos perdidos, Caracas: Editorial Equinoccio, 2008 }

Una tarde con Huidobro y Parra / Roberto Bolaño

An Afternoon with Huidobro and Parra

It will soon be two years since my friend Marcial Cortés-Monroy took me to Las Cruces, where we ate and spent the afternoon in the company of Nicanor Parra. The author of Poemas y antipoemas, first published in 1954, has a house there that hangs on a hill from where you can contemplate the vast ocean, as well as the tomb of Vicente Huidobro on the other side of the bay. Actually, in order to see Huidobro’s tomb from Parra’s terrace, it’s best to have a pair of binoculars, but even without these the tomb of the author of Altazor is clearly visible, or at least as visible as Huidobro would have wanted it to be.

“Do you see that forest?”, Parra says. “Yeah, I see it.” “Which forest do you see?”, says Parra who wasn’t a professor in vain. “The one on the right or the one on the left?” “I see all of them,” I say, while I contemplate a landscape that seems almost lunar. “Well, look at the forest on the left,” Parra says. “Below it there’s a type of road. Like a stripe, though it’s not a stripe but a road. Do you see it? Now lift your gaze and you’ll see the forest.” And sure enough: I see a scratch that must be the road or the neighborhood trail, and I also see the forest. “On the upper part of the forest there’s a white patch,” says Parra. It’s true: the forest, seen from his terrace, has a dark green color, almost black, whose uniformity is broken by a white patch on its upper edge. “I see the white patch,” I say. “That’s Huidobro’s tomb,” says Parra, and he turns around and goes back into the living room. Marcial accompanies him and for a moment I remain alone while a gust of wind rises from the beach to the hill, contemplating that diminutive white patch under which Vicente Huidobro’s bones are rotting.

Afterwards I feel something tugging at my pants. Huidobro’s ghost? No, it’s Parra’s cats, six or seven stray cats who every afternoon come to the garden of the greatest living poet of the Spanish language to eat his food. Just like me, to say no more.




{ Roberto Bolaño, Entre paréntesis, Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2004 }

Postal / Dayana Fraile

Postcard


I can’t remember how many times this scene has repeated itself. Ana is wrapped from head to toe in her plaid blanket. Aside from her head, I can only see a bit of her hand between the fabric, an incandescent sparkle where the cigarette should be, the quivering ash, always about to fall anywhere except the ashtray. Beth Gibbons shredding her vocal chords in the background, “Nobody Loves Me” playing live, “Over” or “Glory Box” in Sao Paulo.

I’m always sitting on the mattress spread out on the floor, beside the bed, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left. Sometimes the room is smaller or bigger, the window changes position, with more or less things, because the things are essential there, the mountains of CDs, the quartz stones, the teddy bears, the music magazines, the books, always the dwarf bamboo resting in a glass container full of something that looks like colored gelatin, the hair clips, the blister packs of pills scattered on the floor and Ana raising or lowering the music’s volume, arbitrarily, as though she were disconcerted by having a free hand and nothing to do with it.

I light up and extinguish a cigarette, the same cigarette, several times, I think I want to smoke and I light it, I think I don’t want to smoke anymore so I put it out – “You know? I’m tired of being alone” –, Ana always seems to want to add something else, but never does, she entertains herself with the CDs, she wants to make a long enough pause so that the words she has just pronounced, a few seconds ago, will distance themselves enough from those that will soon come. She tries to make some time. She puts on a CD and takes it off, she puts another one on and takes it off, and now she plays a song by Fiona Apple, almost always the one where she says, “Sometimes I feel like a criminal.”


I don’t say anything to Ana when she tells me this, I just listen to her and sometimes I feel like a criminal, laralarala... I light another cigarette, skim through another magazine, and finally end up inventing some story about a sudden and unexpected encounter with some ex-boyfriend, because I know those types of stories fascinate her, she looks at me from the bed, and asks for details about each one of the guy’s actions, about mine, “Seriously?... And what did you do?”, she asks if I pause during the story, as she checks the time on the clock at the bedside table, stretches out her arm and pops another Lexotanil in her mouth.

It’s always the same scene, the same songs, the same eiderdown, the same bamboo buried in gelatin. I think certain people stay within us like a fragmented image, a postcard photograph, a scratched record where the same needle rolls indefinitely. For me, Ana is one of those people. That’s why when I go out for walks in the afternoon without any fixed destination in mind, I sometimes end up at Ana’s door, at any one of her addresses that are subject to constant change. When I go into her room, I feel like a shipwrecked person who has swum across the Caribbean and finally reaches shore.

Even though six months may have gone by since my last visit, when I go into her room I feel I’ve never left, everything is identical to how I remember it, including the sleepy expression on Ana’s face, framed in the empty space of the door as it opens.

It feels good to visit her, it feels good to sit on the mattress she pulls out from under the bed when I arrive, to cook up something quickly, serve a plate of salted chicken strips with slices of pear on the side, creating a strange salad only Ana and myself understand. I invent stories for her, I bring her news from a reality I don’t inhabit either. I think our friendship, at its core, is a lot like that.





{ Dayana Fraile, El Apéndice de Pablo #6, May 2009 }

Phantasmal Repeats (Petrichord Books Edition)

Petrichord Books is very pleased to announce the release of Guillermo Parra’s second chapbook, PHANTASMAL REPEATS. Spare, abstract, thoughtful, the poems in PHANTASMAL REPEATS move sneakily within an insular, ambient framework. They are self-referential to an extent but still viscerally linked to the world at large.

PHANTASMAL REPEATS is available in two eye-catching color schemes: red on curry or red on pool. If you have a preference, please specify when ordering. The price is $6 (incl. s/h). Purchase via paypal at

http://petrichord.com/titles.php

or send a check made payable to Aaron Tieger to the address on the webpage.

Thank you!

SAMPLE POEM:

I sit alone in the house all day
Recurring rhythms make paste
My ears hummingbird control
An autobiography of loss
Forced into spy situations
On occasion, the rain clouds gather
Graphic proof serial songs
I write fitting spaces
For the sake of secrecy’s map

A propósito de Job, 27,9 / Eduardo Mariño

Regarding Job 27:9

Just as the dry leaves
hide themselves
in the depths of the forest.

Will the overwhelming city
by any chance hide
its solitary poets?




{ Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital, Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }

Afuera la luz se extingue vaporosa / Eduardo Mariño

Outside the Light Is Extinguished Vapor

Who am I at this hour?

Where do my truth and your distance dwell?

Where the measure of my time,
barely a ghost or a vestige of your own?




{ Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }